The Lord and Giver of Life W/Pastor Andrea

This week we used the Nicene Creed, an ecumenical testimony of what we believe, as a launching point for thinking about the Holy Spirit. The creed describes the Spirit this way: "The Lord, the giver of life." That is such a foundational way of thinking about the Holy Spirit when often we assume that this member of the trinity is only at work in the spectacular and the supernatural. But in recognizing that our very life depends on the Spirit at all times, we realize He is closer and more accessible than we think. Just as the Spirit was breathed into Adam's nostrils to give life, and over those dry bones in the valley, and on the disciples in that upper room... the Spirit is still filling our lungs with the very Breath of God so that we might have life. 

Transcript

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We are in the season of Easter tide. And uh these are the 50 days between Easter and Pentecost. And we said last week as we were starting to think about, well, what are we going to spend the next 50 days doing? We said, we're going to spend it thinking a little bit about the Holy Spirit, the living breath of God. And last week we were in John chapter 20 when Jesus breathed on his disciples and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. And this week is kind of like a part two to that in some ways. And it's good that we're spending this time in the Holy Spirit because in some churches and traditions, I think the Holy Spirit can become a bit of a forgotten member of the Trinity. God the Father and God the Son can feel a little bit more concrete for us. The Spirit hovers just outside of our experience. Just it hovers just above our understanding. Jesus said the wind blows, but you can't tell where it comes from or where it is going. You can't explain how people are born of the spirit. You can hear the wind, but you can't you can't see it. So even he kind of says it's a little mysterious how the spirit works. You might see the effects of the wind, but you can't see the wind itself. And so this week I was I was reading in a in a book by Michael Horton, who's a systematic theology professor, and he's an author, and he wrote a book called Rediscovering the Holy Spirit. And I thought, I want to rediscover the Holy Spirit. And so I was I was reading in there and I really appreciated how he sort of introed the book because he notes that we have all kinds of roadblocks in our way to understanding the Holy Spirit. He says maybe it's some of us who grew up in the King James language of the Holy Ghost. And he says it's like the Spirit became the spooky member of the Trinity. It's associated, you know, with the paranormal and the sensational and the extraordinary. We weren't always sure what the Holy Spirit did, he writes, but it was definitely something that happened outside the usual course of events. So in his book, he draws on the Nicene Creed for some help because he says the creed tells us who the Spirit is. And so I thought before all these upcoming weeks where we look at different aspects of the Spirit, the living breath of God, I thought, well, what's foundational to the Holy Spirit? And the creed helps us with that. And we're going to do that for just a few minutes this morning. So just a few minutes. And so we're actually going to read the Nicene Creed together. And it's important for us to say these words together because I think it reminds us that we're not just saying this creed at Madison in 2026. We're actually echoing a testimony of belief that has carried the church through centuries of joy and sorrow, centuries of orthodoxy and heresy, centuries of conflict and unity, of trouble and revival. The life of the church over centuries has in many ways been underpinned by our creeds. They can help steady steady us in times of division within the church. And we don't know anything about division within the church, but it might still be good for us to read it together. Because creeds help us find what's common in our belief, some common ground, some unity in the faith with others, even if they're very different than we are, but but believers share these creeds. So this way we join our voice not only to our own tradition, but also to believers across centuries and across cultures and across continents, because they remind us that the church is just far wider than the local church or our own denominations, our particular denomination or tradition. And so reading the creed sort of helps connect us to the worldwide church across space and time. And so we're doing this a little differently today in that we are going to read the creed together, and we will stand in just a moment to read it together. And then we're going to be seated and I'll be pulling in some different scriptures, but we're not going to stand for a scripture reading on its own. So it's a little bit different than how we might normally do it. Um, but I hope that we can have it on the screen. So if you would rise in body or in spirit as we read the Nicene Creed together, this is gonna be our springboard for thinking about the Holy Spirit this morning. And maybe you know that last year was a big anniversary of the Nicene Creed, 1700 years. Now, church historians would want to point out that it was an anniversary of the Council of Nicaea and the Creed was not complete. And church historians are really fun at parties. So they would want to say, well, actually, um, it's the Council of Nicaea that had a big anniversary. Anyway, the creed wasn't complete till later. So um, but it was a big anniversary, and so it's good, even if we're a little late, although I would say quite early, because the creed wasn't complete yet, it's good for us to read this together this morning. And so let us read in unison what we believe. We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of the same essence as the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made human. He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, he suffered and was buried. The third day he rose again, according to the scriptures, he ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead. His kingdom will never end. And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life. He proceeds from the Father and the Son. And with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified. He spoke through the prophets. We believe in one holy Catholic and apostolic church. We affirm one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look forward to the resurrection of the dead and to life in the world to come. Amen. So the creed puts it pretty basically for us this morning. The Holy Spirit is the Lord and giver of life. Calling the Holy Spirit Lord means that the Holy Spirit is God to the same extent that the Father and the Son are God. He is no less eternal, no less unchanging, no less loving, no less omniscient, no less just than the Father and the Son are. These are their essential attributes, meaning qualities that all three members of the Trinity have, because all three are God. And so this is a good reminder, or maybe just a good corrective, for those of us who grew up in churches that didn't always give equal airtime to the Holy Spirit, to this member of the Trinity. Most of the sermons may be centered on the person and work of God the Father and God the Son and focus on the Holy Spirit was sort of reserved for Pentecost. But the Holy Spirit is not like the JV member of the Trinity, right? Where it's sort of God the Father and God the Son, and then like the Holy Spirit kind of on the side. No, the Holy Spirit is Lord. The Holy Spirit is God. And just a little bit of an aside here before I go any further, Scripture, as you know, sometimes uses he for the Spirit, not to assign gender to the Spirit, but to remind us that the Spirit is personal, that the Spirit is not an it or an impersonal force. And I recognize that this is a thorn that we can catch our sleeve on. And I just want to free us from that for for today. I want to free us from that thorn a little bit because I'm echoing the words of scripture in a way of keeping the Holy Spirit as a person. But I just want to recognize that. But the Holy Spirit is not a force, it's not just an inner light or some kind of divine energy or something you got to like plug into for power per se. The Holy Spirit is a person and is fully God, as much as God the Father and God the Son are. So everything that the Godhead is doing is done by God in the Son through the Spirit. So those are their common attributes that they share: eternal, loving, omniscient. But then there are these different attributes that each member of the Trinity has. These are their proper attributes. And the Nicene Creed really helps us with one here today, and that's why it's kind of our launching pad. It tells us that the Holy Spirit is the giver of life. It's that basic. I asked about maybe 10 people this week, what does the Holy Spirit do? Or who is the Holy Spirit? Not theologians per se, just people. And I got lots of answers, and some of them more right than others, and very varied. Not one person said the Holy Spirit is Lord and giver of life. So now, if anyone asks you randomly, because I know that that's going to happen, who is the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is Lord and giver of life. This is rooted in a few different texts, but one of them being Psalm 104, which is this sort of glad doxology. It's this, it's a joyful song to God, basically, because the psalmist is overwhelmed by how God is upholding creation in every moment. Sometimes we think God spoke creation into being at the very beginning and then said, See you later. But no, God is always upholding creation and sustaining it in every moment. And so Psalm 104 is this is this doxology where the writer affirms that truth that everything is living moment to moment because of the breath of God. Moment to moment. And so the Spirit of God gives it life, and if God takes that spirit away, it turns back to dust. Psalm 104, verse 24 How many are your works, Lord? In wisdom you made them all. The earth is full of your creatures. All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time. When you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things. When you when you hide your face, they are terrified. Verse 29. When you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust. When you send your spirit, they are created. You renew the face of the ground. So when you take away breath, they die and return to the dust. And when you send your spirit, they are created. And it's pulling from this because the the word breath there in both verse 29 and in verse 30 are the same word. So the way they're used together shows us that the world moment by moment is dependent on the life-giving power of God, the presence of God, the breath of God, which is the Spirit. When you take away their ruach, they die and turn to dust. And when you send your ruach, they are created. So thinking of this, of this breathing in and breathing out of God, Lord and giver of life. And of course, this tracks with Genesis 2 when God breathes into Adam's nostrils and turns some clay, some dust into a living being. And Job says the same thing. He says, The Spirit of God has made me, the breath of the Almighty gives me life. Romans 8, if the Spirit who raised Jesus to life lives in you, then he will also give you life in your bodies because of the Spirit living in you. And so it's all throughout Scripture where we recognize that the Spirit is as close to us as our breath, as we're breathing. If you say, is the Holy Spirit worked in your life recently? You can say, Yes, I'm breathing. I've been given life. The Holy Spirit is the giver of life. And I do think this helps just keep an important balance when we're thinking about the Holy Spirit between sort of flash and formation. Because it guards us from the temptation of reducing the Holy Spirit to only being present in really dramatic experiences. Thinking of how the Spirit works, Horton was saying early in his introduction, he said, Yeah, we just thought whatever the Spirit did would happen outside of the course of normal events. And so being the giver of just those rare spiritual highs would mean that there's sort of two tiers of God's people, right? People that have experienced those and then people that have not. And Horton is saying we have to be really careful with that because you cannot only expect the spirit to be moving when there's sort of extraordinary phenomena happening, such as tongues or miracles, or ecstatic experiences that people are having. And those do happen, and the spirit is at work, and they are gifts to the church, and they are gifts to God's people. So make sure that you hear me on that. The spirit does disrupt expectations and disrupt routines, and the spirit can be spot and you know spontaneous and surprise us. And in many ways, that is a gift to the church, because then God's power sort of breaks all of our categories, right? So it is a gift to the church. It gives us a glimpse of the power of God. But if you are waiting on only an amazing outside of the ordinary experience to attribute to the Spirit's work in your life, then you're gonna miss a lot of what the Holy Spirit is doing. If that's the only way you think the Spirit works, and you haven't had any sort of, you know, amazing phenomena or ecstatic experience, or you've never spoken in tongues, you might go, well, maybe, maybe the Holy Spirit is not working in my life. And so I think then you're gonna you're gonna miss a lot of what the Holy Spirit is doing. And the Nicene Creed helps us with that. I think it's a good correction. The Holy Spirit is Lord and giver of life. The Holy Spirit is also at work in this ongoing, life-giving, steady, ordinary formation of the Christian life. And a lot of our formation in the Christian life is awfully ordinary. It's just showing up again to pray and again and again and again. And maybe sometimes something happens and you say, the spirit was here, but the spirit was there all those times that you showed up to pray. All the times when you didn't know what to pray and the spirit had to intercede on your behalf. And when you were learning how to pray, it says that the spirit teaches us to pray. And so the absence of spectacle does not mean the absence of the Holy Spirit. I guess that's really what I'm just trying to get, you know, get across to you. Giving us patience in relationships, that is the life-giving work of the Holy Spirit. Giving us endurance in our suffering, that is the work of the Holy Spirit, giving us consistency in prayer where we do show up once again, even though we're like, is anybody listening? Is anything happening? Does this even matter? That is the Holy Spirit's work to help us come before God again in prayer. It's growth in loving our neighbor, it's it's all the ways that we grow. In other words, the Spirit is breathing life into you and giving life to you and breathing life into the church and giving life to the church moment by moment by moment. At the height of worship, and in the tears of baptism and the joy of profession of faith, and and gathering around someone to pray for them. All of this is the Holy Spirit at work. Because sometimes we'll maybe leave the sanctuary and say, Oh, the Spirit was so present today. What does that mean? Right? I mean, it's worth asking one another because the spirit works in lots of different ways. Renewing the very face of the ground among us. I just think you ever been in a rut and then suddenly God renews the ground under your feet, and there's a more spacious place to be or a more free place to be. That's the spirit's work. Renewing the face of the ground. The spirit helps us to understand the scriptures. Maybe you have read something your whole life long, and then one day you're like, wait a second. It illuminates something for you. That's the work of the Holy Spirit. You might think, I am so smart. And you might be smart. I'm not disagreeing with you that you're smart. You might be smart. But also, this is the Holy Spirit turning a light on for you, illuminating something for you. In baptism and in the Lord's Supper, the Spirit washes us and feeds us along this pilgrim way, making Christ present to us in the sacraments. The Spirit leads us into all truth, constantly pointing us to Christ, testifying to us about Christ, helping us to testify about Christ. The Spirit forms obedience in believers through very dramatic conversions. Yes, those happen too. They're amazing, they're wonderful testimonies. They build the faith of the church, and we need those stories. But also for the long haul, for that for that upward hill climb of sanctification, which is slow and steady and sometimes rolls back downhill a little bit and then it keeps going uphill. For that long haul, the spirit is there forming obedience in us. That's the work of the spirit. Are you more obedient in a certain area of your life this year than you were last year? That's the Holy Spirit. So if someone says, Have you had an encounter with the Holy Spirit? You can say, Yes, I have. I look more like Christ this year than last year. That's the Spirit. I'm more obedient in this area of my life this year than I was last year. That is the Spirit at work. Jesus says, I will not leave you as orphans. I will send you a helper, the Holy Spirit. You have a helper. Whatever you're going through, whatever valley you're walking through, Jesus says, I'm not going to leave you alone in that. I am going to send you a helper, the Holy Spirit. And so the Holy Spirit comes alongside of us. I think of how the Spirit upheld Jesus in a time of temptation in the wilderness, and the Spirit will do the same for you. Rely on the Spirit. Say, I don't have enough strength to do this thing. But Jesus said he wouldn't leave me alone as an orphan. I have a helper, the Holy Spirit. And rely on the Holy Spirit for that help. Every day, if you realize you are being formed more and more into the likeness of Christ, that is the Lord and giver of life, giving you new life day by day by day. And this help doesn't always come to us in some kind of supernatural burst of you know intensity. Sometimes it does. I love to see it. I love to see it when it happens. Like I said, it's a gift to the church. But this life is given to us, breathed into us consistently over time. Inhale, exhale. Remember last week we talked about inhaling new creation and exhaling by oxygenating the broken world that is around us. All of that. The spirit is as close as our breath, giving us new life, giver of life. And I think of one of our contemporary testimonies, see, so we are in the Nicene Creed. If you have your little handy uh ecumenical creeds, reformed confessions, and other resources, which I'm sure is just on the shelf at home. So it's okay that you didn't bring it today. But I love one of our contemporary testimonies, our world belongs to God. And it gives us a few jobs of the Holy Spirit that I just really appreciate. If we do we have those at all? Jobs of the Holy Spirit, otherwise I'll just read them. No? Okay. It says this. So Articles 28, 29, and 30 gives us this sort of list of things that the Holy Spirit does. It says the Holy Spirit renews our hearts, moves us to faith, leads us into truth, helps us to pray, stands by us in our need. So sometimes people are like, I'm going through a lot, but I I feel sustained. That's the Holy Spirit. That's the Holy Spirit. Makes our obedient obedience fresh, lavishes gifts on the church. When you see someone up here and you're like, where's Drizy? When you're like, how does Dreezy sing like that? That's the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit has lavished a gift on her. And then someone else might work behind the scenes, but they're really good in admin and they get a lot of details figured out. That's the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is lavishing gifts on the church. Equips each member to build up the body of Christ and to serve our neighbors, gathers people from every tongue and tribe and nation, convinces the world of sin. Hello, and pleads the cause of Christ. These are the jobs of the Holy Spirit. So if someone is asking you, like, what does the Holy Spirit do? We tend to go to kind of earth, wind, fire type of stuff from Pentecost, right? Sort of a supernatural outpouring. But actually, day to day today, the Holy Spirit is being breathed on us and giving us life. When we identify the Holy Spirit only with that heightened or supernatural experience, we risk overlooking so much of what the Spirit is doing in the ongoing, daily, life-sustaining, life-giving breath of God, being breathed into us all the time. You send your spirit, the psalmist says, they are created. You take it away, they return to dust. And so we're right back in Genesis, right from the creation in Genesis, breathing into Adam's nostrils to the new creation promise of Ezekiel 37, which we sang today. That the spirit brings that those dry bones back to life. Remember, even when they got flesh on them and they stood there like an army, they had no breath in them. And then what breathed into them? Well, prophesied to the breath, the word of the Lord, and then the Spirit rushed in and filled them with air. So think of how the Godhead is still all working together all the time, right? Whatever God does is done in the sun and through the Spirit, bringing those dry bones back to life. And some of us feel like we're living in a valley of dry bones at times, where you wonder if there's any life at all. And the whole the promise of the Holy Spirit is that yes, this these dry bones can live. They can live when the Spirit breathes on them. To Jesus breathing on his disciples in John 20 from last week. And then, yes, the mighty rushing wind that blows on the church in Acts chapter 2. And it blows on the church so hard that it scatters them to be witnesses to the very ends of the earth. In fact, our our world belongs to God. If you keep reading those articles, it says, anointed and sent by the Spirit, I love this, the church is thrust into the world. Thrust into the world. Why? To kick butt and take names? No. As ambassadors of God's peace. Think about that. The Holy Spirit, Lord and giver of life, breathes on us, fills us with new creation, and we are thrust out because of that, right? The Holy Spirit wind blows us out to do what? The ambassadors of God's peace. For all of us to be olivers, right? To be peacemakers. It is the spirit who creates faith in you. So when Dottie and Nora and Ava and Addie, when they said, I want to say yes to Jesus, I want to stand up here and I want to say yes in front of my church family and in front of God, that I'm gonna follow Jesus my whole life long. That was the Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, working in their lives, working that yes into their hearts. If you say yes to Jesus, it's not of you. You're not the original source of the yes. The Holy Spirit is the one who puts that yes in your heart. And so if anyone asks these girls, have you ever had an encounter with the Holy Spirit? They can say, Yes. I sure have, because I've said yes to Jesus. And I want them to know, don't worry, the Holy Spirit isn't only working in you to start faith, to come to faith, to say, I have come to faith, I've taken this step, and I've made public profession of faith. Thankfully, for all of us, the Holy Spirit also is about sustaining faith. When you're tired and you're walking uphill and life is hard, and suffering is a part of your life, and you wonder, do I have enough to endure all of this? The Holy Spirit is the helper who comes alongside, the Lord and giver of life, to help you in those times. The Holy Spirit is not only the one who gives Oliver life, but is the one who now seals him with Christ in baptism. That's what the Holy Spirit is doing. Someday, we pray, Oliver stands here and says yes and amen to God's promises, just like we saw today in profession of faith. Until that day, the Holy Spirit is sealing him, the Lord and giver of life. He's gonna bring every work of God in Christ to completion. That's what the Holy Spirit does, finishes God's work in Christ. How? Through the Holy Spirit, and that includes you. You are a work that God wants to bring to completion, because any good work that He's begun, He will bring it to completion. And that includes all of us, and that requires the Lord and giver of life, the Holy Spirit at work among us. The same spirit that breathed, that was breathed into Adam's lung, bringing him to life, is the same spirit who brought those dry bones back to life. And it's the same spirit that raised Jesus up from the grave, and it's the same spirit that then Jesus breathed out onto his disciples. That same spirit is at work in you. The spirit that rose Jesus from the grave, from the dead, right? Up from the grave he arose. No, up from the grave he was raised by the spirit. That same spirit is at work in you. The Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life. If we can take all of this that I've just said, we will start to see the Spirit at work everywhere. Everywhere. When you say, ah, I don't know if I'm full of the Holy Spirit, but it occurs to you, I should send the message to this friend who's been struggling and encourage them. Or I should put a note in someone's locker that has a Bible verse on it that I think they need. That is the Holy Spirit at work in you. It's not just the spectacular, it's the day-to-day, too. It's the ordinary. That is how the Spirit is being breathed onto the church. Every day, in every breath, listen and follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit more and more every day, and you'll start to hear it more and more every day, and acknowledge the Spirit's work more and more every day. And so I love the song that we sang earlier that we're gonna sing again here at the end of our time together. It is your breath in our lungs. What do we do with it? We pour it back in praise. We pour it back in praise. And so we give God thanks today for the promise of a helper, the promise that we would not be left as orphans, the promise of the spirit who is as close to us as our very breath, the promise of new life, that the Holy Spirit has cut us off from the genealogy of the first Adam and has grafted us into the life of Christ, the second Adam. Praise God! Praise God that we can walk in the Spirit. Amen. Let's pray. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You give life, you are love. It is your breath in our lungs, moment by moment, day by day, and so we pour out our praise to you. God, I think of the psalmist who was singing this glad doxology of how much you sustain creation day by day with your breath. You send out your breath, they live, you you pull it back, they return to dust. God, we want to be filled with the breath of the Holy Spirit. We want to be formed into the image of Christ. We want to follow God's will in our lives. And so we pray that there would be an increased anointing of the Holy Spirit in this place, in this church, perhaps for those spectacular moments and also for the day-to-day, the grind of the Christian life, would it be joyful in you, God, because we have inhaled the breath of new creation. Would you send us? I love the word, would you thrust us out into the world to be your peacemakers? Because we are so filled with the Holy Spirit. I thank you that the Spirit, Spirit's work in the church is to gather us as a people from every tongue and tribe and nation. God, I pray that we would be an accurate signpost of the kingdom of God that is coming. Would your spirit breathe into these dry bones? Would you re-inflate and invigorate the church for the work that you want us to do? And I pray that we would see the spirit everywhere, the work of the spirit everywhere, in us, in the church, and as we go in our neighborhoods and in our communities. God, we pray that as we walk in these days of Easter tide toward Pentecost, that you would indeed fill our lungs with your breath, the living breath of God. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.