Sermon Tone Analysis

Our Theme for 2023 is “Life in the Spirit”

It is more than just recognizing the work of the Holy Spirit.

It is understanding that we live in two realities - natural reality and spiritual reality.

We live at the intersection of heaven and earth.

We are an altar where heaven’s business is transacted on earth.

Our vision at SCF is to “Encounter God’s Transforming Love.”

How do we do that?

(Four R’s)

Respond

Restore

Release

Relate

That describes who we are and what we are about.

We are reviewing the 4R’s just as a reminder of what we have committed to do as a church, but we will be doing so in light of our life in the Spirit.

We will be recalling the commitments that we made on our membership form.

If you want to see it, it is back on the information table.

Last week I started the series by saying that we need to respond to God.

God reveals Himself through a divine encounter and we respond, by our worship, our actions, our obedience.

This week is the second R- Restore.

God’s goal is restoration.

We participate in this by allowing God to remove the hindrances in our lives.

This is a lifelong process of aligning our hearts with His.

Restore is represented by the stream that flows from the cross.

There is a prophetic picture in the scripture of a river of life that flows from the Presence of God.

Did you get the picture?

The river of life grows deeper as it flows!

But look at how this river is described:

That is restoration!

When you respond to God, His life flows through you, bringing life to dead places!

How does ‘life in the spirit’ change the way we practice ‘restore’ at SCF?

Just like we said with Respond, this is not a self-help program.

Restore is about the transforming work of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit renews our spirit to be able to live and interact in spiritual reality.

We become spiritually alive - that is the life of the spiritual river flowing in us and through us.

We must then learn how to nurture and grow that spiritual capacity.

It should change the way we view ourselves and the world around us.

And we learn that it is beneficial that we do this together with other spiritually-empowered people.

Feed your spirit.

You are a spiritual being.

I won’t spend a lot of time on this because I have been saying it often - part of what it means to be a restored human being is that we have a capacity for spiritual awareness and functioning in that we were created for relationship with God.

We believe that the Bible teaches that we are body, soul and spirit.

Not everyone agrees - some scholars argue that the bible only depicts our inner life and our outer life.

In other words - that soul and spirit are the same thing.

The writer to the Hebrews points out that even in our inner life, there are thoughts and intentions which originate from us, and those which come from God.

Knowing God’s Word - His self-revelation - helps us to know the difference.

Not every thought you have is yours!

This has some startling implications.

If you have the capacity to relate to spiritual reality through you inner life - then you can be influenced by spiritual forces - either good or evil.

If you are under the impression that all of you inner life is completely you - then you will also believe that every thought that passes through your mind is completely yours and originates from your own mind.

Every temptation becomes your own desire - “I must want that.”

Every off the wall thought becomes your own imagination - “I came up with this crazy idea.”

You become a victim of every urge or impulse - “this must be who I really am”

Now you know how people can “identify” as something that they certainly are not!

But spiritual reality means that my mind is attuned, like a radio or a TV, to be able to pick up certain wavelengths.

I was created with spiritual WiFi or Bluetooth, a capacity to communicate with the invisible world.

Sometimes we hear God speaking to us, not in an audible voice, but in our own thoughts.

We know it’s God because it is beyond what we know or would have come up with on our own.

But sometimes our thoughts are also dark, in a way that is disturbing even to ourselves.

A mentally healthy individual learns to question even their own thoughts and push back at thoughts that would take them down a wrong path.

A spiritual alive and aware person discerns every thought, every feeling, and the general direction of their inner life.

Where is this coming from?

From God? From me? From satan?

Is this in agreement with who God says I am?

You must cultivate your inner life.

If you know that you have a spirit, then pay attention to what you feed your spirit.

You will want to be intentional about participating in things that promote healthy spiritual growth and development.

In our membership agreement we make the following commitment:

1.

I commit myself to grow spiritually by developing habits of reading the Bible, prayer, and reflection.

This should not be a chore - it’s just about healthy spiritual growth.

Imagine making a commitment like, “I will eat at least one meal a day which contains nutrients needed to sustain life!”

You laugh, but for a drug addict, a severely depressed person, or a college student - that might be an appropriate goal.

Some of us are just a bad when it comes to feeding our spirits.

We either don’t feed on the Word of God -whether Bible reading, listening to God’s voice or meditating on what we have already heard.

Without the Word of God we lose the ability to discern.

When we lose the ability to discern, we open ourselves up to believing things about ourselves that didn’t come from us or from God and aren’t even true!

I hope you understand that this is not about being a ‘good person’.

It is about survival as a spiritual being in a world of mixed influences.

Have a spiritual perspective.

Orient your life away from pleasing yourself.

We have established that we are spiritual beings and that our inner life requires discernment because there are both good and evil influences - the outer life is exactly the same.

The world around us is also sending us all kinds of messages.

Advertising is a great example.

Advertisers are trying to tell you what you should want or need.

They are trying to paint a picture of self- fulfilment.

The world is not telling you to follow the devil- it’s not overtly evil.

It’s telling you to follow your own desires.

And its hoping that your inner life is confused enough to not know which desires are really yours.

Living to please yourself plays right into the devils trap, because he will make you confused about what you want.

Living to please God, on the other hand may seem less fulfilling, because personal fulfilment is no longer the goal.

But it is actually more fulfilling because you are becoming the person that God created you to be.

You will see things backwards from the world.

Paul says that the flesh and the spirit are opposite.

What seems right from a self-centered perspective is going to seem backward to a person centered on the spirit- a person living to please God.

And the life centered on the spirit is backward to what the world says - because they are opposite.

Take for example the next item on our commitment form:

2. I commit my resources to God by practicing generosity, good stewardship, and tithing.

Why do we have this as part of our membership commitment?

And why is it under the heading “restore?”

Precisely because it is the kind of exercise that is directly opposite of what the world is telling us.

The world tells you to “Get all you can - can all you get - and sit on your can!”