Session 4 - Holy Spirit & Church | Core Testimony

Christians believe that after His resurrection and ascension, Jesus did not leave His followers alone. Through the Holy Spirit, Christ continues His work in the world today.

At Pentecost, God poured out His Spirit upon His people, forming a renewed humanity—the Church. The Holy Spirit does far more than give individual believers comfort or strength. He forms ordinary people into the Body of Christ, equips them with unique gifts, produces His fruit within them, and sends them into the world as witnesses to Jesus.

This session invites us to consider not only who the Holy Spirit is, but how the Spirit continues to shape the Church into God’s people for the sake of the world.

Transcript

The Big Bible Story In Six Parts

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We are in the final stages of these learning sessions related to our testimonies. What we have done in the first series of learning sessions is give an overview of the Bible, taking a look at the big story. Sometimes I summarize it in six words: the mission of God, the method by which God carries out that mission through Israel in the Old Testament and through the Church of Jesus in the New Testament, the managers of that mission, and we think of Moses and Joshua and the elders and the judges and the kings and the prophets, and then we get to Jesus, and then we get to the disciples or apostles. And then the meltdown in the Old Testament, this great promise of God seeking to draw all God's people back to him from all of the nations of the world through the ministry and witness of Israel. And somehow it seems to be closing down and diminishing in size. And that's where the fifth M comes in, and that's the miracle of Jesus. God inserts God's own self into our story, and Jesus, our Savior, comes among us. God become flesh and teaches us and does miracles and dies and comes back to life again and sends us into the world. And then that brings us the sixth uh part of a story, and that's the mutation, because it seemed as if, as the prophets were talking about it in the Old Testament, things would culminate when God came to with the day of the Lord to make all things new. And somehow Jesus brings the day of the Lord, but does not close it off. And so we live in this new age in between Jesus' first coming and Jesus' second coming. And this is where we're looking at the New Testament and the witness of the church. We've already talked in our previous sessions also about how the church grew and developed in the world. That was our second group of sessions, the look of the church's story throughout the history of the human race. And now we're looking at the key elements of the testimonies that we make. We started in this series talking about how do we believe and what do we believe, and what is faith, and how is that related to the Bible and to the story that we find there. In our second session, we talked about who is the God of the Bible that we believe in. And that God comes to us in a variety of ways, always the same God, but the creator and the redeemer. And in Jesus, things get a little bit complicated. And so we looked at how this God, this one God who's creator of all and the one who wants to bring us all home, has to renew God's relationship with us through the person of Jesus, who is also God and but not the Father. And so we talked about the Trinity and the manner in which we might think about the one God existing in the three persons of the Trinity. And today we're going to, and last time we took a look at the person of Jesus, who he is, what he said about himself, what people said about him, what they experienced in him, how he provided salvation, and how we think about salvation, and how he has now gone back to glory and begun the mission of the church. And that's where we'll turn today, looking at the work of the Holy Spirit and the development of the church and its mission. We'll talk more about it in the next session when we look specifically at mission and witness. And then one session beyond that, we'll talk about things still to come. What's the culmination of it all? And we'll focus especially on things like we find in the book of Revelation. But for today, the Holy Spirit and the witness of the church, and also the way in which the things that Jesus brought become real in our lives.

Testimony Around A Church Table

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Some years ago, when I was a pastor in a congregation in another city, we had a new member's class once a month on a Sunday afternoon. We had a lot of people who were joining the church. I officiated at many baptisms of adults and also of children and adolescents. We had many who were filling our benches in our church, coming to worship on Sundays. We expanded the number of services we had. It was a good time as the church was engaged in a meaningful witness in the downtown area of the city. But as we sat at the table with this new members class, I distinctly remember one couple in particular who were becoming members of our congregation. And they each told their story. We always started with a meal together, and then we would tell our stories around the table. Who are we? How did we get here? What is our faith about? What are we seeking? What do we believe the church is? Who is Jesus to us? And then we get into some of the specifics of belonging to Jesus, belonging to the church, and being part of this particular congregation.

A Love Story That Reopens Faith

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The gentleman, young man who was sitting to my left, began our conversations with the stories. He said that his father was a Baptist minister and that he hated being the son of a minister. He said that he had no use for that faith and all the stuff of the church. And he didn't like what his dad had to do and how he was so busy with the church and how the people were such hypocrites and how he couldn't do anything because he had to obey the rules and regulations. And he was pretty down on the church. And as soon as he could get away from home, he did. He graduated from high school and he did a variety of jobs. And then he decided to go back to school, to university, and he had to find his way there until finally he settled on becoming a lawyer. He had finished his undergraduate work and he was now in the law school at the university in our city. While he was there, he was partying on a Friday night. He'd gone to a party that everybody knew about. And at this party, he saw a young woman across the room and he was rightly attracted to her. And before either of them could believe it, they were having a night-long conversation with one another. And by the time they were parting ways, he was thinking pretty seriously about getting together again. And her response stopped him very short. She said to him, Are you a Christian? Well, what should he say? He had grown up in a Christian home, but technically he didn't consider himself a Christian anymore. He had gotten rid of all of that. So they talked for a little bit about that. And then she said to him, I'm a Christian, and I won't date anybody who's not a Christian. I won't go out with somebody who's not a Christian. I certainly will not marry anybody who's not a Christian. And that got him to thinking, and that led him back. He talked with some friends, and some friends that he knew had been participants, had been members of our congregation. And it led him and his girlfriend to come to our church and participate in worship activities. And now he was here. They had gotten married, and he was ready to become a member of our congregation. Kind of an interesting story. Well, the next person at the table was this young woman, recently married to this young

A Hard Question About A Buddhist Mother

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man. And she told her story this way. She said, My mother grew up on a rice farm in Vietnam. She was only a teenager, a young teenager, the day that the soldiers came through, the French soldiers. They came through and she was working alone in the rice paddy. And they took turns raping her. And then they left. And never saw her again. She gave birth to a child, and that was the young woman sitting at our table in the church in this welcome session for new members. She said, I was very, my mother was very young when she had me, and we grew up together. We were like sisters. She said, My mother got jobs cleaning rich people's homes, and that's how she provided for the rent and for the food, but we were very poor. She said she was very curious. And so she and her mother would talk about many things. And one day, the little girl, this woman now at the table, she said she asked her mother, could you tell me about God? And her mother said, No, I can't tell you about God. She said, I'm a Buddhist. And we had a shelf on the wall of our small apartment, and we had some pictures of parents and grandparents, the ancestors we called them, and we had a little dish in which we burned some incense. And her mother said, Every morning I make my peace with the ancestors, and that's all I know. I don't know anything about God or gods. But her mother said, There's a building down the street, they call it a church, Igles in the French language. And she said, There are supposed to be people there who know about God. And so this young woman said, as a young girl, I used to go up and down the streets, and sometimes I would go into that building. The door was always open, and it was a huge place, massive in size, always quiet, except sometimes there was an organ playing. And she said, I like to sit there in the darkness, in the silence, and then the sun would come streaming through the windows, and the windows were colored, and I could see the colored lights, and it was just a I could tell it was a holy place. And one day when I was sitting there, she said, a man came along and he said to me, he stopped and he said, Can I help you? And she said, I want to find out more about God. And he said, Well, I'm the priest here. I think I can do that. And he took her and talked about with her about God, and then got her enrolled in the school that was part of the church's ministry. And so she became a Christian through going to a Catholic school, and she became a part of the Roman Catholic branch of the Christian church, and she went on to university in Paris, and she got her degree in French literature. And then when she finished that, she said to her mom that she wanted to explore other worlds too. And so she decided to come to Canada and that she would go to university there and get her doctorate so she could teach the French language in Canada. And that's when she was at a party where the young man was at a party and they met and they fell in love and he became a Christian all over again, and they got married, and now they were sitting here at the table and they were seeking to become members of our congregation. It was a fascinating story, and we were sitting there dumbfounded that she was expressing this strange way in which he had traveled the world in order to come to our table. But then she had a question for me, and she looked me straight in the eyes, and she said, Now, before we go any further today, I want to ask you a question. She said it. What will happen to my mother when she dies? She said, My mother never became a Christian. She is my best friend in this world, and she is a devout Buddhist, and she will not become a Christian. And what do you think will happen to her when she dies? And if you tell me that she's going to hell, I'm out of here right now. Well, what would you say? How do you talk to someone else about not only Christianity, but about the nature of the relationship between God and all of the peoples on planet Earth who are, by creation, the children of God, made in the image of God. What is the point of all of this and what happens with the work of Jesus and the lives of others around us? It was something I have struggled with all my life and tried to figure out in a meaningful way. The church has come up with basically four options. Option one is to say that

Four Christian Views Of Salvation

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if you believe, you have salvation and you receive eternal life. But if you don't believe, well, then you don't receive those things. And we talk about such things as eternal punishment, eternal judgment and hell and those kinds of things. A second possibility, said the church, that that's a theory called particularism. Only if you believe, only if you can say, Jesus is my savior, Jesus is my Lord, do you move from the family of the first Adam, which has been condemned and under the jurisdiction of evil since the fall of our first parents, you move from there into the family of the second Adam, as Paul puts it in Romans 5. You move to the family of grace. So believe in Jesus, and then you get to move. A second theory is called generalism. And here the idea is that God's heart is bigger and more gracious than our hearts. And there may well be people who are part of the family of God, even though they don't necessarily know it, and even though we might condemn them out of hand just simply because they're not like us. I think, for instance, of someone who might be a young girl in Afghanistan after the Taliban has taken over, and the social world has become very focused on Islam and the dominance of the male side of human society and the lack of training available for females. And this young girl is not allowed to go to school, does not hear anything about Christianity, is not able to read the Bible. But within Islam, in the Quran, there are many mentions of Isa, Jesus, who is one of the three great prophets of Islam. And she hears the stories about Isa and she believes in this wonderful person who does miracles and who is very kind and plays with children and all of that. She believes in Isa, the great prophet of Islam. And in that believing, says generalism, could it be that she enters into the family of God in a way that to other human perceptions she is not there because she never makes a testimony. I believe Jesus is my Lord and my Savior. Well, that's called generalism. It's the way in which we might think about children who die in early years of life, never having the ability to come to adult testimonies. It's the way we sometimes talk about those who, because of certain diseases or certain ailments or accidents, their capacities for thinking are not the same as many of the rest of us, and therefore they might not have the ability to make those kinds of testimonies. They may lack the ability to speak, or they may not have the same cognitive functions. What about those? Didn't Jesus love the children and play with the children? What about those who live in places where the gospel has never come and they try to live appropriate lives and believe that there is a creator and believe that this world functions according to rules and mores and expressions of value that are higher than just our own devices and that there is a good way to live. What about those people? And so we have the possibility there, that's generalism, that they too join those who make testimony and move from the family of Adam one to the family of Adam II, to the family of Jesus. There is a third way in which uh Christians have talked about these things, theologians have talked about these things. It's what we call universalism. And universalism says, well, you know, Jesus said that God is our Father, and Jesus talked about us sometimes not being good parents, and how even as people who are not necessarily the best of parents, we would try to take care of our children well. And are we not all the children of the Heavenly Father? And what father would ever slam the door in his children's face and lock it and say, no, you can't come in here? And so don't you think that at the end of the day the Heavenly Father is going to bring all the children in? And I want so much to believe that's true. I really do want to believe that's true. Because I want to be a good parent to my own daughters, who I think are wonderful people, but they are certainly not perfect. And I know that I'm not perfect. And how do we make this work? And yet I know that even in their worst times, my daughter's worst times, and my worst times, I don't think I could slam the door in their face and lock it and say, you don't belong here anymore. And then what do we think about God being our father? And so it's hard to think about that. And yet I also think about ways in which we as humans have done some awful things, dastardly things. I think of that in a macro scale with people like Adolf Hitler or perhaps uh Joseph Stalin, who deliberately starved people just because he wanted to rearrange the politics and the economics of Russia. I think of those throughout history who have done horrible things, slaughtering others just on the whim of it, and people today who do really bad things. And you can't simply say, oh, that's okay. God loves you and forgives you, and so do I. I think of that particularly with our daughters when they were much younger, and thinking, what would I say if I found out that some person had molested one of my daughters, had done some horrible things to one of my daughters? Would I simply say, hey, I'm a Christian, that's okay, you're a brother in Jesus, and you know, we'll work this thing through. I would have great anger toward this person. I would want justice to be done. And then I think too about Jesus. If God is going to bring all the kids home at the end of the day, why did Jesus have to go through such an excruciating experience of the cross? It doesn't make sense. And so I'm left kind of feeling like none of these three solutions solves the issue completely. Particularism seems to make my salvation based upon me. If I believe, if I make the testimony, so in effect, it's not the grace of God, but my choice that gets me in. And with generalism, I say, yeah, that's wonderful. Yes, people who make testimony and also people who are kind of on the road and don't necessarily know it. But then what about the other people? What does a loving father say about that? And with universalism, I say, wonderful, bring all the kids home. But isn't there Any set of dynamics in there, some kind of rule that says you have to repent, and what does that look like? And that's where there's also been a fourth way in which uh the Christian theologians have tried to think about this, and it's a little bit different. You see, particularism and generalism and universalism all look at the world in this manner. They say, here's the family of Adam one, and because of the sins of our original parents, as well as our own sins, none of us will receive the grace of God unless we get it through Jesus. We can't choose to get into the family of Adam II. So Jesus comes along and he's the second Adam, Romans chapter 5, and he brings the new humanity into full relationship with the Father. And how do we get from here to here? Either because we make testimony or because God is gracious to us, or God simply says, come on home, everybody. But what has been called modified universalism talks about it in a bit of a different way. And it says, Well, here's the family of Adam one, and they need to come back into favor at good graces with the creator of the family. And so Jesus is the second Adam, as Paul writes about in Romans 5. And instead of saying, you and you and you and you and you and you, but not you and not you and not you and not you, instead, Jesus takes the whole of Adam one's family, sort of like in a big container, and brings it over and makes it the family of Adam 2. And since the family has been restored in its relationship with God, not by its own ability, but by the gracious act of God as savior in Jesus, the restoration of the freedom of will and choice happens, in which people can choose to opt out of that in a way similar to what happens sometimes in families when children are a bit naughty and parents are trying to discipline them, and a child might say, You can't do that to me. And a parent might say, Well, yes, I can. I'm your parent. Well, I didn't ask to be born into this family. And you have this sense of, how could you say that? And so there's this possibility that a child might choose not to be part of the family. In any case, those are conversations or those are ways of looking at these things that we keep thinking about and wondering how can the grace of God be so strong that we can't choose salvation, but somehow God makes it available. And shouldn't that be for everybody? And why is it not for everybody? And that's an ongoing question. And so the woman sits at the table in our church building and says, My mom led me to Jesus. She told me to go to the church. She's the reason I became a Christian, but she is a Buddhist. What happens to her when she dies? And I really don't know how to answer that question meaningfully, but these are four ways that we've struggled with answers. Now, in all of these ways, we're talking about the work of the Holy Spirit. Before Jesus goes back to heaven, remember that he makes appearances to his disciples and to others.

Jesus Sends The Spirit To All

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And one of those appearances in John chapter 20 is to Mary Magdalene in the garden where the tomb was. And Jesus shows himself to be the gardener who created the world, who has now redeemed the world, and she is sort of part of the new family of Adam and Eve in her understanding of God's grace. But Jesus says, don't cling to me, because he has to go to the Father in order to send the Holy Spirit, the paraclete, in the in the Gospel of John, so that people everywhere. And if Jesus were to remain in Jerusalem, even living without dying again and being that wonderful light of salvation, Jesus would only illuminate that particular part of the world. And Jesus says, I need to go to the Father in order to send the Spirit who will be disseminated among you all and through all of you, and will become like a spreading flame and a spreading light to the world. And that's what the Holy Spirit is. In John's gospel, Jesus gathers his primary disciples together after his resurrection, and he breathes on them and they receive the Holy Spirit. And if Jesus is the light of the world, all those who receive the Spirit of Jesus become glowing elements of that light spreading to the ends of the world. And that's where we have ourselves today. We glow because we were empowered by the Holy Spirit. And that became powerfully true at Pentecost. Jesus left his disciples and told them to wait. And he said, something big is coming. They waited for Pentecost. It was a Jewish holiday, the Feast of Weeks, seven weeks after Pent after Easter or after Passover. They didn't call it Easter then, but that was the time. Seven weeks later, they had the Feast of First Fruits or the Feast of Weeks. It was a time in which they remembered two things. One was this caused them to remember Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the new revelation from God, the covenant at Mount Sinai, Exodus chapter 20, the new way of seeing things, the new pair of glasses through which they understood themselves and the world and what God was doing in a new way. And the second thing that the Jews remembered on Pentecost, on that celebration, was the beginning of the harvest. They had a harvest celebration in later in the year, it's what we would call the fall, after all of the harvest had been brought in. This was at the beginning of harvest. And it was called the feast of first fruits because they were supposed to take the very first stalks from the grain field, the heads of grain, maybe harvest them and take the kernels, maybe make some flour and make a loaf of cake out of it or something like that, or take the grain itself. They were supposed to take the first young lambs that were cast by the mothers in the flock. They were supposed to take the first grapes or the first figs, maybe even not yet fully ripe. They were supposed to bring these first to the tabernacle and later to the temple as a symbol of saying, you know, this is not our doing. We may be great farmers, but the harvest itself comes from you, the great, greatest farmer of all, the one who created the heavens and the earth, the one who created the animals and the flocks and the fields and the plants, the one who causes things to grow and also brings in the harvest. And so the feast of weeks, the feast of Pentecost was the feast of first fruits when the first of the harvest would come in and be offered to the one who was the Lord of the harvest, saying, We trust that you who began the harvest will bring the rest of it to its completion. And that's why the time of Pentecost was such a powerful time for the Christian church. Because it said to those first Christians, just like the great farmer God, who brings in the harvest year after year after year, has done so, we can trust him to do it again. And now that great parent of the family of God is going to begin to call all of the children home. And this is the start of it. The Pentecost festivities where 3,000 people suddenly became new children of God by the work of the Holy Spirit, and 5,000 more a couple of days later. This is quite something. The harvest is beginning, and now we can move out into the fields as workers of the harvest and bring the rest in. And that becomes the mission of the church. And it was shown in a powerful way through the signs and symbols at Pentecost. For one thing, people were just going about their festive business on this feast of unleavened bread, a feast of weeks, or feast of Pentecost, when they hear the sound of a rushing, roaring wind, and we all stop. What's going to happen? Are the trees going to topple? Will the roofs of the buildings be blown off? Should we seek shelter? Where can we find shelter from? A powerful wind. But none of the leaves on the trees moved. Instead, the sound was there, but something different was taking place. And here's where in the Aramaic and the Hebrew and the Greek languages, there's a fascinating thing. In each language, there is but one word which can mean three things. It can mean wind that blows across the face of the earth. It can mean breath, which I breathe in and which I breathe out, and therefore it animates my body. And it can mean spirit, which is this unseen presence of life in me. And we can talk about it as the spirit of God, this unseen presence of God. So we hear the sound, but we have to not interpret it as the wind out there, but as the very breath of God, which animates us and animates the church. This is the birth of the new body of Christ. Just as at the beginning of time, God in the pictures of Genesis stoops down and forms out of clay the humans and breathes into their nostrils

Pentecost As First Fruits And Harvest

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the breath of life, and they become living flesh. So now with these bits and pieces of clay that are animated, the breath of God breathes into the disciples and into those around them, and they become the new living body of Christ. Jesus has gone to heaven with the body that he has received, and now this becomes the extension of the body of Christ on earth, and the spirit becomes the animating power within us. It's seen also with regard to the fire. They looked up and they saw this kind of major flame just coming down out of the sky. And when it got about head height, it split into smaller little flames, and each one stood above each of the disciples. Why? Well, it's kind of fascinating. The Dr. Luke writes both the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts, the Acts of the Apostles. And at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke, he tells the story of John the Baptist, who is the last of the Old Testament prophets and the one who precedes Jesus and prepares the way for Jesus, like Isaiah said, one would come, prepare the way of the Lord. And John is baptizing Jews, calling them to act on their faith, and they come out and they say to him, Hey, are you that suffering servant of Isaiah? Are you that Messiah who is to come? Oh no, no, sis John, I'm not that person. I'm not even worthy to untie his sandals. But he is coming soon. And I tell you what, I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Here comes the Holy Spirit, and here comes the fire. It's an amazing picture. And Dr. Luke is very consistent that Jesus brings the Holy Spirit, which is the fire of cleansing, the fire of passion, the fire of heat, the fire of renewal. All of those things come together in the symbols. And there's one more thing about what happens here on Pentecost that's kind of fascinating. And that's that there's a story in the Old Testament, Genesis chapter 11, where after the flood, we have this thing happening, Genesis 10 and 11, where the people of the human race, the descendants of Noah and his wife, the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Jaber, they restart life on planet Earth, the human race. And they begin to think, you know, we're pretty powerful. We survived the flood. Man, nothing could stop us now. And so they create a world in which they are self-sufficient, self-contained. They don't need anything else. They don't need anybody else. They don't even need a God. And God says, whoa, wait a minute. That's not good. They are not the end in themselves. And so God comes down, you know the story of the Tower of Babel, where they're building this massive structure, not only to house them and provide for their shops and their economy, but also to mark them as dominant in this world. There are mountains out there, but we can make our own mountain, and we will never be lost to one another because we will see the place and we'll come back together. We are one and we are powerful and we are the end of all things. And one day, according to the story in Genesis, God comes down, and the next morning when they get up, they start their work again. One says, Hey, could you hand me that hammer? And the other guy looks at the other guy and says, And they're talking in ways that they can't communicate. And suddenly they don't understand one another and they get upset with one another. And one group breaks off over here. They can understand one another, but they can't understand the rest of these. And it brings the unified human race separated and spreading across the face of the earth. Well, think about that, and then think about Pentecost. What happens at Pentecost? But that same divided people, notice how Luke begins the story of the day of Pentecost. He talks about people from every region and language in the known world of that day being present in Jerusalem. Now they're they're Jews, but they don't speak the same languages because they have been living in different places. And so they are aliens from one another. But the moment the Holy Spirit comes, the one spirit, which at one time came and made many languages, so people separated and divided. Now the one spirit speaks in all of those languages and brings these people together. You might say that Babel is turned on its head, that God has now, in one way, brought all of the languages and all of the peoples back together by the power of the Holy Spirit. And that becomes the story of the book of Acts and beyond. We've looked at that already. Now, along with that, to step into this new community, there is an entrance rite. And it is what's called baptism. We'll look at baptism just a bit more in a few minutes. But right now, what we'll see is that instead of circumcision, which was the actual cutting of male flesh, it's now a bloodless entry rite in which people are baptized into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and they become members of this new humanity, the humanity of the second Adam. Now, the Holy Spirit is kind of an interesting character in the New Testament because

Wind, Fire, And Babel Turned Over

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the Holy Spirit is almost a silent witness. Powerful, powerful, powerful, but never calling attention to the Spirit's own presence. Here are things we read about the coming of the Holy Spirit. The disciples were made bold and courageous. They were given words to speak. There was a sense of love that pervaded the community. They had a sense of appreciation, a sense of respect for one another. It was like the thing was starting over from the beginning of time, and the human race was what it was intended to be. And that's all the work of the Holy Spirit. But one of the things that the Holy Spirit does not do is call attention to the Holy Spirit. The rest of the New Testament hardly talks about the character of the Holy Spirit. It talks about how the Holy Spirit comes and people say, Yay, Jesus! Yay, Jesus, Jesus is my savior, Jesus is my Lord. The Holy Spirit does not become a powerful entity of unique naming or focus or anything like that. The Holy Spirit is more of this pervasive presence of God, allowing and encouraging us to worship Jesus. And the rest of the New Testament will talk about the Holy Spirit in that way. We can argue about the filling or indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We can argue about being baptized in the Holy Spirit. We can argue about the gifts of the Spirit and the fruit of the Spirit and all of that, but none of it seems to have a clear theology in the New Testament. Those theologies of the Spirit are things we sort of deduce and sometimes use as weapons against other children of God to divide us from them. We do know that the New Testament will talk at length about two things in particular. One is the fruit of the Spirit, which is the way of people coming to the fullest or more full expression of themselves. Paul talks about that particularly in Galatians, where he talks about some people trying to divide the church. I'm better than you are. Our kind is better than your kind. We're good, but we're over here and you're not. And this division that's going on. That's what the letter of Paul to the Galatians is all about. And by the time we come to the end of that, he keeps saying that's the wrong way to think about it, the wrong way to think about it. He talks about the works of the flesh, which divide us and bring us an antagonism toward one another and separate us into groups. And then he talks about, but the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And there's no law against these. And what are those kinds of things? Well, if you've ever lived on planet Earth, if you've ever liked anybody, if you've ever worked with anybody, if you've ever loved anybody, if you've ever fallen in love, if you have parents that you have hoped to love and wanted to love and have loved, if you have children that you want to love, if you have neighbors who are good neighbors, if you have any sense of good society, what do you want from someone else? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. In other words, what the spirit does is that it restores the capacities of us as human beings who have lost our good qualities, restores those and gives us the ability to at least think about them and want them again and desire them and work on them. That's the fruit of the spirit. It is the way in which we as individuals are nurtured and encouraged to become the selves we could have been and should have been. The second major way the New Testament talks about the work of the Holy Spirit is the gifts of the Spirit. And every time there's a list of the gifts of the Spirit, take Romans 12 or think about 1 Corinthians 12 through 14, 1 Peter chapter 3, different places where there are listings of gifts of the Spirit. What we find is that these are not strange things like, oh, suddenly I've developed the ability to fly and I don't even have wings. Or the spirit has given me the ability to bound over mountains with a single bound. That's what the spirit has given to me. One woman came to John Wesley and said, Well, I have the gift of criticism, but your sermon wasn't very great. And John Wesley is reported to have said to that woman, Madam, that is probably not a gift of the spirit. And you should probably bury that and forget about it. The gifts of the Spirit are those individual ways in which the Holy Spirit helps each of us not only to be generally good, but to bring out what our uniqueness as individual persons created by God, children of the Heavenly Father, are good for. I think of our own daughters, and I see this in other families, where no two children are identical, not even necessarily identical twins. They have their unique personalities, but most of us are very different from our siblings. And the way in which good parents deal with that is by affirming the uniqueness of each child. Not saying you're better than your sisters or brothers, not saying you're worse than your sisters or brothers, but you are unique in this way and bring out these things which are part of your inherent nature. And the Holy Spirit does that. Now, the Holy Spirit, in that respect, is the thing, is the energy which brings life to the church. But how should we think about the church as we live in harmony with one another, the new humankind, the new people of planet Earth, the family of the first Adam ended up fighting and pushing people away and dividing itself, the family of the second Adam brings people back together. How are we to understand this? And so what has happened along the way is that we have seen ways in which both the fruit of the spirit and the gifts of the spirit come together to restore the character of communal life on planet Earth. And that's what we call the church. Paul Manier, years ago, he was a great New Testament scholar. He was at Yale Divinity School. He was head of the World

Fruit And Gifts That Form People

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Council of Churches for a while. He wrote a book, which is really a kind of standard on this. He wrote a book that's called The Images of the Church in the New Testament. And he said that when it comes down to it, he went carefully through every page of the New Testament. He said there are 99 different images of the church, the Christian church in the New Testament. But then he said there are really only three big images of the church in the New Testament. Many of the others are kind of gathered under these three umbrellas. And the three umbrellas that he talked about are uh the people of God, like Israel was called to be a people. So the New Testament talks about the church as the people of God in a holy assembly. Peter says, you are a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God. So there's something about a kind of standardized character, kind of like a new nation without particular borders. In fact, the Christian church is the single largest nation on planet earth, but it doesn't have particular borders. That's with other nations, political nations. But the nation of Jesus is an entity which goes beyond human borders and is one assembly of God over all of planet Earth. The second major umbrella, said Paul Medir, is the fellowship in the faith. And here's where we see in the book of Acts that one of the terms applied to the first disciples was most often the way. People who are sort of on a journey together, telling each other stories of forgiveness and transformation. People who tell stories about change because Jesus has come into their lives and they are not tied to one place. It's like Hebrews chapter 11. They left their old country and their old cities because they were looking for the city of God. And so they are on the journey of faith towards something bigger. The third one of those themes, uh, the umbrella, says Paul Manier, is the idea of new creation. That the God of creation saw his creation disintegrate, and God is recreating, and the church is the beginning of that recreation. So everything that God intended for this world and everything that God is drawing the world to in its recreation has begun now in time. Paul says that very forthrightly in 2 Corinthians chapter 5. If anyone is in Christ, new creation, the old has passed, behold, all things have become new. And that becomes the theme also of the book of Revelation and in the book of Hebrews, that idea of the Sabbath rest that remains, or the city of God, or the thing, the new creation that is coming. We are always in that direction. But Paul Manier said there's even one bigger image of the church in the New Testament, what the Holy Spirit does to draw us together. And he called that image the body of Christ. And here we cannot get bigger than that. Jesus used the language of bridegroom and bride in some of his teachings, how he's the bridegroom, and the people that he loves are the bride, and he loves his bride. And he told stories about that in 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14. Paul talks about that, that we are the body of Christ. So we are the living flesh of Jesus. He is the head, we are the body. And then on into the book of Revelation, where that image comes again. We are the bride of Christ, and the bridegroom is coming to restore us to himself. So the body of Christ and the bride of Christ and all of that come together. And Paul Minier said, all of the 99 images and all of the three big umbrellas that draw all of those little images together, they are all subsumed under this one massive story, one massive image in the New Testament, the body of Christ, the body of Christ. So we become thia. And that leads us to think about how we see the church today.

How The Church Holds Together

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And the church is seeing, we sometimes call it church polity or church governance. And there are three major ways in which the work of the Holy Spirit in and through the body of Christ is generally talked about today. One of those we call sometimes congregationalism. It's more of the idea that I have Jesus, I testify to Jesus, I believe in Jesus, I have the Holy Spirit. Do you have the Holy Spirit? Do you know Jesus? You know the Spirit too. You know Jesus. Great, we can get together and we can form an assembly. And that's a congregation. It's pulling people together, each of whom has an individual testimony. If we don't agree, then either you're wrong and I'm wrong, or I'm wrong, and I know I'm not wrong, so you must be wrong. And so there's this sense of pulling apart. And Christianity is largely believed to be an individual thing, and the church becomes associations of individual believers who choose to worship together and choose to work together until they don't choose to be together and don't choose to work together. That's called congregationalism. And it's one way of certainly looking at things. Almost opposite of that is something that's often called Episcopalianism. It's the idea that Jesus, before he left this world, he said to Peter, You are the rock, and on this rock I will build my church. And he said, Here's the controls, here's the keys, I hand them over to you, Peter. Now go build the thing. And so it has the idea of the church structures as being the things in which Jesus is experienced today. And so we as individuals, yeah, we we try to believe, we try to do right, but it's the church as a governing structure that holds reality together. We only participate in it. What does the church say? How does the church function? And the church largely took that cue in the times following Constantine and became a business or an institution or a corporation, and the identity of Jesus is perceived to reside in the corporation itself. And so you have the rules and regulations of the corporation, and are you being a good participant or not? And so sometimes some of my students will say, Well, I'm I'm Catholic, I'm not Christian, and I'm not a really good Catholic. And so there's this idea that the church exists independent of me, and I choose to invest myself, maybe or maybe not. A third way in which the church is sometimes viewed, this is called the Presbyterian way of looking at the church, based on that word presbyteros in the New Testament, the elders who draw together the congregation. And here the idea is that Jesus is most seen not in individual testimonies and not in corporate structures, but rather in the messiness of congregational life, where people who are actually different and who have different spiritual gifts and who have different temperaments and maybe even different languages come together and actually exist as our bodies exist, with fingers and arms and shoulders and knees and legs and toes and inner organs and all of that, where just like our bodies function in some way beyond the scope of each individual part, 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14, we function in a way that gives expression to the life of the head, who is Jesus, the head of the body. And so you don't look for Jesus to be just in individual Christians, although Jesus should be there, nor do you look for Jesus to be in the structures of the church, although Jesus ought to be part of the systems. Where you look for Jesus any given day or any given Sunday is in where Christians are gathered as body, and in the messiness of their differences, they become one because some of the gifts within the congregation include the gifts of leadership, and the leaders by the Spirit of God are able to give shape to the body, give it articulation, give it definition, and even give it messiness in its engagement with the world around. Three different ways. I think that it's important for each of us to have a Christian testimony, certainly. And I think that what has been seen over the years is that corporate structures can be effective in stabilizing communities. But I really believe that the New Testament talks about the messiness of the congregation as being the area in which Jesus continues to live, and the church is best seen as the body of Christ through congregations, and they are never isolated from other congregations. That's the big thing in the New Testament. Paul sends letters to the congregations in houses, house churches, or in cities, or in regions, and they are supposed to be in relationship with one another, but the expression of the body of Christ is seen most fully and completely in any congregation, be that three people who sing together, or be that thousands who gather together, or it be in congregations in association with one another. But it is the living entity that is the body of Christ. And this is where we think about the sacraments. And the church has had a long history of thinking about sacraments,

Baptism And The Meal That Remembers

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but there are really only two things Jesus specifically commanded. Baptism as the way of marking those who come in, sort of like when our daughters were born, we gave them names. Sometimes I joke and say, well, when our daughters were born, we didn't give them names because we didn't know how they would turn out. And so we say, well, when they figure out who they are, they can give themselves names. And then we certainly wouldn't want to give them our family name because maybe they won't even be worthy of being in our family. No, no, no. We gave them names and we gave them the family name as they were born. Because the only way they come to understand who they are is by coming to understand whose they are. So baptism is the initiation rite. It doesn't save people, but it is like a wedding ring. It is a symbol of something that is unspoken and regularly spoken between me and my wife, our relationship with one another. That is the thing. This is not the thing, but this symbolizes that thing, and so does Baptist. The other thing is the community meal. And here we have the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist, the various ways in which it's been described. But Jesus said to his disciples, When you eat this bread and drink this wine, remember and believe. And so it is our ongoing thing. I have had literally millions of meals, I think, at least hundreds of thousands of meals in my life. And there are very few that I remember. But I'm glad I had those meals because I wouldn't be the person I am today without having the meals. And so it is with the fellowship of faith. We eat together in order to remember and speak our testimonies and remind ourselves and always look to the one who is the true host of the meal, and that's Jesus. And that leads me to think of one more thing. Some years ago, one of my colleagues, a minister, he's no longer with us, but he was pastor of a large

Little Churches And A Surprising Leader

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congregation, and he was realizing that the church had become rather stable and stalled and formal and sort of rules and regulations. And so one of the things he was reading through church history, and he he was captivated by the idea of little churches. Little churches are a way that the church in the New Testament and early church age talked about house churches. There's a big mass of gatherings, but there's also the little churches. And so he said to his governing body, he said to the elders and the deacons, he said, we should bring that back. Well, how are they going to bring that back? Well, they began by having one evening a month where each of the elders would lead people, they called them districts, but the people in their different communities of the church bring them together and meet in houses and read some scripture and pray together and talk with one another about needs and have meal together and celebrate the elements of communion together. And the elders finally decided, okay, the pastor thinks this is important, so maybe we should do this. And so they went ahead with it. But uh several of the elders they complained all the way, and they said, we don't want to do this, but because they felt bound by the governing body doing this, they felt they had to do it too. And one elder complained all the time. He didn't want to do this, he wasn't going to do this, he had to do this, and so he called these people up, some of them he knew, some of them he didn't know, and he had them come over. About six months later, after he had complained and complained and complained to complain to the pastor and to everybody else, he came to the pastor with tears streaming down his cheeks. And he said to his pastor, you know, I started this out thinking I don't want to do this and it's not going to work, it's not going to be any good. And what do I do? I should read the confessions and I should read some Bible, and I don't know how to pray, but I guess I have to print it out a prayer or something like that. He said, We met and we met, and every time we tried to do these formal things, one of the young women who came was a new converted. She had tattoos on her arms and she had her nose pierced and her ears pierced and gouged, uh, gauged, and she had spiky hair, and she she wore goth clothing. I didn't like her. I didn't like, but she she said she was a Christian and she was part of this, so she came. And while we were trying to discuss theology, she kept saying, you know, Jesus is good. You know what I was able to do this past week? I was able to talk with this person and and and tell her about Jesus. And she kept talking about Jesus, she kept talking about Jesus, she kept talking about Jesus and what she did, and people were coming to know Jesus to her. And the elder said, I didn't realize it at the time. I thought I was trying to lead the church. Turns out that she was the one who was leading our little church. And with tears coming down his face, he said, Pastor, the only regret I have in life that I'm now 67 years old, and it's taken me more than 60 years to figure out what the church is. And I think that's what happens when the Holy Spirit comes. The church is created, there are parameters, the work of Jesus is applied, but we become new people. The body of Christ, the bride of Christ, the people on the way,

What The Spirit Creates Next

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the people who understand for the first time what it means to be truly human and truly alive, and we start telling other people about that, and we'll look more about that witness and mission next time.