TEACHING

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2021
10:30 AM (in-person + livestream + kids!)
2021 ADVENT SERIES: Good Gifts
Spirit & Fire
Luke 3:16; 11:5-13
When you’re ‘caught up’ in music, games, a movie, dance, or something awe-inspiring, you experience a taste of how God wants to empower you directly, personally, and in/through your body and mind together. These signposts of play and beauty point to the creator who desires that you experience delight. Are you drawn to choose to welcome the power created in your body and mind to grow in love and care for others? Are your relationships taking the form of goodness and truth? This power is the presence and ministry of the Holy Spirit who makes Jesus real in you; power to live differently, power to preserve under pressure, power to reject choices that destroy love; power to speak words that advance the creational work of God—creating new things and situations where goodness and love grows.​
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PREFLIGHT
In one sense every Christian is, and should be, increasingly charismatic. We learn from Paul, but it is also true that there is a dimension of the Spirit's enabling that one enters by virtue of a baptism-filling in the Spirit distinct from conversion.  This dimension might be properly called the prophetic dimension.  In Luke's perspective, the community of faith is potentially a community of prophets; and it is by reception of the Pentecostal gift (Spirit-filling/baptism) that this potential is realized. --Glen Menzies 197
The Spirit-filled life is not a special, deluxe edition of Christianity. It is part and parcel of the total plan of God for His people. --A.W. Tozer
“Neither in the Old Testament nor in the New, nor in Christian testimony as found in the writings of the saints as far as my knowledge goes, was any believer ever filled with the Holy Spirit who did not know he had been filled. Neither was anyone filled who did not know when he was filled. And no one was ever filled gradually.”
TAKEOFF
Luke 3:16; 11:5-13 CEB
FLIGHT Saving power, Sharing power, Staying power 

• The Holy Spirit’s activities are the “power” source for the follower of Jesus—power that is not dependent on anything external or in any other human view of power.

 

• Inward Relational Gifts - The Holy Spirit is promised as a gift. 
  • Gift of Presence
    • Assurance

 

• Advocate/Comforter

 

• Gift of Transformation

 

• Gift of the Spirit Himself Interceding For You - You are never alone Romans 8:26-27

 

• Outward gifts - The Holy Spirit gifts individuals for the sake of the church and God’s mission in the world. Corinthians 12:7
  •  1 Corinthians 12-14;  1 Corinthians 12:8-10; Ephesians 4:7-13; Romans 12:3-8
  • The Body of Christ and Your Enspirited Body
    • Gifts of the Spirit working through your body
    • Gifts of the Spirit build the very real body of Christ

 

• Gifts must be received (and can be resisted or ignored) - “do not quench” “do not be ignorant” “eagerly desire” Patterns of reception based on Acts 2, 10, 19

 

• Where to start? Be filled! Keep on being filled!

By the time I graduated from [seminary], I had many convictions and few questions, especially regarding the Holy Spirit …. But during a lifetime of ministry that has taken me around the United States and to many countries abroad, I have found that the work of the Holy Spirit continually keeps me off balance. I'm not alone in that. Those in church leadership seem afraid the Spirit is going to do something we can't explain. I've found that disturbs many folks … but I'll admit it energizes me. I've come to realize there are dimensions of the Spirit's ministry I have never tapped and places in this study about which I know very little. I'm on a strong learning curve. I have witnessed a dynamic power in his presence that I long to know more of firsthand. I now have questions and a strong interest in many of the things of the Spirit I once felt were settled. To say it plainly, I am hungry for more of him. I long to know God more deeply and more intimately.  - Charles R. Swindoll, Embraced By the Spirit(Zondervan, 2010), pp. 25-26

• Cultivate Receptivity - positioning yourself to receive the filling of the Spirit
  • Attitude of Openness - McKnight
  • Awareness 
    • of Scripture
    • Awareness of the charismatic throughout all of Christian history (and reactions, excess/avoidance (control)
  • Active pursuit
• Trial and Error - learning to listen to the Spirit in your body and mind
  • Test the spirits
  • Risk words for others coming out of prayer, worship, and scripture in community
• In our Church
  • Silence, centering, speaking!
  • Home Church prayer
  • Worship freeing your tongue

 

• Pitfalls - mistakes will be made - but let's be a church where it’s ok to risk and make mistakes!

Final Word/Landing

• The Spirit’s ministry is making Jesus real, in real time, with real people, regarding real needs (and needs that we might not be able to give words to yet).
• It starts by welcoming the Spirit to live in you—that’s giving allegiance to Jesus. The Father and the Son, Jesus give the Spirit. Salvation starts by welcoming the king, Jesus, and his way of living. He gives the Spirit, as the agent of the Father.