You know, there are a lot of wonderful reasons
to come to lectureship.
And to me, one of the sweetest is to get to see
people that I haven't seen in a long time.
And just the experience of giving this class
has been such a rich blessing to me
because of a conglomeration of people that I've
seen from different periods of my life.
I hadn't lived that long. I know some of you
guys have been coming here for a long time.
My step-grandfather, is that what you are, Wallace?
Was baptized when he was 18. That's 70 years ago.
And he's seen a few lectureships come and go in
that time.
And the collection of people that God places in
our lives through that time
and the bonds that we share because of the
things that we're talking about here
are just really special.
So let's read this passage of Scripture.
It's really tied to what we're going to focus
on during this last hour together.
And not only that, it's just real good. It's
just real rich.
We've had lunch in the middle of the afternoon.
And unfortunately, the last two weeks I put on
a bunch of weight
because about this time of day I get me a Dr.
Pepper and a Three Musketeers bar.
I don't have a Three Musketeers bar today, but
this is going to be our dessert for lunch.
2 Corinthians 13, and we'll begin reading with
verse 11.
Here you go, Brother, I eat.
We might ought to dismiss on this, but we're
going to start with it.
Finally, brothers, goodbye.
Aim for perfection. Listen to my appeal.
Be of one mind. Live in peace.
And the God of love and peace will be with you.
Greet one another with a holy kiss.
All the saints send their greetings.
May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the
love of God
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with
you all.
I think we can all amen then.
Let's pray together.
Father, we are so thankful for the people that
have shaped our heritage of faith.
We thank you for those that have influenced our
lives because of their lives.
We thank you for those that have taught us.
We thank you for those that have criticized us,
who have made us carefully rethink who we are.
We are thankful for those who advanced the
faith as far as they could in their generation
and have passed on a heritage of learning and
faith to us.
Father, most of all, we thank you for the grace
that is ours in Jesus Christ
and your love that's poured out through that grace.
And because we have shared in that grace
through baptism,
we're able to enjoy the brotherhood, the
fellowship of the Spirit.
Bless us this final hour as we seek to honor
you with our lives.
Bless us as we open your word.
In Jesus' name we pray, amen.
See, there's some folks that are enjoying that
fellowship in the Holy Spirit right now just
outside the door.
My middle brother is named Byron, and Byron has
always been unusual in our family.
He's very sensitive, very creative, and I'm
thankful to tell you that he's growing up to be
God's man.
I grew up with college kids at Richland Hills
in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
But when Byron was little and before my
youngest brother Gordon arrived,
Byron had a friend, and his friend's name was George.
Now, we never saw George, but George was real.
I know because we set a place for him.
There was a chair for George, and Byron talked
to George.
He was real as far as Byron was concerned.
Nobody else could quite identify with George
the way Byron could,
but I'm thankful to say that when Gordon
arrived on the scene, George just disappeared.
So my youngest brother is sometimes harassed
and called George,
and we just kid him that Byron could see him
before the rest of us could.
Well, in a strange sort of way in the religious
world today,
there are a lot of people that talk about the
Holy Spirit.
What they do, what they decide, how they get there,
whether it's from green beans to going in the
mission field, they're led by the Spirit to do.
And they seem very confident about the Spirit's presence,
and that makes a whole lot of other folks that
have given their lives to serving God a little
bit perplexed.
How exactly to think about these people that
kind of just seem to,
and I don't mean to use this derogatorily, but
just kind of slop around a lot of Holy Spirit language.
You know, the Spirit led me to do this, Spirit
led me to do that.
How are we to understand that?
Because there seems to be a whole lot of that
in the religious world in general.
I don't know if you ever watch religious TV,
that's a contradiction of terms,
or you listen to Christian radio, but there
seems to be a lot of talk that way.
How are we to know what the Spirit's at work doing?
That's a real important question to me, and one
I guess I've struggled with for a while,
and one that maybe is a little bit difficult to answer.
I was talking with an older brother at the
conclusion of our session today.
I don't know how old he was, but his Spirit was
so precious and tender,
and as he talked about over the years, trying
to understand what the Holy Spirit was at work doing,
and how he had taught things a certain way, but
was troubled by the promises that were given to
all those in the audience
of John the Baptist about receiving the gift of
the Spirit and some other things like that.
I hope, if God gives me that many years, that I
am that sweet in spirit and reach that point.
But he said, you know, in my life as a
disciple, until about 1966 or 1967,
I couldn't find much in the churches of Christ
literature about the Holy Spirit.
Those of you that can remember back to 1966 and
67 will recall that there was kind of an explosion.
All of a sudden we began to be overcome with
the Charismatic Movement.
It was the major hot potato at ACU lectureship
and at preacher's forums that year or those two years.
The battle lines began to be drawn.
People started talking about what was believed
on which side of the Mississippi River and all
that kind of stuff.
And it's kind of raged since then.
But when I came back to college here in the
early 70s, one of the lectureships was
dedicated to spirituality.
And I went to as many lectures as I possibly could.
And I've even gone back and checked the book
just to make sure my memory was not too faulty.
And in a series of lectures on spirituality,
there was not one lesson on the Holy Spirit.
It was not because people didn't believe that
the Spirit was necessary for spirituality.
It was just it had become such a war zone that
everybody avoided it.
Or the folks that might bring it up were not
asked to be on the program.
I'm not sure exactly which.
I don't think that would happen again, and I'm
thankful for that.
But when you feel the tension of all this slop
around the Holy Spirit language
with this other not wanting to be divisive or
ugly or bitter as sometimes has happened,
it's difficult to know exactly where to come down.
And so I want to raise what I think is the
essential question in regard to the Holy Spirit.
What is the Holy Spirit's primary work in Christians?
Well, I don't have a very profound answer.
And since I don't, I think I would much rather
let Paul give us that answer.
So we were in 2 Corinthians 13. Let's just turn
back 10 chapters to 2 Corinthians 3.
Now if we want to get real uppity sounding, we
can talk about 2 Corinthians 3
being a sort of pressure commentary on Jeremiah 31.
Is anybody interested in the pressure
commentary on Jeremiah 31?
If you are, there's a small room over here and
we'll let you all go discuss that.
The basic point of that is the prophecies in
Jeremiah spoke of a day when
the law of God would not be written on tablets
of stone.
But where would it be? On human hearts.
And 2 Corinthians comes and asserts that there
are two basic periods of covenant.
There's a covenant of the written code and now
there's the new way of the Spirit.
If we want to know really what the focus of the
work of God is about,
2 Corinthians becomes essential in
understanding that
because it's here that Paul takes up what are
scattered references in Romans
and scattered references in Galatians and says
this is the new way of God,
the new covenant of God. It is not a way of the
written code.
It is not a way of law. It is suddenly the new
way of the Spirit.
Now that makes a lot of folks uncomfortable
because it sounds like
we're all automatically cut off from any standard.
And in one sense that's true. We don't have a
law like the Hebrew people had a law.
But if we understand what the goal of the Holy
Spirit in the life of the Christian is,
then suddenly I think it will allay a lot of
those fears.
What is the primary work of the Holy Spirit?
Well let's read the end of this discussion,
verses 17 and 18.
Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the
Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
And we who with unveiled faces all behold or
reflect, depending on your translation,
the Lord's glory are being transformed into his
likeness with ever increasing glory,
which comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.
One of the things that I guess I had never
asked myself until developing this material,
and I told somebody that the first time I
presented this I presented it to the older ladies
at the congregation at Westover. We don't have
a lot.
But I do that because I knew that some of the
things that I was seeing
were things that were not necessarily new to
our fellowship.
I mean the things we talked about at our second
period were taught in the early days
of the restoration movement by Moses Lord and
Walter Scott and some of those.
It's not a new position, but it was new to a
lot of folks in our fellowship now.
And so I wanted to share that with them, make
sure that I was communicating clearly
and also they are very gentle in telling you
you're crazy.
And when you try something out like that you
want to be corrected gently.
And one of the questions they ask, a sweet
sister asked just very openly,
you know, with tenderness she said,
well really what's the Holy Spirit trying to do
in us anyway?
Well you know that's a pretty simple question,
but it's really the question.
What's the Holy Spirit trying to do with us anyway?
Her name is Amity Allen and she's moved north
now to a retirement community.
But I'll miss her.
But she gave me a wonderful gift in making me
ask that question.
And I think that in going back and looking at
the New Testament,
what saves us from a position that relegates
the Holy Spirit to a mere figurehead
and what saves us from the position of just
outright Pentecostalism
is a recognition that the work of the Holy Spirit,
whether you're talking about the work of the
Holy Spirit in the church
or whether you're talking about the work of the
Holy Spirit in the individual Christian,
is to produce the character of Christ.
I think that's what Paul is saying in 2
Corinthians 3:18.
You hear him say that very clearly in Ephesians
4:12-16 in regard to the church.
And when you pull out the fruit of the Spirit list,
the list of nine qualities that make up the
Spirit's fruit in the Christian,
who do you think of that embodies those qualities?
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
gentleness, faithfulness,
self-control, those qualities that we see there.
And of course we all think of Jesus, that the
relational abilities that he had,
the maturity that he had, the compassion that
he had,
the way to balance things out.
And so what really came to strike me very powerfully
is that maybe we've been asking some wrong
questions of the text.
What is the work of the Holy Spirit?
Not so much because they weren't important questions,
because when you get into furors and
church-splitting problems,
that becomes a major concern.
But maybe we needed to go back and ask just
that simple question.
What really is the spirit's work?
Now, in going back and saying that,
I think we need to go back and ask a follow-up question.
If the work of the Holy Spirit is to produce in
us Christlikeness,
our spirituality, then let's go back and ask
that question a second way.
What does spirituality come from in the first place?
Have you read Romans 7 recently?
Boy, go read Romans 7 and feel the anguish of
Paul as he says,
you know, I wanted to do what's right.
I would that I please God in my flesh.
But every time I commit myself in my heart, my
mind, and will to do that,
I find myself breaking the will of God,
breaking the law.
And I find myself an abject prisoner to the sin
that lives in me.
And I don't know anybody that quite has the
will of Paul.
I've never met anybody quite that focused.
And Paul just, I think you hear him say in
Romans 7,
gives up on producing his own spirituality.
I cannot do it. Sin controls me.
But something remarkable happens on the way out
of Romans 7.
And so in hearing Paul say, and we're going to
get back to that.
That's the good part.
In hearing Paul say he can't produce his own spirituality,
we have to ask where does spirituality come from?
Does it mean first that it requires no effort
of us
if the Spirit is producing this transformation?
And the first answer, of course, is obvious.
No, that's ridiculous.
2 Corinthians 3:18 says that as we behold Christ,
as we focus on Christ, as we reflect His nature
in our lives,
we are being transformed.
We all know the passage in 2 Peter 1
about adding the Christian virtues to our life.
If you go back a few verses, you hear that
we're reminded
that our ability to do that is based on the
grace of God.
He has given us all things that we need for
life and godliness.
How? From His grace.
By giving us knowledge of who He is.
But we're to make that effort.
But at the same time, we must not think that
that effort
is what's going to produce the spirituality.
Now this is a hokey illustration, but I don't
know a better one.
But can you imagine a caterpillar on a limb
deciding today I will be a butterfly?
A caterpillar cannot make himself or herself,
we want to not be too gender specific here,
cannot make itself a butterfly.
It doesn't have that capability.
All a caterpillar can do is eat what a
caterpillar is supposed to eat
and do what a caterpillar is supposed to do,
and I'm not sure exactly what that is.
But the turning into the butterfly happens
because of who that caterpillar is,
what has happened in the nature of that caterpillar.
And I think we see that same principle strongly
at work in Scripture.
We have a responsibility to give ourselves to
the things of God,
but we never ever think that we're going to
make ourselves spiritual.
But as we give ourselves to the things of God,
what happens?
God, because we have been redeemed, sanctified
by the Spirit,
and because of His presence within us, suddenly
transformation takes place.
Now the reason I use that old hokey
illustration is that it's really not so hokey
because 2 Corinthians 3:18, the word for
transformation is the word
from which we get the term metamorphosis.
We are metamorphosized, you know.
We are changed. We are transformed
because suddenly in Christ we are given freedom
through the Spirit to be like Him
that we didn't have when we were trying to
manufacture it in ourselves.
So what we're saying then, basically,
spirituality is a combination much like our
Christian baptism is
of our surrendering our lives and our will to God,
that's Romans 12:1 and 2, and a host of other
passages, 2 Peter 1,
but trusting in God to produce that
spirituality we long for.
It's not a formula. We don't say, do this and
suddenly we're this,
but it's God at work within us.
I believe God is still sovereign. I believe God
is still at work,
and I still believe that God produces spirituality.
Now, I don't know anybody that knew this more
than Paul.
Now I think we would all agree Paul was pretty
aggressive in his church ministry.
I don't know many of us preachers that could be
quite as
intervenive or as totalitarian as the apostle
Paul was with his members.
He was that way. Now I think he earned a lot of
that right,
but he was that way.
And yet Paul himself knew that he was not going
to make those people spiritual.
Now how in the world can I make a statement
like that?
Because Paul reveals how he helped make people
spiritual in his letters.
Let's look at Ephesians for a minute. We could
pick a number of letters,
Ephesians 1.
I was studying form criticism, which is pretty
boring stuff,
about 10 or 12 years ago, and I came across a reference
to a scholarly work from England that talked
about the prayers of Paul
and how they tied into his churches.
I spent three years trying to find that book,
and finally I just pulled out the letters of Paul,
Xeroxed them, cut out the prayers that he
prayed for his churches,
and collected them in one place, and began to
read those.
And one of the things that just hit me like a
two-by-four upside the head
is that Paul clearly recognized he could not
make his people spiritual.
But he could pray for God to empower them to be spiritual
by the release of the Holy Spirit in their lives.
Now here's one example. Ephesians 1, we could
start with verse 3
in the praise part, but we'll just go on down
to about verse 18.
The NIV helps us break this down into sentence
structure that we're familiar with.
If you pick it up and read in the original, you
start with verse 3,
and I'd defy anybody to know where to put
periods or whatever for about two chapters.
I mean, Paul is just caught up into rapturous
praise and thanksgiving,
and it's just, you know, just like you'd speak
it in church.
You know, no punctuation. It's just one
rapturous event
as he speaks to them about who they are and his
thanks for them,
and he gets to this part about praying for them.
And we'll pick it up in verse 17.
I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus
Christ, the glorious Father,
may give you the spirit of wisdom and
revelation so that you may know him better.
Now, there's a big debate about whether that
should be a capital S or a little S.
New Testament guys that hadn't read the Old
Testament prophecies of the Messianic kingdom
want to make it a little S, okay?
If you remember some of those prophecies, one
of the things that would happen
as a part of the Messianic kingdom is because
God's Spirit was in us,
we would know him. We would have a spirit of
wisdom and understanding.
So, you know, just make it a middle-of-the-road
S, okay?
And understand that if we are Christians,
our spirit has been changed by God's Spirit
that's in us,
and I think that's what he's talking about.
But he first prays for wisdom and
understanding, okay?
He doesn't stop there, though.
He says in verse 18,
I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened
in order that you may know the hope to which he
has called you,
the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints.
Okay, man, we're talking about preaching stuff
deluxe right here.
I pray that you can know what God has in store
for us, his riches.
But we've got to get down to shoe leather
living, don't we?
We want people to know God and we want people
to know what God has in store for them,
but somewhere along the way they leave the
assembly and they go to businesses
and they go to the world and they have to face
the struggles
of being holy in an ungodly world.
And so he prays this third part of his prayer,
verse 19.
And he prays that they will know his
incomparably great power for us who believe.
That power is like the working of his mighty strength,
which he exerted in Christ when he raised him
from the dead
and seated him at the right hand of the
heavenly realms,
above every rule and authority.
And what's Paul doing?
He's praying for spiritual understanding.
He's praying for spiritual hope.
And he's praying for spiritual power.
I can't give those to any of you.
I may make you excited for a minute.
I may give you a glimmer of hope or encouragement.
But there's nobody here that can give you something
that will last the rest of your life and give
you hope.
God can't, built in Jesus Christ and his
presence within you.
In case we miss it there, Paul even makes more
clearly known
what that power is in his transitional prayer
in the middle of the book, chapter 3 and verse 14.
I have two rules that I make myself adhere to
as a preacher.
One is that every other year I will preach a
series of lessons on Jesus.
I don't want people to forget who and why we
are what we are.
And the other thing that I make myself adhere to
is every year I preach on this passage.
Now maybe after I preach 70 years, if God gives
me that many years,
I'll preach the same sermon.
I'll preach the same sermon on this in 12 years.
It's just an incredibly rich source of inspiration.
But I want you to notice again we're talking
about where does spirituality come from.
And Paul recognizes he can't give it to them,
but only God can.
He says, he prays,
For this reason I kneel before the Father from
whom his whole family in Heaven
and on earth derives its name.
And I pray that out of his glorious riches he
may strengthen you with power.
Sounds just like chapter 1, doesn't it?
But where is that power and where does it come from?
He may strengthen you with power through his
Spirit in your inner being
so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.
And I pray that you being rooted and
established in love
may have power together with all the saints to grasp
the height and depth and breadth and length and
all of that that's found in Christ
and to know his love that suppresses knowledge
that you may be filled with all the measure of
the fullness of God.
Then he concludes with a doxology, but it's not
a random praise.
It's directly rooted to what he is praying for them.
He says, Now to him who is able to do
immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine
according to his power that is at work within us,
to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus
throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen.
Now what's the point of saying that?
Paul recognized that spirituality happening in
people's lives
happened when they partnered themselves with God,
when they surrendered to his will and they
trust in his grace and his Spirit
to strengthen and enrich them.
And as their minister, their apostle, and their servant,
the most important thing he could do for them
was to pray for God to strengthen them with his
Spirit to make them holy.
Now, you can go to the book of 1 Thessalonians
and you can see the same thing.
The same thing happens in 1 Thessalonians.
The book's normally divided by commentators
into two pieces.
And I told my students two weeks ago, I said,
you know, one of the reasons that it's done
that way
is a lot of those commentators have spent too
much time in the library
and not enough time in people's lives.
Because when you get through the book of 1 Thessalonians,
if you just talk about Paul's relationship with
the Thessalonians
and Paul's demands for holiness in their life,
you've left out the vital ingredient.
Paul prays for God to make them holy.
Paul prays for their relationship to be good.
Paul cements the book together by this recognition
that God alone is going to make them his people.
And that's going to happen through the Holy Spirit.
Now, we've declared that through Paul's practice.
Let's go back and see it as Paul teaches us.
Let's go to Romans 7.
We're going to go back to Romans for a minute
and we're going to expand on that thought that
we had earlier.
I'm going to take off my coat.
Anybody that wants to take off their coat,
it's okay with me.
I'd probably just be a lot more at home
and pair old Levi's and boots with no socks on.
But I'm told that you're not supposed to wear
those kind of things here,
so I'll wait until I get back to my mom's farm
and put those on.
But you can take off your coat if you're hot.
I see a lot of you gasping and waving and all that.
I don't even know if the wind is open.
We talked earlier that there is a chasm of difference
between Romans 7 and Romans 8.
We talked about Paul giving up on producing his
own spirituality in Romans 7.
And let's just go back and remind ourselves of
the despair
that he feels about producing his own spirituality.
Verse 21 of Romans 7.
So I find this law at work.
When I want to do good, evil is right there
with me.
For in my inner being I delight in God's law,
but I see another law at work in the members of
my body,
waging war against the law of my mind,
and make me a prisoner of the law of sin at
work within my members.
And then hear this desperation cry. This is not exaggeration.
This is just spiritual abject pain.
Wretched man that I am, who will rescue me from
this body of death.
Paul has sought with all his might to produce
his own spirituality.
And he says, I failed. There's no way out.
And until he met Jesus on the road to Damascus,
there was no way out for him.
You hear in Galatians him say, if you break the
law, what does that make you?
You're a lawbreaker.
And you can't be an unlawbreaker anymore. You
can't be fixed again.
You can't live any better than perfect,
so how are you going to ever catch up for what
you've done wrong?
And so he begins to just turn that abject
horror and pain around,
and we know the reason.
Who will rescue him? Thanks be to God through
Jesus Christ our Lord.
That's the way chapter 7 ends.
Now, let's look at a couple of statements in
chapter 8,
and then ask what's the difference.
Chapter 8 and verse 1.
Therefore there is now no condemnation for
those who are in Christ Jesus.
Skipping on down further in the chapter, verse 37-39.
Knowing all these things were more than
conquerors in Him who loved us,
for I am convinced that neither death nor life
nor angels nor demons,
neither the present nor the future nor any
powers, neither height nor depth,
nor anything in all creation, can separate us
from the love of God
that is ours in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Now, that's a major difference.
Let me ask you, what is the difference between
Romans 7 and Romans 8?
It's not a trick question. It's okay to answer.
I know I've been kind of going 90 to nothing,
but what's the difference?
I think we hear two clear images that we cling to,
and they're the images that take us back to
what we were talking about earlier
about our baptismal experience.
We see the work of God at Calvary.
We see what God has done at Calvary,
that He chose to place on His Son our sin in a
tone for it
at the sacrifice of His life.
You know, grace is just paramount.
I don't know the last time you've read
Colossians 1:21 to a new believer,
but when we suddenly realize that in Christ,
when we contact that grace,
God no longer looks at us based on our
performance, but based on the cross,
and He declares us to be holy and blameless and
free from accusation
because of the blood of Jesus.
These things have happened. You've moved from
wretched man to glorious child.
That's grace.
But a lot of times we stop there.
I think the last 10 or 15 years we have really
gotten into...
You know, in the Old Covenant you're knee-deep
in blood.
But it's the blood of bulls and goats and
heifers and all that stuff.
And we're thankful that we've been liberated
from that
by the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus for sins.
But that's not all that grace is.
And when we go back to Romans 8, we hear that.
When we go back to 2 Corinthians 3, we hear that.
Not only are we liberated from the guilt of our sin,
we're liberated from law keeping.
We're liberated to live the life of God
through the law of the Spirit of life in Christ.
We're no longer under the written code.
We're now in the life of the Spirit.
What's the goal of that life? It's to be like Christ.
And so when you go back and you read Romans 8,
in verse 1-4, suddenly it comes alive.
Verse 2, because through Christ Jesus, the law
of the Spirit of life,
set me free from the law of sin and death.
For what the law was powerless to do in that it
was weakened
by the sinful nature God did by sending His own Son
in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering.
And so He condemned sin in sinful man.
That's the first half of grace, right? You hear that?
Jesus was the sacrifice. He condemned sin.
He took the pain of sin, the guilt of sin.
Verse 4 is the other half.
In the order that the righteous requirements of
the law
might be fully met in us who do not live
according to the sinful nature
but in the Spirit.
And we're going to talk in a minute what that
means exactly.
But what Paul is basically saying is,
liberated from the written code,
we suddenly find ourselves in the new way of
the Spirit.
And what that means is that we are in a new
relationship with God.
We suddenly not only know the moral
requirements of God,
but we also have the power to live those moral requirements.
It's not a matter of us hitching up our bootstraps
or hitching up our pants or pulling ourselves
up by our bootstraps
and living for God.
Suddenly we have within us the power, the
holiness of God,
to begin that quest.
Now, when somebody's baptized, we don't expect
them, or we shouldn't,
the first day they're a Christian to suddenly
know all the do's and don'ts.
We don't suddenly expect them to be perfect as
a Christian.
But we do expect one thing to begin happening,
the transformation.
The metamorphosis of their life begins.
Now, there's some rather dramatic changes at
that point of conversion.
But even more, as their life goes on,
we expect God to be changing them more and more
into the image of His child,
His son, just like we expect that to happen in
our lives.
How does that happen?
Again, we want to emphasize it happens when we
give ourselves to God,
do the things we're called to do, and His
Spirit gives us the power to do that.
And we're going to look at some ways that that
happens in just a minute.
But let me give you an illustration that I
think beautifully illustrates
both sides of grace.
This is free, okay?
I called Max Locato last week.
And as we were visiting, you know, Max has
exposed a lot of books
and that kind of stuff.
And he'd been proofing a book.
And before he hung up, he said,
let me tell you an illustration that I saw in
one of the books I was proofing.
And it's about the former mayor of New York
City, Mayor LaGuardia.
You know, if you've flown into the airport
there that's named after him,
you're probably familiar with that.
And he was for a period of time much beloved in
New York City
because of his generosity to the poor.
And one of the stories that is still alive,
supposedly a true story,
is that one night in one of the poorest wards
of New York City,
he went in and sat on the bench for the night
court judge.
And the first person brought before him was a
woman, an older woman,
not sure exactly how old, 50s, 60s, that was
caught stealing bread.
And he said, lady, don't you know it's against
the law to steal bread?
She says, yes, I do.
Why in the world do you steal bread?
She said, my husband has passed away, my
son-in-law is unemployed,
and he and my daughter and their two children
live with me,
and we were out of food and had nothing to eat.
And he told her, Ma'am, we cannot have people
in New York City stealing bread.
It's against the law.
And as he was reaching in his pocket to pull
out a $10 bill, he says,
I fine you $10.
And then he paid what was rightfully and
justfully her penalty.
But he didn't stop there.
Just like God didn't stop with giving us
forgiveness in Jesus Christ.
But he gave her the ability to begin life again
because he looked up and the court was
extraordinarily full that evening,
and he said, what's more, I find every citizen
of New York in this courtroom
¢50 each for allowing such a travesty as this
to happen in our city.
And they passed the hat and collected $43.50
and gave it to that woman,
and she left the court with justice having been met
and a new life begun with power to start over.
Now, in the late 20s, $43.50 worth a little bit
more than it is now,
wouldn't it, Wallace?
Okay, that's what we see happening, I think,
between Romans 7 and Romans 8.
Justice is met with the death of Jesus on the cross,
and new life and new power is given because
we're given the Spirit.
And Romans 8 suddenly bursts forth with new
life when you see it in that way.
You know, we're called sons of God.
What does that mean, really?
It means when we pray to God, the Spirit within
us, the Holy Spirit,
cries, Abba, Father, with our spirit,
testifying that we're children of God.
We have immediate access as His children do His throne.
When we pray, 826 says, what happens?
The Spirit intercedes for us.
Those times where we don't have the ability to
put into words
our anguish, the groanings of our hearts,
the Spirit speaks those to God according to His will.
We find along about verses 11, 12, and 13,
the Spirit gives us the power, the ability to
begin to put to death
the misdeeds of the body so that we begin to
overcome sin.
And so suddenly it becomes a wonderful chapter.
But the real question comes, how in the world
does that happen?
Where do we get that strength and that ability from?
And what I want us to do is just take a few minutes
and try to answer that question.
I'm not sure. We don't have a whole lot of time left.
There are a couple of handouts that you're
welcome to pick up later on after class.
And if you don't get one, well, just give me
your name and I'll try to get them to you.
But one of them just gives a list of things
about the Spirit in the New Testament,
and that's important.
But the one that I really want to focus on is
the one that deals with
how can we be filled with the Spirit if the
Spirit does these great
and wonderful things in our lives, if the
Spirit sanctifies us
and makes us holy when we're Christians,
and if He produces the character of Christ in
us, the fruit of Christ,
as Galatians 5 says, if He enables us to
understand the Word of God,
as 1 Corinthians 2 says, if He leads us as we
live for God,
if He gives us access to God the Father in prayer,
if He gives us a fellowship of God's people as
the temple of God,
as the body of Christ and gifts to use in that context,
if the Spirit enables us to worship acceptably,
if the Spirit is the very real presence of God
in us,
if the Spirit gives us a gift or a ministry to
use for the church,
if the Spirit gives us the power to overcome sin,
if the Spirit gives us the strength to
accomplish Christ's mission,
if the Spirit can give us assurance in the face
of death,
then how can we be filled with the Spirit?
Well, what have you heard?
Again, have you watched any religious
television lately?
If you have, you may have seen a television
preacher stand up and say,
be filled in the Spirit.
And he'll read that little verse from Ephesians 5,
and then he'll close his Bible and he'll give
you five or six steps on how to do that.
Well, I think that's kind of bushy.
You know, I don't want to tell you how to be
filled in the Spirit.
God needs to do that.
So let's just look, and this is just one example,
but let's look at the book of Ephesians and ask,
how can we be filled in the Spirit?
Let's just begin.
We've already looked at the prayers, Ephesians 1.
We'll just make a brief reference to them and
we'll move on.
But how can we be filled in the Spirit?
One way that I believe we can be filled in the Spirit
is to have brothers and sisters praying for us
and for each other
that God strengthens us with His Spirit in our
inner being.
If Paul believed that was necessary for his
church in Ephesus,
then I think it's necessary for us as well.
I want somebody praying that for me.
In Ephesians, the fifth chapter, however,
we just need to do a little work.
That's where the charge, be filled in the
Spirit, comes from,
and if we're going to be filled in the Spirit,
then maybe we ought to hear what Paul puts with
that exhortation.
So open your Bibles to Ephesians 5.
Ephesians 5:15 begins a section that runs all
the way to the end
of chapter 6 and about verse 19 or 20, verse 18.
And it begins and ends with a reminder.
We live in an evil world.
If you read the newspapers, you don't have to
have anybody tell you that.
If you're from a big city, you're reminded of
the evil,
the dirt in the world every day.
But he begins by saying, be very careful how
you live, not as wise,
not as unwise, but as wise, making the most of
every opportunity.
Why? Because the days are evil.
And then he finishes it off with the armor of God,
and he reminds them that the world is an evil place.
So how do we face the evil world?
How do we be God's people in that world?
He says we're to be filled with the Spirit, not
drunk on wine.
But does he tell us how?
And I'd say, yes, he does tell us how.
Because following that exhortation of being
filled with the Spirit,
he modifies that imperative, that command, that demand,
with five following participles.
Now, that may not be important to you,
but it's a way of identifying the five commands.
Some of them you recognize.
Why is it important to be with God's people and
worship God?
Because as we read, it becomes a way of being
filled in the Spirit.
Notice what he says, be filled in the Spirit.
Well, Paul how? Verse 19.
Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and
spiritual songs.
Now, Sunday at Westover, it came a gully washer
at our first service time.
And we had a lot of people in Abilene.
I hate lectureship Sunday.
I get left at home and somewhere between 150
and 200 people every year come to Abilene.
They are with God's people somewhere else.
So that meant we were fewer in number.
It was humid, it was draggy, and of course
early service.
It was early and everybody was tired.
And they were about half put out for having to
get soaked to get into the church building.
And I will guarantee you that the songs were
like stirring molasses,
the first two songs we sung.
I mean it was flat.
It was almost like, I dare you to have me meet
God in this service today.
But we sang a couple of songs.
One of them was not one of those toe-tapper,
heart-tingler types.
It was a slow, moving, introspective song.
But by that final verse, something began to happen.
And then we sang, Revive Us Again, and
something happened.
And by the time I preached, I could barely keep
those people in their seats.
Now, I don't think that was an accident and I
don't think that was human conditioning.
When we come and we speak to each other about
the promises of God in song,
something happens that is bigger than human emotion.
God fills us with His Spirit and suddenly we
quit being an audience
and we become a congregation of God's people.
We're caught up in who He is.
So why is it necessary to be with God's people?
Because we need each other to speak to each
other, to stir one another up.
It's not a matter of somebody being up and
everybody being down.
We came in, everybody was down, but God was up,
and we were caught up into that.
What follows are the next two.
Speak, sing, and make music in your heart to God.
There is a singing dimension that is to each other,
but there is also a praise dimension that is to God.
When I was living here, we had horses,
and my dad kept the hay in an old two-story house.
And, of course, you know how dads are.
You can't start with the hay on the bottom story.
You've got to get the stuff at the top first.
And so I went up the stairwell and started
dragging this old hay out.
Of course, it's a rickety place, and I'm an asthmatic.
And, man, it closed in on me.
I couldn't breathe deep, wheezing, and all that
kind of stuff.
And I ran over the window, and I threw open one
of those windows,
and air never tasted so good in all my life.
And there is something about heartfelt praise
to God
that takes our stale, limited worldview and
suddenly fills it with fresh air,
but not fresh air from outside,
but the air of God, the breath of God, the
Spirit of God.
And so he says, okay, be filled with Spirit.
Speak to each other, but also sing and make
melody or music in your hearts to God.
Focus on God.
Not anything controversial about those things,
is there?
How are we filled with the Spirit?
We speak to each other in song.
We praise God.
The fourth one, verse 20.
We're always giving thanks to God the Father
for everything
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Boy, we are, you know, Jesus' name is not the
PS of a prayer.
In Jesus' name is a reminder that we are who we are
by the power, the grace, the work of God and Jesus.
Our access, our connection, our sonship, all of
that is through him.
And so when we give thanks in recognition of
who Jesus is, what happens?
We're filled in the Spirit.
So suddenly it changes church or a small group
worship meeting
or a private devotional away from just a
discipline, doesn't it?
It becomes a time where we surrender our will
to God,
seeking to honor him, and what happens?
He gives us the Spirit to produce the
spirituality we earn for.
But the fifth one is the one that gets lost in
the wash,
the fifth participle.
And it's the one in verse 21.
Submit to one another out of reverence to Christ.
Now, why do we need the church?
We need the church because we need to learn to
surrender to each other.
Not only that, we need relationships to learn
how to surrender to each other.
You know, that's who Jesus was.
He surrendered himself, Philippians 2:5-11.
But you know, when we all meet ourselves,
and really and truly this insight came from
counseling people who said,
I just can't go back to that relationship anymore.
I do not have anything left within me to give.
And maybe that's the point that we all need to reach.
I'm not sure I can forgive that brother.
I'm not sure I can forgive her what she's done
to me.
I'm not sure I can be what God has called me to
be as a husband or a wife.
But it's at that point that we hear Paul say,
be filled in the Spirit. How?
Submit to one another. Why?
To make our marriage work? No way.
To get along? No way.
Submit to one another out of reverence to Christ.
We are to that person what Christ wants us to be.
And it's then in his name with his honor that
we're empowered by the Spirit.
Now, there are a couple of other things that I
think we can see in Ephesians
that would fit into this same basic pattern.
Chapter 6, verse 17, utilizing the Spirit's
sword, the Word of God.
Ephesians 6:18, praying in the Spirit all
become means and ways of doing that.
But the point that I want you to hear is in a
bizarre sort of way,
very much like we are as Westerners in the world,
we tend to be prone to the spectacular, the
outlandish, the latest fad, the newest scheme.
And so when we hear somebody that seems to be a
well-known speaker,
well-known figure talk about being filled in
the Spirit,
and once we believe that we can be filled in
the Spirit,
we want to rush over there because we've heard
so much Spirit talk.
When in reality, every one of us in here had
the basic tools to be filled in the Spirit,
we just have never connected the two.
What's the difference?
The difference is a recognition of the glory
and grace of God who does it.
I'm not going to be holy by my power.
Now, I can do everything I can to present my
body as a living sacrifice to God,
but it will not be a holy sacrifice except by
His grace in Jesus Christ.
And I will not grow into a spiritual leader in
the church
save by His empowering me to produce the fruit
that is His.
I believe that with all my heart.
And so I give myself to prayer.
I give myself to singing to each other, to my
brothers and sisters.
I give myself to both public and private,
singing and making music in my heart.
I teach and I try to practice praying always
with thanksgiving.
And the hardest one of all, and we know it,
is learning to surrender my will to somebody
else in honor of Jesus Christ.
But I believe when we do that, when I do that,
God changes me to be more like Jesus.
And I've got a sneaking suspicion if we could
pick up Jesus' quiet time diary,
those are probably the things He gave Himself
to in those mornings alone with God.
We've got one question we're going to have to finish.
I don't believe there is either.
That is a wonderful point.
And I think you see the direct connection there
to this thought of submitting ourselves to one
another in Christ.
What you can almost do is take the context of
grieving the Holy Spirit in Ephesians 4
and comparing the fruit of the Spirit in
Ephesians 5 and their contradictions of one another.
The fruit of the Spirit and what grieves the
Holy Spirit are directly opposite things.
So I think that's a wonderful insight.
Admitting, confessing those sins in our lives
and seeking to honor God and seeking to submit
ourselves to each other
becomes a way for the Spirit to reactivate us
and reclaim us and cleanse us.
That's a beautiful insight.
Anybody else?
We've got about three minutes I think.
That's pretty important, isn't it?
I believe that to be true.
The sister up here said we really...
You're right, I didn't emphasize it because
that's usually the one that gets emphasized.
Daily surrender to God's revealed Word and
Scripture is essential if we're going to have
Him begin to mold and shape us.
That's really, really true.
Anybody else?
I appreciate that.
Let me say one thing.
It is very uncomfortable for me.
I'm losing my hair.
That's in my jeans.
But I still consider myself to be awfully young
at 35.
To have a step-grandfather that's been a
Christian twice as long as I've been alive is
pretty humbling.
There was a brother that came up at the end of
last class.
Just such a wonderful spirit.
He said, I'm not up to you young guys, and I
said, no, that's not right.
You've been living the fruit of the Spirit
longer than I knew how to talk.
We've got to remember that I think that God
works in a mysterious way through the process
of heritage.
In America, we have such a short view of what
time is.
But if what's happened in the last 180 years in
the restoration movement leads to an outburst
of the Spirit's work
and the character of Christ and the mission of
Christ, then everybody along the way,
no matter where they've been in the process,
it's a part of this heritage that's formed and fashioned
and set the stage for this to occur, has been
part of the work of God.
And we need to be real careful not to make it
old and young and in between.
It's by grace we're going to get anywhere, and
it's by God's work through the Spirit that it's
going to happen.
Let me close with one thing. This is a real
important thing to my heart.
Westover is very much a missions-oriented church.
Thomas was an elder there for many, many years.
And we have finally, I think, in the core soul
of the church,
come to a realization that the reason that
mission work has gone so poorly in our fellowship,
and that's not to cast any bad light on any of
our missionaries, because that's not where the
problem is.
But the fact that we have not had more people
stirred to do mission work that have not heard
God's call
to be involved in world missions and all that
is tied directly to our not being open to the
work of the Spirit.
You know, it's not an accident that Jesus said
the Spirit's going to be the one to take the
gospel to the world.
And so my prayer is that we'll focus our
understanding and our hopes and our dreams and
our prayers
on what the Spirit's doing in the church, on
the concepts of developing the character of Christ
so that we can accomplish the mission of Christ
in the lost world.
Let's close with a prayer on that thought.
Father, I thank you so much for the hearts of
the people here and for our desire to honor you.
In a very special way, we're humbled by each other.
So many different paths have brought us to this
day at this time.
But we recognize and we confess to each other
that it is your work in Jesus of Nazareth
and your work on producing the character of
Jesus in us through the Spirit that makes life
worthwhile for us.
And we pray for ourselves and we pray for our
churches and we pray for our children
and we pray for this critical time in the world.
And we pray that you will break forth among us
with your Spirit leading us to your mission.
In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.