2023-01-10 Ghosted - Why does the Holy Spirit Matter

The speaker discusses the importance of the Holy Spirit and its role in the lives of Christians. He emphasizes the need to actively seek and recognize the Holy Spirit's presence. The Holy Spirit teaches and reminds believers of God's teachings, and it is important to be open to its guidance in both big and small aspects of life. The Holy Spirit residing within believers is seen as the hope of the world, as it displays God's glory and brings hope to others. The speaker encourages listeners to have a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit and to seek its guidance in their lives. Tonight I'm going to be answering the question, does the Holy Spirit matter? As we continue the series we started last week titled, Ghosted Talking About the Holy Spirit and Living a Holy Spirit Filled Life and Real Life. Now some people get nervous when we start talking about the Holy Spirit, and I call those people in process. Because we as Christians of all stripes, I don't care what your denominational background is, have a reason to be excited about the Holy Spirit and to be excited to talk about the Holy Spirit. So it's a good thing. And the nice thing about being in process is that every one of us is in process in different areas and different ways. So why don't you just tell the person next to you, you're in process. So we are going to jump into the same set of scriptures that we actually read last week. It's going to be kind of our theme set of scriptures for these few weeks on the Holy Spirit. And it's John chapter 14, starting in verse 15, and we're going to go on to 27. And this is Jesus speaking. He says, if you love me, obey my commandments. And I will ask the Father and he will give you another advocate who will never leave you. He is the Holy Spirit who leads into all truth. The world cannot receive him because it isn't looking for him and doesn't recognize him. But you know him because he lives with you now and later will be in you. No, I will not abandon you as orphans. I will come to you soon. The world will no longer see me, but you will see me since I live. You also will live when I am raised to life again. You will know that I am in my father and you are in me and I am in you. Those who accept my commandments and obey them are the ones who love me. And because they love me, my father will love them. And I will love them and reveal myself to each of them. Judas, not Judas Iscariot, but the other disciple with that name, said to him, Lord, why are you going to reveal yourself only to us and not to the world at large? Jesus replied, all who love me will do what I say. My father will love them and we will come and make our home with each of them. Anyone who doesn't love me will not obey me. And remember, my words are not my own. What I'm telling you is from the Father who sent me. I am telling you these things now while I am with you. But when the Father sends the advocate as my representative, that is the Holy Spirit, he will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I have told you. I am leaving you with a gift, peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give is a gift the world cannot give. So don't be troubled or afraid. When my wife Hannah and I were first getting to know each other, we were in sort of a long distance friendship for a while. You know, we had met in person in Halifax. We were introduced by a mutual friend when I was visiting him. But after that, I went back to Ontario and we stayed in touch mostly through digital communication, text messaging, email, those kinds of things. And while we had a good starting place of getting to know each other that way, when I moved to Halifax and Hannah and I got to know each other face to face, it was a much better experience. There was the nuance of facial expressions, tone of voice. You know, Hannah was able to see how slowly I eat and how slowly I walk when I'm going places. It was a more rich, full experience. I think that sometimes as we read the Bible, we get the mistaken impression that we're getting a second tier experience to the early Christians that were walking with Jesus physically and seeing him face to face. Because the reality is that when he was with them physically, he told them in John chapter 16 verses 7 that it is better that he goes away so that the Holy Spirit can come dwell within them. So we actually told them that we were going to get a better experience than they had. The Holy Spirit within us is a first-hand experience with God rather than a second-hand experience of just being around him. He is living within us as believers. And often, I think we don't think the idea of the Holy Spirit matters as much as just the idea of God in general because we haven't necessarily experienced him yet. But why haven't we? Because we need to look for the Holy Spirit, which is my first point for you tonight. In a passage we read at the beginning of this, we heard that the world cannot receive him because it isn't looking for him and it doesn't recognize him. And this isn't about seeing with our eyes. This is about discernment. And discernment isn't just observation, right? It's using wisdom to determine what it is we're looking at and how we should respond to it. That's the difference. My father-in-law, John, is a man with great expectations for the good things that God is going to do in his life. And he taught Hannah that same kind of expectation growing up. And because of this, I remember early on when I met both of them, it just seemed like God was doing amazing things in their life, left, right, and center. And I mean things like, you know, just always running into somebody that they could share their faith in Jesus with, or just getting like a discount out of nowhere in a restaurant, like just for no apparent reason. They just got a discount. And, you know, it isn't that they receive these blessings because God loves them more in some way. He loves us all equally. But I think that they were more aware of the good things the Holy Spirit was already doing in their lives. They were expecting it, so they saw it. And I want to be clear here. When I say they expected it, so they saw it, I'm not saying that because they expected it, they created that opportunity to happen. It's not that they're expecting it, willed it to be. But because they were expecting it, they were open to seeing it. You ever have a bad day where you wake up and it just seems like things go from bad to worse? And half the time, if you actually look at it, it isn't so much that that day was any worse than anything else. It's just that something bad happened. So now you're in a bad mood. So you're noticing all of the bad things. And it's a similar concept. Now, someone could claim that Hannah and my father-in-law were just experiencing some sort of confirmation bias, right? And that these were coincidences. But really, they're perceiving the Holy Spirit because they're willing, they're looking. The world cannot receive him because it isn't looking for him. It doesn't recognize him. So will we open our eyes to see the Holy Spirit tonight? My second point for you tonight is that the Holy Spirit matters because he teaches us and reminds us of what we need to know. John 14, 26 says he will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I have told you. So he'll teach us things we haven't learned yet. What are those new things that he will teach us, that the Holy Spirit can teach us? Well, he can make plain to us the confusing parts of scripture, and he can show us how to apply those scriptures in our lives if we ask him and if we're willing to listen and quiet ourselves like we talked about last week, when we need to put those distractions aside so we can hear God and focus on him. But what's the limit to what he teaches? Because a lot of people, like I said earlier, people get nervous sometimes when you talk about the Holy Spirit because people get like, well, you know, I met somebody and they're real Holy Spirit goosebumps and they're just kind of like whatever idea popped into their head, they're just like, it's the Holy Spirit kind of thing. You're like, I don't think that one was the Holy Spirit. And there is, yes, there is a limit to what he's going to teach us. And that limit is because God is the same yesterday, today, and forever, right? So he's not going to contradict himself. The Bible, I look at it a bit like this. The Bible is a bit like the text messages that Hannah and I exchanged when we were getting to know each other. If when I moved to Halifax, she started saying and doing all these sorts of things that contradicted those text messages I had received, you know, red flags would start to go off for me. But that didn't happen. She was consistent, just like God is consistent with his text message, the Bible. He's always going to be consistent with it. The Holy Spirit is only going to teach us that which agrees with what's already in here in Scripture. So he's also going to guide us on how to apply what he teaches us. And I think we tend to think of the Holy Spirit's guidance in the really big senses, right? Needing the Holy Spirit to guide us in what a calling is, what we should do with our life, where we should live, who we should marry, all these big things. But I saw this thing online. I want to show you guys through it because I think this really speaks some truth into it. People ask me, do I need the Holy Spirit to go to heaven? Bruh, you need the Holy Spirit to go to Walmart. You really do. You really do. It's not just about the big, big things. It's about the day-to-day moments. And I think sometimes the biggest evidence of the Holy Spirit at work in someone's life is not, you know, these big miraculous displays, but just the fact that they have some self-control. The fact that they're not going off on everybody that, you know, annoys them and these kind of things. That's a huge thing in the Holy Spirit. I heard someone say once the fact that we can understand literally a single word in the Bible is a work of the Holy Spirit, because without that, it doesn't make a lot of sense sometimes. So we need the Holy Spirit to guide us in those day-to-day moments too. He's also going to remind us of what God already taught us. We saw that in the verse either, but He can only remind us if He is remind. He can only remind us of what's already in us. Are we giving Him the material He needs to teach us with and then remind us with? So where do we get that material? Church, like we're doing here. That's one way that we're learning about God and giving Him stuff to remind us with in the future. The Bible, obviously. Worship, prayer, Christian relationships like we can have with one another. But we also have to avoid toxic distractions. We talked about this a little bit last week too, about how we can get distracted by things. And some of those things are not necessarily inherently toxic, but they can be taking the focus off of God. And it's like what we put in us is what is going to come out of us. Your parents probably all told you growing up, garbage in, garbage out, right? What we put in us is what's going to come out of us. I've heard of people who have, missionaries and things who've gone to prison and stuff like that, and they were reciting verses that they could remember, but they were reciting it because they knew it, right? They wouldn't be able to do that if they hadn't had that in them in the first place. We've got to get that into us so the Holy Spirit can remind us of that. The last point for you guys on the Holy Spirit this week is that the Holy Spirit matters because the Holy Spirit within us is the hope of the world. Colossians 1.27 says, to them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. The point of the gospel is that you can be like Jesus, standing next to somebody else because the hope of glory is Christ within you. The hope of glory is not Christ coming by any method he could, but specifically Christ residing within you. That is how he chose to display his glory to the world. Now, I don't want it to get mixed up. I'm not saying you're the hope of the world. There is an aspect where you can bring hope to the world. Jesus is the hope of the world, but he chose to come in a specific manner. Like, he doesn't need us, right? I hate to burst anyone's bubble here, but he doesn't need us. He could just evangelize the whole world without you. He doesn't need you. Sorry, but he chose to work through you for a reason. You know, Christianity is not a religion about a guy who lived and died 2,023 years ago. It's about how God himself lives actively and literally within a Christian and displays the hope for the world through that Christian today. So does that mean that Jesus lives on as a metaphor of goodwill in Christians, the spirit of goodwill? No, that's a hollow, pointless, hallmark Christmas card, Christianity, and that's a waste of time. The Holy Spirit is literally God himself. Just as Jesus is literally God himself. And it's not that it's a plurality of gods, but rather that God is so vast that one simple label doesn't cover it all. God is literally within me right now. What does that mean? Does that mean we can wheel up an x-ray machine in front of me now and see him just kind of swimming around in my belly? No, it means that his spirit exists within mine. You and I are not simply the sum of some biological machine parts, as some would argue. There's an essence that's deeper than that, and that is where the spirit of God is living in the life of every believer. So how can the Holy Spirit be a fringe topic if him living inside of us is meant to be the evidence to the world of God's existence, of the hope for those who don't yet believe, of those who don't yet seek him, but can see him at work in us and want that same spirit in them? Recently, a video game company put out a video game titled I Am Jesus Christ, where you might be shocked to know you can play as Jesus. Now, it's not... It's very confusing. I don't have time to go into it all right now. It doesn't appear to be intended to be at least intentionally sacrilegious. Let's put it that way. It didn't seem to be that. But I shared the link to the trailer for this game with a friend being like, this is so weird, right? Like just sending it to him like, did you see this? This is so bizarre, right? And he remarked to me how in the trailer it said he was just laughing because he's like, in this game trailer, it's saying like, you know, hit R to recharge the Holy Spirit and stuff. And he was just laughing, thinking like he said, if it was that easy, I'd just hit the R key all day long, you know? But that got me thinking, maybe it is that simple. Not that we can just press a key and activate the power of the Holy Spirit, but rather that he's as close as the mention of his name. We don't need to hit the R key. We simply need to open our Bibles to pray, to focus our minds on Christ, to enter into worship. That's how we recharge. We've spent some time now talking about the Holy Spirit, but maybe it's time we spend some time talking to the Holy Spirit. Sometimes we dance around these high-minded ideas and we forget to just keep it simple and talk to God. So why don't we just take a moment to do that now? Holy Spirit, forgive us for when we've treated you as some vague force or fringe topic, something to talk about or something to use for our own gain and command. God, we submit to you. We need you. Fill us again and guide us. Help us to be instruments used by you to display your glory to the world. Amen.