SPEAKER_00: Alright, good evening.
SPEAKER_00: Happy Wednesday to you.
SPEAKER_00: Pastor Daniel snuck out the back way.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, there he is.
SPEAKER_00: It is his birthday today, so I wanted to make sure all of you knew that before he sneaks off.
SPEAKER_00: So, anyways, um happy Wednesday to you.
SPEAKER_00: Glad you're here.
SPEAKER_00: Hope your bellies are full and you're ready to be recharged.
SPEAKER_00: Um heard a Christian pastor tell a story once of uh of a friend that he knew that owned a recording studio, and a Christian artist came and rented time to record in that studio.
SPEAKER_00: And everything's set up.
SPEAKER_00: They're halfway through the first song.
SPEAKER_00: Uh he's the producer.
SPEAKER_00: He thinks everything sounds great and amazing.
SPEAKER_00: And but the artist uh halfway through just said, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
SPEAKER_00: He's not here.
SPEAKER_00: And he chimes in through the microphone, uh, who's not here?
SPEAKER_00: Um, and she replied back, the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit is not here, and we need to uh stop and and pray.
SPEAKER_00: So they stopped and prayed, uh anointed the room, got the oil, put it out, uh started back up again, halfway through, again, just stop, stop, stop.
SPEAKER_00: He is not here.
SPEAKER_00: We we can't do this.
SPEAKER_00: Went on about uh as they entered the fourth time, the music producer looked down at his keyboard and realized that the reverb that the artist usually hears in the monitor that kind of pushes back at them had been turned down.
SPEAKER_00: So he reaches down and turns up the reverb, and immediately as the artist sings, she cries out, Yes, the Spirit of God is here.
SPEAKER_00: Praise the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I sh I share that as uh a funny story, but truthfully, um uh as I'm gonna get into here in just a second, um how do we know that we are experiencing uh the Spirit of God?
SPEAKER_00: So on Wednesday nights we've been taking little steps about uh understanding how the Holy Spirit meets us, teaching from God's Word, in terms of uh how do I know that the Spirit of God is there?
SPEAKER_00: And so far we've covered topics like you came to faith through the power of the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Your belief in the gospel of Jesus Christ, according to the Scripture, is only through the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: The Spirit's job is to convict you of sin.
SPEAKER_00: And so when you feel that conviction, it doesn't feel good to get convicted of sin, but that's the Spirit of God inside of you.
SPEAKER_00: Pastor Daniel spent the last couple weeks looking at the fruit of the Spirit, okay, that is produced in our lives and the spiritual gifts that the Spirit unfolds in us.
SPEAKER_00: So uh there's gonna be a shift in in our sermon series now moving forward, because I'm gonna press into from here uh probably till the end of the semester, and we're gonna talk about how I can know that I'm experiencing the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: How do I know that I'm experiencing the Holy Spirit?
SPEAKER_00: And as with most theological constructs, we need to put up guardrails in uh in theology, right?
SPEAKER_00: Stay on the road because there is a ditch on both sides of the road with almost every theological topic.
SPEAKER_00: And so the the first ditch that I want to talk about on the side of the road on experiencing the Holy Spirit, the ditch on the side of the road is that the Holy Spirit equals your emotions.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, the Holy Spirit equals your emotions.
SPEAKER_00: That is the the illustration that I shared at the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: How you feel, how you experience in that moment, okay?
SPEAKER_00: Whether you're having a good day, a bad day, whether you catch a chill from the air conditioner, okay, and you think the Spirit of God is here.
SPEAKER_00: Um and that is why we keep it so cold in here on Sunday mornings.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, okay.
SPEAKER_00: So very important that each of us understands the Holy Spirit does not equal your emotions.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure every one of us has uh a personal example that we can talk about when someone that you have been dealing with has played the God card.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit told me this, okay, because when someone plays the God card, what can you possibly say in reply, right?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I shared with you a funny story uh at the start of this series how my uh one of my college buddies uh was talking about the Holy Spirit moving when he was meeting girls and he dumped one girl to find a different girl, right?
SPEAKER_00: But when you play the God card, when you say God told me to break up with you, sort of deal, right?
SPEAKER_00: There's no reply to that because, well, if God said it, we all want to be obedient to God, okay?
SPEAKER_00: So we've probably all been in situations where we scratch our head because I think you're being led by your feelings, not necessarily God's Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: This is the ditch on this side of the road.
SPEAKER_00: God's Spirit never contradicts his word.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: And the truth of his word guides us regardless of our feelings.
SPEAKER_00: The Spirit of God is omnipresent.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit is here, okay?
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit is at your house.
SPEAKER_00: Now there are aspects where the Spirit comes together when we meet as a church, right?
SPEAKER_00: There the Bible describes particular things, but it's always according to his word.
SPEAKER_00: There is clarity of the Holy Spirit in experiencing the Holy Spirit through his word.
SPEAKER_00: So that's the ditch on one side, and put a guardrail up there.
SPEAKER_00: The ditch on the complete opposite side, and just as dangerous is that the Holy Spirit equals your logic.
SPEAKER_00: The Holy Spirit equals your logic.
SPEAKER_00: There are far too many Christians that I know in the circles that I frequent that do not wish for God to move in any way because they think they've read all that they need to out of the Bible and they have everything systematized, and that's that.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: Not realizing or acknowledging that God's word is full of you experiencing Him in a personal way in real life.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: When you read the Bible, the Bible's constantly talking about the fact that the Holy Spirit guides you.
SPEAKER_00: When does he guide you?
SPEAKER_00: In real life.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because there are decisions and circumstances that the Bible does not answer, but you need the wisdom and the guidance of the Spirit of God in those moments.
SPEAKER_00: That the Spirit of God teaches you.
SPEAKER_00: There are countless examples throughout the scripture of the Spirit of God interacting and leading the saints, speaking to the saints, and the saints follow with obedience.
SPEAKER_00: And those stories are articulated throughout the scripture.
SPEAKER_00: For example, Abraham, get up and go to the land I'm going to show you.
unknown: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: The truth of the matter is, is there is mystery in the Holy Spirit that you cannot logically systematize.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says that the Spirit is like the wind.
SPEAKER_00: He moves as he wishes, and you don't know where it comes from or where it goes.
SPEAKER_00: We must also there is a mystery of his Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: God will not be tamed by your logic and you boxing him in.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: Now, in the book of Acts, some quick, a quick overview of the Spirit of God moving or leading.
SPEAKER_00: Occasionally, when you come through the book of Acts and you look at the the moments when the Spirit of God moves in powerful ways, occasionally it is through something like a dream or a revelation.
SPEAKER_00: In Acts chapter 16, the Spirit of God had told Paul not to go into Asia and he sits there and he's wondering where to go.
SPEAKER_00: That evening he gets a dream.
SPEAKER_00: He gets a dream of a Macedonian man, a man who's dressed in Macedonian clothes, who is calling him this way.
SPEAKER_00: Paul interprets that dream as the answer that the Holy Spirit is calling them to take the gospel into what's going to be Europe, to go into Macedonia.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: But most of the time in the book of Acts, the author Luke does not tell us how the Holy Spirit spoke.
SPEAKER_00: Just says that he did.
SPEAKER_00: But he uses phrases like Paul was resolved in the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Acts 19, 21.
SPEAKER_00: Resolved in the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: Or in 1528, it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.
SPEAKER_00: And those instances seem to indicate that the Spirit moves by prompting, by peace inside the Christian, and by collective discernment through discussion.
SPEAKER_00: You imagine that the church gathered, that they began to discuss, and that they began to pray, and through that collective discussion, there became agreement within the body, and they all sensed that the Spirit was in unison in that.
SPEAKER_00: Such that we could say this guidance by revelation was the unexpected exception, not the rule.
SPEAKER_00: When the Spirit did reveal, they obeyed.
SPEAKER_00: But most decisions that the apostles made, they used wisdom that they had gleaned from the Scriptures to guide them, not a magic eight ball fashion.
SPEAKER_00: Now, with saying that, John chapter 16, verse 14 says this.
SPEAKER_00: That is, whenever he is truly present, you are not actually thinking about him.
SPEAKER_00: You're thinking about Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Have any of you ever seen the Washington Monument or say the Statue of Liberty at night?
SPEAKER_00: There is a splendor of them illuminated against the night's dark sky, right?
SPEAKER_00: There are hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of lights that shine directly on them in order to make them shine.
SPEAKER_00: Yet I doubt you've ever had one thought about how expensive or how brilliant those lights are.
SPEAKER_00: Because that's not their job for you to sit around and think about lights.
SPEAKER_00: Their job is to illuminate something else.
SPEAKER_00: I want you to look at this text again.
SPEAKER_00: What does it say?
SPEAKER_00: He will glorify me.
SPEAKER_00: The role of the Spirit of God is to glorify Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: Now I tell you, all of that, I'm about to land the plane, but I want to I want to show you where we're going with the rest of this, uh, with the rest of the series on Wednesday nights, okay?
SPEAKER_00: Uh let me read this one verse, Acts 4 31.
SPEAKER_00: It says flip the slide.
SPEAKER_00: And when they had prayed, the place that they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak the word of God with boldness.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what I want us to see.
SPEAKER_00: The Spirit meets us and equips us in order to live out the Christian life.
SPEAKER_00: His job is to help us meet with God through his word, through prayer, so that we would abide in the love of Christ and to walk out of God's kingdom work in our lives.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: So the rest of the spirit, the rest of the series, what we're going to be focusing on are promised meeting spots that the Spirit of God promises to meet you in.
SPEAKER_00: There are locations that you can go into those locations with confidence that the Spirit of God promises to meet you there.
SPEAKER_00: I don't care how you feel that day.
SPEAKER_00: I don't care if you get a chill from the air conditioner.
SPEAKER_00: In those moments, the Spirit of God has promised to meet you there, and you should be filled with faith because you know God is gonna meet me here.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna look through those spots, spots like the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: The Spirit of God has promised to meet you in His Word.
SPEAKER_00: How about prayer?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, we're gonna look at those passages.
SPEAKER_00: How about church?
SPEAKER_00: When the saints are gathered, okay?
SPEAKER_00: How about when we share the good news of Jesus Christ with other people?
SPEAKER_00: Even though it can feel complex, even though it can feel combative, the Spirit of God has promised to meet you there.
SPEAKER_00: How about in our giftings?
SPEAKER_00: Lots of places that we will see about how you and I can know that we are experiencing the Holy Spirit because He's promised to meet you there.
SPEAKER_00: Let's close in prayer.
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we thank you for this evening.
SPEAKER_00: We thank you for your word.
SPEAKER_00: We thank you for the promised Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: God, we want to experience you.
SPEAKER_00: We can't cage you in.
SPEAKER_00: When you move, we absolutely know it, but we obviously can't program you.
SPEAKER_00: And you call us to overcome our feelings.
SPEAKER_00: You don't want us to be led by our feelings.
SPEAKER_00: You want us to be led by faith, that trust that you're gonna move and you're gonna do what you've said you're gonna do, regardless of how we feel that day.
SPEAKER_00: Father, help us.
SPEAKER_00: We want to be led and to abide in your Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name we pray.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Turn me back on.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, uh, real quick, I meant to say this at the beginning.
SPEAKER_00: Um, I know a lot of you are breaking up into classes.
SPEAKER_00: You're going to classes, you're going to choir, but something new that I want to start doing after recharge each week is if you have a prayer request and you want me to just spend a few minutes praying with you at the conclusion of recharge, I'm not teaching a class this semester.
SPEAKER_00: I would be more than happy.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be waiting here for probably 10 minutes after this.
SPEAKER_00: Make your way up front.
SPEAKER_00: I would love to pray with you, whatever the circumstances are.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: Thanks.
SPEAKER_00: God bless you.