Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

We continue this week in our month long study of the HS

Last week we discussed:

The importance of such a study as we seek to better understand the God we worship.

As ignorance regarding the HS has led to His being misused, and lied to and about in numerous different ways.

We laid the scaffolding last week of our study by first understanding that the HS is not some impersonal force, but that the Holy Spirit is a Divine Being described as with the personal pronoun “he”

That He can be grieved

that he has a mind

that he makes choices

and that He is a member of the divine Godhead

As such He ought to demand our fullest attention as much as the Father or the Son, and we should not be quick to dismiss our study of Him on the basis that His ways are too mysterious to understand.

To be certain, as I said last week, there are things about the HS that we simply are unable to understand, but there is enough in my belief to keep us on safe ground.

Our aim for today is to recognize the HS role in both the life and ministry of Jesus, and the role of the Holy Spirit in the early church.

The Prophesied Messiah of Spirit

Often reminded of the prophesied spirit to be poured out on all flesh as we often read from and recall the prophecy of Joel in

We often talk about how Peter proclaimed on the day of Pentecost how this prophecy was fulfilled in their hearing, but this was not the only prophecy regarding the HS.

There was also prophecy regarding the coming of a king, a messiah from the line of David,

speaks of a servant that will become a shepherd over the house of Israel

Hosea as we’ve been studying refers to Judah and Israel uniting under one head.

We could spend all morning in Isaiah looking at the references of one who is to come.

A suffering servant

a prince of peace.

a wonderful counselor of God

A Stone, a cornerstone, a sure foundation

and the list goes on and on.

And it is with these prophecy in mind that the Jewish people endured what we know as the 400 years of silence between the close of the OT and the coming of Christ.

Illustration, how much things can change in 400 years

The US is not yet 250 years old.

and look at how much things have changed, can we earnestly say that we hold the same values and beliefs as dearly as they did?

But this is an ancient people, a storied people, a people with an incredible and rich history of being God’s chosen people, and unlike us they knew all too well the words of the prophets and how they spoke of a reconciled kingdom under the headship of one that came to be known as the Messiah, or God’s anointed one.

But over the course of that 400 years, there was an expectation of a coming kingdom where the spirit of God would be poured out on all flesh, AND there was an expectation of a Messiah on whom the Spirit of God would be upon as He led the people of God.

Isa 11:1-

Isa

So for 400 years the people have been looking for the day when all this would be fulfilled.

They’ve been longing for comfort, for justice, for mercy, for God’s spirit to be poured out on a dry and weary land, to heal them and to reign in righteousness, and they were looking for the messiah whom God’s spirit would be upon.

And so what I’m trying to relay to you this morning is that while we often focus on the Spirits work in the early church, we need to understand that the spirit was also very much involved in the life and ministry of Christ.

So with our remaining time lets’ look at the ways that the HS was involved in the life and ministry of Christ.

And after 400 years of silence the silence is broken and the God begins to set in motion the plan that existed before the ages began.

Conception

In Luke chapter 1 you will recall that… Gabriel, Mary, Joseph, and tells her

You will conceive in your womb, and have a son, and his name will be Jesus, he will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.

Now all that is quite a statement.

But as you can imagine, of utmost importance to Mary is the means by which this is going to happen.

Luke 1:35

HS role in giving life, the breath of God, the Ruach the Pneuma of God brings the spark of life to the elements that make up our bodies.

And here again the Holy Spirit is able to make life outside of the natural ways in which life has been designed to come about.

Baptism

Luke 3:

We often read the accounts of Jesus’s baptism and come away asking some pretty strange questions don’t we?

Did Jesus need to be baptized?

- I mean what did he need to repent of?

Did he need any sins forgiven?

If not why was he baptized?

Well the answer to that is plainly given in , that it needed to be done to fulfill all righteousness, and Jesus being born under the law needed to obey the commandments of God, especially those of the HS inspired John.

But what we often miss is the connection, and the fulfillment of what we have read about in Isaiah.

The Gospel writers want us to understand that here at the beginning of Jesus ministry, that the HS descended like a dove and came to rest upon him, and John says, the HS remained on Him.

Recall back to the Isaiah scriptures we read earlier

- the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him

- I have put my spirit upon him.

- the spirit of the Lord is upon me.

The connection is unmistakable, God is showing us through this event at the beginning of Jesus public ministry that the HS is going to empower Jesus for the work that lies ahead of him.

That they are united, and that the messiah which has been long prophesied is now here.

To this effect, Luke goes through great lengths to help us to understand the fact that Jesus was in fact being led by the Spirit in his ministry.

Ministry

Where he is tempted for by the devil after fasting for 40 days.

Where Jesus withstands the temptations and Luke records in 4:14

Does that scripture that Jesus read in front of the synagogue sound familiar?

It should, because it’s from

lUKE 4:16-

And Jesus by reading this wants everyone to know that He is the one they have been waiting for.

He is the one upon whom the Spirit of the Lord is upon, it is He who will throughout the course of his Public ministry carry out the will of God.

He will do this by:

not judging by what his eyes see or his ears hear, but judge with righteousness.

By giving sight back to the blind, by freeing those held captive by evil spirits, by touching the untouchable, loving the unloveable

Healing those whom had been in slavery by their paralysis, or by their years of bleeding.

Jesus proved that he was the long awaited Messiah by his public ministry, of which Peter said in

Conclusion

Here’s the point.

It can be often overlooked that the HS played a huge role in the life and ministry of Jesus himself.

It was the HS which brought about the Virgin birth, bringing life from a seemingly impossible situation.

It was the HS which descended and remained on Jesus at his baptism.

It was the HS which led him out into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan.

It was the HS that anointed Jesus for his ministry, by which he fulfilled all which had been prophesied about Him.

The HS led and empowered Jesus, the son of God in His ministry.

So my question is this, if Jesus needed the HS to fulfill His ministry, who are we to think that we can fulfill ours without the HS?

I asked you last week to pray throughout the week, to give thanks for the HS.

I hope that this morning we have come away with a better understanding of what exactly we’ve been thanking him for.

We thank God, which includes the spirit, for the birth of Christ, for the life of Christ, for the fulfillment of His ministry, and for the gift of grace and forgiveness that we receive through his blood that he shed on that cross.

Yet of course that is not the end of the story.

Johns Prophecy of baptism of the HS

Jesus promised the comforter, the one who would reveal all truth.

We will talk more about the HS role in the early church tonight.