Rely on the Holy Spirit

Biblical Authority: The Bible is God’s Holy word. It is the highest source of written authority regarding God's plan for His people. It reveals how to live out that plan, individually and corporately. Beliefs, practices, priorities, and our mission are to be anchored in clear biblical teachings. (Psalm 19:7, 2 Timothy 3:16, Luke 24:44, Luke 4:18-21)

Transformational Discipleship: Discipleship is the ongoing process of becoming more like Christ. A disciple actively imitates both the life and teaching of Jesus. It is the unique job of the church to make and equip disciples. (Psalm 1, Matthew 7:21-23, Matthew 28:16-20, John 20:21)

Love God and Others: When Jesus was asked what is the most important thing in the Bible his response was:  “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” It is our strong conviction that we honor God by loving others.  (Deuteronomy 6:4, Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:37-40, Luke 10:25-37)

Share the good news of Jesus: We believe that Jesus is too good to keep to ourselves.  We are compelled to share the good news of Jesus with others and to invite them into a relationship with Jesus.  (Isaiah 9:6-7, Romans 9, Matthew 28, Romans 10:14)

Rely on the Holy Spirit:  Jesus told his disciples, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you”  We believe that the Holy Spirit is God’s gift to all who have put their faith in Christ.  We can daily rely on the Spirit through a life of prayerful obedience.   (John 14:18, Ezekiel 36:25-27, Romans 8)

So our Last core value here is to rely on the Holy Spirit

What does this mean?

How can we come to rely on the Holy Spirit?

And you might be here thinking…I have heard about Jesus…We talk about Jesus a lot...

Its easy to rely on Jesus, we can apply the core value of Biblical authority and we can read the word of God...

But what does it mean for us as a church that we are going to rely on the Holy Spirit?

Well it means that we believe that Jesus is still alive and active in the world today, and he animates all life through the gift of his spirit.

It means we wont make leadership decisions without praying about it

It means that even as I come to preach I am praying and asking for the lord to speak to me through his spirit so that I can say something that he wants said!

It means that I don’t try and go it alone in this world, I know that wherever I am the spirit of God is with me

So first and foremost we have to establish something:

The Holy Spirit is a gift given to each believer:

lets look at Ephesians 1:13-14

Ephesians 1:13–14 NIV

And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.

See when Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus he is saying that when you believe you are marked and sealed by God with the promised Holy Spirit.

And this spirit that God is given us is not just the personal presence of God but just a deposit of things to come...

Its is God with us here and now and that pales in comparison to an eternity spent with God in heaven one day.

But the idea is that we have the spirit of God available to us and we have to make the choice to rely on him

The Spirit of God is not static! The Spirit of God dwells in each one of us and helps us to walk in step with God’s desires for our life.

But just like it is your choice to follow Jesus or not, you can follow Jesus intellectually and rely on yourself rather than the spirit

See the Spirit of God is how people change

So How do people change?

How do we get from greed to generosity?

From pride to humility?

From rage to peace?

How is it that people actually change?

So when God wants for us to change what does the Bible say about it?

The Apostle Paul wrote one of the most important passages in the entire Bible about how we change in the Christian life. It’s found in Galatians 5:16-23. There he said that the key to change is learning what it means to “walk by the Spirit.” Consider Paul’s words:

Galatians 5:16–23 NIV

So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh. They are in conflict with each other, so that you are not to do whatever you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. The acts of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.

So when Paul spoke of a conflict between “the flesh” and “the Spirit,” he was not talking about corrupt bodies.

“The flesh” is Paul’s shorthand way of talking about the self- oriented outlook—

living life depending on me and me alone,

in my strength, for my purposes in self-sufficient independence from God.

Paul knew that we all learned to live life in this way, and in doing so, we developed deeply ingrained patterns of “the flesh.”

He included a list of examples in Galatians 5 that he called “the acts of the flesh.” Some of us may look at the list and think, “well, it’s been awhile since I’ve practiced witchcraft or shown up at an orgy, so I must be doing okay.”

But the fact of the matter is that we all ought to be able to find our own tendencies somewhere in there.

The works of the flesh that Paul listed can be summed up in two broad categories

They are: the selfish desire for control and power and the selfish desire for pleasure.

Thats what the works of the flesh are…either the desire for control or power

When you move away from the specifics of the list and start thinking in terms of these two broad categories, you recognize that while your personal “issues” might not have made the list, they very well could have.

Paul’s list isn’t meant to be exhaustive but instead is meant to illustrate what life looks like when it is lived according to “the flesh.”

Even when we come to faith in Jesus, we still find ourselves prone to living in these old patterns of self-sufficient independence.

We are in need of transformation, a change from within that enables us to live life a different way, but we cannot change by our own will power, by our own strength, or by our own rugged determination—that is to try to fight the flesh by means of the flesh.

What we must realize is that we are not powerless to change, but we are powerless to change ourselves. The only power that can change us is the power of the Holy Spirit.

We only change as we learn, day in and day out, to “walk by the Spirit.”

“walking by the Spirit” as living in

“unbroken reliance upon the Spirit to do what He has come to do and what He alone can do.”

To walk by the Spirit is to learn to live in dependence on his strength, not our own.

To say it another way, We are a people who are depending to live on a power other than our own

It is learning, each and every day, to say to him “Holy Spirit, I am weak. You are strong. Be strong in me.” In the praying of “I am weak,” we are reminded that we are not God, and we do not change ourselves. Thus we need to confess and repent of the many ways in which we try to be God, the ways in which we put ourselves first and fail to love

The Apostle Paul was talked about “a thorn in his flesh” something that kept him from becoming conceted. And its actually a strange passage because he compares his “thorn in the flesh” to a messenger from Satan…So we don’t know what he is talking about. many people have theorized what Pauls thorn could be...

But it doesn’t really matter…what matters is that we all have a thorn in the flesh...

We all have temptations, hurts, hangups…and if we just try and rely on our own power to solve all of our problems then we are going to end up lonley and isolated and defeated

But listen to what Paul says that Jesus told him

2 Corinthians 12:8–10 NIV

Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

What I love about this is that Paul is telling the church look I struggle…you don’t think I struggle

I haven’t spiritually “made it”

I am weak! I need God

See in our

Why do we rely on the spirit?

The Spirit of God is the way that God reveals knowledge to us today

John 16:15 NIV

All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.”

When we learn to embrace our own weakness then we will learn to actually hear from God

Sometimes it is when I am at the end of my own rope that I hear from the Lord

And its almost like God is like…Ok you are finally done being in charge…now I can help you!

How can the Holy Spirit provide an answer if I have all the answers?

Let me just give you some more functions of the Holy Spirit

The Spirit of God is our Advocate that reminds us of Jesus’s words and give us knowledge (John 14:26)

Truly the Holy Spirit is the way that God is personally present with you and with his whole church

The Spirit convicts the world about sin(John 16:8)

The Spirit of God is what makes us new (Romans 8:10-11)

Romans 8:10–11 NIV

But if Christ is in you, then even though your body is subject to death because of sin, the Spirit gives life because of righteousness. And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of his Spirit who lives in you.

See we are made new by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The spirit gives life to our mortal bodies!

The Holy Spirit is what convicts us and sanctifies us. Sanctify is just a fancy word for setting apart for God’s purposes

Prayer:

So how on earth do you access the spirit? How do you come to rely on the Spirit?

Through a regular prayer life!

We do what Jesus taught us to do and we pray

How do we pray....well we have a pretty good skeleton outline in Matthew 6:9-13

Matthew 6:9–13 NIV

“This, then, is how you should pray: “ ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’

Let me just go through this for a second:

Our father in heaven

In greek there is no singular word for heaven, if this were literally translated it would be our father in the heavens…SO Jesus understanding of the word heaven would have been that it exists in three levels, the ground you stand on, the air you breathe and then what is above your head

So what Jesus is saying is our father who is near to us

I think that what Jesus is saying is that when we pray to Jesus he is actually closer than the air we breathe through the spirit of God

When you pray, Jesus will come up to you!

Then we give God praise and glory, why because he deserves it not me

Then we say your kingdom come your will be done....In other words…God rid me of thinking that I am in charge…help me to come rely on your plans for the world rather than my plans for the world!

Give us this day our daily bread: Literally Lord we rely on you for our very survival

Forgive us! and then Jesus just assumes that we would have already forgiven others

And save us from our temptations!

If you don’t know what to pray

print out the lords prayer…pray it and then sit and listen!

Rod

So we have been having testimonies all through this time and instead of me speaking some more I want to invite up my friend Rod to share about what it means for him to rely on the Holy Spirit

Challenge:

Confess your weaknesses before God

Maybe you’re here today and you need to confess that you live a life in the flesh!

Lay dow the desire for control

Lay down the desire for pleasure