Breathe: Living Free
Acts 2:42-47 and 2 Corinthians 3:17
In London, the ad agency handling T-Mobile’s account hired dance troupes in the Liverpool London train station to dance to music piped in over the station’s intercom system. The dancers had two minutes to get everyone to dance to five different rhythms. Let’s see the result…..(play video) “Life’s for Sharing.” From the Christian perspective, life is for sharing….. sharing in the move of the Spirit. And just as the Holy Spirit is always living, moving and breathing among us, the challenge for most Christians is to get in sync with the Spirit and move as the Spirit does, where the Spirit does. This summer we have been rediscovering the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God and the way we experience Jesus today in our lives. It is only in the Spirit that you will be free to live the lives God intends for us.
Two weeks ago we celebrated as a nation our freedom. We recognize that freedom is an innate need God has placed within our souls. Many of you will remember this image of Tinamen Square where a student stood down the tanks and every time the tank moved he moved as well, until he finally climbed up on the tank and placed a flower in the turret. He was one of 1000’s of young people who demonstrated and demanded freedom, resulting in beatings and even imprisonment. More recently, we have seen similar images from Egypt, Syria, and Libya where young people have protested and demonstrated for freedom. All of these incidents are testimony that there is within us a desire for political freedom.
But there is also a deeper need for freedom within us and that is the freedom from sin and the life it leads to which is full of contradiction and deceit. And that really is the struggle for many of us. We say one thing and do another. We come to worship but then live as the world lives. We have a public persona and then we have a private persona. We have seen in it Bernie Madoff, Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, Bill Jefferson, Oliver Thomas and many others. When we were kids, nobody wants to grow up and become like these people. All of us want to have a life free of duplicity and role playing. And as followers of Jesus, we all want to experience freedom from sin which then enables us to do the will of God. God has revealed to us through his Word our utter brokenness and sinfulness and the resulting separation from God. The moment every Christian begins to truly grow in Him is when we realize we’re completely dependent on Him for forgiveness. It is only then that we become free to fully yield our lives to God. But God does not leave us there. He has given us his Spirit to lead, transform and empower us to live as He intends. For “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.”
The problem is that living free is hard work. Americans have a saying that “Freedom is not free.” Freedom comes at a great cost. Similarly, grace is free but it is not cheap. It is freely given to all of us but it came at a great cost to God who gave his only Son to die on the cross for our sins. But it also comes at a great cost to us. Too often Christians miss out on the Spirit empowered life because of this. How do you enter into a Spirit filled life?
First you have to be broken by your sin. Peter in his first sermon on Pentecost Day said, “Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.” When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart.” There’s the cost. You have to acknowledge your sins and that’s not just acknowledging you have sinned. Rather it is looking at your sin’s impact on God and your relationship to Him. It is looking in the face of God and seeing how your sin has not only disappointed God but grieved Him. It is coming to a point of being cut to the heart, of being so overwhelmed at the offense your sin is to God that it moves you to grieve. George Barna has found in his latest book, “Maximum Faith” states that this is the single most challenging step on the spiritual journey, that of “brokenness.” Most Christians stop short of brokenness because it is too painful and difficult to own about ourselves. But that is exactly where the people who heard Peter’s sermon were: “When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart…” Grace was not cheap for Jesus on the cross or for God who sacrificed his son for the sins of the world. But it is also not cheap for us as it leads us to brokenness and then utter dependence on God, opening the door for us to completely abandon ourselves and the world in favor of listening to and obeying God. It is only then the Holy Spirit begins to move in us. The crowd “said to Peter and the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’ Peter replied, ‘Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.” That grace and the power of the Holy Spirit is available to everyone. Who are the ones who are far off? You and me! What is the promise if we repent? You will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Second, the people devoted themselves. Ezekiel 11:19-20 says, “I will give them an undivided heart and put a new spirit in them; I will remove from them their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. Then they will follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. They will be my people, and I will be their God.” Circle that phrase undivided heart. Devotion means having an undivided heart. An undivided heart means they invested all of their free time and energy to living as Jesus lived. Devotion is hard work. You have to be committed to it. Life in the Spirit is more than a pastime or hobby. It is a lot of hard work to be devoted and committed. It doesn’t matter what you try to do, to become good at something or even to become excellent, it takes a lot of hard work. That applies to sailing, playing baseball, sewing, fishing, anything. In fact, sociologists have found that it takes 10,000 hours of doing anything to become an expert at it. It takes a complete devotion of mind, body and spirit, to the exclusion of almost everything else.
Living by the Spirit and being completely devoted to Jesus takes a lot of hard work. The Apostle Paul uses the metaphor of the Olympic athlete. If you’re really going to live this life in the Spirit, you have to train as an Olympic athlete. You just don’t train to be in the game, you train to win the gold. When you are training to be an Olympian, it becomes all life consuming. It becomes your identity. It’s not a fleeting Sunday to Sunday type of thing. Every moment of every day, every meal and even your sleep is all a part training your body to be the very best that it can be. Olympic athletes have given up school, jobs and careers, and even a social life to focus on one and only one thing: training. When you are a devoted follower of Jesus Christ, it is the focus of every day, every moment and every part of your life. Devotion is driven by this deep inner desire to be the person God created you to be in Him.
Devotion is different from duty and obligation. Devotion is ‘to want to’ while duty and obligation is have to. How many of you took piano lessons as a child? I sit over here and watch Warner and Kurt and am amazed. I would love to be able to do what they do on the piano or keyboards. When I was a child, I took piano lessons and hated them. The problem was I didn’t have the desire. I had duty because my mom was making me take lessons. Desire is to want to while duty is to have to. Since it was always a duty for me, I did as little as I could and if I am honest sometimes even less than that, to get by. There were times I started my lesson and didn’t once touch the ivories. Devotion comes out of this deep inner desire which creates the willingness to put the work in. Obligation and ‘Have to’ will never create the willingness to put in the necessary work. So what did the early church devote themselves to?
For these people to experience life in the Spirit and the resurrected Jesus, they “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching.” For the early church, that meant the teachings and stories of Jesus as passed on by the Apostles. Jesus’ goal was to prepare the disciples for the time when they would no longer have Him there so that they could carry on his mission on their own. And that is exactly what they disciples did in teaching the first Christians. They devoted themselves to the teachings which meant they surrendered their lives to the teachings and commands of Scripture. Now here’s the third key: it takes surrender. Today, the Apostles teachings are the New Testament and we called to surrender our lives its teachings and commands.
Now all winning teams have great coaches. Pics of Pat Summit, Sean Payton, John Wooden. The purpose of a great coach is to take different persons with varying personalities and temperaments and skill sets and meld them together to work as a team. If you want to be a player on a winning team, you have to submit your agenda and your priorities to the demands of the coach. That can make all the difference in the world. LSU tackle Drake Nevis was the anchor of the defensive line for LSU last year. Listen to what Defensive Coordinator John Chavis said about Nevis before the draft: "Folks are going to fall in love with him. When you get a guy that has the athletic ability he does and competes, and is so willing to please what the coaches are asking, he'll have a long career." If you don’t get on the agenda of the coach, you’re not going to play. It takes surrender. Who is our coach? Jesus! If we want to be a part of His salvation plan for the world and be a part of the move of the Spirit, then we have to continually surrender our will, our agenda and our desires to that of our coach. Jesus said: “Who has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me.” John 14:21 There’s a disconnect in the church. Every week, we hear the Word, we study the Word, we take notes on the Word but do we live the Word? Are you surrendering your lives to the commands of God’s Word.
The fourth key to achieving a life in the Spirit and that is community. They devoted themselves to the fellowship, in other words, to each other. We can’t do life in the Spirit alone. We need each other. One of the greatest challenges to community is rugged individualism, the mentality of “I can do it myself.” When you’re on a team, you can’t do it by yourself. Chris Paul can’t win a playoff game all by himself. If he tried, it would be 1 on 5. Drew Brees can’t win a football game by himself, he needs his offensive line to protect him, his receivers to catch his passes and his running backs to hand the ball off to. We need life changing biblical community.
Bill Hybels writes of Dr. Gilbert Bilezikian speaking at his Church’s leadership conference. “Dr. Bilezikian said there’s life-changing fellowship in biblically functioning community. That was a far cry from the childhood experience of a lot of his audience! The only kind of fellowship that many of his listeners had witnessed revolved around the 15 or 20 minutes after the service when the men would stand around the church patio and talk about superficial things like the weather, work or sports. That was about it. They’d (find their wives who) were having similar conversations. But the Bible says true fellowship has the power to revolutionize lives. Masks come off, conversations get deep, hearts get vulnerable, lives are shared, accountability is invited, and tenderness flows. People really do become like brothers and sisters. They shoulder each other’s burdens. That is real Holy Spirit empowered community! We can’t follow Jesus alone. We need the love, support, challenge and encouragement others in our journey to follow Jesus Christ and to live for him in every moment.
The fifth key to life in the Spirit is confession. They devoted themselves to the breaking of bread. John Wesley considered regular communion to be what he called a means of grace, that is, ways in which God works in us. In communion we remember what Jesus did for us on the cross and in receiving those elements, we are to confess our sins and receive forgiveness anew. One of the greatest impediments to the spirit filled life is sin. As long as we cling to a sin or sins in our lives, the harder it is for the Spirit to move in our lives. And so we are not only to remember what Jesus did for us on the cross but we are to repent of our sins. It is then that God gives us the sustaining power of the Holy Spirit in our lives to avoid that sin in our lives in the future but to do His will.
The sixth key is communion with God. They committed themselves to prayer. Prayer is like this extension cord. It allows you to move and to do the work needed to be kingdom buildings with the power needed to accomplish God’s will. But the moment I become unplugged and lose that connection to the power source, I lose the ability to do God-sized things for the kingdom. I move from a power drill to a screw driver, from a skill saw to a hand saw, from a paint gun to a paint brush, from a nail gun to a hammer. Do you get the picture? I can still do the work but what I can accomplish is severely limited. Ephesians says, “By the Spirit’s power we are able to do infinitely more than we ever dare ask or imagine.” When you have communion with God, the Spirit begins to work in you and there is an infinite power that begins flow through you to do the will of God.
You can know the resurrected Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in you as you if you devotion your entire life to God, surrender to His will, have the support, encouragement and accountability of the community of faith, continually confess your sins and seek to lead a new life in Christ and live in constant communion with God through prayer. But it will never happen out of duty, it will only come out of a passionate desire for the Holy Spirit in your life.
