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The Spirit and Mission

I Corinthians 12: 1 — 13

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 6 Feb, 2005

SINCE ABOUT 1965, there has been an explosion of Christian understanding of the work of the Holy Spirit. Yet, 40 years on, I am amazed how few Christians really know what they have.

  At the church I first attended, our pastor told us over and over that, if the Holy Spirit was taken from the church, everything should stop at once. But he said that most of what the church does would still continue. And, if that was the case, then the church was disobedient to Christ and working in its own strength rather than in the Holy Spirit’s power.

  I agree.

  And I add that, unless a church discovers how to work in the power of the Holy Spirit, it gradually withers and dies, because there is no life flowing in it.

  I have been a Christian since 1962. When I became a believer, at an open air meeting in Goulburn Street in Sydney, I was taken through John 3: 16 and asked if I believed in Jesus. And I was given a booklet called, The Reason Why. That is not a very effective start on a Christian life.

  Very soon, I became very dissatisfied. I was not dissatisfied with Jesus, but I was dissatisfied with my knowledge of him. I was dissatisfied with my spirituality. I was restless and unhappy.

  Of course, a lot of that unhappiness came from other factors. I didn’t realise that I was inclined to depression and often felt defeated and trapped by circumstances.

  But I am also quite sure that much of my unhappiness was related to not knowing who I was in Christ, it was related to an inadequate understanding of my privilege in Him.

  I really want you all to know that we have a standing, a position in Christ.

  I want you all to know about the Holy Spirit and his power.

  I want you to become confident and able to do all the things you are called to do.

BAPTISED

  The first thing we all must know is that every true Christian believer is baptised by the Holy Spirit into the one Body of Christ.

  We read that in our passage:

For we were all baptised by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

  But what does it mean to be baptised by the Holy Spirit?

  In Biblical times, the most common kind of baptism happened in the woolwash.

  If you have never seen shearing, you might not understand what happened. The shearer drives the points of the shears close to the sheep’s skin, and he begins cutting. The idea is to take all the wool off like a big wooly mat. And, if the shearer does his job properly, that is just how the wool comes off. Someone picks it up in a bundle, and takes it to the sorting table. Then he or she grips it by one edge and spreads it out on the table in much the same way as you would spread a tablecloth. That mat of wool just clings together.

  It’s got a lot of grease in it, that mat of wool. And the grease holds a lot of dirt. So the wool has to be washed, and that can be done just by soaking it in running water.

  In Greek times, they used to baptise the wool in water. That was the term they used.

  Christians picked up the same term. When someone was dunked in the water like a sheep’s fleece, they were “baptised.”

  So the early Christians thought about cleansing when they thought about baptism.

  But a more important idea was that baptism had to do with being made useful.

  That wool was too greasy and dirty to use just as it came off the sheep. But once it was washed, the wool could be pulled out and spun and woven into cloth and all kinds of useful things could be made from it.

  So, while cleansing was part of the idea of baptism, a far more powerful idea was the one of starting on a process, the idea of beginning in the Lord.

  Baptism is the great symbol of initiation. It is the great sign of entry.

  And the primary baptism for the Christian is the Holy Spirit baptism which comes at the moment of faith.

  As soon as you believe in Jesus, as soon as you surrender to him, his Spirit is poured out on you, you are immersed in the Spirit, your life in the realm of the Spirit begins.

  I have some good friends who are Penecostal. And I have some sympathy with what they are saying. But I am not Pentecostal in my theology. They say that you need a baptism in the Holy Spirit after conversion to equip you for ministry. That is not what the Bible says. Holy Spirit baptism comes the moment you believe.

  It’s like a little while after I was converted, when I was baptised in water.

  I have seen people coming out of the water of baptism positively glowing. They say, “Wow! That was a great experience!”

  Baptism wasn’t a great experience for me.

  I was a bit scared, actually, because I knew my father didn’t want me to get baptised, and I was thinking more about the possible conflict ahead than about any exciting new sensation from being put under water.

  Baptism was nailing my colours to the mast, declaring exactly where I stood, and expecting that the results would not be pleasant.

  Later on, I began to understand better what that act of baptism really meant to me. It became more vital to me in retrospect than it was at the time.

  And, for many Christians, the Holy Spirit’s baptism is more meaningful later in their Christian experience than it is at the moment when it happens. That’s where my Pentecostal friends are right.

  But get it very clear in your heads and in your growing experience of Christ, that the Bible is totally true when it says,

8 Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God.

⁹ You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.

  If you belong to Christ by faith in him, you have his Spirit within you; if you don’t have his Spirit within you, you don’t belong to him.

FILLED

  While I think my Pentecostal friends have gotten their terminology muddled, and while I believe that that muddle has some unfortunate consequences in other areas of their faith and practice, I believe they are almost right at one point, where they say that we all need a baptism in the Holy Spirit after our conversion.

  We don’t need baptism, because we are baptised; but we do need an infilling of the Holy Spirit to activate our relationship with the Spirit of God. Many Christians never discover that dimension.

  It’s a like the latest Windows XP. Some of you here will know just what I mean, others won’t. That’s OK. Windows XP is the operating system that actually makes a computer work.

  You have to copy Windows to a computer, or all that happens is that the computer will issue you with a list of detail about what sort of computer it is, and then it will sit there telling you that it doesn’t know what to do.

  But you have to make Windows work. First you have to type in the installation number that came with the installation disk. If you can’t tell it that number, it doesn’t even install.

  It’s much the same with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is real. He will touch you and convict you of your sin and of the possibility of righteousness and the certainty of Judgment. He will show you the crucified Christ and reveal the resurrection to you.

  But he will not enter your life until you have an installation code; he will not come into your life without your personal faith in Christ.

  However, at the moment you believe, he comes in; because that’s how the Holy Spirit is. He is the operating system to make our life in Christ work. Faith in Jesus is the authorisation for the Spirit to install.

  But you don’t all know about computers.

  Here’s another illustration. Jesus talked about the plants in a vineyard, and he said,

I am the vine, you are the branches.

  By faith we are engrafted into the vinestock. How do we share the life of the vine? It’s by the life sap of the Holy Spirit flowing through the vinestock and us.

  The Holy Spirit makes Christ present and real to us.

  Going back to Windows XP... you can install it and get it running, but that will only last for 30 days. You have to contact Microsoft and get them to activate your copy of Windows. It needs an activation code for that particular computer, or else it stops working.

  And we Christians eventually stop working if the Holy Spirit’s presence isn’t activated in us.

  He’s there, but he isn’t fully operational.

  And that is in your hands.

  In Ephesians 5, Paul tells us,

18 Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.

  This is a commandment: be filled with the Spirit.

  You can choose: be filled, or remain unfilled.

  The overwhelming picture in the Bible is that the filling of the Spirit always has an active result.

  For example, when the sorcerer, Elymas, opposed Paul at Paphos in Cyprus, we read,

8 But Elymas the sorcerer (for that is what his name means) opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul from the faith. ⁹ Then Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked straight at Elymas and said, ¹⁰ “You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right!...

  And Paul declared that Elymas would be blind for a time to show God’s power, and immediately Elymas could not see.

  Or when Peter and John were hauled before the Sanhedrin, we read that Peter was filled with the Holy Spirit when he spoke boldly about the healing power of Jesus.

  An infilling of the Holy Spirit enables you to speak God’s word boldly, to declare God’s judgments, or to mediate the healing power of Jesus to someone. And that’s just for starters!

  And it has to start somewhere, with that first activation, which, like everyhing in our Christian life, comes by faith.

  But first, I want to talk about some hindrances to infilling with the Spirit.

HINDERED

  When things don’t work as they are supposed to, you have to trouble–shoot. Generally, I find that the problem is that it isn’t set up properly, or it isn’t being used properly.

  It’s much the same with the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

  In Ephesians 4:30, Paul writes,

do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, with whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

  It is easy to not have the Holy Spirit installed properly, because our sin has made him sad.

  It’s like when you put a table down and it rocks, because you didn’t clear rubbish from under one leg.

  That uncleared rubbish in our lives keeps the Holy Spirit from doing his proper work. Paul mentions falsehood, theft, careless, unkind talk, bitterness, rage, malice and a whole lot of other things.

  The more of those you let into your life, the less stable your experience of the Holy Spirit becomes.

  The other warning is about misusing the Spirit.

  In I Thess 5, Paul writes,

¹⁹ Do not put out the Spirit’s fire; ²⁰ do not treat prophecies with contempt. ²¹ Test everything. Hold on to the good. ²² Avoid every kind of evil

  The exact problem in Thessalonika was that some people were going overboard about the second coming and the end of the world, while others refused even to listen to prophetic words. As far as Paul was concerned, both were wrong.

  Furthermore, they created a third problem. Some people who felt theSpirit prompting them to speak were remaining silent so they wouldn’t offend the people who resisted prophecy or join with the ratbag fringe.

  So the Spirit’s promptings were being misused, resisted, distorted. Those are sins!

  And we need to repent, we need to confess those sins, if we are to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

  If you are hurting yourself or other people, if you are rebelling against God, if you are throwing water in any way on the Spirit’s fire, then you have to acknowledge it and repent of it, and ask for God’s forgiveness, if ever you are to fnd the Spirit’s fullness.

RELEASED

  We can release the Spirit in our lives by repentant faith.

  As Paul says in Romans, God’s kind of righteousness is by faith from beginning to end. And the work of the Spirit is part of that work of making the righteousness of Christ real in our lives.

  So,

• If you trust Christ as Lord and Saviour...

• If you repent of all known hindrances to experiencing the Spirit’s fullness...

• If you ask to be filled, and trust Christ our Lord to fill you with the Spirit...

then you have what you asked for. It’s as simple as that. Thank God, trust him regardless of how you feel, and begin living in the assumption that you have what you asked for. The evidence will follow!

REASON

  Why do we need the Spirit’s fullness?

  It’s simple. We need him because he equips us to minister. Jesus himself didn’t begin his public ministry until he had been baptised by the Holy Spirit. Immediately, he was tempted and tested, but he emerged the victor. Many of us will experience the same if we truly desire to obey and be filled.

  But it was in the power of the Spirit that Jesus returned and began his ministry of spiritual power. He will continue ministry through you, too. He will give you gifts to minister with, and wisdom to do it, and power to make a difference.

May we all find that to be true,

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2005. 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.)