Ours for the Asking, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. It is as you understand the glory of the God who gave Himself for you in the Gospel that then all these appetites are produced in you. The Spirit of God transforms your appetites so that Christianity is not a have-to religion. Christianity becomes a get-to religion because you desire. You seek God because you desire it.

You follow God because you crave Him. Welcome to Summit Life with J.D. Greer, the pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh, Durham, North Carolina.

I'm Molly Vidovitch. As Christians, don't we often wonder how exactly we're supposed to become more like Jesus? Is it by reading the Bible more or getting an accountability partner or even volunteering at church?

Those are definitely good steps that lead us in the right direction, but truthfully, they're only dealing with surface level issues. Today Pastor J.D. explains how the Holy Spirit works to transform our hearts and our desires, changing us from the inside out. Here's Pastor J.D.

with a message titled, Ours for the Asking. There is a verse that I want us to pray together this week. It is Habakkuk chapter 3, verse 2. O Lord, says Habakkuk, I have heard the report of you and your work, O Lord, do I fear.

In other words, I'm familiar in theory with the power that you have. Look at the next phrase. In this in the midst of the years, my years, revive it.

In the midst of my years, make it known. So in wrath, wrath is what we deserve. In wrath, remember mercy.

Let us have familiarity with it. There are three primary things I'm gonna try to show you about that verse. Number one, that I'm gonna try to show you, number one, that every major spiritual awakening in the Bible was connected to an intense time of prayer. Then number two, I'm gonna show you five things that the Holy Spirit does when he comes.

Then number three, I'm gonna give you a couple of examples of what this looks like in the Bible. Number one, the connection between prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit. The connection between prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit. Every major spiritual awakening, all of them in the Bible, are connected to intense times of prayer.

Intense times of prayer. Joshua 24, that was a time when Israel was reawakened and renewed in the covenant, and it starts out Joshua 24, one, saying that they all stood before God. The book of Judges has a number of spiritual awakenings of Israel, and they always go like this. Israel wanders from God, they grow cold, they grow apathetic, they get in a lot of trouble, and so they cry out to God in desperation, and God raises up a champion. That's Old Testament. New Testament. That shows you over the last several weeks that Luke, the author of the Gospel of Luke, seems to go out of his way to show you that the Holy Spirit's power comes in the midst of prayer.

Even with Jesus, when the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus, it says, Luke 3 21, that after he was baptized, he stood praying. Acts chapter four. Right? At this point, they're dealing with some pretty intense opposition, their courage is starting to flag a little bit, so what do they do? They get it back together in that upper room, and they pray, and it says, that's 4 31, when they had prayed, then the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continue to speak the word of God with boldness.

All right? So here's number two. Five things that the Holy Spirit does when he's present. Things that only he can do.

Number one. Number one, he convicts. John 16 89, Jesus said, when he, the Holy Spirit comes, he will convict the world concerning sin, concerning righteousness, and concerning judgment.

All right? So what does that mean? What that means is that he takes those things, sin, righteousness, and judgment, and he makes them real. He makes sin seem disgusting. He makes Jesus and his righteousness become beautiful. He makes judgment seem imminent. Before, there might be an knowledge of those things, but there's kind of a separation from them.

You know about them theoretically, but suddenly they become real and overwhelming to you. Here's number two. Number two, he creates awe. He creates a sense of awe among the people. You see, in Acts 2, Acts 2 43, when the Spirit of God came into the church, a great sense of fear and awe came upon every soul. By the way, every soul means people inside the church and outside the church. Before the Holy Spirit comes, there might be a knowledge of doctrines. There might be external conformity to Christian ways, but when the Spirit of God comes, those things are engulfed in a sense of awe and worship that gives you a holy hush before God that makes it altogether different.

I learned something this week. In the Old Testament, there is a phrase that gets repeated over and over and over again that is core to somebody really knowing God, and that is this phrase, the fear of the Lord. Proverbs 1 7, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Psalm 103 verse 17, the Lord's eyes are upon those who fear him and on those who keep his covenant. Fear, it's just dominant throughout the Old Testament.

Here's the odd thing. In the New Testament, you hardly ever see that phrase. You can find it every once in a while, but it's not nearly the dominant place it is in the Old Testament.

Why? Old Testament scholar John Murray says because that phrase is interchangeable with the fullness of the Spirit. So that's the phrase you see repeated in the New Testament because to be filled with the Spirit is to be filled with a sense of awe in the presence of God. Fear of the Lord, full of the Spirit, both refer to a profoundly spiritual encounter with the presence of God that goes way beyond simple intellectual beliefs or external religious observances.

It has to do with a sense of awe in God's presence, an awareness of his largeness, a spirit of worship, and a taste of his glory. Number three, he transforms appetites. He transforms appetites. I'm giving you this verse frequently here. Philippians 2 13, it is God who works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Watch, it's not just the Holy Spirit that gives you the power to do the works of God, it's the Holy Spirit that gives you the desire to do the works of God. He gives you not just the power to do it, he also gives you the will to do it.

He creates new taste in you so that you begin to desire God. I love that image of tastes because, you know, I mean you can think my decisions about what I eat are free choices, right? I mean nobody tells me this is what I have to eat.

They conform to my taste. For example, my wife and I, I love Thai food. I just, mentioning Thai food makes me begin to salivate. You know, a roasted duck with red curry, tom yum soup, all that stuff. I mean I walk into a Thai restaurant and I feel like, I'm like this is a taste of the new millennium. This is where we're all headed in heaven. When Jesus welcomes us around the throne, it's going to be Thai food and chopsticks, bring it on, amen, have power of the Holy Ghost, all right?

So that's, I love it. My wife finds it disgusting, if you're Thai, no offense, but she just doesn't like it. You know, she has other tastes. You walk in and give me a choice between Thai food and something else, I'm always going to choose Thai food because I love it. When I was in Southeast Asia, served there for two years, there was a fruit there that some of you have heard about. It was a fruit called durian. Anybody ever heard of durian? Anybody ever tasted durian? How many of you like durian? Put your hands up. There's just a few of us that are spirit filled in the room, okay? All right, yeah, right over here.

You put your hands down. Durian is a fruit that honestly, when I first got to Southeast Asia, it is the most disgusting smell that you probably have ever encountered in something that you're supposed to eat. It smells, and I kid you not, it smells like a mixture of Captain Crunch and armpit. If you could mix those two, that's what it smells like. And I remember for a year being like, this is the most disgusting. What's wrong with you people? Why would you eat that?

And then the strangest thing happens consistently to people after they spend about a year there. Not everybody, because not everybody's elect, but after about a year, about a year, I noticed that that smell that had been so repulsive began to be appealing to me. And then I tried it and I tasted it. And I'm telling you, after I got hooked on it, I'm like, that's the greatest stuff.

That is the greatest fruit ever. Now, you and I could both be in the presence of that. It would be repulsive to you. It would be desirable to me because our tastes have changed. You see?

Yeah, I mean, you can flip it around. What I hate, for example, is cottage cheese. That is a food from the devil.

Is it not? My roommate, thank you, testified. My roommate in college, my roommate in college, he loved cottage cheese. And he'd come in, you know, from a hard day, and he'd pour him a glass of buttermilk and cottage cheese.

Gross. You could put that in front of me a hundred times and I would never choose it, ever. What the Spirit of God does is he takes appetites and he makes them distasteful, and he makes other appetites suddenly come alive. The reason that's important is because some of you feel like Christianity is a have-to religion. You have to do this, and you have to say this, and you have to give this, and you have to go there.

That just shows you've never really encountered the Spirit of God. I don't have to eat a Ruth's Chris steak. I don't have to kiss my wife. I don't have to take a nap. I get to do all those things. You're like, in that order? Okay, yes, all right. Those are my tastes.

Those are my desires. What the Spirit of God does when he comes in is he recreates new desires. That, by the way, is the theme of the entire book of Galatians. The entire book of Galatians, the theme is that the Spirit of God does in your heart what the demands of the law never could. The Spirit of God produces in your heart love, joy, peace, patience, and five other ones I can't remember off the top of my head. He produces all those things in your heart.

The law, the demands of the law could tell you to do those things, but the demands of the law can never give you the desire to do those things. The Spirit of God births those things in you. The way that he does that is not by giving you a list of things that you're supposed to do for God.

He births those things in you by helping you understand what God has done for you. That's why the other theme of the book of Galatians is justification by faith because it is as you understand the glory of the God who gave himself for you in the gospel that then all these appetites are produced in you. The Spirit of God transforms your appetites so that Christianity is not a have-to religion. Christianity becomes a get-to religion because you desire. You seek God because you desire it.

You follow God because you crave him. By the way, this is what I pray for my children. I remember when I first started out, I thought fullness of the Spirit is something you only pray for a believer. Then I read, I was reading in the Gospel of Luke, and I'm pretty sure this is okay.

If your heresy meter goes off, then send me a note later. It says about John the Baptist in Luke, the early Gospels of Luke, that he was, get this, filled with the Spirit from his mother's womb. That means that kid was born full of the Spirit. And I'm like, I kind of want that for my kids because I want them to develop tastes from an early age for righteousness.

I want them to develop a taste for God. I used to, I remember I used to listen to people tell their testimony, and I thought the coolest testimonies were like the really dramatic ones. You know, where I was on drugs, and I'd been in prison five times, and I'd, you know, as a prostitute, and I was just about to kill somebody when a voice from heaven spoke to me and told me stop that, you know, and I thought, wow, that's so awesome. Wouldn't it be cool if I had a testimony like that? And I was, I thought my testimony was kind of boring. I was like, I just, you know, none of that stuff that was there, and I thought those were the cooler testimonies, and then I had kids. And I thought that's not the testimony I want for my kids.

Here is to a generation of Summit children growing up with boring testimonies, right? Let's say I was born, and God's Spirit was upon me from the time I was a kid, and I started to develop a taste for righteousness, and sin always seemed stupid to me, right? That's when the Spirit of God comes into my children, and I'm praying that for them that they would be filled with the Spirit, all right? Number four, number four, he manifests God's power. He manifests God's power. 1 Corinthians 14, Paul gives you a description of the Spirit-filled worship service, and he says that one of the characteristics is that an unbeliever, a guest, comes into contact with the church, with a small group, with an individual in the church, and the Spirit of God is on the members so strongly that they are speaking supernatural words of insight and prophecy into him or her, and it says, quote, the secrets of his heart are disclosed and falling on his face. He worships God and declares that God is really among you. Now, why does he do that?

Is it because of the guitar riff, where he's like, man, that's just the way all those instruments came together? It was awesome. It was powerful. God's here. Is it because of the careful and close logic, the eloquent speech of the pastor?

These things might be great, but they're not what he noted here. It's because the Spirit of God was so on the members of the church that they had insight into somebody's life that they wouldn't have any other way of knowing unless God had given it to them. Let me give you another dimension of this. Moses, speaking to the children of Israel, Deuteronomy 4-7, he's telling them what distinguishes them from the nations around them. How are the other nations going to know that God is real, that he's upon you? Deuteronomy 4-7, what great nation is there that has a God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us, his presence. Whenever we call upon him, that's how other nations know. But what I'm talking about, Summit, listen, is people coming into contact with you, with our church, and you having supernatural insight into their lives, knowing just what to pray, knowing just what to say in a manner that makes them say God is the only one that could have known that. He gave you insight and God exists, or you pray for them and God answers your prayers in a way that they say, wow, God was in that, and they realize his presence is upon you. And we're going to talk more about this.

We're going to do a whole week on it here in a couple of weeks. I got my PhD in systematic theology, and I've served all of my ministry and all my life in a Southern Baptist church. And I will tell you the Holy Spirit is, for the most part, despised in the religious academy, and he is altogether domesticated by the church. But he is desperately needed among the people of God today because he is what, listen, he is what brings this awakening. He is what brings the awareness in our community that we so long for.

There is nothing that can replace him, nothing. We're not talking about needing just a few more churches. We're all about planting churches, you know that. We're not about me preaching better sermons.

We're not about a new professor at Chapel Hill that can just articulate the reasons for the resurrection in a way that all the students will be convinced. All those things are great, but what we need is the Spirit of God because he alone does that. And that's, though he is despised in the academy and domesticated by the church, he is our desperate, he is our only hope. Number five, he empowers the church. He empowers the church.

This is something, again, we're going to get to more in a couple of weeks. But Paul says in Ephesians that the Holy Spirit gives, in the Holy Spirit, God gives gifts to his church, quote, to equip the Spirit of God and the saints for the work of the ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ. The Holy Spirit, when he comes into a church, empowers each of us so that we build one another up in the faith to maturity. In a Spirit-filled church, listen, everywhere you turn, you're being spoken to by God. In a Spirit-filled church, I mean, everywhere you turn, God's speaking through somebody, giving you reassurance. In a Spirit-filled church, God's speaking to you, giving you words of counsel and wisdom and guidance. How would you like to be in a place where everywhere you turn, at every point in your life, God himself is speaking to you and speaking into your life?

Would you like to be in a place like that? That doesn't come through powerful sermons. It comes through Spirit-filled church members, because he makes you the eyes and the ears and the mouth and the hands, so that everywhere we go, you can't come into contact in our church with anybody without being contacted by Jesus himself. You know, if you spend any time around here, you know that I'm a big fan of a guy named Tim Keller, and I quote him a lot, right? It's gotten to a place, I don't think I've told you this before, it's gotten to a place where I will sometimes, because I've read so much of what he's written and I've listened to so many of his sermons, that I will plagiarize him without even hearing him talk about a certain subject, because I just, I've read so much of it, I know what he's going to say about it. So there have been times that I will like work through a passage and I'll come up with what I think is a good insight on the passage, and then, then I'll go get his sermon on the same passage and I'll listen to it and be like, dang it, he said this like 35 years ago. And so I'm going to, you know, people are going to hear this and think I'm plagiarizing him once again, and that's not fair, because I didn't listen to it. But in fact, I told him this, I was like, I feel like I plagiarized you without even knowing it. You know, and I said, so I've told the church one time for all that anything insightful that I say may or may not end up going back to him.

And so if I could just give that one blanket statement, then we'll be okay. And he laughed and he said, he said, well, and he named the guy that he had done that with, he says a mentor of his that he kind of tended to plagiarize. When this, listen, when the spirit of God comes into you, you start to plagiarize Jesus, because you become so admiring of him, you start to know his mind so much that you begin to say what he would say and do what he would do to sort of instinctively and automatically. Plagiarism of Jesus is spiritual maturity. Plagiarism of Tim Keller is illegal, okay? But plagiarism of Jesus is spiritual maturity.

And that is what we desire in the church is that Jesus be plagiarized all over the place, all over the place, because we become the eyes and the hands and the ears and the feet of Jesus. Those are the five things only the Holy Spirit can do. I want them all.

I'm not going to lie to you. I want them in my life, I want them in my family, I want them in you. I want all of them, all of them. I want the Holy Spirit. You get those convicting, creating all, transforming appetites, manifesting God's power, and empowering our church. Now, my last section here, all right, quickly, is I'm going to give you a couple of biblical examples showing how the Holy Spirit, what it looks like when he comes into a church, all right? I'll give you one from the Old Testament, one from the New.

Which do you want first? New it is. Acts 7, verse 54. Stephen. Stephen is not an apostle.

He's just a regular church member. He is in a place where he begins to testify to Jesus, and he's in front of a lot of the religious leaders, a lot of the political leaders, and he basically tells them that the reason they don't believe in Jesus is because their hearts are hard, and the reason that their fathers didn't believe in Jesus is because their hearts were hard, and for all of Jewish history, their hearts have been hard, and that's why they've rejected and killed the prophets. Just for the record, that's not going to be a popular message in any culture, right?

Your whole generation, he says, has been hard-hearted. So, verse 54. When they had heard these things, they were enraged, and the ESV is so boring, ground their teeth at him. The KJV says, gnashed their teeth at him.

I'm not really even sure what that means, but it sounds nasty, right? So, they gnashed their teeth at him, but Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God, and he said, behold. He said, behold, I see the heavens open and the Son of Man, Jesus, standing at the right hand of God. Now, question, do you think that last statement helped or hurt his cause with those people?

It didn't turn out well for Stephen. He got stoned right after this, all right? Tim Keller says, to bring him up, says that this provides a pattern for being filled with the Spirit.

You see three kind of stages in there, all right? Stephen looks up into heaven and gazes into heaven. His eyes are filled with the glory of God, and he is full of the Holy Spirit and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

By the way, Trinity, right there. He sees the throne of God, he sees Jesus standing, and he's filled with the Spirit of God. Now, what is it that he saw specifically about Jesus?

There's a little detail in there you shouldn't skip over, because it's unusual. What position is Jesus in? Standing, that's right. Jesus is standing. What's unusual about that is every other place in the New Testament where Jesus is by the throne of God, he's always seated. He's sat down at the right hand of God. What you see happening is you see all of these leaders in hatred of Stephen picking up stones, gnashing their teeth, calling him a fool, about to kill him. Stephen looks up into heaven and he sees Jesus.

How awesome would this have been? Stand to his feet and turn to God and say, they call him a heretic. I call him mine. The religious leaders are telling him he's a fool and a heretic, but the prince of theology is saying he belongs to me. And Stephen sees that, and he is filled with a sense of God for him. He is filled with a sense of God's glory, and then he turns and proclaims God in boldness to those that are listening. As you pray, God opens your eyes to see his glory. That's the fullness of the Spirit, and that life-giving presence only comes through prayer.

You're listening to Summit Life, and if you'd like to hear this message again or share it with a friend, visit us at JDGrier.com. J.D., something that we've noticed is that while most Christians believe the Bible is true, so many of us don't really spend time studying it. We prefer to have a pastor walking us through it, but our goal here at Summit Life is to help our listeners learn how to read the Bible for themselves.

Now, that's not a personal confession, is it, Molly? I feel like you are in the Bible all the time, so I'm going to take that as you're asking for a friend. Is that right?

Right. Listen, we don't want you just taking my word for it when it comes to the Bible. We want to equip you to study and then dig in for yourself, because the best things you learn are with your Bible open when you are before the Holy Spirit, just listening to him and he's speaking to you. That's why we created this devotional book to accompany the series.

It allows us a way for you to go deeper into the things that you're hearing, so that you're not just a hearer, but it's saturating your soul. Devotionals give you a chance to go deeper into scripture and, maybe most importantly, pray through the scripture and pray what you're learning back to God. That's the most important part of, I think, Christian discipleship is this daily time with God. So much of my own spiritual life flows out of those moments for me in the morning and evening that I spend with my Heavenly Father. This particular devotional goes along with our current teaching series on the Holy Spirit.

It doesn't leave you hanging on how to process what you're learning. It's just one or two questions per day that'll help you reflect and pray about what you've heard and seen in the scripture. We're praying that this devotional will help you feel more confident and more joyful than reading your Bible.

So I'm very happy to be able to offer it to you and I think it'll be a help and I think you'll like it. Thanks, Pastor JD. Go more in depth with this concept of understanding the Holy Spirit when you get a copy of this devotional study today. When you give at the suggested level of $25 or more to support this ministry, we'll send you a copy of the book along with our sincere gratitude. Ask for the Rushing Wind devotional book when you give by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220 or give online at jdgreer.com. That's jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vidovich inviting you to join us again next time when Pastor JD reminds us of the most important prayer requests that we could have. It just might have slipped your mind. That's Wednesday on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.