Today on Real Life Radio. Because the Holy Spirit is teaching us that God has gifted each of us. To minister in this body. Or maybe you're visiting tonight, and God is calling you to. to go back to your church wherever you might be from and to serve and to minister.
Okay. This is real life. Welcome to Real Life Radio with Pastor Jack Hibbs. I'm David Jay, thanking you for joining us today as we listen, learn, and are challenged by God's Word, the Bible. Hey everybody, we got our first time ever actually devotional.
We have a 40-day devotional called Watching Waiting. 40 days of walking you through biblical passages that excite you and prepare you for the soon coming of Jesus Christ. Watching Waiting is a 40-day devotional that's all tied to biblical prophecy. Watching Waiting. It is our featured resource for this month and it's available for a gift of any amount at jackhibbs.com/slash real radio.
Jackhibbs.com/slash real radio. On today's edition of Real Life Radio, Pastor Jack now continues his series called 1 Samuel with a message called Church Growth 101, Part 2. Samuel of the Old Testament, of course, was the last judge of Israel, and he was the first of its prophets.
So here in chapter 16, now we'll continue to draw lessons from the story of David. You see, when Samuel anointed David to be the king of Israel, the Spirit of the Lord came upon him. To be filled with the Holy Spirit in strength and in power, it's our greatest purpose. Church growth is not merely about numbers, but that the Holy Spirit is welcome in the body of Christ.
So today Pastor Jack teaches us that as true believers, the Holy Spirit was given to us to equip us for ministry and to edify the church. Serving others really should be our passion no matter if it's digging ditches or mission work or helping wherever we're called.
Now with his message called Church Growth 101 Part 2, is Pastor and Bible teacher Jack Hibbs. Turn if you would, just actually momentarily. To 1 Samuel chapter 16, because we are using verse 13 as we've come to it in our verse-by-verse study of Samuel. Uh we have come to an An unscheduled stop, I have to confess. And 1 Samuel 16, verse 13, where it says, then Samuel.
So Member Samuel. The Kingmaker, Samuel. Took the horn of oil and anointed David in the midst of his brothers. And the Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward. And so Samuel arose and went to Ramah.
The Spirit of the Lord came upon David from that time on. There was a great move of God in his life. For any one of us who know And loves and enjoys the Lord, you want. God to come upon you in your life. You want God to use you, you want God to manifest His power in you.
And that is a great thing. In fact, I believe that the church has suffered more violence From itself than anything outside. When I say that, I mean this. I believe the church has afflicted itself more than that the world could ever afflict it by or of. Because the church has, by and large, settled.
For a very mediocre type Christian life. Very Void of power. And we know from David's life that there was great power. In his life for the kingdom of God. And if you and I believe this book, if we live this far removed and with the book complete before us.
We have much more promises, many more. than David ever had. We've got more of the promises. Than John the Baptist had. We've got more than what Paul had.
We have now the complete Word of God before us. Think about it. And yet, it could be argued tonight that certainly in the Western world, the church is more asleep, the church is more lazy than ever before. And that is an unfortunate thing. I don't think God wants that.
I don't think that's the purpose of God. And it is. The reality of the Lord wanting to do more in our lives excites me. There's always something. Is this not true in our lives?
There's always something concerning our walk with God that maybe, maybe this could be the next thing where something really breaks open for the kingdom. Do you feel like that? Do you walk like that? It's almost as though And it's that strange Christian thing that He's done in our lives. We're not thirsty anymore because He's filled us, but we are thirsty.
We're not hungry anymore, but we are hungry. We're no longer seeking some fulfillment. We've got that in Christ. But now that He has fulfilled His will in our lives and He's working in our lives, now we want to see more of Him. We're longing to see.
What? More people filled with God. More of what God has recorded in His Word done. And so, if so long ago the Spirit of God came upon David and he rose up and did great things, like kill giants. Right?
He slew bears, he slew lions. That guy was amazing. I love this guy. We should do, honestly, there should be come a time where you just do a character life study on David. You want to know why?
He was an amazing guy. He wrote songs. Doesn't that sound kind of feminine? He wrote songs. He poured out his heart and he walked around in the middle of the night looking up at the sky, and he was just writing songs.
And while he's writing songs, if you heard a move in the bushes, he'd pull out a sword and slice the enemy's head right off. You know that? And then, in fact, after he sliced the enemy's head off, he would just write a new song about: Lord, how great thou art that thou gavest me the power to slice off their heads. And Lord, you are the one who gives me the strength, really, as he said, to break. the enemy's teeth off in their mouth.
Only David can make that sound so good. He was an amazing guy. He knew everything about war. He knew everything about.
Songwriting. He was very, very sensitive on one side, and the guy was an absolute incredible.
Soldier on the other, a great commander of God's forces, a guy whose heart was very tender toward the Lord. It appears that David Even in the midst of his sin with Bathsheba, he was never a calloused man. He tried to hide his sin, that doesn't mean he was calloused. And I am not going to sit back and judge David on why and how he hid his sin. Maybe he's trying to protect the kingdom by hiding his sin.
I don't know. But his heart was tender. God lays them low? And David writes a song. Amazing.
The power of God came upon him. And so That power manifested by that of the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit, as we know in the New Testament, Has been given that the church might have gifts to minister one to another. And without you and I ministering the gifts of the Holy Spirit in our lives one toward another, we will be spastic as a church and spastic as a people. In fact, a Christian, I'm not pointing at you.
In fact, I went like this. See? Kind of went off over to here. If you, as a Christian, are not operating in the gift or gifts that God has given you by the Holy Spirit. then quite frankly, um you're spastic in the kingdom work.
God wants you to be viable, active, knowing what to do. He's given you a call in your life. And you ought to know what that call is. That to me is exciting. I love that challenge.
I do not yet know all that God has called me to do. He said, Jack, are you kidding? I mean, he's called you to be a pastor. He's called me to be a pastor, but. There is still in my heart a longing.
That is not going away a longing for the foreign mission field. Ever since 1992, I have longed to be deeper and more involved in the foreign mission field. Will God ever allow me to go and be? Pastoring in the foreign field, I do not know. But I know that through that passion he's put in my heart, that I get excited seeing other people go and helping them go.
And I want to believe that I'm generous in sending funds to help them go. But what has God called you to do? Whatever that thing might be, I trust you're in the middle of it and walking in it as the works. He has ordained before the foundations of the world that we should walk in them. That's happening in your life, but even still, there's that excitement and there's that joy of what God might do next that we cannot explain.
That is an exciting thing. The Holy Spirit has been given. For many things, but one of the great functions of the Holy Spirit is to equip us for ministry. Ephesians chapter 4, 11 to 13. And maybe tonight someone's here.
You're here tonight and God is calling you. And he's been stirring up your heart about a gift or gifts of the Holy Spirit.
Well, consider these. Ephesians 4.11. It says there that the Holy Spirit is working in the body of Christ for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry. If you're a Christian, He's equipped you to work among each other. For the edifying of the body, see the gifts you're given that we might be edified, and that's going to happen through you and through me, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God to a complete or perfect or maturing man.
To the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. This is a great little verse or verses. Because the Holy Spirit is teaching us that God has gifted each of us. To minister in this body. Or maybe you're visiting tonight and God is calling you to.
to go back to your church wherever you might be from and to serve and to minister.
And people who do that out of Uh Oh, being forced to or coerced to. You can always tell they're grumbling, they're. Complaining about it, oh man, and you know, it's like you see them do their thing, and that's the last thing you ever want to do. Man, whew. But when you see somebody who's called by God and empowered by God to do what they're doing, God does it through them in such a way that you want to do it.
You want to say, hey, scoot over there. I mean, there's some people. There's some guys I've seen guys use shovels. And they make it, they just know how to move it. I do not know how to move it.
They're just going and they're moving and the dirt's flying, and I make three digs, and my back hurts, and I'm twisting my wrist, and I look like a dork, you know, trying to pull this thing off, and I don't have it. But there's some people who just do that and they know how to do it. In the spiritual sense, there's people that you see doing a certain gift, and it's so exciting because if you see that, you go, Man, I'd like to do that. If that's true in your life, for many of you, If you see something going on, That the Spirit of God is doing, and you're saying, Man, I would like to do that. It could be God speaking to you and encouraging you and edifying you through the ministry of others.
Some of you in this church, thank God for you. You get excited about people praying. You want to join them in prayer. And you enjoy interceding. We must have those people here.
There's people who come to church here for the first time and they see guys out there doing parking lot and they say, hey, wow, I could do parking lots. And they look in the Bible and there's no gift, you know, oh, I have the gift of parking. No, that's not a gift, but you may have the gift of helps. That is a gift. Or some other gift may develop from your step outward.
God will lead us one foot at a time. See, we're little stinkers and we try to manipulate God.
Okay, God, I'm willing to serve you. Here I am. Just use me. And we wait for about five minutes. And we say, God, okay, use me this way.
You know, Billy Graham's getting pretty old, saw him on TV the other night. Looks like he's going to need a replacement.
Okay, God. I'll do it. That's not how that happens. I hope, I pray. And I remember just a couple of three weeks ago, six or seven hundred of you stood up to receive the baptism in the Holy Spirit.
That's great. But what's been happening since? Remember, are you still asking Him? Keep asking Him and then be looking? See, it always first begins with seeking him.
Jesus said, seek. What? You'll you'll find knock, it's gonna be opened. Ask. Listen.
You, yeah, you keep coming. to him. Say, Lord, what would you have me to do? And then the moment you do that, see, you're taking that step. And asking the Lord, open my eyes.
And the needs are there. You're listening to Real Life with Pastor Jack Hibbs. To learn more about this ministry or to catch up on some previous episodes, go to jackhibbs.com. That's jackhibbs.com. And now let's get back to today's message.
Once again, here's Pastor Jack. I'm looking around this body right now and I see people who are in ministry. And you guys are serving your hearts out, and many of you would say, we need help. You would say to me, you know, Pastor Jack, make an announcement for our work that we're doing here at the end. We need help.
And yet there's probably, in fact, I know this to be true. If you disagree, don't tell me, because I don't want to hear it. I know how God works in a church, and it's this way. He never generates. The need.
Without first putting the people in the body to meet the need. He never runs in the deficit. He doesn't run like our government or like maybe your checkbook. He doesn't do that.
So I'm looking around and there's great needs. It's amazing. Tom Jordan. The work that you're doing, reaching the The homeless. Downtown LA There's always needs in this area.
Doug and Carolyn reaching the truck drivers across the United States, always a need. There's always a need. And whenever there's a need in this body, I know. God has put someone there. or a group to meet that need.
It's exciting. It's awesome. The work of the Holy Spirit is to build us up that we might be unified, I think, out of all the things. that you could point at The Holy Spirit doing in somebody's life, the bottom line will always be that the church, watch this. The church is unified.
And that's important because watch. God will see to it. And don't you love how he pastors his church? He knows every one of us. And he's so wise that he will give every believer specifically the gift or gifts that are needed to make this church work.
And he's very strategic about that. Having done that, Even though you and I operate independently in the gift, The operation of the gift must be church related or else It's nothing. It must be Producing the unity of the body, edifying, building one another up. Isn't that neat? I may have the gift of teaching, but it's to unify this body together.
The bottom line is to unify us together. You may have the gift of tongues. You may have the gift to interpret those tongues. What's it for? To unify the body.
And when you begin to see the gifts of the Holy Spirit that way, You're gonna lose a lot of the shackles and a lot of the chains that have been wrapped around your mind for fear of what's happened. in your past, or whatever it might be, or church abuse in the area of gifts. But to think for a moment as the gift of prophecy. Yes, the word prophecy means one who tells before it comes to pass, and it also means one who puts forth. the word of God in a very Certain way.
So it's very, very common for a pastor, teacher, or even an evangelist. To have the prophetic gift of even speaking something futuristic, though he may not even be aware of it. But you might have been raised up in a church to where, oh my goodness, oh no, we we had a prophet in our church and just when the pastor was about ready to get to his final point, this guy would stand up and say, Thus saith the Lord, you know, and everybody would like, you know, freak out and Well Who's to say it was the Lord? If that pastor was preaching and teaching under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, I do not believe the Holy Spirit would interrupt himself.
Well Pastor, I was at a church and You know, we were just kind of praying and And uh everybody started speaking in tongues.
Well Again, 1 Corinthians 14 makes it very clear that's not supposed to happen. We need to be careful that what we're doing is to the edifying of the body, not to the promotion of someone. I think those of you who have the verbal gifts, as they're called in many of the commentaries, run kind of a danger. We run a danger because it's verbal. And oh, you know, we've put, we esteem highly the position of someone who's talking.
When in reality that can be very dangerous. And the other thing is, if you really read the word carefully, Paul seems to indicate that the Lord picks the foolish and the most idiotic ones to fulfill those spots. And I think that's a built-in safety device. Yeah. God's gifts are given.
That the body might be unified. And he does that, that he might bring about his will. Ephesians chapter 1, verse 3 says, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in heavenly places. Note this, this is great. Obviously, the word is given to those of us who dwell on the earth.
But positionally, he says, Blessed are those. Blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies. Is as it is in the Greek, heavenly places. Positionally, we have been gifted by the Holy Spirit, but practically we're living in this world. And here's the big link.
The Holy Spirit So to speak. descends that gift down into our hearts. And we are the ones to be practically living out what God's will is in our lives and in the lives of the world around us by serving, by being. Unified, and that unity produces spiritual success. I underline spiritual success.
The spiritual gifts create Spiritual. unity. Remember this, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are spiritual gifts. Gifts. To create and to establish a spiritual unity.
They're not a sideshow. They're not some kind of a circus. And yet the body who practices the Gifts of the Holy Spirit will be a strong, healthy, Body that's alive. You say, well, Jack, and I want to get personal with you guys tonight because I don't even know if we're going to tape tonight. That's how personal I want to get with you tonight.
How's that? Plus I really like when you so when something happens, you're really cool. And Your friend who was going to come but decided to sleep in on this. cold and blustery night.
Well what happened? This was the message, or God was doing this, or this person, whatever. Oh, I'll get the tape. No, they didn't tape it. I kinda like that sometimes.
But that's the carnal part of me. Yeah. Remember, we used to sing that song, We'll Be Blessed Because We Came. Remember that old song? Yeah, that's true.
That's a good song. But um Listen, here's the deal tonight with with with what I'm just going to be looking at briefly. I want tonight, I want to I want to We really have tonight. Matter. In this area of The Holy Spirit coming upon as it was with David, and maybe tonight you've got some things to ask, or you've got some questions, or you've got some concerns.
And if they're not answered in what I'm talking about right here, we're not going to be going very long tonight. And I want to have you respond if you'd like. I want you to know something. The gifts of the Holy Spirit The Bible says were given without God taking them back. All of them.
Every one of them. And I know the argument.
Well no, maybe, you know, some of the gifts only exist today. You have to confess that everyone who says that, if you listen to them long enough, they have a real absolute white-knuckle panic experience with the gifts that they can't explain. Or the gifts that they saw growing up in an abusive set, in an abusive way, place. They can't explain it, so they panic about it. But, my friend, regardless of your panic, I have to tell you, the Bible is very clear.
It teaches the perpetuity. of gifts. A continuance since the day that they were given, and in fact, an increasing. Because didn't the scripture say through the prophet Joel, which Peter quotes on the day of Pentecost, this is what was spoken of by the prophet Joel, that in the last days, We're 2,000 years. Into the last days.
Sons and daughters will prophesy, see dreams, visions, right? Old men are not the pouring out of the Spirit.
So I want you to be thinking tonight and Don't panic, we're not gonna... scare you and Weird you out. But if you have any questions and I want them answered, but listen carefully. Ephesians 4, verse 3 says, Endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit in a bond of peace, endeavoring, sweat at it. We're to sweat at keeping unified.
Boy, that's something good, isn't it? I mean think about it. A family. Think about a family. And I see the church much like a house.
I really do. Does the house always get along?
So if you have teenagers, does a house ever get along?
Well, does the church always get along? No. Boy, the better we understand that, the more we can relax because so many people have got this concept: I'm going to go to the perfect church.
Well you don't don't go there if it's gonna be perfect. Just keep it perfect and don't go there. There's no perfect get There's no perfect church Pastor and Bible teacher Jack Hibbs, here on Real Life Radio, and his message called Church Growth 101, Part 2. You know, this message is part of Pastor Jack's series called 1 Samuel. A series that highlights the prophet Samuel who was called by God during one of Israel's darkest times to bring the people back to a heart of true worship.
And will continue on the next edition of Real Life Radio. Daniel Cohen here from Israel. If you love Pastor Jack Hibbs' fearless approach to teaching God's word, you'll love the Real Life Network. It's built for warriors who want the truth. God's truth.
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That's reallife devotions at jackhibbs.com. This program is made possible by the generous contributions of you, our listeners. Visit us at jackhibbs.com. That's jackhibbs.com. Until next time, Pastor Jack Hibbs and all of us here at Real Life Radio wish for you solid and steady growth in Christ and in His Word.
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