Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] We just got through with a sermon series looking at the time between the Crucifixion, resurrection of Christ and Pentecost, the start of the church, and how the disciples were kind of went through a process of being prepared to be these vehicles, to be filled with the Spirit, to be on mission of God, to be a part of God's new work through the church into the world and kind of the, the insane steps that they had to go through to get to that point, from a sense of total despair to being totally open to and filled with the Spirit empowered to do their work. But as I was doing that sermon series, I was really overcome by, I was distracted by looking at the Holy Spirit and looking at the work of the Holy Spirit and how the Bible describes the work of the Holy Spirit. And I wanted to, I wanted to do a follow up series on that. Really looking at something that I. Something I was seeing was that when we talk about the Holy Spirit, we are, you're never talking about the Holy Spirit, that you're not also talking about the kingdom of God. You're not talking about the Holy Spirit and the kingdom of God without talking about the mission of God.
[00:01:20] The mission of God, the kingdom of God and the Spirit of God are always interacting. If you were to say, I really want to know what it's like to be filled with the Spirit, you are saying, I want to be a part of God's mission. I want to know what it's like to be a citizen in God's kingdom. If you say I would really, I really want to know what God's calling me to. Like, I want to know what, what my purpose is in my life that God would be calling me to do. You are saying that you want to be empowered by the Spirit of God. If you're saying you want to know what God's calling you to, you are saying you want to be empowered by the Spirit of God and you want to be a citizen in God's kingdom. Those are, these are the same things. If you say that I would like to know what it's like to live in God's kingdom. Like the idea of living where God's will is done and having God's will be normative in my life. You are saying I want to be filled with the Spirit and I want to be doing the work of God.
[00:02:19] These aren't just like, they aren't just fit together. I believe they are functionally descriptions of the same thing. Like if you are talking about the one thing, whether or not you realize that you are carrying the other two along with you.
[00:02:35] And if you imagine yourself to be.
[00:02:39] To desire the one thing and not care so much about the other thing, you. You are not talking about the thing that you're saying. If you say, you know, I just really want to know what it's like to be filled with the Spirit of God. And you have no intent to participate in God's mission or to be a part of God's kingdom. It is not the Spirit of God that you're asking for that you want to be in your life. So in this sermon series, I want to look at how these three elements, how these three aspects that we talk a lot about in church, the Spirit of God, the kingdom of God and the mission of God, how they are fundamentally interwoven, how they are, for a Christian, inseparable. And I want to start off with the Spirit of God and looking at what the Spirit of God is, what it means to be a part of the Spirit of God, what the work of the Spirit, what the work is of the Spirit of God.
[00:03:30] In order to do that, to look at the Spirit of God, it's good to look at Genesis chapter one at the very start. Genesis chapter one one says, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
[00:03:41] In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That's a verse that everybody has, even if you're not a Christian. You heard some Christians say that sometime. It's like. It's like a thing that you hear. But the next verse is, to me, the most interesting verse in Genesis chapter one. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was shapeless and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the watery deep.
[00:04:07] But the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water.
[00:04:10] The imagery that goes on here, I think, is.
[00:04:16] It's very evocative. Like, when I read that, I hear that God created that in God's creation, it was this murky, empty darkness.
[00:04:30] It was shapeless. It was. It was empty.
[00:04:33] That creation itself has no purpose, has no value.
[00:04:43] Except that makes no sense, except that the Spirit of God is working in creation.
[00:04:54] It is the Spirit of God. It is the Spirit of God that brings, like, form, shape, purposefulness into anything that we see. Any experience, anything in creation that makes sense, that's not utter chaos, is a result of the Spirit of God, a part of creation.
[00:05:20] That God didn't just create his creation, but that he brought Himself into his creation, that he works continuously in his creation, that God isn't. He didn't Just make it, spin it like a top and take off and say, like, oh, look, it's working the way I want it to. Good luck. Like, it literally is nothing useful or good except that God is presently working in among it. That's the thing that the author of Genesis wants to get across. And especially when we look at Genesis chapter. When you look at Genesis chapter one, people think about, like, oh, the seven days of creation, Day one, day two. We're so focused on, like, days that we. It's like.
[00:06:05] It's like if I told you a story and you were to pick out some detail, the story that was like, had nothing to do with the point. That's what we often do with Genesis. We want to be like, oh, well, how many days was creation? And like, what is days? And what does that mean? It's like literally zero to do with the point. The point is discussed, said right here in the second chapter of Genesis.
[00:06:28] All of creation was shapeless and empty, but the Spirit of God was working.
[00:06:36] Now, what is the spirit of God?
[00:06:39] As Christians, there is a way for us to understand the spirit of God, which I think is necessarily deficient.
[00:06:48] I don't mean wrong. I mean necessarily deficient.
[00:06:52] What I'm about to tell you, I think is accurate in as much as humans could possibly understand God. Like, for humans to make sense of a created being outside of all creation is an insane task.
[00:07:11] Hence Jesus, who can't literally brings that God comes into human form and interacts with us in our space because our ability to understand his space is, like, not possible. The way I heard it described one time is like, we interact in height, width and depth. Right? Can you imagine this may not work for you? This might be really tough.
[00:07:33] Geometry was the only math that made sense to me. Algebra and all the rest of that. But, like, geometry made sense to me. So somebody said, like, immediately imagine if you only operated in height and width.
[00:07:45] So like, plane. You only operated on a plane.
[00:07:48] And then somebody else came along and operated in depth as well.
[00:07:54] Totally impossible because the entire world is just height and width. And then something else comes along and it can exist in all spaces at the same time because there's an entirely different dimension that they exist in now. Not possible to understand.
[00:08:07] For me to understand.
[00:08:14] The otherness of God, like, what it means for God to exist beyond my ability to comprehend Him. It helps me to limit.
[00:08:23] I can't imagine more dimensions. I can't imagine future dimensions. And I could see from that, like, oh, that would be an entirely different thing.
[00:08:33] God is beyond us.
[00:08:35] I say that.
[00:08:38] I say that in order to preface what I'm about to say about the Holy Spirit.
[00:08:43] God has revealed himself to us in three different ways.
[00:08:47] God the Father, that is the origin, the Creator, the sustainer of all things, God the Son, the one who God made flesh, visibly present in living a life like us, so that we could see what it looks like to interact with God. Jesus said, I only do ever what I see the Father doing. And so we can look at Jesus interacting with the Father and say, that's what it looks like to interact with the Father in heaven.
[00:09:19] And the Spirit of God, that is the indwelling presence of God, the sensation, the breath of God is the third, the third way that God is described.
[00:09:31] The three persons of God, we call it the Trinity. And the analogy that the early Christians used was like the sun, the sun in the sky. The origin, the creator of all things is like the sun.
[00:09:44] The light was like Jesus Christ. The visible light rays coming from the Father and then the heat is like the Spirit you can feel but can't see. They had that analogy and say, this is what.
[00:10:01] There isn't a Son, except that there's light and heat. There isn't a God except there's a Father, the Son and the Spirit. That was an analogy that they used for us. That's very helpful.
[00:10:10] Another analogy that they use literally is caught up in the word itself, the Holy Spirit.
[00:10:15] The word Spirit just means air or breath.
[00:10:22] I want you guys to do something for me.
[00:10:26] I want everybody just take a deep breath.
[00:10:32] Okay?
[00:10:34] I'm curious. When you took a deep breath, was there a different sensation in your. Like, did your head feel different? Did you, like, like when you take a deep breath, there's a vitality. Like, there's a.
[00:10:51] Like I feel, I feel more awake or alive. Like, if you're tired, you take a deep breath. It helps you be more awake, right? There is a. There is an energy or an aliveness that comes with that breathing.
[00:11:07] When we talk about the Spirit of God, it's not just that he is like the wind. He is the vitality that comes along with the.
[00:11:15] It's the energy that exists along with the wind. A presence that literally brings life into your lungs as you breathe.
[00:11:24] There's a, you know, especially for them, there's like an odd relationship. Like, you know, science now we get. We get the whole lungs and what they do and carrying oxygen through the bloodstream and all that. But when you think about it, there's this strange, like, that I breathe air in makes me feel More alive. That's a. How does breathing air make me feel more alive? That was an analogy that they used to talk about. This aspect of God that literally the spirit of God working on creation, like hovering, the way it's described here, moving over the surface is. Is. It is vital in bringing life to creation. The way that breathing is vital to bringing life to you.
[00:12:18] All of creation is infused with the breath of God. The spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water.
[00:12:26] Now, I want the next.
[00:12:29] I'm only going to look at day one and day four because it sets the pattern for this, to look at the work of the Spirit, the two works of the Spirit that we see in Genesis, chapter one, day one. Oh, I'm sorry. Let me. Let me say this. I wanted to throw this in.
[00:12:47] When we think about what it looks like for the Holy Spirit to work, I don't know what you imagine it to feel like the spirit descended like a dove, like peace and gentleness or whatever that could be. Very true. I like how the. The Celtic church in Ireland thought of the Holy Spirit. They used the imagery of a wild goose.
[00:13:10] When they thought of what it was like for them to be working in the spirit, to be living in the spirit. It was the imagery of the wild goose, and it was described this way. The wild goose is untamable and free, unpredictable. Instead of a soft coo, the wild goose was noisy and raucous, and it seemed always to be on the move.
[00:13:30] I think this fits with the world that we see around us.
[00:13:34] All of creation comes to life, and it's not like a well oil. It's not like a machine that purrs without.
[00:13:44] Like, there are giraffes and they're like, there's.
[00:13:50] There are.
[00:13:52] The breath of life that came onto the world is orderly. It is.
[00:13:57] It fits, it works together, but it doesn't fit the way that my brain would think that it would fit efficiently. It's wild and it's free, and it does things that are good and beautiful and unpredictable. Like the way that the spirit brings life isn't the way that an engineer might efficiently use resources to make a thing happen.
[00:14:21] It's more wild than that. And I like. Sometimes we can think about the order and the kind of life that the spirit brings, and we can almost imagine it becoming dull and like, smooth, like glass.
[00:14:43] And that's not the way that the Celtics thought of it. And honestly, that's not the way it's played out in my life.
[00:14:49] It is orderly, but it is unpredictable. It is a Lot more interesting than the way I would think of order myself. And I just wanted to. I wanted to throw that in before we start looking at the rest of this with the Holy Spirit. Because as I was thinking about my sermon, I was like, this could almost come across, like, very boring. And it's not that at all. So if.
[00:15:14] If the description that I give to you feels boring, remember, I have failed at that. And the Celtics got that wrong. Okay, so day one, into this shapeless and empty world, the Holy Spirit was hovering. And then God says, let there be light.
[00:15:32] God saw that the light was good. And so God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness night. There was evening, and there was morning, the first day. So notice this. Into a shapeless world he begins shaping.
[00:15:47] The act of separating day from night is literally, we're shaping day and we're shaping night.
[00:15:56] There is a sense that comes into the world because of the distinction between day and night. We can see, we can experience a distinction between the two. There is.
[00:16:06] There is something that is useful as a result of the distinctions between them. We know that day might have certain purposes, and we know that light might have certain purposes or darkness might have certain purposes. And so we can begin to distinguish between the two, begin to make sense out of something that was chaotic initially.
[00:16:32] The Holy Spirit operating on the world is an agent against chaos.
[00:16:40] The very first work of the Spirit is to make chaos not chaotic.
[00:16:48] It brought order into chaos. It rank order, like, this is light, this is day. Things begin to make sense. Oh, I can see where things kind of fit together. Now. There's a.
[00:17:02] There's a pattern that emerges in all of creation as a result of the distinction the Holy Spirit brings.
[00:17:10] As the Father God calls out and says, make this happen. The Spirit of God working on creation generates this distinction, which is the opposite of chaos.
[00:17:21] Now, I'm going to skip ahead to day four, because day one, two, and three, there are different separations. He separates.
[00:17:28] He separates the sky from the. From the water. He separates the land, land from the sea. There's. He begins. There's all these forms of separation that occur. But then it's interesting. He's got three days of separation out of the chaos. And then he has three days of filling, which is.
[00:17:48] This skips down to day four.
[00:17:51] God said, let there be lights in the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be signs to indicate seasons and days and years, and let them serve to give light to the earth. It was so. God made two great lights the greater light to rule over the day and the lesser light to rule over the night. He made the stars also. God saw that it was good. There was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.
[00:18:15] So on day one, you've got this distinction between day and night. And not till day four. Do you actually have the thing in the sky that makes the.
[00:18:23] The sky day?
[00:18:25] Like, I can't. Even if I'm thinking like a scientist, what is day without the sun? Like? What. What does it mean for there to be day without the sun?
[00:18:37] That is exactly the wrong question.
[00:18:40] The question is, what does it mean for creation to be not just formed, but filled?
[00:18:46] The Holy Spirit had two jobs, and the author wants. The author has no intent.
[00:18:51] Bye. The author has no intent to offer up a science manual on the creation of the world. He says exactly what he intends to communicate in the first few lines.
[00:19:03] All of creation makes no sense. It's chaotic without the Spirit of God.
[00:19:08] With the Spirit of God, it is no longer chaotic. It makes sense. And all of creation is purposeful.
[00:19:18] It is filled with purpose, with things to do. It's like what it is and what it does, all that's taking place.
[00:19:26] So you have the Spirit of God both forming and filling all of creation.
[00:19:35] The work of the Spirit has from the very beginning been to form and to fill.
[00:19:43] Okay, that's gonna be really important. When we think about what it means to be filled with the Spirit of God, we don't mean particular, like there are certain things I can do.
[00:19:56] What we mean is that there are certain purposes that the Spirit of God is always achieving.
[00:20:02] And if I'm a part of God, if I am with God, I am with God in anti. Chaos, in antipurposelessness.
[00:20:11] I am with God in order, and I am with God in purpose. Now, I want to be clear about this.
[00:20:18] Humans love purpose. Humans love order. And we very often attempt to degenerate our own purposes and our own order apart from God.
[00:20:30] That always creates tension between us and other people.
[00:20:35] When you become God and assume that you know what it means to be orderly and that you know what it means to be purposeful, that's going to come up against someone else who has decided that they know what it means to be orderly and what it means to be purposeful. And there will always be conflict in that.
[00:20:51] It is the mutual submission to the orderliness and the purposefulness of the Creator God that creates a unity among humans that we can participate in his kingdom, which we'll look at the next week.
[00:21:04] Next week.
[00:21:05] So it is not just Enough that we desire order and purpose in our life.
[00:21:13] It is that we desire God's order and God's purpose in our life, which means that we desire the Spirit of God in our life.
[00:21:22] Literally, I have this will, the Spirit, this sense of like, what's good and what's wrong. This, the sense inside of myself of the way things ought to be.
[00:21:36] I die to that thing. I literally die to my own spirit.
[00:21:41] And I open myself to the Spirit of God and I allow him to indwell my life. And we'll talk about some practices the third week that I think are very important in allowing ourselves to get to the point that we receive the Spirit of God.
[00:21:57] Okay, so the work of God from the beginning is to create order and purpose out of chaos and purposelessness.
[00:22:06] That's a long word. There's probably a better word for that that's extremely important.
[00:22:15] The whole story, like literally From Genesis chapter 3 on demonstrates humans desire to claim for ourself that our own order and our own purpose, to reject God's order and to reject God's purpose, we reinsert chaos back into God's good kingdom, a kingdom without chaos.
[00:22:40] We choose to exist in a world of chaos instead.
[00:22:44] When we reject God's will, you see that in Genesis chapter three with the Fall and you see such. I really appreciate the humility and all the. In all the writers through the Bible as they honestly detail their insane choice to participate in the chaos around them rather than the Spirit of God and God continually working to reclaim order. And every time that they do, they talk about the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God was on him and he did something that led to orderliness and purposefulness of God. Like if you read all the stories of the Old Testament, every time they say the Spirit of God is on them, look what occurs.
[00:23:29] You see a purposefulness and an orderliness that emerges into that. You literally see the work of God always happening with a person filled with the Spirit of God.
[00:23:41] A person is never described as filled with the Spirit of God, except that the purposefulness and orderliness of God doesn't occur. That's literally a sign that it's happening.
[00:23:54] When we get to the New Testament and we talk about what it means for us as followers of Christ to be people filled with the Spirit. Paul in Ephesians, I think makes it very clear that last week we looked at Acts chapter two and we looked at how when we submit our lives to God, when we repent and we return to him, we have two promises that our sins are forgiven and that we'll be filled with the Spirit.
[00:24:22] Paul describes what it's like to be people filled with the Spirit in Ephesians, chapter 4.
[00:24:28] He says, since you've heard about Jesus and have learned the truth that comes from him, throw off your old sinful nature and your formal way of life, which is corrupted by lust and deception.
[00:24:41] Instead, let the Spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes. Notice he's not. He describes your old way of life, which is just like when you were thinking about that. A different life, a life without the Spirit, corrupted by lust and deception. In my head, I immediately went to things that I did. I immediately filled that word lust and deception with activity. That's not what Paul does here. He's not talking about filling that we are filled by the Spirit. He's talking about us being formed by the Spirit.
[00:25:14] And as Christians, we call this being renewed, that we are renewed by the Spirit. That's literally what it means to be. To be formed. It's a spirit. It is literally spiritual formation. The Spirit forms who we are, not just what we do.
[00:25:35] Instead, let their spirit renew your thoughts and attitudes.
[00:25:40] Put on your new nature, created to be like God, truly righteous and holy.
[00:25:51] I've been talking to some friends about this about, like, how do we.
[00:25:55] How do we change our behavior? Like, things. Things that I wish were different, things that I've spent years learning to cope with life with these particular tools.
[00:26:10] Maybe it's avoidance, or maybe it's anger. There's something that I've learned to pick up that's helped me get through hard times and it's gotten me so far.
[00:26:20] But it's also. It keeps me from getting where I want to. It keeps me from being the kind of father that I want to be like.
[00:26:27] It keeps me from falling apart, but it keeps me from being truly a good father. It keeps me from, you know, from just crying and feeling like I'm nothing. Like, this thing that I've learned to do keeps me in the game, but it keeps me from winning the game.
[00:26:48] I can see that if I were to obey Christ and really pick up on the law of Christ, to love the Lord, my God with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, and to love me and myself, that it could generate outcomes far better than what I'm currently experiencing. But I don't know how to get there. I don't know.
[00:27:09] For some reason, I keep doing the thing that's always worked for me instead of the thing that I would like to do that I know would be better.
[00:27:19] The Bible consistently says that it is always the work of the Spirit which transforms your spirit.
[00:27:28] You become righteous and holy, not because something great that you did, but because you repented of who you were. Like, you literally stopped fighting God.
[00:27:41] It's like an asymmetric sort of thing.
[00:27:44] I don't get to where I want to get by, like just picking up new habits or doing something like pushing forward and just being stronger, being a better man.
[00:27:55] I have to first unbuild who I am. I have to die first. The Bible keeps says that over and over again, you have to die to this.
[00:28:04] I built up this clay that's working all right, but I want it to get here. There's more that I wanted to get to.
[00:28:15] And it seems like I could just add to that, but I can't. I literally have to knock that down first. I have to repent. I have to tear down some things that have been built up poorly before I can rebuild the thing that could be in Christ.
[00:28:29] So before I can put on my new nature, I have to throw off my old sinful nature, my old life corrupted by lust. And instead I don't build that new thing. I have to let the Spirit renew my thoughts and attitudes.
[00:28:47] I have to quit.
[00:28:49] I have to die.
[00:28:51] Just quit thinking that I can just plow through this and make it happen, just stop.
[00:29:04] That is so counterintuitive for me.
[00:29:08] I have to remind I was talking to my friend. Like for some of them, the next part of it is more important for them. But for me, this is the most important part. Because quitting is. That doesn't make sense.
[00:29:22] This is the thing that requires the most faith for me.
[00:29:25] Not that I would trust God to do things, but I would trust God enough to let go of the things I've already done.
[00:29:34] To deconstruct myself, to make myself less than is the hard part for me. So that's the part I have to think about a lot.
[00:29:43] But then In Ephesians chapter 5, Paul says this.
[00:29:45] So in Ephesians chapter 4, he describes the work of the Holy Spirit. Let the Holy Spirit make you into something new. Let him form you, renew you. Form your thoughts, form your attitudes.
[00:30:00] But then In Ephesians chapter 5, notice how he switches over to action.
[00:30:05] Be careful how you live. Don't live like fools, but like those who are wise. Make the most of every opportunity. In these evil days, don't act thoughtlessly, but understand what the Lord wants you to do.
[00:30:17] Don't be drunk with wine, because that will ruin your life. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves and making music to the Lord in your hearts and give thanks for everything to God the Father. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Notice what he says to do.
[00:30:38] I need to let the Spirit renew me, to reshape me, to separate the light from the dark in me.
[00:30:48] I need to let the Spirit do that.
[00:30:51] I need to quit being confident of who I am and let the Spirit remake who I am. I need to die to who I was.
[00:31:00] That's something. That's.
[00:31:02] That's him forming my spirit spiritual formation.
[00:31:07] But then I need to look at what's happening. How does God fill this person who is being reformed?
[00:31:14] What am I being filled with?
[00:31:16] He says, be filled now with the Spirit. So let the Spirit reform you and then let the Spirit fill you. Just like Genesis, chapter one.
[00:31:26] Forming and filling. This has always been the work of the Spirit. Forming and filling.
[00:31:32] For you to be reformed, be more than you are, you must first be reformed. You must be formed by him, and then you must be filled by Him. You won't become more like. You won't be fit to the kingdom of God for God's purposes, unless he is both forming you and filling you now for you. I don't know which of these is more difficult. I don't know if it's more difficult for you to let go of this person that you've built already that's been successful to some degree. You know, you're not like falling apart. You're not crying right now. Like you're making it. Like you've done things that are somewhat. Yeah, Chris, right now you're not crying. Yeah, I saw that.
[00:32:12] Everybody near Krista patted her on the shoulder. Good job, Krista. You're not crying right now.
[00:32:17] So.
[00:32:19] Yeah, it's, you know, like you're making it. You've. You're successful to some degree. You know, good job.
[00:32:26] Not enough.
[00:32:28] Not enough.
[00:32:29] You know that there is a version of you formed by Christ that is a better man, that is a better husband, that is a better father, that is a better friend. And you know that you won't get there just building off of what you've already built on. On tools that aren't tools of God.
[00:32:50] You know that first you have to die to who you were and you have to let the Spirit make you into who you're going to be. And that requires, in my mind, a tremendous amount of trust that I've got some sense of what makes me worthwhile or good or whatever this clay that the Spirit might reform in me. Might be something that everybody's like, well, that guy doesn't seem too impressive at all.
[00:33:14] I don't know. I don't know. I'm not. The Spirit is forming me, not me. I don't, you know, like, I don't get to choose what that clay gets to be. That's kind of.
[00:33:26] That's scary to me.
[00:33:28] But I think for some of you, it might be more scary to think about what God might call you to do as that new person.
[00:33:35] Like, if you do trust God to be. If you do trust your yourself to be led by the Spirit. And again, we'll talk more about how to be led by the Spirit. We talk about the mission of God, the kingdom of God. So don't worry about the how yet. Like, oh, I don't know how to do it. Good, it's fine.
[00:33:52] We haven't talked about it yet. No big deal. Maybe after church you can come tell me and we'll work that into the sermon. If you've already thought about that, that'd be fantastic. But if you haven't thought about it, no big deal. We haven't gotten that yet.
[00:34:02] Just know for now. You need to allow yourself to be filled by the Spirit after you've been formed by the Spirit, which means he gets to decide what you do, the actions that you do that are fit to him.
[00:34:19] Now, Jesus made clear to us that all of his work can be distilled down to these two things.
[00:34:28] You will know if your spirit is being formed, if your actions, if your mindset first, like your sense of self and your actions, are fit to these two commandments. That you are loving the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and that you are loving your neighbor, that is the people that you're interacting with daily, the way that you love yourself.
[00:34:54] To love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, means that your identity is fully in Him.
[00:34:59] Who am I? I am a child of God. I trust him fully. Anything that's not him isn't me. I identify with him and I look around.
[00:35:13] The way I love you means I am so excited when I hear about what's happening in your.
[00:35:21] It matters to me that your life is good.
[00:35:25] I desire your good as much as I desire my own good.
[00:35:29] Like I love you, like I love myself.
[00:35:33] To live in a world that is like the world before the fall, before people interjected that chaos back into the world means that we are infused with the spirit of God that is forming and filling us to Love God fully and to love each other fully.
[00:35:54] That's kind of the simplest way to look at what it means to be formed and filled by God.
[00:36:01] My heart desires to love God and to love people.
[00:36:07] And my actions speak to a faith in God and a care, a desire for your good.
[00:36:16] That's when you see people that are living like that. You are seeing people being formed and filled by the Spirit.
[00:36:25] That's an indication when we say, God, I want to know your spirit. I want to be filled by your spirit. We're not talking about any particular.
[00:36:38] We don't decide how that shows up. And again, we're going to talk. We'll talk about some of the fruits of the Spirit and all that kind of stuff in future when we look at the mission of God.
[00:36:49] But that isn't up to me. That doesn't like I don't get to decide what manifestation of that looks like. God is going to equip you to love him and to love each other. As you're filled by the Spirit and you're not in control of it. You are letting him do that in your life.
[00:37:12] As we look at living in the kingdom of God and working with doing the work of God, participating in God's mission, neither of them make any sense except that we have also given ourselves to the Spirit of God, the Spirit that brings purposefulness and meaning, usefulness into lives.
[00:37:39] We know that as we are participating in God's the great, the great commandment of God, we know that we are being formed and filled.
[00:37:54] Day one Sermon let's pray.
[00:37:59] Father God, as we unpack the next few weeks, what it means to live.
[00:38:05] Live doing your work, live in your kingdom, being filled by your spirit. God.
[00:38:09] I pray that there's a hopefulness and a joy that comes out of the vision of what it can be like to live like this, Lord, that it's not.
[00:38:18] That your kingdom isn't inaccessible, that your spirit is not inaccessible. And Lord, that your mission isn't hidden from us or that we can know daily what it means to be a part of your work, a part of your kingdom and a part of your spirit as we see them all three cooperating together.
[00:38:37] We love you, Lord. We thank you for giving us this purposeful, ordered life and removing from us the chaos that happens without you.
[00:38:50] We love you, Lord. Amen.
