The Ministry of The Holy Spirit (Part 2)
Notes
Transcript
Doxology:
This is my Bible. It is God’s Holy Word. It is a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, and I will hide its words within my heart, that I might not sin against God. Amen!
Scripture Reference: Titus 3:4-5
Context
Context
We are continuing in our series titled, “Who Am I?”
This series seeks to answer the question, “What does it mean to be a Christian?” Or more specifically, “Who does God say that I am?”
We have discussed that being a Christian means that we are A Child Of God. We have also discussed that being a Christian means that we are A New Creation In Christ, meaning that when we are born again, we receive the Holy Spirit of God, who dwells within us to lead and guide us into all truth.
4 But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared,
5 not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit,
Last week, we began to unpack exactly what all the ministry of the Holy Spirit is.
We looked at how it was through the Holy Spirit that we got the Scriptures. We also saw that it is through the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives that we come to understand the spiritual truths imbedded within these Scriptures, and by doing so, we also come into a closer relationship with God as a result. All of the Scriptures are given to us by God, but all of the Scriptures are also about God. So the more I understand of Scripture, the more I understand of God.
Though that in itself is an amazing part of the ministry of the Holy Spirit, it is not all that He accomplishes in us.
Today we are going to see that the Holy Spirit helps us to go even deeper into our relationship with God.
Content
Content
He Equips Us To Worship God
He Equips Us To Worship God
Last week, we ended by looking at how the Holy Spirit reveals God unto us. As a natural part of this process, the more we learn of God, the more we desire to give Him worship.
Giving worship to God is an essential element of being a Child of God, of being a Christian. After Jesus was born, this is one of the first things we see take place:
2 saying, “Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him.”
11 And when they had come into the house, they saw the young Child with Mary His mother, and fell down and worshiped Him. And when they had opened their treasures, they presented gifts to Him: gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
These wise men fell down before Jesus Christ, while still a babe in a manger, and presented Him with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. The very first thing we see accomplished after Jesus took on flesh, is that He was worshipped.
The worship of God is all throughout the Bible. We see it as early as Genesis 22, when Abraham took Isaac upon the mountain to worship the Lord, and we see it as late as Revelation 22, when the angel tells John not to worship him but to worship God alone.
We are even commanded in Scripture to give God worship:
2 Give unto the Lord the glory due to His name; Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.
36 but the Lord, who brought you up from the land of Egypt with great power and an outstretched arm, Him you shall fear, Him you shall worship, and to Him you shall offer sacrifice.
We are commanded to worship God…
But what is worship? What does it mean to worship the Lord?
The most common Greek word used for worship throughout the New Testament is proskyneo (pros-koo-neh’-o). The Root word “pros” is the same root word used in our English word “Prostrate”. The main idea of worship is to prostrate oneself before the Lord by bowing down before Him.
But true worship is more than a physical posture… it is a spiritual practice. To worship something is to give reverence to it… it is to assign a certain level of worth to it. It is to spiritually bow before that something and submit a certain part of yourself to it, by acknowledging that this object of your worship is worthy of it.
True worship is accomplished in two parts:
19 The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet.
20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.”
21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father.
23 But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him.
24 God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
Jesus explains to this woman that God is Spirit. He is teaching her about the nature of God. And true worship of the Father can only be accomplished in spirit and truth.
We have already discussed last week, how the Holy Spirit leads and guides us into all truth by opening up the true understanding of Scripture to us. And when we apply these truths to our lives, we are worshipping God in truth. We are deciding that the words that God has spoken unto us is worthy enough of our worship. So as we apply these truths to our lives, we are in a sense bowing before the Lord and acknowledging that His Word is worthy of our time, our energy, our efforts, and our sacrifices. But… this is only part of true worship.
To truly offer up true worship to God, we must also do so in the Spirit. See, one of the major problems of Jesus’ day, was that religion had taken over. Many practiced some form of what they called worship, but the problem was their object of worship. They had come to a place to where they worshipped the Word, instead of the giver of it. They were attempting to worship in truth by applying the Word of God to their lives, but they had lost their personal connection with God Himself. They were going through the motions, but there was no meaning to the motions.
Jesus said it like this:
8 ‘These people draw near to Me with their mouth, And honor Me with their lips, But their heart is far from Me.
So Jesus says to this young lady, “But the hour is coming when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth;”
This hour He spoke of was Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit would come down from the Father and fill the heart of man, equipping them to worship God as He deserves to be worshipped.
So it is through the presence of the Holy Spirit in us that allows us to worship the Father fully.
And it is so important that we have the Holy Spirit to worship God in this way for two reasons:
Our flesh is constantly challenged by the things of this world to give our worship elsewhere.
Over and over again, God warned His people to guard their hearts against false worship. Remember that we said to worship something is to give a certain part of yourself to it. God knew that as His people travelled through various different lands, that they would be exposed to various forms of worship. Some of these other people worshipped different gods; some of them worshipped idols (totem poles, wooden sculptures, sculptures made from gold and silver); some of them worshipped certain animals, certain foods, and even the bodies of heaven (sun, moon, stars).
15 “Take careful heed to yourselves, for you saw no form when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire,
16 lest you act corruptly and make for yourselves a carved image in the form of any figure: the likeness of male or female,
17 the likeness of any animal that is on the earth or the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air,
18 the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground or the likeness of any fish that is in the water beneath the earth.
19 And take heed, lest you lift your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the host of heaven, you feel driven to worship them and serve them, which the Lord your God has given to all the peoples under the whole heaven as a heritage.
God warns Israel that once they come into the promised land, they are going to be tempted to give away their worship to many different worldly things, but they must not give in to this temptation. They must reserve their worship for God alone, for God alone is worthy of that worship.
14 (for you shall worship no other god, for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God),
2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
3 “You shall have no other gods before Me.
4 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth;
5 you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me,
We need the help of the Holy Spirit to guard our hearts against such things. We need Him to keep us focused on the things of God and Him alone. We need Him to help us keep our hearts pure before the Lord, so that we might not give ourselves to anything else but Him, that He would have our whole heart.
Though we are indeed Children of God, we walk in the midst of a fallen world every single day. Though we see this fallen nature for what it is most days, there are other days when certain things seem awful enticing. We all know what this feels like, but we must be careful to guard our hearts against such things. God alone can truly satisfy our inner man, so it is God alone to whom we should turn to on these most difficult days.
Because of this fallen nature that surrounds us, worshipping God can be difficult.
This week has been especially hard. I think the weight of this week has fallen hard on many of us. I never had the privilege of meeting Charlie Kirk, but I listened to enough of his podcasts, his debates, and his shows to get a pretty good feel for who he was and what he stood for.
He was a major force behind the Trump campaign, and he was one of the leading political voices for the politically conservatives. But he was so much more than that. He was a husband, a father to two beautiful children, an entrepreneur, and most importantly… he was a man of God.
He consistently shared his faith from the platform of churches, as well as from the platform God gave him throughout the United States at college campuses. It was unavoidable. There are certain questions who many feel are political in nature that are actually biblical in nature, and when someone would ask one of those questions, he always took them back to Scripture. He would quote Scripture and then say, that is why I believe this, because this is what God said. It doesn’t matter what Charlie Kirk thinks on this issue, because this is a God issue… bottom line.
And Charlie was gunned down at one of his rallies this week. And if that in itself is not bad enough, we have seen the internet and every social media platform available flooded with people who are celebrating the fact that Charlie was brutally murdered. And this has absolutely broken my heart.
It breaks my heart because a young man, only 31 years old, who was sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ from every platform he was given, has been taken from us.
It breaks my heart that a young wife is going to have to continue without her husband and two precious babies are going to have to grow up without their daddy.
It breaks my heart that a certain individual fell so deep into sin that they were willing to take another man’s life simply because they didn’t agree with what he stood for.
And it breaks my heart to see the spiritual separation of so many people from God, who have no regard for the sanctity of life, no remorse for a family who has lost a loved one, and no regard for the Word of God.
It is during weeks like this that I find it difficult to worship God in spirit and in truth. I have been angry this week. I have felt the weight of sin heavy upon my heart, my own sin as well as the sinfulness of this nation. But God has not changed. God is still God. He is still righteous and He is still Holy. He is still Loving and He is still Gracious. He is still worthy of my worship, regardless of what is going on.
This is why I need the Holy Spirit. I love God, and I fear God, but there are times like this to where I kneel to pray and I don’t even know what to say. I just can’t seem to get the words out.
26 Likewise the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.
I need the Holy Spirit even to pray, and prayer is a form of worship to God. As we bow before the Lord of Creation, we are taking time to speak to our Father in heaven. We are sharing our lives with Him, sharing our hearts with Him, and we are growing in our faith each time we do this. Even when we are at a loss for what to say, He takes the intentions of our heart, puts that into words, and conveys that to the Father on our behalf.
Why? Because it is less about the beauty of our words, and more about the beauty of our willingness to fall on our knees before a Holy Righteous God who is worthy of our efforts and worthy of our worship.
And make no mistake, in times like this, worship is exactly what we need the most:
2 Chronicles 20:21-22
Jehoshaphat sent out worshipers before the army.
Acts 16:25-26
Paul and Silas sang at midnight after being beaten and thrown into prison.
Job 1:20-21
Job was attacked by Satan and lost everything. He lost all of his thousands of livestock; he lost his children; he lost his health. In spite of all of this, he said, “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Daniel 6:10
King Nebuchadnezzar had signed a decree stating that no one was able to bow down to or worship any other thing. If they did, they would be thrown into the lion’s den. Daniel knew that the King had signed this decree, but he went home and bowed in prayer three times that day to pray to God, just as he always had done.
Psalm 57
David was running from King Saul, hiding our in caves because Saul was trying to kill him, and this is what he said:
To the Chief Musician. Set to “Do Not Destroy.” A Michtam of David When He Fled from Saul into the Cave.
1 Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me! For my soul trusts in You; And in the shadow of Your wings I will make my refuge, Until these calamities have passed by.
2 I will cry out to God Most High, To God who performs all things for me.
3 He shall send from heaven and save me; He reproaches the one who would swallow me up. Selah God shall send forth His mercy and His truth.
4 My soul is among lions; I lie among the sons of men Who are set on fire, Whose teeth are spears and arrows, And their tongue a sharp sword.
5 Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; Let Your glory be above all the earth.
6 They have prepared a net for my steps; My soul is bowed down; They have dug a pit before me; Into the midst of it they themselves have fallen. Selah
7 My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast; I will sing and give praise.
8 Awake, my glory! Awake, lute and harp! I will awaken the dawn.
9 I will praise You, O Lord, among the peoples; I will sing to You among the nations.
10 For Your mercy reaches unto the heavens, And Your truth unto the clouds.
11 Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; Let Your glory be above all the earth.
Commitment
Commitment
In times of loss, in times of darkness, in times of persecution, we are to lean into God that much more. It is during these times that our hearts should take on a posture of praise and worship.
As we go into this time of invitation, let us worship God in spirit and in truth. Let us lean into the Holy Spirit and have our hearts filled with praise!
