How many of you have ever taken any form of an accounting class or a bookkeeping class? Raise your hands. How many of you really didn’t enjoy the class? Most people, unless they are a little quirky, don’t really enjoy an accounting class. A little bit about my past, some of you know that I spent 20 years in the business world prior to becoming a pastor and I actually was a corporate controller. A corporate vice-president for a major restaurant chain back in Oregon. In addition to a corporate controller, a corporate accountant, I also taught an accounting class part-time at the local community college. It wasn’t really an advanced class. It was basically an accounting 101 class. As many of you know when you teach a 101 class you often find quite a wide variety of people in the class. There are people that really do not want to be there. They are just there because it is a requirement. They have to take the class. They have some other major and it is just a required class. Then you have the people that really enjoy it and they are thinking about making a career out of accounting. The thing that is common is you have to figure out how to teach this sort of class. My approach was to basically reduce accounting to the lowest common denominator and keep it in very simple terms; as simple as you can make accounting, which is very difficult. What I would do is say let’s pretend we are going to open a hot dog stand. When you open a hot dog stand you have to buy the stand. You pay $5,000 for the stand and you would have to make an accounting entry in the books and we call that a double-entry accounting entry. There has to be a debit and a credit. You buy the equipment and you debit equipment $5,000 and you credit cash unless you take out a loan and then you would credit accounts payable. Then you have to buy hot dogs. You would buy them with cash and debit hot dog inventory and credit cash and on and on and on. Even when I tried to present it in a very simplified format, there were just people that just couldn’t get it. They were just totally confused by it. Kind of like some of you are looking a little confused now and want nothing to do with accounting. The reality is when you are taking an elementary class you have to start with the basics. You have to get down to the lowest common denominator.
Today, as we look in the book of John 14, we see Jesus not teaching an accounting 101 class. We see Jesus teaching a Holy Spirit 101 class. If you have your Bibles, please open up to the book of John 14:15. A little bit of history here. We have been going through the book of John. Hopefully, we will be done around late spring/early summer. We have been in it about a year. I am trying to go through it as fast as I can, but I need to slow down and spend some time on some of these parts. Basically, where we have been the last few weeks you may recall that we are in the final week of Jesus’ life on earth. He is in a supper setting. The Last Supper. It started out in chapter 13 fairly positive. Jesus was in this dinner setting and about halfway through the meal, he decides to get up and do something very kind; very servant oriented. He decides to take a towel and wash the disciples’ feet and that is what he did. It was a very nice thing to do. It was an example of humility and servant hood and it really was an example of what he was about to do on the cross. He was going to be crucified for the sins of the world and wash the sins of the world clean. Then things took kind of a sour note. During the meal, Jesus told everybody that somebody is going to betray him. John asked who is it. Jesus said the one who takes the bread from my hand is the one that is going to betray me. He reached out and gave it to Judas. Judas took the bread and immediately Satan entered his heart and then Judas was out the door. The last words of that section were “And it was night.” An indication that things were getting a little bit darker. Things got even more troubling because his close disciple Peter said very impulsively I am loyal to you. No matter if Judas betrays you, I would never betray you. In fact, I am going to lay my life down for you. That is when Jesus says oh really Peter? Would you do that? He predicted that before the rooster would crow, Peter would not deny him once or twice, but three times.
Last week we were looking at the situation that was the whole mood had gotten kind of dark. The whole mood around the dinner table had become kind of oppressive so Jesus decides to lighten it up a little bit. He says in my father’s house there are many rooms. He starts to paint this picture of a mansion out there and he begins to tell them how he is going to go away and prepare a place for them. There are a lot of rooms out there. Remember the song we sang last week? In my father’s house there are a lot of rooms with lots and lots of food and a big yard and that sort of thing. We sang that song last week but the whole idea was Jesus was trying to paint a picture of comfort; trying to paint a picture of home. About that time, he says I am going off to prepare a place for you and then I am going to come back and get you. About that time, Thomas pipes up and says you are going to come to get us. Jesus says you already know how to get there. He says we don’t even know where we are going. How are we going to know the way to get there? At that point is when Jesus says I am the way, I am the truth, and I am the life and that no one can get to the Father except through me. That is kind of where we begin to pick the story up because Jesus is still kind of expanding on the notion that he is going to go away. In this section today, we see that he is going away but he is not going to abandon the disciples. He talks about how he is going to not leave them as orphans, but he is going to send another counselor to be with them forever. That is where we are going to pick it up. John 14:15 and following. (Scripture read here.)
Now we have a lot of scripture here again and a lot of it has to do with the Holy Spirit so it is good background information on the Holy Spirit. It is a good taste of the Holy Spirit for us and for the disciples. Today what I want to do is focus on a small passage in here; a passage that, to me, gives a very good basic introduction to the Holy Spirit not only to the disciples but to us here in the room. As a side note, anytime I encounter a passage about the Holy Spirit, I get a little nervous for a number of reasons. There is so much information about the Holy Spirit that where do you begin. What can you say about the Holy Spirit in 20 minutes or so? There is just too much content. I began to research. I began to do the homework. I had book spread everywhere. There is just a lot of information that you could speak on about the Holy Spirit. Not only that, when I speak to an audience such as you all, it is a very mixed audience. Mixed in the sense that some of you grew up being aware of the Holy Spirit. In fact, you heard about the Holy Spirit from the moment that you stepped into a church while there are others who maybe didn’t get a lot of exposure to the Holy Spirit. You could be like some of those early disciples who, when Paul was going to Ephesus, he came across a group and asked them a question whether or not they had received the Holy Spirit. He said “‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?’ They answered ‘No. We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.’” These were the followers of Christ who had not heard about the Holy Spirit. I suspect that possibly in this room or possibly obviously out in the community, there are people who have not heard about the Holy Spirit. That is the challenge. We have this teaching about the Holy Spirit that is not consistent all across Christianity. Consequently, what you have is a lot of misinformation about the Holy Spirit. Then you have some churches that spend a little bit too much time talking about the Holy Spirit while there are other churches that hardly ever talk about the Holy Spirit at all. Consequently, the very person who was designed to unite us, the Spirit, actually becomes a source of division for the churches. That is not a good thing.
Today, what I am going to do is put those divisive issues aside and just present what I would say is the basics of the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit 101. To do that, I am basically putting on my professor cap because I am going to probably present in somewhat of an academic format. I am going to use a lot of scripture, a lot of headings, and a lot of PowerPoint slides. If you are taking notes, you might want to grab about three or four sheets because there is going to be a lot of information coming to you very fast. Where we start off again is the situation that Jesus is about to head out. He is about to go off to the Father’s house and prepare a place for the disciples, but he is letting them know that he is not going to abandon them. He says in verse 16 “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever – the Spirit of truth.” I want to stop here for a second and think about that word counselor. When we think about a counselor, we might be thinking of some sort of an academic counselor or career counselor or those types of things. It could be something else. Some translations actually put the word comforter here. Some translations actually use the word advocate such as someone who would stand beside you in a courtroom in your defense. Some use the word teacher. I think that The Message actually places the word friend here. You begin to think well what is it? What is the right word? The answer is we don’t know for certain. The underlying Greek word here is a word called Paraclete. We know that the New Testament was originally written in the common Greek of the day. So the word here is Paraclete and actually the word Paraclete can have a variety of meanings. It actually has the idea of someone called alongside or beside to help. That is the idea that we have going on with this word Paraclete. When you think about the underlying meaning, the meaning of the word Paraclete, it can really take on a variety of these titles. You think about someone like a counselor. What do they do? They come alongside and they give advice. Or you think about an advocate; somebody who is standing next to you maybe in a courtroom for your defense. A mediator of sorts. Or maybe you have the idea of a comforter; someone who is there for you when you are going through some troubling times. Or possibly a friend; somebody who sticks by your side. So can you see how the variety of translations would use a different word there? They can’t all agree on what the proper word is here. You think if the word is so important, why didn’t Jesus just pick the right word? Why didn’t he just pick out counselor or comforter or whatever? The answer is I don’t know. What I suspect is maybe Jesus wasn’t interested in nailing down a specific word to describe the Holy Spirit. Maybe he was thinking about the fact that the Holy Spirit can’t be described by one word. The Holy Spirit would have a variety of titles, a variety of functions, and a variety of responsibilities. In other words, what maybe he was thinking is that he wanted the disciples to begin to think well maybe the Holy Spirit is kind of like Jesus. Really, that is the point here.
You say how do I know that Jesus was trying to get them to think in terms of him, Jesus when they thought about the Holy Spirit? The answer really goes back to the word that is connected to the word counselor, which is a very simple word. It is the word another. It is a very key word. It is a word that we would pass over very easily. When he says another counselor, the underlying Greek word, there are actually two words, that both can be translated another, but they are nuanced a little bit differently. One word actually means another of a different sort; of a totally different kind. Where the word that is used here, I believe it is allos, which actually means another of the same kind. Specifically the exact same kind. Which really brings me to the first key point that I wanted to make in Holy Spirit 101. When we talk about the Holy Spirit, we are talking about someone who is exactly the same as Jesus. So I guess what I am saying is that the Holy Spirit is God. If you were here a year or so ago, I was teaching on what we would call the Triune nature of God. In Orthodox Christianity we believe in one God, eternally existent in three persons; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Not three gods; one God, eternal existence in three persons. That is Orthodox Christianity. Across the board, all Christian faiths would ascribe to that. We believe in one God. Consequently, because we believe in one God eternal existence in Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, we believe in the coequal nature of each of those persons. They all share the same type of attributes. In other words, if you were going down the list of the key attributes of God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit you would find the same sort of things. You would find the idea of omniscience which is the idea of all-knowing. You would have the idea of omnipotence which is the idea of all-powerful and omnipresence with the ability to be in many places at once. The idea of God’s holiness and love and truth and all that sort of stuff. Those attributes that we would attach to God the Father and the Son are the same attributes that we would attach to God the Holy Spirit. Because we see them equal, we also believe that the Holy Spirit is worthy also of our worship. The Holy Spirit can be worshiped. God is not sitting back there saying when you are worshipping me make sure you are not thinking of the Holy Spirit or make sure you are not thinking of Jesus because there is jealousy going in there within the triune God. There is not. There is really not. After a while, you get worshipping and you don’t know at any given time who you are directing that to but you know it is being directed to God. The idea is very key. This is probably the essential thing about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God. There are a lot of passages that lend support to this. In Romans the apostle Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit as both the spirit of God and the spirit of Christ. How does that happen? I don’t know but what it does is give you a pretty good indication that we are talking about the spirit of God. We are talking about the Holy Spirit is God. There are a lot of other passages that give support to the idea that the spirit is God. One I just put out there is because it is pretty straight forward. The story goes in Acts you may recall the early church started out. I think I talked about it last week how you had this early community that had to stick together. You had this close-knit group of Christians that were staying together because they were trying to just survive. They were losing their jobs, losing their houses, and that sort of thing. They began to sell their possessions. They began to worship together. They began to pray together. They began to eat together. What happened is they started selling all their stuff and putting it into a pile I guess of some sort and saying we are going to sell this and give to so and so because that person doesn’t have something or this person is short of money and that sort of thing.
In Acts 5 we have the story of Ananias and Sapphira that were a couple that had apparently had a big piece of property. They decided to sell that property but for some reason they decided to keep a big chunk of that money for themselves. The apostle Peter got wind of that. He goes up to Ananias and he says to him “How is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied to men but to God.” What Peter is doing is making a very clear connection between the Holy Spirit and God. He is using them interchangeably here. It gives credibility to the fact that when we talk about the Holy Spirit we are talking about the third person in the trinity. We are talking about the Holy Spirit as God.
As a side note, when we think about the idea that you can lie to the Holy Spirit that actually gives credibility to my second point. Not only is the Holy Spirit God, but the Holy Spirit is considered a person. He is not just considered some sort of a nebulous impersonal force out there. Some sort of a mystical thing. Some sort of a ghostly thing out there. He is not thinking he is some sort of an active force or somebody that God just uses at his will. No, he is talking about a person. This is contrary to what I would call some of the cults believe. If you have heard the term cult it basically is a group that would not flow with what I would call Orthodox Christianity. Orthodox Christianity can pretty much run the gamut really from the Roman Catholics all the way over to the every extreme of Protestants. Basically Orthodox Christianity generally with the core teachings of the Bible they believe the same thing. Whereas a cult steps way outside of that. One cult in particular that steps outside of this mainline thinking, this Orthodox thinking, is the group known as the Jehovah Witnesses. I love a lot of people in the Jehovah Witnesses. I actually have a brother-in-law that is a Jehovah Witness, but I disagree immensely with some of his teachings. Especially this idea that the Holy Spirit is some sort of a mystical figure and some sort of an impersonal force. Actually an it. You say how do you know that is what they believe? Believe it or not I just decided to go to the Watchtower website. I decided to look up what they think about the Holy Spirit. Basically, this is what they say: The Holy Spirit is not a person and it is not part of a trinity. The Holy Spirit is God’s active force that he uses to accomplish his will. It is not equal to God but is always at his disposition and subordinate to him. Does that sound different than mainline Christianity? When they come up and say they are Christians, they are not Christians. Nice people. Great people. Servants but they are not Christians. Orthodox Christianity teaches that not only is the Holy Spirit God but he is a personal God. He is a person.
The scripture that lends even more credence to this is the fact that if we were to read through that entire passage again that I started off reading we would see the use of the masculine pronouns of He and Himself. I hate to give you too much grammar here because I am not that good at it, but basically you have the idea that in the Greek language a noun could have three different genders. You could have a masculine noun. You could have a feminine noun and you could have a neuter noun. The thing that is interesting is that when the spirit appears kind of randomly with a small s in different places in the Old Testament or even get outside the Bible and go back to the original Greek writings, the spirit is also considered neuter. But when the spirit is connected with the Holy Spirit speaking of the third person of the trinity, it is a masculine noun. That is why we see the He and Himself. If you read through that passage you would see the Holy Spirit is always referred to in the masculine sense. What I am saying is the Holy Spirit is not an It. The Holy Spirit is God. He is a personal God and because he is personal he has the attributes of personality. He has a mind and emotion and a will. We see those things expressed through things like the wisdom of the Holy Spirit as we see him flow through the book of Acts as he is starting the first church. We see it where the disciples do something that grieved the Holy Spirit. How could you grieve an it? You are grieving the Holy Spirit. You are grieving a person. When you sin you are grieving a person. You get the idea of his calling how he calls out the apostles for a specific task for a specific place for a specific time. You have the idea of interceding where the Spirit is praying for the disciples. Then you get the idea in some aspects where the Spirit is able actually to do the thing that I think only a person could do; is to demonstrate love. The passage that came to mind when I was putting this together was the passage I mentioned last week in Romans. Romans 5:5 that spoke about the idea that God had poured out his love into the hearts of the disciples. It says “Hope does not disappoint us because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us.” God the Father is not going to pour his love out into an it. Into some sort of an active force. He is not going to do that. He is going to pour it out through a person, the third person of the trinity, the Holy Spirit. In fact, the Holy Spirit is going to be the one that is going to come into us and be able to pull that love into our hearts.
Which actually the third point that I want to make is that the Holy Spirit is not only God; he is not only personal, but the Holy Spirit lives in believers. John 14:16 says “The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him, but you know him for he lives with you and will be in you.” When you become a believer, when you become a follower of Jesus Christ that is when you get the Holy Spirit. In other words, when you make that conversion experience is when you receive the Holy Spirit. As a side note, some of you say at what point in that conversion process? Do I receive the Spirit when I am sitting in my room and I just begin to pray to God and I open up my heart and say I want to accept you as Lord? Do I receive the Spirit when I am in the baptistery and I go underneath the water? Or do I get the Spirit when I come out of the baptistery? My answer is I don’t know. I really don’t know. That is why I put up the passage from Acts 10. You may recall that is the story of Cornelius and his family. One of the first persons to be converted. Converted the entire family. If you recall, he was converted and then he was baptized. This throws a whole monkey wrench in a lot of our views, especially the Christian Church views that believe that normally you get the Spirit immediately after baptism. The Spirit is going to move as the Spirit wills. The Spirit flows wherever he wants to flow. It is not for us to decide when somebody receives the Spirit. It is kind of like a wedding. I use the example of a wedding. In the eyes of God when is somebody officially married? When they say the vows? When they pass the ring? When the pastor says I now pronounce you man and wife? I don’t know. It could be any point. I think they are all important, but I am not the one to sit here and say this is when it happens. This is when you are married or this is when you receive the Holy Spirit. The point is that you do receive him and that he lives within you. Because he lives within you, you have this vital, real connection to the Father, to God. There is a verse in Romans that speaks of it. It really speaks of it in an amazing way because before New Testament Christianity the Jews didn’t really feel like they could get anywhere near God. Like I said, they would try to enter the holy place and they would be terrified. Because of the cross, because of that veil being torn down it says we are able to enter into the holy of holies. We are able to enter into the holy of holies basically because of what Christ has done. When we enter the holy of holies, we no longer have to be terrified because the Spirit of God lives within us. We have a very intimate relationship with the Father. Such an intimate relationship that we are able to refer to him almost as daddy. In fact, in Romans 8:15 it says “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you as a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship and by him we cry Abba, Father.” Abba is an intimate form of the word daddy or father. It is basically the word daddy as we would think of it. The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. He establishes this really intimate relationship with God the Father because of the Spirit that dwells within us.
The other thing we have to keep in mind is if we have the Spirit of God with us in conversion and we are able to have this close connection with God because of the Spirit that lives within us, one thing that Paul makes clear is that your body is like a temple. It is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Before God resided in this huge temple that very few people could have access to. He says you have the temple right in your body. When he is writing the letter to Corinthians he is dealing with some stuff there that people shouldn’t be doing to their bodies. In fact, they are out there doing things they shouldn’t be doing. They are having sexual relations with somebody they shouldn’t be having sexual relationships with. They are bringing in their addictive behavior from their pagan practices. They are doing the things they shouldn’t be doing. Paul says “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your body.” Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit if you are a believer. It makes you think twice about some of the things you are doing to your body. He says don’t do it. Don’t do it because you are bringing dishonor upon the Spirit of God that is within your body.
Just before we close, I want to give you a quick recap of where we have been. Holy Spirit 101 teaches us that the Holy Spirit is God, that the Holy Spirit is a person and that the Holy Spirit lives within each believer. The good news about all that is that because God is a God of truth, the Holy Spirit is truth. We saw that in an earlier passage where it said “I will ask the Father and he will give you another counselor to be with you forever – the Spirit of truth.” That is an interesting thing the title that Jesus gives the Holy Spirit because last week Jesus said I am the way, I am the truth, and I am the life. Now he is calling the Holy Spirit the truth, which is an indicator that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are basically the same. The Spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit, are both the Spirit of truth. They both contain the spirit of truth. Just as Jesus is truth, the Holy Spirit is truth. It is interesting how the disciples were able to sit at the feet of Jesus and receive the true insights from God, the things that they needed to know about God and about themselves, now because we have the Spirit of God living within us, we actually are able to receive the truths from God ourselves through the power of the Spirit. There is a great passage that speaks of this. It says “No eye has seen, no mind has conceived, no ear has heard what God has in store for those who love him.” Basically it goes on to say “But God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.” We have access to the great truths, the mysteries of God through the Spirit of God that lives within us. That is an amazing thing when you think about it. Not necessarily that we are able to take truths that are not found in the word of God or that we are able to invent new things. What God does through the Spirit is basically unpacks them a little bit more. Remember a few weeks ago I said why did Jesus only give the disciples a certain amount of truth? Because they could not handle the whole truth. God is going to reveal his truth to us by his Spirit as we need it. A little bit at a time when we need it. Not only is it the Spirit of truth that continues to feed us truth. Because he is truth, he can become a guide to us. It also says in John 16 Jesus is saying “I have much more to say to you; more than you can now bear, but when he, the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you in all truth.” That goes back to the Spirit of God as the counselor, as the Paraclete, as the one who walks beside because he has the truth with him. When you are walking with the spirit walking down the road and you decide to go this way and it is not the right way you should be going, it is the way of falsehood and lies, the spirit gets ahold of you and says why don’t we go this way because this is more in line with the truth of God. It is more in line with the truth of you. It is more in line with the truth of your situation. It is the way that you should go. Not only does he act as a guide, as we saw earlier he exists to intercede with us. In other words, when we are so confused about life, when we don’t understand what is going on whatsoever, when we just can’t figure things out, and we don’t even know how to pray, he says you know what, don’t worry about it. Just do your best. Just come before me on your knees and begin to give it up to me and I will take it from there. I will take the words that you don’t even know how to speak and I will take those and put them in a language that God understands. I will interpret them rightly for them. I will speak truth to you. I will make sure it comes to me at the truth level even though you might not even be thinking rightly; he is going to be able to intercede in a way that reveals truth to you and truth to God. Words that you cannot express.
As we think about all these things, especially the idea that the Spirit is within us and next to us and the Spirit intercedes with us, it would only makes sense that the last point would be that the Spirit is able to basically aid us in our worship. He is going to help us out. We are not that good at worship. We are pretty good at worship but really we need some practice. We need some help and that is where the Spirit comes in. You may recall that there was a passage way back in John 4 about the Samaritan woman sitting at the well. She wasn’t living her life the way it should be. Jesus started revealing things to her. In her frustration, she changed the subject and said you Jews say you should worship in Jerusalem at the temple. Us Samaritans think you should worship at Mount Gerizim or wherever. That is when Jesus said I tell you the truth. There is a time coming where we need to learn to worship God in Spirit and truth. God is Spirit and his worshippers must worship him in Spirit and truth. When you think about it, what better person to teach us how to worship in Spirit and truth than the one who is called the Spirit of Truth. That is how the Spirit aides us. You think what does it mean to worship in Spirit and truth? That is a loaded question because there is so much I can unpack about that. Really, in a nutshell, when we think about what does it mean to worship in spirit? Basically it means that God’s Spirit is in communion with our spirit, specifically our broken spirit. When we come to a place where we are totally broken, no façade. We are just going to come and say I messed up. This is who I am and I just want to give you praise God. I just want to worship you God. That is when God begins to really commune with our spirit. The passage I want to read from is Psalm 51 where David writes “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart. O God you will not despise.” That is what he wants. He wants the kind of spirit that is broken. A spirit-to-spirit connection but it starts with us being able to be broken. The amazing thing is when we are willing to go with God and take away all the pretenses and all the pride and all the other stuff that goes along with coming before God or being human or whatever it is, when we expose our brokenness to God he says I can fix that. He starts sending his Spirit down and starts really doing the work inside at the soul level. Specifically the mind and the emotions and the will and all the weird stuff that you have been carrying around in your soul, your personality for so long. He says I can come in and I can start fixing that stuff. All you have to do is come before me in brokenness and I will start doing the work on you. I will do it in the context of worship. This may be a strange way for some of you to think about it. What I am saying is that, although worship is about ultimately about God, we are the ones that receive the benefit. We are the ones that receive the benefit from it. In other words, God is not sitting up there saying I am feeling kind of insecure today so I think you people better go to church and stand up and give me praise because I need to get my self-worth filled up. God doesn’t need that. We come into worship thinking we better praise God. We better show up on Sunday because that is what God needs. He doesn’t need any of that. What he is saying is you come into worship and although you are directed towards me, I am going to make sure that you leave and you begin to be filled up with what you need. Do you get that? Worship when it boils down to it is all about reversing the effects of the fall. I don’t want to go into a lot of theology about this but when you think about what was taken away at the fall there were a lot of things taken away. The main thing that was taken away was worship. Everything in the Old Testament what you see is when they got free from the Pharaoh they were supposed to go out and worship. All the Old Testament and all the New is a calling back to worship. It is basically coming to a place where we would have existed had sin not entered our lives. Come into a place where we are living out our identity exactly the way God had determined for us to live. Just living and going out into the world in the way we are supposed to live, not in a sense of pride, but in a sense of full submission to him. Basically an attitude of praise and worship.
What I am saying is when you come into worship, although we think we are giving something to God, he is all the while standing in the wing saying you come to me and I am going to give something to you. You might not even know what you want. As a side note, the song the choir sang today, Debbie picked it out, I wasn’t even thinking of it; Majesty. Does anybody know who wrote the song Majesty? Jack Hayford wrote the song Majesty. Some of you don’t even know who Jack Hayford is. He has been around for a number of years. He had a church in Southern California for about 20 or 30 years, one of the largest churches in Southern California, about 12,000 people there. He wrote the song Majesty. He got it one night. I forgot the story behind that but he got that song Majesty. Since that time, he has written about 400 hymns. So if there is anybody that I respect when it comes to worship it is Jack Hayford. In fact, he wrote this book that I just read over and over. It is called Manifest Presence. It is the whole idea of how we should view worship. Within this book, he kind of explains what he means about the whole idea that when we come to worship we come into worship with an attitude of being ready to receive what God wants to give us. I want to read from a section really quickly. I printed it out so you can get what he says. He says “From God’s viewpoint, worship is a means designed to unlock the human heart that he may answer to human need and serve his own heartfelt interest in the wellbeing of his most beloved creatures.” Do you see what he is saying there? We come to God and he wants us to worship not so he can get some sort of a high. So that he can answer our need because we are the people that he loves the most. He wants us to be fulfilled. He wants us to be whole. He wants us to take the garbage out of our past. He wants to clean up our soul. He wants to clean up our mind. He wants to clean up the emotions. He wants to clean up wrong desires. He wants to make us whole. That is the thing that is happening in worship. We come to God and God gives us what we need no matter what it is. We don’t even know what we need.
In closing I think of another story. He actually brings it up in the book here. You know about John that wrote the gospel. It is the same John that wrote the book of Revelation. He wrote the book of Revelation I think when he was in his late 80s or early 90s. As I said a few weeks ago, during that time, there was a lot of persecution going on in that church. This was a very early church. There were a lot of people getting killed for their faith. A lot of people getting burned at the stake. All sorts of things. People struggling with their faith whether they should stay with it or not. Going through these weird ideas that were coming in from the pagan religions. You imagine that John is getting pretty frustrated and saying you know what I don’t know if I believe this stuff anymore. I wrote the gospel of John. I am writing this book of Revelation. He is saying God I just need something. I just need to know that all this stuff is real. God says I will take care of it. You come up here and I am going to give you a glimpse of my throne room. We actually begin to see a look of that in Revelations 4:1 where it says (this is John writing) “After this, I look and there before me was a door standing open into heaven. The voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said ‘Come up here and I will show you what must take place after this.’ At once I was in the Spirit and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it.” You see the Spirit was in him but I think when you go into heaven you are in the spirit completely. I think that is what was going on there. I think John could not go into the throne room as a mere mortal man. He had to go in as a spiritual man. When he went in there he was engulfed by the Spirit of God. He was able to get a vision of the throne room of God. In other words, God gave him exactly what he needed when he needed it. No sooner and no later.
In closing, it kind of goes back to accounting. When you think about accounting, there were people in that class that wanted nothing to do with accounting. They didn’t want to be there. They couldn’t get it. They couldn’t accept it. They said this makes absolutely no sense. I am out of here. Yet there were people that really enjoyed it. They seemed to get it. The more they studied it and exposed themselves, the more they began to know about accounting and they began to know it through experience. I took like 45 hours of accounting. When I stepped out there into that business world, I didn’t have a clue until I got in and I started doing it. Then slowly by slowly all the pieces started coming together. Really that is what John says here. He says “The world cannot accept him (speaking of the Holy Spirit) because it neither sees him nor knows him but you know him for he lives with you and will be in you.” If you think about the world not being able to accept him because the world cannot see him. Most of you cannot see the Spirit but he doesn’t address that because he has already addressed it in other passages. Christians do not see like the average human. They do not see with their sight. They see with through the lens of faith. Everything about the Christian walk is based on faith. Coming into Christ is a faith walk. Receiving of the Spirit, believing in the Spirit is a faith walk. As you begin to receive by faith not only that Christ is your Lord and he died on the cross for your sins, but you begin to receive by faith that the Holy Spirit lives within you what happens is you begin to walk in that. You begin to walk in experience. As you experience the Holy Spirit living in you, as you experience these realities, you begin to understand some things. You begin to understand that the Holy Spirit truly is God and deserves the same recognition as the Father and the Son. You begin to realize that he truly is a person. A person that wants to have that intimate relationship with you so much so that he comes inside of you to live and you begin to get it. You become comfortable stepping into that throne room of God and addressing God as daddy. You have that intimate fellowship. You know when you go there that you are not going to hear lies. You are going to hear the truth. Because not only is he the Spirit of God, the Spirit of Christ, but he is the Spirit of Truth and ultimately what you are going to know is that when you come into worship and you begin to worship in a broken manner spirit to spirit, God is going to give you something. He is not going to be up there just waiting to receive. He is expecting you to get down on your knees and you begin to receive from him what he wants to give you at that moment. Let us pray.
