Sermon 5th October 2012

From now until Advent, adults will ask, and discover answers to, questions on the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

One of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, continues our study - exploring answers to the question:

Did Jesus rise again?

The Bible passage is from Luke 11: 5-13

The Holy Spirit

  

Good morning and welcome to church this morning as we carry on with our series on the fundamentals of the Christian faith. The series is based on the well-known Alpha course and this week we are asking ourselves who is the Holy Spirit and how does he affect our lives today?

Before we unpack all this I am going to summarize it up front that the Holy Spirit is good, not weird or scary…good and powerful… and the way God wants to meet us and live with us in our deepest and most real experiences.

We are always mentioning the name of the Holy Spirit in church. “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen” would be a familiar line in so many traditional church services. But it’s probably the case that for many or most of us God the Holy Spirit is the least well-known, in the sense of the least pictured, the least thought about, member of the Christian Trinity.

In fact there is so much about the Holy Spirit in the Bible that sometimes on Alpha courses, groups will go away somewhere for an entire weekend to look at this topic. We obviously can’t manage that this time but it does mean that my task is to try to fit a weekend’s worth into the next 15 minutes or so! So let’s see how far we can get in the time available. Who is the Holy Spirit? What does the Holy Spirit do? And how can I be filled with the Holy Spirit?

Who is the Holy Spirit?

First, who is the Holy Spirit? When I was a child you’d hear in church about the Holy Ghost but I don’t think that language works at all well today. The Holy Spirit is in fact not a ghost but a Person who, according to the accounts in the Bible, thinks, speaks, leads, comforts, strengthens, empowers, lives, encourages, guides and so on. He is sometimes described as “the Spirit of Christ” or “the Spirit of God” and the more you read the Bible, the more you realise that the Holy Spirit is pretty much everywhere you look! And here are just a few of many, many examples:

It is clear from the Book of Genesis that the Holy Spirit was involved right at the beginning, in creation,

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” is Genesis Chapter 1, verses 1 and 2.

The work of the Spirit of God here – however precisely it actually happened - is to bring new physical things into being and to bring order out of chaos.

A new promise

And as we move through the Old Testament it is possible to see a building expectation of the promise of a gift of the Spirit from God. This is picked up by the prophet Ezekiel, where this promise from God is recorded,

“I will give you a new heart and a new mind. I will take away your heart of stone and give you an obedient heart. I will put my spirit in you and I will see to it that you follow my laws and keep all the commands I have given you…..you will be my people and I will be your God.”

The new promise of the Holy Spirit seems to be about a good change from within.

Then the prophet Joel, a few books further on in the Old Testament, affirms that this promise is available to all when he proclaims from God,

“I will pour out my spirit on everyone. Your sons and daughters will proclaim my message; your old men will have dreams and your young men will have visions. At that time I will pour out my spirit even on servants.”

It seems the promise of the Holy Spirit really is to be available to all, regardless of their gender (sons and daughters), regardless of their age (old and young), regardless of their status in society (those who serve as well as those who are served).

I reckon that would probably cover all of us…..

And by the time we get to the accounts of the birth of Jesus, almost everyone concerned is described as filled with the Spirit of God. In Luke’s gospel the angel says to Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, who was to prepare the way for Jesus, that “from his very birth” John “will be filled with the Holy Spirit”; Mary the mother of Jesus is told that “the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you”, Elizabeth herself is “filled with the Holy Spirit”, his father Zechariah, is “filled with the Holy Spirit” and so on.

And then during his own ministry, John the Baptist famously proclaims, when asked if he is the Messiah,

“I baptise you with water, but someone is coming who is much greater than I am. I am not good enough even to untie his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

And then Jesus himself, throughout his ministry, is described in the gospels as full of the Spirit, led by the Spirit and empowered by the Spirit.

On one occasion Jesus was in Jerusalem at the time of a great feast, looking back to a time when the Israelites were in the desert and Moses brought water from a rock. He spent some time teaching in the Temple and, according to John’s gospel, on the last and most important day of the feast, he stood up and said in a loud voice,

“Whoever is thirsty should come to me and drink. As the scripture says, “Whoever believes in me, streams of life-giving water will pour out from his heart.”

And John in his gospel goes on to say that when talking about this life-giving water, Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit, which those who believed in Jesus were going to receive, but at this stage the Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus had not yet been raised to Heaven….

This is a picture of the Holy Spirit as good and powerful, living water filling up and pouring out of the hearts of God’s people….

That is..out of your heart and out of mine..

And then, just before he ascended to heaven, right at the end of his time on earth, Jesus is recorded in the Book of Acts as promising to his disciples that “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you” and then after Jesus’ resurrection, you may be familiar with the story of the disciples waiting in a room, afraid and with the door locked, when there is a sound like a violent wind and the disciples are filled with the Holy Spirit, which appears like flame over their heads and they speak in a variety of different languages or tongues.

And Peter goes out and explains to the crowd what has happened and that they have seen that promise of the prophet Joel fulfilled in the pouring out of God’s Spirit and he exhorts the crowd to repent and be baptised and to receive God’s gift of the Holy Spirit.

What does the Holy Spirit do?

We have touched on aspects of this already as we have reminded ourselves of the Holy Spirit at work in the Old and the New Testaments.

But, if being a Christian is essentially about having a relationship with God, the work of the Holy Spirit is essentially about starting, growing, developing and empowering that relationship.

A man called Nicodemus came to see Jesus because he was obviously impressed with all he had seen and heard. Jesus said to him,

“I am telling you the truth. No-one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. A person is born physically of human parents but he is born spiritually of the Spirit. Do not be surprised when I tell you that you must all be born again.”

This is a well-known passage in the gospels, partly because the expression “born again” has unfortunately become a bit of a cliché and sometimes, gained a bad press. But don’t worry about that this morning because what Jesus means at its heart is true and that is that when any person becomes a Christian they are reborn spiritually, into a new relationship with God the Father.

And just as physical birth is the start of a new human relationship, so spiritual birth is just the beginning of a new relationship with God. And so the Holy Spirit helps us to develop our relationship with God, bringing us into the presence of the Father, helping us to pray, guiding us and helping us to understand what God is saying to us.

I have only got time to share, at this point, one thought that I have often had about the way the Holy Spirit guides us. Jesus once described the work of the Holy Spirit as like the wind, which blows where it wants to. You cannot see it but you can see its effects. I don’t know if you have ever been cycling into a heavy wind? I can tell you from experience that if the wind is against you there is nothing worse.

But if the wind is behind you, there is nothing like it. You are cycling along wondering where all this power is coming from. I’ve even been blown up a steep hill on a bike cycling in Cumbria. And if the wind is absolutely right behind you, you can’t even feel it. You just know from your speed that it is there. So it can be with the Holy Spirit. When you just know that something is God’s will, that it is the right thing to do, then sometimes, you start flying along, all the doors open in front of you and you sometimes wonder how on earth you got from A to B….

And as our relationship with God grows, as we spend time in his presence, the Holy Spirit’s work is to transform us into God’s family likeness. As Paul wrote to the church in Corinth,

“All of us, then, reflect the glory of the Lord with uncovered faces; and that same glory, coming from the Lord, who is the Spirit, transforms us into his likeness in an ever greater degree of glory.”

Paul writes also that the fruits of the Spirit, if you like what the Spirit produces by way of transformation in the lives of believers, are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These are the characteristics – and did you spot any bad ones on the list?? - that the Holy Spirit develops in our lives. It is not that we become perfect immediately but over a period of time there should be a change.

Looking briefly at just one of the fruits of the Spirit on Paul’s list, joy is not dependant on outward things but comes from the Spirit within us, experienced perhaps in prayer or perhaps in worship. Yes, it is possible to experience heavenly joy in church! I don’t feel that every week but there have been many occasions when my spirit has felt lifted heavenwards during church services, even with children crying in the background and the imperfect efforts of myself and my fellow human beings going on around me.

And not only in church. There are many accounts of Christians able to experience joy even in desperate circumstances.

And finally, for today, in terms of what the Holy Spirit does, the work of the Spirit is to give gifts to those who are in the body of Christ, to be used by each person for the benefit of all. Every Christian is different, each has a different contribution to make, each has a different gift. In his first letter to the church in Corinth, Paul lists nine gifts,

“The Spirit’s presence is shown in some way in each person for the good of all. The Spirit gives one person a message full of wisdom, to another a message full of knowledge. One and the same Spirit gives faith to one person while to another the power to heal, to another the power to work miracles, to another the gift of speaking God’s message, to another the ability to tell the difference between gifts that come from the Spirit and those that do not, to one person the ability to speak in strange tongues and to another the ability to explain what is said….but it is one and the same Spirit who does all this.”

How can I be filled with the Holy Spirit?

So, finally, to the question of how it is possible to experience or even be filled with the Holy Spirit.

On this question I would just like to share a few thoughts in the brief time we have left this morning.

I would say that anyone who feels led to put their faith in Jesus Christ is being led by the Holy Spirit and that anyone who puts their faith in Jesus Christ and experiences any of what we have summarised in our churches before as forgiveness for the past, new life for the present and hope for the future is experiencing the work of the Holy Spirit.

And that anyone who feels the guidance of conscience, the voice telling them that something is wrong or that they really should do something because they know it is the right thing to do, is likely to be experiencing already the work of the Holy Spirit.

And that anyone who experiences inside for themselves anything of the joy, peace and love of God is likely to be experiencing the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes these experiences can be gentle and peaceful. Sometimes in the experience of some Christians they can be very powerful. I’d say for myself that in the last 40 years I have had a few fairly powerful spiritual experiences – once for example some years ago a vision when I was praying with a friend, of the enormity of the living water which Jesus describes and which I felt in the vision compelled just to touch with my lips. I felt I was actually touching the fundamental power of good in the universe and I saw it sweeping through the Earth and making everything new. And  just twice, some years ago now when I was desperately concerned first for a member of my family and secondly for a friend who was in really serious difficulty the experience of praying in words which come from God, what the Bible calls speaking in tongues, when I simply had no adequate words that I knew to express what I needed to say.

But whatever our experience of God moving in our lives, I am convinced from my own experience that the Holy Spirit works in a way that is not wild and fearful but loving and good, a way that builds up and can be tested because it is constructive and helpful, a way that is powerful but does not force itself on anyone.

One danger for all of us in this country certainly is that we tend to see our world as self contained – supermarkets, schools, healthcare, work, entertainment, holidays and so on - but God’s challenge is for us to open our hearts and minds to Him, to ask and to receive.

The way Jesus put it was to say to his followers that you just need to ask. And if you do you will receive.

He said you just need to seek and if you do you will find.

He said that you just need to knock on the door. And if you do, the door will open for you.

And I reckon that means us..

The Holy Spirit is still there for those who are open and who ask, because God is a loving heavenly Father who longs to give good things to his children.