Holy Spirit Sermon Ocean View Methodist April 30, 2013.04.

26 I have encountered two kinds of people in the past few weeks that is really challenging my faith in humanity. You know you have those days where you really see the good in people, and you see love just spring forth and people work together and just love. And then you have days where you see the absolute worst in humanity and you honestly wonder whether there is much God can do about it. Well I have been having some of the latter kind of moments. And I can really put the types of people I am struggling with into two categories. Drug addicts and babies. Yep. Both are challenging my faith in God. I am not joking. Ill start with the more obvious challenge, drug addicts. Drugs is a reality of our world, and it is something that deeply afflicts this community. Every single one of you has personally witnessed the destruction of drug addiction in your lives. Some of you have seen drugs tear apart your neighbors, or that boy you once had hope in. Maybe drugs has turned your child into someone you dont even know. Maybe drugs has torn apart your own life. Drugs come straight from the devil himself, I have no doubt. Lately I have been dealing with two drug addicts in my life and I am really struggling. At the Colour conference God really challenged me with these two people and said that I need to love them. I wept over them and dedicated my heart to loving them. In the past two weeks they have only become worse, more destructive, and hurt more people than I can even bear, including myself. Personally these people have lied to me, stolen from me, and hurt me deeply. I hate drugs. And I sometimes wonder in my dark and honest moments if these people that I do love will ever be able to get out of their drug addiction. Is God strong enough to cure even them. So that is one kind of person I am dealing with. And I am struggling to love them, struggling to see hope. The second group that is challenging me lately is babies. Specifically one baby, and his name is Keller James Prince. Keller James is only 10 months old, and as you all have been personal witnesses to, he is nothing short of total perfection. He is fat, he is happy, he laughs, he sleeps, he eats, he is just pure joy. The boy has been perfect. I mean he is a baby, and all babies are pretty good, right. But Keller is just perfection. UNTIL LATELY.

 It is insane, but I think I am witnessing a human being come into the understanding of good and evil before my own eyes! He looks right at me and screams when he doesnt want to do something! He hit my hand when I try to feed him something he doesnt want on a spoon! He literally slaps and pushes away the beautiful face of his own sister when she tries to snuggle him! WHO WOULD DO THAT? Well a baby would! My perfect baby has suddenly come to understand how to hurt someone, how to protest, how to be angry and he routinely chooses it! He looks right at me and chooses to sin! It is seriously breaking my heart! I have always known this is a tough world. And since I became a Christian I was aware that Adam and Eve were the first to sin and brought in evil into our world, but geez, I never knew it could be so bad! I might be a tiny bit dramatic about the babies being unredeemable, but seriously its painful to watch a sweet and innocent child begin to choose sin. It hurts! He needs those peas! He needs hugs from his sister! And yet he chooses sin. And on the other end of the spectrum of people and sin are these people in my own life. People that I love and that are beautiful human beings but are caught in the throws of drugs and addiction in a way I cant even imagine. They lie and hurt those they most love. They live in total desperation for their drugs and will destroy anything to get it. They will destroy you and they are destroying themselves. And you pray and pray and pray, but nothing seems to work. Is sin too strong? Is evil too much? Are there really people who are unredeemable? This are pretty intense questions for a Sunday morning, I know, but let me take you one more place real quickly. While this has been stirring in my heart and keeping me up at night for the past weeks, I finally had the absolute worst realization this week. As bad as the sin is in the hearts and lives of those around me, its even worse in ME. While I may not do drugs or hit Kieren in the face when she hugs me, I judge people. I criticize. I think I am better than others. I am jealous. I too lie. I hurt. I destroy others and even destroy myself. Sure my sin doesnt look like theirs, but its sin none the less. And when you really take a minute, just a minute because its hard to bear much more of really looking at yourself, you begin to wonder if YOU are even redeemable.

 Forget about the drug dealers and the babies. Is it even possible that God could pull ME out of sin? If this is just too udderly intense for you this morning I am sorry. But I am not alone in this thinking. Or at least I think I am not. You know there are some parts of the Bible that are written for all to see and other parts that we can only imagine. One part we see is Jesus predicting Peters denial of him. Can you imagine. The messiah, Jesus Christ looks you in the face and says YOU will deny him! Hello! This was Peter! Like 5 minutes ago Jesus said that the CHURCH would be built on Peter and that he was the ROCK. And now he will deny him! Never! No way! It couldnt be! We do hear Peter profess his unending passion for Jesus in that moment. Then we hear Peter deny for the third time and the rooster crows. And silence. The silence of that moment must have been deafening. Im sure Peter immediately thought of Jesus prediction. Now some scholars have thought that Peter in that moment, when he realized Jesus had predicted that unthinkable sin, that Peter would have realized Jesus predicted it SO THAT Peter would know Jesus still loves you. Like if Jesus was saying, Peter you are going to sin against me in this way, but its going to be okay, I will still love you. I dont know, but that wouldnt have been the thoughts in my head. In those moments of settling and reckoning in Peters heart, I imagine Peter was thinking some pretty bad thoughts about himself. Comparing his own heart to babies and drug addicts for sure. But they had nothing on the sin of that moment. Peter must have thought he was hopeless. He must have thought he was helpless. There was nothing that could rescue him from that pit of sin. If you cant relate to Peter feeling that way, well then one of the main authors of the New Testament can. Paul writes in Romans 7 about his own sin: For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature.[c] For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to dothis I keep on doing. Paul can relate. Paul wants to do good. Paul wants to be who he knows he can be. But something else is at work within him. Its like a war he says. A war of good and evil.

 We look around and see the babies and the drug addicts thinking they are the worst of the bunch, only one day to realize that its truly our own hearts that are the most sinful of them all. BUT. There is more to the story. There is more to Peters story and more to Pauls story. GOD writes more to this story. You see Jesus knew that Peter wasnt enough on his own. Jesus knew that Paul wouldnt be enough on his own. And Jesus knows YOU and I arent enough on our own. No matter how passionate we are, how driven we may be, how focused we are on the goal, no matter how many meetings we attend, committees we join and scriptures we read, we can never be enough. Jesus said to the disciples, to Peters face, that it was actually going to be BETTER that He left them. And that they would go on to do far greater things that Jesus himself did. This must have been unthinkable. Unexplainable. What could ever be better than JESUS himself? The mighty rushing wind. Jesus told them about the Holy Spirit, he prepared them, he told them to gather together and wait for it. But truly nothing could prepare them for that wind. Acts 2 tells this story: When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues[a] as the Spirit enabled them. And then in verse 12, as a crowd gathered, they said, Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, What does this mean? And people are still trying to figure out what it means. But here is where I want us to focus on today. The group on the inside who received the Holy Spirit and the group outside who were trying to figure out what happened. Next week I will again talk about the Holy Spirit outworking and what the effects of the HS in our lives are. Those on the inside were never the same after that day. There stories radically changed and their lives radically changed. They went from being passionate but

cowardly to visionary and courageous warriors. Everything changed that day. But that day not everything changed for EVERY ONE. There were those on the inside and those on the outside. I think we often assume we are like those on the inside who received the Holy Spirit, I mean obviously that was us. But let me paint a clearer picture of what happened that day. There was a huge crowd gathered in Jerusalem because they were there for the Jewish celebration of Pentacost, or as it was known to the, Shavot. So all of these religious Jews were gathered for this festival. It would have been literally thousands. And then in the middle of their beautiful and holy celebration all these crazy Jesus followers start freaking out and acting drunk. It must have been a scene. What is very poignant about this festival that the Jews were celebrating is that it was called the Festival of Weeks and celebrated when God gave the Ten Commandments to his people. It happened 50 days after their wandering in the Exodus ended. So think about this. In Israels history, Gods people wandered for 40 years because they didnt trust God enough to just walk into their promise. When they finally get it together God gives them a list of rules and guidelines to teach them how to live and be holy people. The most focused scripture of the Jewish people is God saying, Be holy as I am holy. The Jewish people followed rules and spent their entire lives trying to be good and HOLY like God. So this festival was celebrating when God began that journey. Well that sounds like a beautiful journey except that the LAW is broken! What did the law ever do for the Israelites but show them how FAR away they are from God! Just like Peter, even though the Israelites TRIED to follow the law, and still do, they ALWAYS fall short. They are never enough. Ultimately their hearts are full of sin and they are lead astray. The story of Israel is trying to get it right, failing, and God rescuing them. OVER AND OVER AND OVER. And this festival celebrated that law. The law that only failed them. But in the middle of this ridiculous ceremony, GOD shows up. The Holy God comes down in their midst in a completely new way and gives them the Holy Spirit. They are filled with a power that they have never known. They start speaking in tounges and are filled forever in a new way.

 And the people on the outside. The religious people, the Jewish people, the God-following people, what do they think? They see God doing something and assume the people are either drunk or crayzy. This is so PROFOUND! There are two groups of people here. Religious and good people and the rest of them. The religious people miss it entirely and the disciples and Jesus followers go into a new level of experiencing God. So my question is WHAT is the difference? What seperates the religious people from the Holy Spirit filled people. When the mighty rushing wind comes, how are some filled with it, and some just have their hair messed up. Ill tell you the difference. The people on the inside are Peters and the people on the outside are religious. The people on the inside are humbled, broken, and messed up and the people on the inside are good and trying to get better. The people on the inside are at the END of themselves and desperate for God and the people on the outside just want the easy path to God. Its the Peters and Pauls who truly receive Gods power from the mighty rushing wind, not the Jews. In todays time its the addicts and the babies who find God, not the churched people. Do you get this? Do you see this? The disciples receieved Gods spirit that day because they were desperate. They were at the end of themselves. They literally felt they would die and be nothing without God. They emptied themselves so that God could enter in. There is no space for God in us when we think we have it together. When we are busy judging everyone else and making lists of all the bad people and how BAD they really are, rather than emptying our own souls of OUR SIN, we have no room for God. God cant fill us, we cant receive from the wind when we think we are okay and everyone ELSE is wrong. I am never going to see a change in the babies and addicts of this world until I see a REAL CHANGE inside me. And ONLY the Holy Spirit can do this. Peter tried EVERYTHING on his own power, but only through God filling him up could he really become the man he was destined to be.

 So for me, I have been spending the past few weeks lamenting and grieving over the sin in the world, particularly in the addicts and babies, and wondering if there was any real hope for them all. And then on Thursday night, in the midst of praying and understanding the Holy Spirit with our womens group, I realized that THEY werent the problem. I am the problem. I am the one with a heart filled with sin. Maybe I dont do drugs and mistreat my children and hit my sister, but I judge and I am greedy and I boast and I think I have it all together, just like the Jews. I love a festival where we come together to celebrate the law, because I have gotten many of them right! I dont murder, I dont commit adultery, I honor my mother and father. Good on me! I get all the ten commandments right, and many more! I would love a celebration of Gods law because most of the big ones I get so right! But Jesus comes to reveal a new law. Its not about the outward things, but whats inwardly going on in my heart and yours. And I may not murder or steal, but there is a lot of darkness in here. And as much as I try to get it out, and pull it out and pretend its not there, it is. And only a mighty rushing wind can blow it away. You know, when that wind comes again in our midst, maybe even this morning. I want to feel it in my soul. I dont want to be on the outside with messed up hair thinking everyone is drunk, I want to feel that Holy Spirit wind on the inside of my heart. I want to be so changed that people think I am crazy. Or they think maybe that God is real. If God can change even SARAH, maybe there is hope for me. There is HOPE. We can all be changed. There is hope for the addicts and the babies, even Keller. And even greater, there is hope for me and there is hope for you. This is good news. Its the greatest news. God didnt just live and die and rise again. He still lives and He still reigns. Inside me and inside you. o And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies because of[e] his Spirit who lives in you. Romans 8:11 Next week I will talk about the evidences of this Holy Spirit. What we can look forward to after everyone is done accusing us of being drunk. But first we must make space for it. We must empty ourselves and our sin so there is room for God to enter in.