The Holy Spirit : From Idea to Experience : The Familiar Stranger | Dr. Paul McDonald

Well, good morning. I can tell your preacher is tall. Well, it’s great to be with you. Hope you had a great Christmas. Yeah, Christmas is so much fun, but I’m always so happy when it’s over. So it’s like, yes, okay, let’s get on with life. Well, glad that you are here. Thank you. This is a weird Sunday in the liturgical calendar. You know, it’s kind of this in between, right, the new year starting. And I can remember in Alaska, we had a congregation, about 700 people. And there was usually about 400 there on the 28th or the last Sunday, you know, today’s 28th on the last Sunday. And I usually always gave that Sunday to an associate. You got it. I’ll be there. You can have it. But thank you for being here on this last Sunday. It’s so good to go. Good to see you. So very thankful for Pastor Ellis and Jenny. Wow. God bless you guys. These guys are like Energizer bunnies. Do you know that? I mean, they, God give us that kind of strength and servant’s heart and appreciate their willingness to jump in and do anything, your competency and your giftings and worship and leadership. Yeah. Let’s say thanks to Pastor Ellis and Jenny. God love them. Appreciate it so much. And of course we love your pastor. Tom and I have been friends for a long, long time. Yeah. You should make sure you tell them you missed them. Make sure you say, oh, you know, the, you know, preaching was okay, but boy, it’s, it’s, it’s not near like your sermons, Pastor Tom. It’s just, it’s incredible. So do that. The Bible says that pastors are gifts to the church. Ephesians chapter four, they’re actually gifts from Christ. Jesus himself gave gifts and one of those gifts is the pastor. And I like to envision when I’m in a congregation, whether I’m up kind of leading a congregation or part of it, we all have pastors in our lives, but these are people who are gifts to us. And I like to envision like if the Lord could walk down this aisle either side and, and hand each of us a gift, my guess is that we would treasure that gift. We probably wouldn’t leave it on the chair and say, oh, I forgot the gift that Jesus gave me. I guess I’ll catch it next Sunday and get it. No, no, no, no. We would treasure that, probably put it on our mantle or somewhere where we would see it. And we would say that is a gift that Jesus gave to me. Pastor and Jenny are gifts to you from Jesus. Read Ephesians four and he gave gifts. So treat the gift as it is. It is a gift from the Lord. And as you follow his leadership, you are honoring the God who gave you the gift. And so thank you for, for doing that. I don’t know what favorite gift you got for Christmas. My favorite gift this year was a toaster. Let me give you a little backstory. We have a toaster in our house and it seems like toasters just won’t die, right? They don’t quite function correctly after a while. You know, do you have to play the guessing game on the dial? You know, like just, uh, cause I like my toast a certain way. I don’t want it light brown. I want it medium brown. So sometimes you put that dial right where it’s supposed to be medium brown and it doesn’t turn out medium brown. It, it would tend to lean toward the dark or the burnt setting. So I would move it back. Well, then it was light brown. So it was always this kind of this guessing game. And if you wanted the right piece of toast, you’d have to kind of stand over it and watch and manually flip it up. And I’m like, you know, Cindy, let’s just junk this thing and get another toaster. Well, word got out to my grandkids and my grandkids bought me this toaster that looks like something that, you know, is created by AI. You know, it’s a digital screen and it actually gives you the picture of the light toast and the what kind of bread and you push the button. I wonder how long it’ll last. But the reason they did that was, was typically when they would come to our house, I’m always usually the first one up and out of bed and getting, I like to eat one piece of toast and one egg in the morning with a cup of coffee. And I get up early before everybody else does. And often I would burn the toast because the toaster doesn’t work right. And as a result, our alarm system would go off. And it’s an alarm system that is connected to all the other alarms in the house. It’s a combo unit. That’s a smoke detector, a carbon monoxide and a fire detection. And I don’t know how many other things there are, but, but it’s just it’s like, you know, like fire, fire, fire, you know, and the kids come out, you know, shut off, you know, there. And so, so they decided the best thing to do is to get Papa a toaster that so they can sleep in the morning. So my, my grandson who’s 11 or 12 gave me the toaster with, with instructions on, on how to use the toaster as well as make sure you have a fire extinguisher, a fire blanket, blanket, blanket. He wanted to make sure I knew the number to the fire department, et cetera. So we had great, we had great fun with that. So last week, Pastor Tom, in his series, the beauty of Jesus reminded us that it is to our advantage that he left, that Jesus left so that he could send us the gift of the Holy Spirit. He explained to us how the Spirit makes Jesus present to every believer, wherever they go, bringing real joy, lasting fulfillment, transforming power that no other path in life can give to us. Jesus said, I will not leave you as orphans, but I will send one who is just like me, who will allow you to experience my presence even though you, I am not with you physically. I will send you my Spirit. It is, by the way, what sets us apart from all other religions. Jesus did not just give us a set of rules and regulations and doctrines and truths and stories that we must muster up enough strength to live by, but we’ve been given the Holy Spirit. He has given to us his Holy Spirit to live inside of us, to learn who he is and what it is that he is enabling us to do for his glory and for his honor. Pastor Tom reminded us last week that the Holy Spirit will teach us, that he will guide us, he will bring back to our remembrance the things that I told you. He’ll comfort us, he’ll convict us, he’ll convince us, and he’ll empower us. He will supernaturally lead us, so much so that Jesus said, I will actually give you the words to say in the most intense moment of your life during persecution. You do not need to worry what you will say, but my Holy Spirit will help you in that moment to say what it is that you need to say in the midst of that intense persecution. We know that the Holy Spirit produces the fruit of Jesus’ character in our life. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and our all-time favorite, self-control. He empowers us with ministry gifts. The ministry that Jesus began to do could continue through those ministry gifts. He equips us with the tools that we need to be on mission with Jesus, fulfilling what he has called us to do. So all this today, all this to say to you today, that Pastor Tom inspired me to continue this focus on the Holy Spirit, because I believe the Holy Spirit doesn’t want to be treated like a familiar stranger. We know the Father, we know the Son, but the Spirit sometimes to us, I think, is like an urban legend. All of us have heard the rumors about him, but kind of has anyone spotted him yet? We spend hours with the Father and the Son, and we hear much about them, but it’s almost like that coworker who we’ve worked with for twenty years, but we’ve really never had a conversation with. I want to speak to you today about this familiar stranger, and who it is, and who he wants to be in our lives, not only a force, but a person who we will have a relationship with. Would you pray with me? Father, thank you. Thank you for the joy of knowing you. Thank you that you have sent your Son, and your Son has sent to us the Holy Spirit. Thank you, Jesus, that you did not leave us as orphans, but Lord, you sent your Holy Spirit to us, one who is just like yourself, so that we would not be alone, but we would know the manifest presence of Jesus in our lives in this hour, and in this day. Lord, we thank you for the gift of your Holy Spirit, in Jesus’ name. And all God’s people said, Amen, and Amen. Would you help me say hi to Cindy, who travels with me everywhere. You may know her. She comes, and I appreciate her being with us. I appreciate my dear colleague Joseph Lanham’s there somewhere in the back. Pastor Joseph, you know him, and Elaine, and the family, and love these guys. He works for me now, so I made him come. I said, You’ve got to come to church. I’m teasing you. Near the end of his life, Jesus took a considerable amount of time to help his disciples come to some understanding of the Spirit. In fact, if you read John 14-16, you see the detail of all of that. If you have had any experience with God the Father or Jesus, it is because of the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit. You cannot receive anything from God without the work of His Spirit. If you’ve ever sensed God speaking to you, prompting you, convicting you, giving you direction, wisdom, encouragement, if you’ve ever felt His presence, it’s been a direct result of the Holy Spirit. He is not a New Age mystical teaching introduced by Jesus. The Spirit was present at creation at the very opening of Scripture, and He is included in the closing benediction of Scripture in Revelation 22, where the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. There are three responses when it comes to encountering the Holy Spirit, at least that I have experienced with people who are wanting to encounter the Holy Spirit. Three different responses, three different categories. Some, I find, are thirsty for more of God, longing for any and every way that they might experience His presence and power. They’re just hungry people for His presence. However, it’s not only possible, but also tragically common to have the right desire without a solid biblical foundation. For if you separate the Word of God from the Spirit of God, you have coma. But if you just have the Spirit of God only without the Word of God, you end up with chaos, and you end up following your own delusion. In recent times, God’s Word and God’s Spirit have been, unfortunately, pitted against one another. It’s almost like the church kind of has two camps. You have the Word of God camp and you have the experiential, charismatic Word camp. Many churches that would magnify one over the other. However, Word and Spirit are viewed in Scripture as interconnected. They are complementary to one another. We’re not just Word people, we’re also Spirit people. We’re not just Spirit people, we’re people who are deeply dedicated to the Word of God, to reading the Word of God, to exegeting the Word of God, to knowing the Word of God, to allowing the Word of God to guide and lead us to follow that, to allow it to be the rule and standard of our life. We are both Spirit people and Word people. Can you say amen? We believe in a holy Bible and we believe in the Holy Spirit. We believe in thinking and we believe in feeling. We believe in teaching and we believe in experiencing. We believe in the contemplative or contemplative and we believe in the charismatic. We believe in exegesis and we believe in prophecy. We believe in preaching the gospel and we believe in signs and wonders. All are important. Others hear the name of the Holy Spirit and it makes them kind of suspicious. Your guards kind of shoot up. I think that’s, there’s two reasons for that. Number one, it’s just that the church has kind of been inundated with weirdness. And God said, be holy as I am holy. He didn’t say be weird as I am weird. And it seems like we’ve kind of sometimes focused in our movement on the weirdness side. We’ve seen our share of that. The Bible says to be holy for I am holy, not weird for I’m weird. For suspicion is born of familiarity. You may be recovering from some painful, manipulative spiritual experience under the banner of the Holy Spirit. And when you have been on the receiving end of such toxic, charismatic, charismania environment, perhaps the safest place for you is to stay away from all of it. But unfortunately, when you throw that baby out with the bathwater, you end up with an incomplete life in Jesus. When I was on staff at Tiffany Fellowship in Kansas City, I worked with Pastor Ray Brewer, and there was a dear saint that, I was probably in my teens, 15 or 16 years old, and she dressed kind of funny and she rarely had much of a conversation with you. Her husband was a prince of a man. And she would come in, and there was often in the service a time when we used to call it cutting loose. And we said that with a lot of respect because we really did love her. But the way that she would give tongues or an interpretation of those tongues would kind of scare the tar out of us because it wasn’t normal, it was weird. And it put us all kind of on edge, and the manner in which she was speaking made it difficult to actually hear what she was saying, which probably what she was saying, the words she was saying, were actually true and right and good and very potentially of the Lord, but the trappings surrounding the word made it weird. We’ve all experienced that in different settings. Sometimes our Pentecostal trappings get in the way of the genuine. Sometimes we’re suspicious just because there’s unfamiliarity. You may have been ashaped in another church tradition that more or less brushed off topics like the Holy Spirit. They just didn’t talk about it. The supernatural events that pepper the pages of the New Testament were studied but never expected and certainly not ever pursued. And when that’s been your experience, an introduction to a new expression of familiar spirituality can be somewhat threatening. But the Holy Spirit is a person that we can know and to be known. Not a power to wield or an experience or a force, but just because it’s uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s not of the Lord. Finally, some people are simply uninformed. So some people are suspicious and others are just uninformed. I love this text in Acts chapter 19 and Paul encountered these believers in Ephesus and he said, did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? And they answered, no, we have not even heard that there’s a Holy Spirit. They’re just uninformed. It’s not a statement aimed at resistance to the things of the Spirit. It’s a statement about their intellectual ignorance. They just flat out don’t know anything about this experience of the Holy Spirit with the full inheritance that God had for them. If you have your Bible, turn with me to John chapter 6. John chapter 6 verse 12. It should be on the screen as well. Jesus says, I have so many more things to say to you, but cannot bear them now. But when he, the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth, for he will not speak on his own initiative, but whatever he hears, he will speak and he will disclose to you what is to come. He will glorify me or he will take of mine and disclose it to you. In other words, he will take the truths of who I am and he will make it experiential for you. All things that the Father has are mine, therefore I said that he, the Spirit, takes of mine and he will bring revelation to you. One of the most significant metaphors used by the biblical authors regarding the Holy Spirit is the metaphor of water. By doing so, they introduce us to the person of the Holy Spirit and they draw together what we are so ever tempted to separate. And that is this idea that in Scripture there is always the tension of the chaos and the suffering and on the other hand there is always this wonderful, glorious, unwavering hope in a Redeemer who can redeem the chaos. Both themes are consistent all through Scripture, that God came in the person of Jesus and through the ministry of the Holy Spirit to bring an answer to the chaos of this world. The Holy Spirit is introduced in the very beginning, I want to trace for you this in the Bible, the very beginning the Holy Spirit is introduced, the Bible’s famous opening line is this, 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 or brooding over the waters. That’s the first, the second verse in the Bible, He’s brooding over the waters. In the ancient Near East world from which Genesis emerged, the waters did not evoke an image of a peaceful stream. The waters were symbolic of something that was to be feared. And as the Old Testament progresses the sea continues to serve as a symbol of chaos and disorder. That’s the point of verse two, is that things are formless and void and there’s chaos and the waters are just, you know, they’re torrential, it’s like a tsunami that’s completely out of control. So with this context in mind let me offer to you a translation. In the beginning the Holy Spirit is hovering, waiting, and when the Father gives the word the Spirit touches the chaos and suddenly there is order. So there is disorder and then suddenly following that immediately by the voice of God through the Spirit of God there is order. Light is divided from dark, land is separated from the sea. But it’s more than just organization, there’s life. When you read Genesis 1, 2, and 3 you see there’s life in the place where there’s only confusion and dysfunction and disorder. Now there’s delight, wonder, joy, and hope. The Spirit of God speaks into the chaos and brings hope. So then when we get to Eden, the Garden of Eden, it includes a river that is watering the garden. Do you remember the river motif in the Garden of Eden? God has channeled the chaos, the storms of the water, ordering them into a spring which becomes a river and a garden that flows through this beautiful setting. From the Bible’s first scene we gather that the Holy Spirit doesn’t just get rid of disorder. The Spirit actually makes the very place of darkness and fear an oasis that is teeming with life. Now it’s important that you get this because as we walk through this motif of water you’re going to see that it ends up being a picture of what Jesus came to do, which was to be the living water to humanity that would speak to the chaos of their lives to bring order and salvation and hope. The Spirit makes the very place of darkness an oasis. Now of course we know what happened in Genesis 3, just barely a page into this paradise, all that order and life is corrupted. Adam and Eve rebelled against God and he cast them out of the Eden. Do you remember that? And that’s why the world we live in has a lot more common with chaos than it does with peace. There’s chaos all around you, friends. It’s why though there are moments of delight, wonder, and joy, and confusion, and dysfunction, that there is plenty of that and disorder that continue to haunt us. So as the story rolls on, water, which once symbolized the fearful unknown, the torrential brooding over these waters, in Genesis 1, it comes to symbolize the promise of God made by Him about the Holy Spirit. The promise really comes alive in the book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel 47 is on the screen for you there. Ezekiel sees this vision of a river. Now we’ll see this pick up in the New Testament. But Ezekiel 47, there’s water that’s flowing from the temple. In verse 1 it says, Then he brought me back to the door of the house, and behold, water was flowing from under the threshold of the house, the house is the temple. Toward the east, by the way, which way did Adam and Eve, when they were expelled, which way did they go? East. He brought me to the temple, and behold, water was flowing from under the threshold of the temple, toward the east. And the water was flowing down from under, from the right side of the house, from the south of the altar. He brought me out by the way of the north gate, and led me around on the outside of the outer gate, by way of the gate that faces east. And behold, the water was trickling from the south side. When the man went out toward the east with a line in his hand, he measured a thousand cubits, and he led me through the water. So Ezekiel is now in the water, water reaching the ankles. So it’s a trickle, and then it’s ankle high. Then he said to me, these waters go toward the eastern region and down to the Arabia, and then go toward the sea, being made to flow into the sea, and the waters of the sea became fresh. This is a picture of the waters flowing, beginning with a trickle, then ankle high, ends up being actually loin high or waist high. And that water flows all the way down to the Dead Sea, and the Dead Sea, which is dead, the reason it’s dead is it’s over 25% minerals, and no life can live in the Dead Sea. And that river, because of the river, that lake, because of that sea, because of the river that’s flowing, turns the Dead Sea into something that is alive. It will come about that every living creature and swarms in every place where the river goes, where every place the river goes, things will live. And there will be many fish, for these waters go there, and others become fresh, so everything we live, everything we’ll live where the river goes. And it will come about that fishermen will stand it from Ingidae to Ingalam, there will be a place for spreading of nets, their fish will be according to their kinds like the fish of the great sea, very many. So again, it’s a picture of all the life that happens because the river is flowing. But its swamps and marshes will not become fresh, they will be left for salt. But the river on its bank, on the one side and on the other, will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither and their fruit will not fail. They will bear every month because their water flows from the sanctuary, the water flows from underneath that stone, foundation stone, it flows out of the temple because the water flows all the way down to the Dead Sea. Because the water flows from the sanctuary and their fruit will be for food and their leaves for the healing. It’s a promise. It grew from a trickle and steps to a flowing river that he followed that current all the way east, the direction of Adam and Eve who walked out of Edom. The direction representing our human condition and the devastating reach for control that resulted in chaos, not order and not life. It is a river that is flowing, which means that the river is overwhelming the chaos. Notice the river flows east, it brings overwhelming life wherever it goes. Alongside the river, fishermen gather because fish of every kind are swimming in the current now. Just as people of every nation, tribe, tongue, and every social and economical bracket, every background, every degree of having it together and falling apart that make up the family of God. Fruitful trees line the banks, yielding fruit that feeds the nations and the leaves that heal the nations. And the Dead Sea becomes alive. Now, I want you to notice in this invitation, there’s a two-fold, or in this vision, there’s a two-fold invitation. Number one, it’s an invitation to come. Before Ezekiel even sees where the river is going, Ezekiel is invited into the waters. Get into the waters. And he explains that it comes ankle deep, you know, and thigh deep, and all the way up to the loins. The invitation was understood as an essential invitation by the earliest Christians to get into the water of God’s Spirit. Do you remember that thing called the ikthus, the fish? You’ve seen a fish symbol? Tertullian referred to Jesus as a heavenly fish. He’s an ancient writer, Christian writer. And to Christians as little fish. The common Christian fish symbol, whose modern use has devolved almost exclusively into kind of an unbearable cheesiness, actually comes from a rich history of understanding the Christian life as swimming in the rivers of the Spirit. So it was an invitation to jump in, and it’s an invitation, secondly, to become. To become a part of the current that heals the world. What happens to the river when it begins to flow? It produces healing for the nations. The Spirit-empowered lives of Jesus’ followers spill into the hopeless, hurting, and helpless places in our world, resurrecting the dead and renewing them with life. So there’s a call to the church, the followers of Jesus, first of all, to come, to jump in, and secondly, to become what you have experienced to a world who lives in chaos. You become a bringer of the presence of Jesus. So it’s a call for us to stop meandering in the cesspool of our own self-pity and to jump into the river. We come to the river and we let God’s healing in our own life turn our Dead Sea into a Living Sea, and then we become a wounded healer, spreading His healing life to everyone we meet. We take on the ministry of Jesus because we have received the ministry of Jesus and we become that river that flows in a chaotic world. My grandkids love to swim. They just love to swim. I think most kids do. I don’t like to swim. If you would do a water sport, I’m into that. You want me to ride a wave runner, I’m there. Go on a boat ride, great. You want me to water ski, yeah, I used to do that a lot. It kind of pulls my arms out of sockets now, but before when I was a little stronger and healthier, it wasn’t so bad. But I don’t like to stand. And they’re always saying, Papa, get in. And I usually say something like, well, you know, it’s a little scary when Papa takes his shirt off. It scares the children, so we best not do that, trying to get around it. But they just keep insisting, and man are they thrilled when I finally say, take the shirt off, I don’t care if it clears out the pool, it’ll be more fun anyway. And when I jump into the pool, the fun begins. Isn’t it sad that as Christians, sometimes we stand on the outer banks of the river and we fail to jump in. And yet we want to experience the results of the river, but we really don’t want to spend much time into it. And therefore the Holy Spirit becomes to us a familiar stranger. It’s like we’ve experienced a little bit of the healing leaves. We’ve picked a few things, but the call of the Spirit of God and of Jesus is to get into the river so that we can be directed by His Spirit to be the healing for the nations. To receive something from Him and not have a posture of being willing to give it, is incongruent with the gospel. So let’s go to John 7, and Jesus picks up on Ezekiel 47. In John’s gospel, Jesus turns Ezekiel’s future visit into a present invitation, but he does so in kind of a brutally honest and almost a rebellious way, if you’re really hearing what he’s saying. And he steps into that festival moment and announces something spectacular. Verse 37, now on the last day, the great day of the feast, this would have been the Feast of the Tabernacles. That’s where Jewish people would actually literally build temporary shelters, and they would stay in those shelters for about a week, and it symbolized their wanderings in the wilderness, and it became a symbolic representation of God meeting them and protecting them in the wilderness days. Jesus stood and cried out. So on the last day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the scripture said, from his inmost being will flow rivers of living water. But this he spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive. For the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified. So on the last day of the feast, Jesus stands up and says, If anyone is thirsty, come to me, and I will give you this living water. During the festival, people would sleep in these tents throughout the city. In fact, if you go to Brooklyn in the Orthodox section of Brooklyn, New York Orthodox section of the town, you will find that they will actually put up tents on their balconies during this festival. But on the seventh day, the final day of the Feast of Tabernacles, the last and greatest day of the festival, crowds would gather at the temple steps for a culminating ritual. Now hear this. Priests would carry large cisterns of water that they had gathered from the pool of Siloam. Now the pool of Siloam is going to be referenced in John chapter 9. Do you remember when the blind guy comes and they say, Jesus, you tell us, who was at fault here, mom and dad or him? And Jesus says, neither. This is happening so that God can be glorified. And he puts this dope on his eyes and says, Go wash in the pool of Siloam. And he does so and he can see. So these large cisterns are filled from this pool of Siloam. And while the crowds would sing the psalms and praise the Lord, the priest would pour water from these cisterns from the altar down the temple steps, which would create a stream that would flow out of the temple. And guess which way it flowed? East. It was a living reenactment of Ezekiel’s vision, an embodied way for a whole nation to pray together and ask God to bring the promised river that you promised Ezekiel. They’re saying, Lord, let it happen. And they actually believe that it was from the foundational stone that one day this river would flow down those steps and all of that river of God would bring healing to all the chaos in the world. It was a holy moment. It was a moment the whole festival had been building up to. It was the high point of this high holiday. Crowds were belting out psalms till their throats were sore. Priests were turning a prophetic vision into a living picture so that all could see it. Tears of longing, glossing the eyes of old and young. And in that very moment, Jesus stands up and says, I’m the water. Can you imagine that? The priests are doing their thing. The religious leaders are reenacting Ezekiel 47. And Jesus comes out of nowhere and says, Hey, I just want to let you know I am he. I’m the river. If you will come to me, I will give to you of this river that is flowing out through me to a world who desperately needs a drink of my cold water. And he stands up and says, let anyone who’s thirsty come to me and drink. For whoever believes in me as a scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow within them. On your own, you should do a study of the motif of water in the book of John. It’s fascinating. Water into wine. The Nicodemus story. If you’re born of the water of the spirit, you’ll see heaven. John chapter 4. If you’ll take the water that I’ll give you, you’ll never die. You will have living water. John chapter 5. The man is waiting there for the waters to be what? Stirred? And Jesus says, your traditions are meaningless and they’re dead. What you really need is to be whole. And I’m giving you this wholeness in Jesus name. John chapter 7. John chapter 19. John is the only writer who lets us know that Jesus was speared in the side. And guess what came out of his side? Blood and water. Through his death and resurrection, Jesus poured life into a place of death. And for those who came to him, who took him up on the invitation, the promise came alive in them too, but not right away. Because John adds this little note. Did you see it? It’s the last verse. By this he meant the spirit whom those who believed in him were latter to receive. He is pointing to Acts chapter 2. John notes that Jesus is referring to the spirit when he blurted out perfectly timed interruption, that he’s quick to add that the promised spirit was not given yet in that moment. Which brings us to Acts chapter 2, the day of Pentecost. The spirit of Jesus promised in John 7 is given in Acts 2. This Jesus, this is Peter explaining Pentecost. This Jesus, whom God raised up again, to which we all are witnesses, therefore having been exalted to the right hand of God. Where is he? He’s on the throne. Right hand of God. And having received from the Father the promise of the spirit, he has poured forth that which you both see and hear. That language of pouring is not accidental. From Jesus, who is ascended, who is enthroned, is now pouring out this experience of the water of God’s spirit that is flooding not just on certain people, but in flooding on an entire community of followers of Jesus. This river of living water has been poured out. Ezekiel’s vision has come to life in our midst. You won’t find it in the temple. The river of living water is now streaming forth from the lives of all who drink, just as Jesus promised. The water is poured out on you and on me. We are containers. We are conduits of the river of God’s spirit. And as the story unfolds in the pages that follow, everything the river was in the vision, the church now becomes to the world. They fed the hungry. The church healed the sick. They proclaimed the good news. That’s the book of Acts. That’s what they’re doing. They weren’t a holy huddle in a sacred building. They were a river flowing east, overwhelming dead places with unstoppable life. And I say to you, friends, and I believe with all my heart, we live beneath our calling. God has filled us with his spirit so that we can let the river flow. A watered church began to water the whole world. And did you notice the commentary of people who knew these church people? The commentary about them was that, man, they are so smart. Man, do they have some degrees on their walls? Oh my goodness, these guys are so competent. I can’t believe it. No, they say, these are just ordinary people. But they’re ordinary people who have been with Jesus. They’re ordinary people who experienced the river of God’s presence. Well, guess what the apostle Paul does in 1 Corinthians 6 chapter 19. He says, do you not know that your bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you receive from God? He uses two different, we don’t do you all in the Greek, but there is plural in the Greek. We just don’t know it because we can’t bring it over. So we know it in context. But he starts by saying, you all are the temple of the Holy Spirit. And then in this verse, he’s saying, do you not know that you individually are the temple of the Holy Spirit whom you have received the spirit of God? You remember this whole temple language, Jesus, that temple, you’re the temple, the source of the river that flows into the dead places. You now are the temple of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit doesn’t live in this building. The Holy Spirit lives in you. You take him with you. The Holy Spirit lives in you. This same spirit who speaks peace over our internal chaos also sends us out to be a peacemaker in the city. Now, guess what happens in Revelation in the future? I’m giving you this whole motif right from beginning to end. And guess what? We’re in Revelation. Good news. Revelation 21, 22, the thematic introduction to the Holy Spirit, to the metaphor of water, began on the first page of the Bible. And it reaches a crescendo in the final page of Revelation. Revelation 21, and then we’ll go to Revelation 22. For the longest time, I didn’t know why in the world God wanted to take away the sea. Because I happen to like the sea. I like to go to the ocean and sit on the beach. I don’t really like to particularly, again, get in, but I like to sit and see. It’s scenic. It’s wonderful. Cindy loves to get in, and I get to watch her get in. That’s always great. So, no more sea. Verse 1, then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there was no longer any sea. Now, I can’t be dogmatic about this because we really don’t know, but I’m thinking, what is with this no longer sea bit? Why is there no sea? I like to see the sunset on the coastal horizon. Why would God give up the Pacific Ocean? I like that. Could it be that this sea is a reference to the chaos once in Genesis chapter 1, verse 2? Maybe it’s him promising the drying up, not the drying up of the ocean or rivers, but the drying up of all chaos, the drying up of the turbulence, the end of suffering and pain and disorder. He’s saying there’s no more of that anymore. There’s no more sea. And then, of course, in Revelation 22, then he showed me a river of water of life, clear as crystal, coming from where? The throne of God. We’ve been on this from Ezekiel to John to Revelation, from the throne of God and the lamb in the middle of its street. On either side of the river, there was a tree of life bearing kinds of twelve, yielding its fruit every month, and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. This sounds like Ezekiel 47. That’s because it is. It’s the ultimate fulfillment of Ezekiel 47 when God does away with all sin and all chaos and all curse of the world. And he says from here on out, it’s just the beauty of the river flowing when all the curse is lifted. The Spirit issues, friends, to us the same two-part relational invitation that we saw in Ezekiel’s prophecy and in Jesus’ words at the festival. It’s an invitation to come. Ezekiel was not invited to observe the river, but to swim in its waters, to become a part of it. That is a challenge for us, church, to not be spectators and watch the river, but to jump into the river and be a part of the healing of the nations. Jesus offered the same invitation in his holy interruption. The Spirit’s life is not for observation, but for participation. The invitation is not only to get in, it’s to become. God wants to move our ideas and our beliefs about the Holy Spirit to an experience. The Christian life without the experience of the Holy Spirit and reliance upon him doesn’t work. Listen to me. The Holy Spirit, the Christian life without the experience of the Holy Spirit and reliance upon him doesn’t work. It does not work. The reason God brings us to the end of ourselves is because that’s when Christianity starts working. It works when we create a dependent connection on us and the Spirit of God. Without participation, come and drink. Friends, it’s nothing more than a worldview, and we have people that believe in God, but there’s a huge gap between their head and their heart. They are not experiencing the presence of the Holy Spirit. Without participation, it’s the best and fullest of philosophies, but it’s just a worldview, and worldviews are important. That’ll work most of the time. It’ll get you by most of the time until it doesn’t. What do you do about those themes in your own story in which despair has swallowed up hope, shame stands taller than grace, and chaos seems more profound than redemption? What do you do with the ongoing battle of chronic illness, the crushing grief of losing a loved one to an illness or an accident? Where does this healing come from? It doesn’t come from a worldview. It comes from encounter with the Spirit of God. When you stand in front of your friends and your family making wedding vows, and now you’re a few years in, and he’s changed, and so have you. Where does the healing come from that brokenness of those forever kinds of promises? It does not come from more moving the sand around in your head of your belief. It comes from an encounter with the Spirit of God to change your life. What about when that abuse you buried so deep resurfaces, and you’re paralyzed in adulthood by events of your childhood? That doesn’t come from psychological mumbo-jumbo. It comes from an encounter with the living God who will heal the brokenness of your heart. What do you do when people who shaped your faith let you down? Where do you take the pain of seeing the community that welcomed you to the family becoming the community that actually hurt you most deeply? The worldview cannot get you by on ordinary days, but it can heal you when the chaos floods. Only the one who spoke order into our primordial chaos at creation can speak order into your chaos. People don’t need to be more educated. Now, we want education. I’m pro-education, but not at the expense of people having a living experience with the Spirit of God. The Spirit also makes you and me a part of the current of the peace flowing. When our lives are broken, friends, the answer is not more understanding. The answer is an experience with the Spirit of God. Back when PlayStations were popular, I think they still have them. I don’t play them. I never wanted to. I was worried I would get addicted. My kids played them a little bit, and one time his PlayStation 1, my son’s PlayStation 1, broke, and I said, no problem. Bring it to me. I’ll fix it. The thing must have had 400 screws in it, you know, the little bitty screws, so I unscrewed it all. I was taking it apart, and it’s probably just that little eye thing that’s dirty. It was back when you had to read a disc. It didn’t have a hard drive, so I cleaned it all up, and I put it back together, and I had like 30 screws left over. And I said, well, son, they probably didn’t need those in the first place, so we’re not going to worry about it. Well, not surprising, I guess, the PlayStation did not work. So I boxed it up and sent it to PlayStation and told them what I had done, said how sorry I was that my son, Brendan, would like to have his PlayStation fixed, and I’ll pay whatever it costs. About three weeks later, the PlayStation shows back up with this letter. Dear Brendan, enclosed is your PlayStation, fully repaired and fixed. Please don’t let your dad touch the PlayStation anymore. Friends, the key to our brokenness is not for us to sit and try to unscrew all the screws of our life to get to the root problem. The key to our brokenness is to take ourselves back to the original manufacturer and say, Lord, here’s my broken life. I want to jump into the river. I don’t know what the healing looks like. I don’t know what you will do, but Lord, I am broken, and I’m asking you to fix me. Can I just tell you categorically that Jesus loves those kind of prayers? That’s why he came. That’s why he came. It’s an invitation to come and an invitation to become. The Holy Spirit brings personal peace to us. He heals our brokenness, and the reward of that is to become a wounded healer to somebody else. The Spirit makes you and me part of the current of the peace of God that is flowing. By the Spirit, the powerfully healed become powerful healers. The depressed can be filled with incomprehensible joy, and then those depressed people can give away the joy they’ve received. The insecure can become courageous, inviting people into the very life that they previously hid before. Why? Because God healed them. The quick-tempered and impulsive with very little self-control can bring people into the transformation that they’ve experienced. The chronically anxious, and by the way, there are plenty of anxious people around us, become a non-anxious presence in a world that desperately needs to see that, pouring living water into their Dead Sea experience. On Mission with Jesus is about sharing the life of Jesus that you have experienced with other people. That’s it! Our deepest wounds are healed and redeemed by the Holy Spirit, and we become that temple from which the water of Jesus flows to the hurting people around us. We come and we become the Spirit of God to others. Shortly before we left Alaska, a man and his wife called me and they were in tears, they were just frantic. Their 23-year-old son had just been killed by a truck that ran through a four-way stop, and it was discovered that that truck, the brakes were bad, and the driver knew it, and he couldn’t stop, and he plowed right into the side of their son, 23 years old. The man in our church, his name was Paul, and I began to minister to him. He was so, so angry, mad at God, mad at the truck driver, wanted the truck driver to pay, wanted to throw the book at him. Of course, the truck driver was brought up on charges for vehicular homicide, and all of my conversations with Paul seemed to go absolutely nowhere. It’s almost like he shut me out and didn’t want to hear anything I had to say about his need to just open up his heart to the healing grace of Jesus. Only the Lord can heal that deep wounding, and I’m not interested in that. Why did God allow this? So we just prayed and prayed and fasted and prayed, and it seemed like we were getting nowhere with him, and then one night he had a dream, and God appeared to him miraculously and said, Paul, you’ve got to let this go, and he knew it was Jesus. And Paul called me and said, Pastor, the Lord just told me I got to let this go, and so we began that journey, and over a couple of weeks, it seemed like he just was releasing all that hurt and pain and anger to the Lord. All along during this process, of course, the court trial is going on, and on the day of sentencing, they invite Paul and his wife and the guy who’s being sentenced, obviously he’s there, and they invite me, Pastor, would you come? I said, sure, I’ll come and support you. Unbeknownst to me, at the end, a lot of times a judge will say, would you like to say anything, because the judge is about to pass sentence on the man, and Paul stands up and says this. He says, Your Honor, the Lord has been gracious to me and has forgiven me and has told me that I need to forgive this man, and I am asking you to not send him to jail, because I have forgiven him, and I don’t want him to go to jail. There are rarely holy moments inside of a courtroom, you know that? The courtrooms beget strife, you know that, right? It’s just awful, and in that moment, there’s like this holy hush just settled into this room. The judge was speechless. He said, I’m going to have to take this back into consideration. The judge came back 20, 30 minutes later and said, Paul, based on your testimony, and this took months to get to this date, right? He said, I will just give him time served with a fine, and Paul walks over and hugs that man for five or ten minutes, and they’re both in tears, and we’re all in tears, right? As Paul is offering, the forgiveness that he has As Paul is offering, the forgiveness that he has received is flowing out from him. Three weeks later, that truck driver shows up at church and gives his heart to Jesus. shows up at church and gives his heart to Jesus. Friends, that’s the gospel. Freely you have received, freely you give, and I believe that as Paul released that man, he was holding so tight to him in unforgiveness, as he released that man, he released him literally into the hands of Jesus when he took his hands off of him, and the Spirit of God drew him right to himself. I often wonder, friends, when we hang on to our junk, how much of that keeps the Lord and his Spirit from operating in the very life of the one who desperately needs the conviction and needs the conviction and convincing of the Holy Spirit. You have received the water of God’s life. Our call now is to let it flow out of these temples to a chaotic world who desperately needs Jesus. Would you stand with me, please, Father? Thank you for the work of your Spirit in us. Lord, such a powerful image of this water of life that flows from you, Jesus, to us. Thank you that we have drank of the water, Lord. Thank you. Thank you that we, your people, have been able to come to the water, and Lord, I just feel such an urgency in my own spirit to just jump in. Enough of this kind of staying on the outer banks and just watching the other thing happening in the river. Lord, I just hear your call that we, as your people, need to jump into the river. We may not really know what that means, but Lord, there is something very spiritual about just saying, Lord, we’re in. We want to experience you. We want all of our chaos and all of our brokenness because, Lord, we are still broken. We want it to be healed by the power of God so that we can become wounded healers. And so, Lord, just as we come, Lord, I also hear your call to become. May we be the hands and feet and words and life of Jesus to a chaotic world around us. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. This world needs to see a genuine demonstration of the river of Jesus. So, may we leave here, Lord, with a tent of eyes and hearts, not only to your Spirit, but to those around us who are broken and hurting, who desperately need you. Where you are in your chair right there, would you just make that your prayer to him? Maybe you just want to say to him, Lord, Lord, I come. Lord, I come. I come to you, Lord. I don’t want you, Spirit of God, to be a familiar stranger. Give us ears to hear what your Spirit is saying, Lord. Lord, we don’t want to just talk the talk. Lord, we want to experience your life in us that invades the chaos of whatever we’re experiencing. And, Lord, I know in a room like this there are hurting people. We bring it. Some stuff we maybe don’t even realize that’s at work in us, but other stuff we know, we’ve pushed it aside and we’ve said we’re not going to worry about that. But this morning, we just bring all of this and we present our life back to you, the original manufacturer. And we say, Lord, heal us, cleanse us. Lord, if there are people in this room who don’t know you as Savior, I pray that they would open up their heart to the love and grace of Jesus, because your invitation to them is to come, to receive salvation. And so, Lord, thank you for working in hearts of people, in me, in us. And you work in us, Lord, so that we will be, Father, we will be your hands and your feet extended. We will be on mission with Jesus. Not our mission, Lord, your mission, because we’ve received your Spirit. We’ve received your mandate. And we ask that you, Lord, would help us become a cup of cold water to people who desperately need you. Lord, I thank you for it. We ask that, Jesus. We ask this, Lord. Would you write where you are? Could we just thank him for his word to us today? Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Spirit of Jesus. Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Lord. Lord, seal it in our hearts, and may we live, Lord, and go forth as the people of God that you want us to be in a chaotic world who needs to see Jesus. We bless you, and we thank you in your name. And all God’s people said, amen, and amen, Pastor. Hi, I’m Pastor Tom Ragsdale. I’m Pastor Ellis Bennis. And we’re from Columbia First Assembly. We are a church that’s on mission with Jesus. Our vision is simple. We want to make Jesus famous in your heart and in our community. Absolutely. Thank you so much for connecting with us online. We would also love to connect with you in person. We are located at 1100 North 7th Street, right in the heart of Columbia, Missouri, right across the street from Hickman High School. So if you’re in the central Missouri area and you’re looking for a home church, come hang out with us. If you’re just connecting online and you’re nowhere near us, then please connect with us in the comments. If you have a prayer request, if you have a question, if you’re wondering anything about the Lord or Christianity, please let us know, and we would be happy to engage with you in the comments. We believe God’s doing something special at our church, and we want you to be a part of it. We’re a multi-generational church. We have people from all different backgrounds. We’re a church of the Word. We’re a church of the Spirit. We believe Jesus can transform your life. That’s why we’re on mission with Him, and we want to help you know God. We want to help you grow in God, and we want to share hope in our community. So connect with us, and we want to connect with you. Awesome. Have a wonderful and a blessed day.