The Power To Go Beyond
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: Acts 1:4-8
Context
Context
I know its Mother’s Day, and I almost always speak to that of course, but this year God has not given me the liberty to do that. So we are going to be continuing in our series “Catching Fire!”
We have been following the steps of Jesus from Resurrection to Pentecost.
We have seen that “It’s Not [Always] What It Looks Like”
We have seen how that sometimes, “It’s The Same… But It’s Different”
We have seen Jesus Himself issue the challenge to come and “See For Yourself...”
And last week, we looked at the the amazing truth of how “Jesus Is King”.
We have seen that everything Jesus has done from the moment of His resurrection, was to cast aside any and all doubt that the disciples may have had that He was the Christ, the Son of the living God, and that though He did indeed die a physical death, He was alive and glorified by the Father.
Last week, we looked at what has been commonly referred to as “The Great Commission.”
And this week, we are going to see the final words that Jesus spoke unto His disciples before ascending to the Father. Our topic for today is, “The Power To Go Beyond”.
4 And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, “which,” He said, “you have heard from Me;
5 for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”
6 Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”
7 And He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority.
8 But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
Content
Content
The Pause
The Pause
4 And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, “which,” He said, “you have heard from Me;
Notice that Jesus is still with them. Since He stepped foot in that upper room where they were all gathered, He has not left them up to this point.
He has revealed Himself unto them in physical form, shown them the scars in His hands and feet, but now He tells them that they are about to see God in a new way, a better way.
You say, “How can there be a better way? What is better than having Jesus Himself right there in your very presence?” That’s the same thing they thought. They too struggled with the thought of Jesus going away, but Jesus Himself told them:
7 Nevertheless I tell you the truth. It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you.
Jesus tells His disciples that it is better for them if He goes away and the Spirit comes. And for this reason, He gives them a final commandment: “Do not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the Promise of the Father.”
Notice that this is not a suggestion. Jesus does not plead with them… He commands them. This goes hand in hand with what we looked at last week. Why does Jesus command them to wait?
18 And Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth.
Don’t forget that Jesus has been given the right to command them. After all, they are followers of Christ. He is their Rabbi, in a religious sense. He asked them to follow Him, and they agreed. This means that they were to obey His commands. This means that He was their master.
But this also means that they wanted to be like Him. They followed Him not because they just wanted to learn from Him, but because they wanted to be like Him. They wanted to be as He was, do what He did, and accomplish what He accomplished. They wanted to be influential as He was. They wanted to leave a lasting legacy as He did.
Jesus had earned the right to have all authority in heaven and on earth because of what He did. It was Jesus who accomplished what no other man could, to live a perfect life in the will of God. It was Jesus who paid the price of man’s forgiveness from sin. It was Jesus who laid down His life so that all others could live in the power and presence of God. He not only earned that right within the hearts of His disciples but also in all of heaven.
This authority was given to Him of God.
19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
20 teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” Amen.
So in the great commission, He tells them to “Go”. Go and do what I did. Go and reach people for the Kingdom of God. Go and show others how to live a transformed life. Go and show others who God is. Go and bare the light of Heaven into this lost and dying world.
Here in Matthew he tells them to “Go”, but then in Acts He tells them to “wait”. There is a Holy Pause commanded before their ministry could begin.
They were to wait for the “Promise of the Father”. What was that Promise?
33 Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He poured out this which you now see and hear.
The Promise that Jesus spoke of was the Holy Spirit.
Jesus says, “You must wait here in Jerusalem until you have received the Holy Spirit of God within you.
The Problem
The Problem
5 for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”
In His last words, Jesus is still trying to help them understand the fullness of what is about to happen. He recognizes that they have been baptized in the flesh by John’s baptism, but He says, “you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”
These disciples had spent almost every single day of the last three years with Jesus. They had witnessed Jesus doing many mighty things, powerful things. But they themselves had yet been granted the power to go beyond the physical. They had witnessed the spiritual things of God in Jesus, and even partially within themselves as God equipped them with the Spirit in certain moments to accomplish certain things, but they had not been spiritually transformed by the power of God through Spiritual baptism.
So Jesus says, “I know that you have been baptized in the flesh, but soon… you will be baptized in the Spirit.” This baptism will take you beyond anything you have ever witnessed before. It goes beyond the physical into the spiritual.
If you go out to accomplish what I have had told you to right now, you will fail. In your own power, you cannot make disciples. In your own power, you cannot lead others to repentance. In your own power, you cannot baptize with meaning and purpose. In your own power, you can do nothing of God.
So for right now, I need you to wait. I need you to wait until you have been filled with the Spirit, as I was. Then you will be able to do what I did.
Repeatedly throughout the Gospels, we are told that Jesus was filled with the Spirit.
Jesus lived for 30 years in almost total anonymity. He had no ministry and no one knew who He was… not who He really was. They see him only as a carpenter.
But all of a sudden, He takes a trip to the Jordan River to be baptized by John the Baptist. When Jesus was baptized, listen to what the Word of God says:
16 When He had been baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened to Him, and He saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting upon Him.
It was after this moment that Jesus’s ministry began. After what… after the Holy Spirit came upon Him.
Over and over throughout the Gospels, we see that Jesus performed certain deeds or miracles in the power of the Holy Spirit:
1 Then Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness,
14 Then Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, and news of Him went out through all the surrounding region.
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He has anointed Me To preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives And recovery of sight to the blind, To set at liberty those who are oppressed;
28 But if I cast out demons by the Spirit of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you.
Jesus lived His life in complete fullness of the Spirit, and it was through the power of the Holy Spirit that Jesus accomplished all that He did.
If they were going to go beyond the physical life and then teach others to go beyond the spiritual life, they were going to have to wait for the Spirit to fall.
John MacArthur said, “All the preparation and training that knowledge and experience can bring are useless without the proper might. Power had to accompany truth.”
Only the Holy Spirit of God can equip one for ministry.
Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3:5
3 Jesus answered and said to him, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Before one can be equipped to serve in any ministry, they must be born again. How does this new birth take place?
5 Jesus answered, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.
6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
The new birth takes place when one is baptized of the Holy Spirit. And this baptism of the Holy Spirit is what saves an individual. Salvation is not just believing in the things of God, it is surrendering oneself to the presence of God within them. And as that occurs, the Spirit of God baptizes them into the family of God.
The Baptism of the Holy Spirit happens at the point of conversion because it is the conversion. There can be no transformation without the baptism of the Holy Spirit. It is only through the baptism of the Holy Spirit that we are brought into the family of God:
13 For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and have all been made to drink into one Spirit.
Furthermore, the Scriptures teach us that if someone does not have the Holy Spirit within them, they are not a child of God:
9 But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His.
If the ministry of Jesus did not begin until after the Spirit came upon Him, I would submit to you that we also need the Spirit of God to do anything, or accomplish anything, in God.
The Power
The Power
8 But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
All throughout the Scriptures, we see a truth presented unto us that we have seemed to neglect lately within organized religion. Here it is, “The Holy Spirit and the creative power of God are synonymous.”
In other words, you don’t get one without the other. If you want the power of God in your life, you must first have the Spirit of God in your life.
Now, here’s the good news. If you don’t want the power of God moving in and through you, don’t worry, He won’t. God does not invade where He is not invited. But I do not think that is true for most us. If you are like me, I do want the power of God to move and operate in my life. I want it because I need it. I need a breakthrough, and I know that that breakthrough will not come outside of the power of God. I need the power of God to deliver me from the power of sin. I cannot fight against the devil on my own. And I think that most of us are in agreement on this. We all need breakthroughs in our own personal ways.
Listen to me, God says the same thing. He wants you to experience that breakthrough even more than you do. He wants you to experience the power of His peace more than you do. He wants to see you live in freedom more than you do.
So here’s the question: “How do we do that? How do we experience this great power that the Scriptures speak of?”
We already have everything that we need.
19 Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?
20 For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.
Isn’t that a sobering thought? The Holy Spirit of God is always with me. To be honest it brings on a flood of different emotions. There are times when this is a great thing. It means that the Holy Spirit sees the tears I cry when nobody else is around. It means that the Holy Spirit is with me as I pray to God; He hears my prayers and knows my heart. It means that the Holy Spirit sees my intentions for good, even when nobody else does. It means that the Holy Spirit sees and knows what I mean for good, even when it turns out to be a disaster. He sees everything that I attempt to do in His power, even when I mess it up.
It also means that the Holy Spirit is present with me in the dark places that nobody else sees. He is with me when I am watching that TV show that I should not be watching. He is with me when I have an outburst of anger that is totally unjustified. He sees me when I treat others in a totally ungodly way. He is with me when I have road rage, when someone takes my parking spot at Wal-Mart, and when I fight with my wife.
I am the temple of the Holy Spirit. He sees and knows all… the good and the bad. He is in me because Christ says He is in me. And when we get saved, we don’t just get a portion of the Holy Spirit, we get all of Him. The Holy Spirit is not divided. When we get Him, we get all of Him.
34 For He whom God has sent speaks the words of God, for God does not give the Spirit by measure.
Listen to me child of God, you are the temple of the Holy Spirit. He is in you. He has saved you. He wants to use you, to equip you for the glory of God, but you must believe that.
The power you possess in Christ through the Holy Spirit is monumental.
7 For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.
Within the Baptist church, we for some reason leave Him out of everything. We talk about Him as if He is some fictional character in a story book, but this could not be further from the truth. If you and I are going to experience breakthrough in our lives, we must realize that the power to do so comes only from the presence of God within us. “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you!” Jesus said.
Let us lean into this teaching. Let us give place to the movement and power of the Holy Spirit within us. We have lost ground in the church today because we as believers, as Christ-followers, have walked around for too long without realizing and living up to the power of God within us. We are conquerors in Christ. We are ambassadors of God. There is more power within us than we can even begin to realize, and that power… according to Jesus… comes from the Holy Spirit within us. It has always been there, but we have been missing out. We need to open our hearts to receive all that God has called us to be in Him. We are called to walk in His steps, to do what He did, to do even more than He did, but that can only be accomplished through the power of the Holy Spirit within us.
The Spirit of God within us is not afraid, He is power. And He fills our hearts with the love of God and our minds with a focus on God. This Spirit of God within us is no coward, but a conqueror. He is mighty within us. He is mighty to the tearing down of strongholds. He is mighty to overcome fear. He is mighty to overcome temptation. He is mighty to war against the flesh. He is more powerful than we could ever realize, but we keep Him locked up in a cage and are afraid to set Him free.
Think about the power that the apostles received when the Holy Spirit came upon them. They were able to speak in languages they did not know. They were able to heal the sick and the lepers. They were able to know things that they shouldn’t have been able to know through supernatural knowledge and wisdom. They were able to raise the dead back to life. I may be out on island here when I say this, but I do not see any evidence in the Scriptures that teach this is over. I believe the gifts of the Spirit are still very much alive today, and the only reason we don’t see them, is because we don’t believe they are possible. God is still the same today as He always was. His power is still just as mighty today as it always was. His saving and transforming power is still the same today as it always was. The only thing that has changed, is that we have quit believing those truths.
The Spirit is just as mighty to perform these miracles today as He was then, and the Bible says that He equips you and I for these great works. But we fail to exercise these Godly gifts because we have been told that we can’t do that anymore. If God can take a dirty rotten sinner like me, wash me and clean me up, put a calling on my life to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and then lead lost souls to be saved through the preaching that He commissions me for, why can’t He do these other miracles through me as well? There is no greater miracle than seeing a lost soul saved, and if He can use men for that, then He can most definitely use men by these other means. When we start believing that He can, we just might see it take place in us and through us.
You are a witness for Christ!
8 But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
We’ve lost the meaning of this great power through the Holy Spirit, because we have lost the meaning of why it came in the first place. The initial movement of the Spirit of God upon our souls is to save us. There is no arguing that. Before there can be spiritual power, there must first be spiritual life.
But let me ask you a question. If the sole purpose of the Gospel upon my life is to see me saved, then why do I need to be infused with His power? Why did God not just save me through His own power and let that be that? Here’s why, I can’t maintain it or share it with others without that same power.
The power of the Holy Spirit not only saves me and brings me into the family of God, it equips me to live a life of faithfulness. Without that power, I would simply continue in sin. I can’t save myself, but I also cannot keep myself. The power of God is necessary for all of this.
Furthermore, as I live in the power of God through the Holy Spirit, what does this enable me to do to those whom God has placed in my path? It allows me to be a witness unto them. That’s exactly what this verse says: once the power of the Holy Spirit has come upon you, “you shall be witnesses to Me” throughout the world.
See many times we think of these Spiritual gifts as nothing more than a show of power, but that is not the case. Jesus, nor the disciples, went about healing people just for the sake of healing people. Jesus would not have brought Lazarus back from the dead if there wasn’t a very good reason. He had already passed over into eternity, a place much better than what we have here. He brought Lazarus back for one, and only one reason, so that those present might believe. His miracles served as a witness to who He was and the true power of God.
It was the same for the apostles. They did many wonderful and powerful works through the Holy Spirit throughout the book of Acts. Why? To serve as a witness for those who did not believe, and as they did those things, thousands of souls were saved and brought into the family of God.
In my life, I have longed for the Power to go beyond, just like some of you have. The power to go beyond my physical abilities; The power to go beyond what I can see; The power to go beyond what I can hear; The power to go beyond logic and reason; The power to go beyond my limitations; The power to go beyond my weaknesses; The power to go beyond what others think of me; The power to go beyond what I feel; The power to go beyond tradition; The power to go beyond the physical realm and witness the things of God in the spiritual realm.
I know that some of you have felt the same and longed for the same.
I am telling you that there is such a power that can and will equip us to go beyond and this power is found in the Holy Spirit of God.
If you want to experience it, open up your hearts to receive all that He has for you. Ask Him to fill you up to the point of overflowing. Ask Him to equip you for service. Ask Him to give you strength to overcome. Ask Him to give you the guidance you need.
The Holy Spirit of God dwells within each one of us. Let’s ask God to show us and teach us how to fully embrace Him and be filled by Him.
Commitment
Commitment
