GUESTBOOK

In the Spirit in ministry

Luke 3: 21,22; 4: 1 – 4; 13 – 21

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 23 May, 2004

WE MOVE on now from the Old Testament to the New. We move on from the hints of greater works of the Spirit to the beginning of the very era of the Spirit. We turn our eyes on Jesus.

Today we are looking at three aspects of the Spirit’s work. We are looking at the Spirit in initiation, we are looking at the Spirit in empowerment, and we are looking at the Spirit in redemption.
I want us to realise how vital the Spirit is in Jesus’ life. Jesus is both God and man, but he never performs marvels through his own deity, or through his own divine power. Look again at Jesus. See how he emptied himself and took the form of a slave. He said nothing of himself, but only what he heard from the Father. He

...emptied himself of all but love
And bled for Adam’s helpless race.

I’m not saying that, in becoming a human, Jesus emptied himself of divine status, but he emptied himself of all reliance on divine power. He became dependent on the Holy Spirit as we must become dependent on the Holy Spirit.

  It’s like the comic strip hero, Superman. He can do just about anything, even stop a speeding bullet in mid flight. That is power.
  One thing is beyond Superman’s super powers. I’m not talking about horse–riding. I’m talking about green kryptonite. Place it anywhere near him, and at once he loses his power and nearly dies.
  Sometimes the evil Lex Luthor exposes Superman to green kryptonite. He gets weak and dizzy and falls to the ground. Other people have to help him to his feet.
  In other words, green kryptonite emptied Superman of his power.
  But even when he is lying half–conscious on the ground, he always has his cape on and his red underpants outside his trousers. Don’t try that at home, will you.

What does that mean? It means that, even without his power, he was still Superman. He still had the status of Superman, even if he didn’t have the power of Superman.

When he came to us, Jesus was infinitely less powerful than he was in the beginning when the universe was created. Yet he never lost his position as God the Son; he never lost his divine status, only his divine power.
He came among us and lived as a normal human being. He held all that divine power in check. Until he was about 30, he was just plain Jesus, the builder.

  Think what this all means. If Jesus did everything in his own power as Son of God, then he has nothing in common with you and me. He heals, he delivers, he transforms, he saves using a power totally alien to you and me. All we can do is stand by and marvel.
  But, if he came emptied of divine power, if he lived as an ordinary human being, if what he did was all done in the Holy Spirit’s power, suddenly everything is different. He has what we can aspire to. He has Holy Spirit power, and so can we have it.
  At the same time, because he remains God the Son, he has the capacity to save us, because, as Man he truly suffers, and as God he takes on himself the sins of the world.

So we come to the first image in the story of Jesus and the Spirit.

INITIATING SERVICE
My Adventist friend, Philip, told me the other day that they cancelled a scheduled baptism at their church at the last moment because the candidate said he wasn‘t ready.
“What do we need, to be ready?” he asked. “If we trust Jesus, we are ready. We should baptise people as soon as they believe, and give them training and teaching afterwards.”

I agree. First, initiation, then consolidation.

We Baptists are half–good at initiation. We baptise right, but where is the Holy Spirit at work? We must get both right.
When Jesus was baptised, the Holy Spirit descended on him.

...in bodily shape like a dove.

and God spoke from heaven affirming Jesus as his beloved and pleasing son.
In his baptism, Jesus fully identified with us. He came down to the water with the worst of sinners. He came down with those who were ashamed of their own sins and failings. He came down with repentant people, and shocked John the baptiser. John could not see why on earth Jesus might want to be baptised. But Jesus knew it had to be done. He knew he had to do everything that any sinner needed to do. If he couldn’t do it, how could he expect anyone else to come to himself and be saved?

  When I worked in engineering in the 1960s, I often had to supervise concrete pours. I had three official jobs. My first job was that I did the designs. My second job was to set out the jobs, putting pegs in in the right places and providing specifications to the concrete gangs. My third task was to supervise if necessary.
  These men were hard working. They’d become labourers when they turned 15, and they knew how to work.
  They wouldn’t have respected me if I hadn’t put on my gumboots and helped them shovel concrete if the delivery was late. Sometimes they gave me a sledge hammer and asked me to break out a length of kerb. I could never do it, and, when the hammer bounced back off the concrete, they would laugh themselves silly, because it nearly bounced me right over — I was only about 60 kg then.

But they knew I was their friend. They knew I tried. They knew that I would gladly fill the boot of my old Jaguar car with formwork and drive them to the next job rather than tell them to wait for a truck from the depot.
And, at 11, I sat in the site shed with them and had horrible black tea that they had made and talked about holidays and their families and what they did at the weekend.

That’s what Jesus did. He came among us and put his gumboots on to help us shovel concrete. He sat in our site shed. He filled the boot of his old Jaguar with dirty formwork. He came as our friend to show us the way.

You’ve heard of Jean Vanier. He founded the L’Arche communities, where people with varying levels of disability live together in community. He began these communities after WWII, when there were a lot of homeless men around — ex soldiers, people whose families had been broken up by war, and people who lacked the skills to look after themselves.
So the L’Arche communities have always had a lot of room for people with severe disabilities of all kinds as well as people who don't seem to have disabilities but just choose to live in community.

Vanier says that everyone is a leader to someone else. The idea that some are leaders and some are followers is a myth.

  I met a woman once who had lived in a L’Arche community in London. One of the other residents was so severely intellectually disabled that he could not speak.
  At first she thought he was difficult, because he would not go to bed when it was time to go.
  Then she discovered that he had been the eldest child in a large family, and he always checked everyone was OK before he locked up and turned out the lights. He wanted to do the same with his new L’Arche family.
  So they gave him leadership in the area of caring for security in the house. He could only communicate by grunts and gestures, but he soon had everything working like clockwork.

Jesus calls us to leadership under him. What he did, we are to do, in our own setting.

As you go, make disciples of all people groups,

he told us.
Making disciples is a leadership role. We need to be initiated into it.

  The way of initiation is baptism and Holy Spirit anointing for the ministry.
  Baptism is your action. You choose it. You draw the line in the sand and say, “Here is where I cross over.”
  And the Holy Spirit’s anointing is God’s action. He responds with pleasure to his son or daughter in Christ.

  I know that one of the knottiest areas of theology is the anointing with or baptism in the Holy Spirit. I’m not getting into that here!
  But I want you to know and to see that your ministry, your response to Jesus’ calling on your life, will be damaged and limited until you give yourself to that calling and receive the anointing you need.
  But there’s another side to it. If you are in Christ by faith, then you share in the anointing he has already received on your behalf. You already share in that voice saying, “This is my beloved Son.” The anointing is yours: take it by faith, and learn to live it!

EMPOWERMENT
The next point is that the Spirit empowers for the battle against the world, the flesh and the devil.

Straight after he is baptised, at the point where you would expect him to be singing Hallelujahs at the top of his voice and joining in ecstatic all night worship, instead Jesus is led by the Spirit into the desert.

I had an e–mail during the week from Regina Rese in Germany. You remember that Rolf and Regina came here one Sunday several years ago.
Regina’s brother, Vincent, in Malaysia, became a Christian recently; suddenly his world seemed to fall apart. Job problems, pressure over his faith, everything. He has been really despondent.

John Wesley felt his heart strangely warmed that night he first trusted Christ alone for salvation. But the next day, his joy was gone and the devil was tempting him to abandon his faith. Then Wesley realised that joy wasn’t the test, and he told the devil to get, because Jesus had saved him regardless of how he felt.
If Jesus went into the desert to begin the fight against Satan, what makes us think we should be any different?

Sometimes in life, life itself seems impossible, everyone seems to have abandoned you, even God himself seems far away.

That is when we most clearly experience what faith is about, when we only hang on by our finger tips, but we hang on; when we have only mustard seed–sized faith, but we have faith; when our minds cry out to us to run and we step out in the direction of the greatest threat, but we do step out.

  Every single one of us, as Christians, is in the struggle to overcome Satan.
  Yes, Satan is a defeated foe, but he is not yet dead. Ever since the Cross, Satan has been in retreat, but he fights back every inch of the battle. If you have enlisted for Christ, don’t arrive at the dock in your Hawaiian shirt with the camera around your neck: your ship is grey with big numbers on the bow!
  The same Spirit who sends us out gives us the power we need for the fight.

REDEMPTION
Finally, we see the Spirit at work in redemptive action, because the Spirit led Jesus to that Synagogue, and he began,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach...

Not every one of us is an anointed preacher. But every one of us is anointed to convey the same message that Jesus preached: a redemptive message to the world’s outcasts.

I just wish we could grasp how radical this message was. When people heard Jesus preach it, they didn’t spiritualise it away like we sometimes do. It said to them,

“God’s time has come. The poor will get fair wages. God will begin emptying the gaols. There’ll be healing miracles so that even the blind see again. The Roman overlords and those like them will lose their power. God is going to bless us.”

  Imagine that! The world is full of people who say, “We can’t afford to pay workers fair wages, because that will reduce profits for the corporations.”
  Politicians have a bidding war between themselves every few years about who will keep the most people in prison. They say it will make for a safer community.
  So now prisoners who could expect a 12 month college course on break and enter techniques can be sure they will now come out at least two year trained. And so on.
  And, when it comes to oppression, that’s cool — as long as it’s our side that does it.

Our job is to bring the message of redemption into our world and begin making it work.

And that means in practical ways.

I have been saying for years that we should be doing something down in South Marrickville. People are imprisoned in those flats opposite where John lives.
Can we do anything about this one, except pray? I heard yesterday that Anglicare has closed its Life after Prison ministry due to lack of funds. I have also heard why they don’t have the funds, and I’ll say that I think it’s an Anglicare problem rather than a problem of the ministry. If prisoners are not helped when they get out of prison, most go back in again.

Men and women are discharged from prison with a week’s unemployment benefits and the clothes they went in with. Some are back to crime by the end of the week because their food, lodging and new second–hand clothes cost more than they had received.

The stories emerging from Iraq are on a level with some of the stories emerging from German or Japanese prison camps in World War II. If that’s not a form of oppression, what is? What can we do about it? Why are we Baptists so quiet?

If the Spirit of the Lord is upon us through faith in Jesus and obedience to his call, then were is the evidence? What are we doing to change the world, to be in ministry, to defeat the devil and to bring hope to the hopeless?

SUMMARY
We are called to follow Jesus in all ways, and, most particularly in the power of the Spirit he gives us.

We Christians are failing our calling because we do not allow the Spirit to lead and direct us. We quench his promptings when he tells us to speak out. We leave him out of our calculations and wonder why nothing happens. We adopt spurious and deceitful doctrines which relegate the Spirit to another period and the lives of great saints.

Let’s repent! Let’s turn back and plead with the Lord to rekindle our first love.

And may we bless our nation in him. AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2004. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.