The Forgotten God?

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. The Spirit is God, just like Jesus is God, which is of course a reference to what we call the Holy Trinity. The God who sits on the highest throne is God the Father. The God that we saw with our eyes was God the Son. The God we feel moving in our spirit is God the Spirit. However you got to understand it, if the point is not for you to be able to dissect the Godhead the way that you would in math equation, the point is for you to experience and behold God as He revealed Himself. When most people try to picture God the Father, I think they think of Him sitting on a throne in heaven. And when we try to picture Jesus, we imagine that bearded carpenter maybe holding a lamb, right? But the Holy Spirit?

He can be a little bit harder for us to picture. Today on Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer, we're kicking off a brand new teaching series called Rushing Wind. We're getting in depth with what the Bible tells us about the Holy Spirit, who He is, what He does, and how He's working in our world today.

So let's jump in. Pastor J.D. Greer titled this first message in our series, The Forgotten God. Get your Bible, take it out, open to John chapter 14. John chapter 14, we are beginning a series this week on the Holy Spirit. On the Holy Spirit, I have found that Christians generally fall into two different categories or camps as it relates to the Holy Spirit. On the one side, you have those Christians that, I don't mean this to be pejorative, but are on the hyper charismatic side so that everything that happens in the church is is really the spirit this, the spirit that. These are the people that if I drop my Bible off of the table this morning, they would, you know, under their breath, mutter something about casting out the demon of Bible fallingness out of this place. Or, you know, these are people, if there's somebody on your road that is looking drowsy, they're back there, you know, muttering and casting out the demon of drowsiness out of our church. It's just that everything is just kind of, I mean, if you're not used to this, when you go into a place like this, it seems pretty, pretty freaky.

It's kind of scary. I've told you, I think I've told you this before, I had a friend who worked in a recording studio and he recorded CDs for a lot of Christian artists, and he said there was this one girl, she was new on the scene, she was really, really good. She came in to record a CD and he said, you know, they start in their first song and he's about halfway through her first song and he thinks, man, it's sounding good. When all of a sudden she just throws up her arms and says, it's useless, he is not here. And my friend was like, who's not here?

Like, what's going on? And she's like, the Holy Spirit's not here. So, you know, she brings in her prayer team and they come in and they start laying their hands on various pieces of equipment, casting demons out. And he said, she started again. She said, I thought it sounded great. You know, whatever she did must have worked. She said, about halfway through, she did it again.

She's like, it's useless. He's not here. And he said, repeated that process. He said, we went through that four times, that little process. He said, the fifth time she starts into that song. He said, I'll be honest with you.

I was a little irritated because I thought we're just wasting time here. He said, about halfway through the first sentence of the song on the fifth time, he said, I looked down and noticed that the reverb on her monitor was not on. So I reached down and I turned it up and immediately her hands go up in the air and she goes, hallelujah, he is here, he is here.

He said, I just didn't have the, I didn't have the courage to tell her that, that was the reverb, ma'am. I'm not really sure that's the Holy Spirit. But there are Christians that operate this way where they almost, it's like they confuse, they confuse, you know, the preacher yelling a little bit or the crescendo of the electric guitars as that being, you know, the Spirit of God. On the other side are what I like to refer to as doctrine only Christians. These are Christians that believe in the Holy Spirit, but he's more of a theory to them than anything else. You know, he helps things add up. He explains a few things, but they have no interaction with him, nothing about his presence, no communion with him. Now, don't get me wrong, some of these Christians can wax elephants about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. I mean, they can tell you who he is and what he does and where he is, but it's more of a theory.

He's more of a force to them. It's not a person that they commune with and that they interact with. Just out of curiosity this morning, how many of you, how many of you believe that the gifts of the Spirit are in full operation in the church today? All of them. Raise your hand just out of curiosity, okay? All right, how many of you believe that certain ones of the gifts have ceased or at least died down during this day? Why don't you raise your hand?

How many of you are waiting to see what I say about them in this series before you'll commit to either side? All right, Lord, give us courage to believe and be bold about what we say we believe. You know, let me tell you a little irony here, church, is that the Holy Spirit was given to the church to unite the church. And how ironic that one of the things that most divides believers from one another are discussions about the Holy Spirit. We have a very diverse church here, the Summit Church, in terms of the people, the different backgrounds that are represented here in our church.

And I'm very grateful for that because I believe that there is a lot that we have to learn from one another. And I hope in the next several weeks that all of us will be a little uncomfortable as God challenges some of the things that we believe, that we open our hearts humbly to the Word of God, that we will be courageous enough to experience all that God has for us to experience. I believe that there are dimensions of the Christian experience that some of you have never tasted of and that God, I believe, wants you to experience in the next several weeks. The title of this series is Rushing Wind because that is how the Holy Spirit first came into the church in Acts 2. He came in as a rushing wind. That is a recurring picture of the Holy Spirit. You should think about it in terms of a sailor in the days before they had ships that were powered by internal engines. Sailors depended on the wind for everything, right? I mean, you know, if the wind wasn't blowing, then you're not going anywhere. That is the relationship you were supposed to have to the Holy Spirit.

You realize how desperate you are to move anywhere. It's got to be Him moving inside of you and moving through you. In this series, we are going to cover the following topics. We're going to first discuss who the Holy Spirit is and what He does. Then next, we're going to look at how Jesus operated in the power of the Spirit. One of the misconceptions people have about Jesus is that Jesus was able to do all that Jesus did because He just played the God card all the time. He's like, hey, I'm the Son of God.

I can do this. But Luke, the Gospel writer Luke, goes out of his way to show you that Jesus did what He did in the power of the Spirit. That's good news for you because you're not virgin born of the Son of God like He was.

You're not a daughter of God in the way that Jesus was a Son of God, but you got access to the same spirit He had. What the New Testament tries to show you is the way that He had power, the way He moved in the Spirit is the way you have access to. That's what we're going to do the next week. Then we're going to look at what it means to be filled with the Spirit and what role prayer plays in all of that.

Then after that, we're going to look at how the Spirit guides us in various decisions. Many of you are in a place where you've got to make some decision. What should you do next year? Should you date this person? Should you homeschool your kids?

Where should you send them to school? Some decision about a job. How does the Holy Spirit guide you? How does He speak to you in various things like that? Then finally, we're going to take a look at the gifts of the Spirit, speaking in tongues, prophecy, interpretation of tongues, interpreting the magic eight ball.

I'm just kidding about that last one. We're going to look at what role that the gifts of the Spirit are to play in your life and what role they are to play in the church. Let me tell you, there's something that I really want for you out of this series. Let me tell it to you by means of a story here. Years ago, I read the story of a southern plantation owner who left a $50,000 inheritance to a former slave of his. This was about 150 years ago. That's the equivalent today of about half a million dollars. This slave had served him faithfully all of his life and he wanted to leave that to the slave. The estate's lawyer notified the now old man and told him that the money had been deposited at the local bank in his name. Several weeks went by and the former slave never called to ask for any of his inheritance.

Excuse me, several years, not several weeks. After several years, the banker finally called this former slave and said, look, you've got this $50,000, again, the equivalent of half a million dollars to us today. You've got this in your name.

You can draw on it at any time. And the slave responded back and said, well, sir, might you be able to spare me 50 cents for a sack of cornmeal? My family and I haven't eaten for over a week. I think this illustrates the state that many Christians live in today. They're still thinking like a slave with no grasp at all on what is available to you. The goodness, the fellowship, the power, it's all there. It's all there and it is yours for the taking. It's as if each of us have been left half a million dollars available in the gospel yet most of us are just hoping we can squeeze out about 50 cents worth out of God. God has so much for some of you that you've never experienced. Y'all, the abundant life is not the religiously busy life.

What makes the abundant life the abundant life is because it's lived with Jesus, full of the presence and the power of Jesus. And my prayer has been over these next several weeks, some of you will move out of religion into relationship where you quit just thinking that it's about giving a little more money and learning a few more Bible verses and giving a little more religious stuff on your calendar. And you will start to understand the presence and the power, the fullness, the joy of just knowing and walking and being filled by Jesus Christ and his Spirit.

That is my prayer for you over the next several weeks. So if you are ready to get started on this, say amen. All right, John 14. I want to take you to the place where Jesus first described his disciples, the Spirit-filled life. John chapter 14, beginning verse 16. On the night before Jesus died to his disciples, Jesus said, And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.

Now, stop real quick. Dwells, what tense verb is that? Present tense. Who is Jesus talking about right there? He dwells with you, present tense. He's talking about himself, for he dwells. You know him because he already dwells with you and will be with you. That's future tense. That's a reference to the Spirit, and that's a little bit confusing, and that's kind of the whole point.

We'll get to that, all right? Verse 18. I will not leave you as orphans.

I will come to you. What a great verse. Then Jesus seems to confuse them, intentionally confuses them a little bit, which seems to be one of his favorite things to do. Verse 19. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live, and that day you will know that I'm in the Father, and you in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me.

He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him, and manifest myself to him. Verse 22. Then Judas, not Iscariot, right?

Had to throw that in there because there were two of them. By the way, how much of a bummer would that be, you know, to have a name as Judas? He's like, Judas, not the dirt bag, the other guy. Imagine you're in the first century, and you're always like, I'm one of Jesus' disciples. My name is Judas. Not that Judas. It'd be like being a Southern Baptist pastor today and having the name Harry Potter.

You know, it's just like, hey, not that one, you know, a different one. So Judas, not Iscariot, Judas, not Iscariot, said to him, Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us and not to the world? Verse 23. Jesus answered him, if anybody loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and we will make our home with him.

Verse 25. These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you, but the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I've said to you. Now, I see two major things in that passage. First of all, I see that Jesus tells us who the Holy Spirit is, number one, and then number two, what the Holy Spirit does.

So that's what we're going to talk about. Number one, who the Holy Spirit is. You'll notice in verse 16, he is described as another Helper. Now, there are two different words in Greek for another. One is the word allos, which means another of the same kind.

The other is the word heteros, which means another of a different kind. Jesus here uses the word for another, allos, which meant I will give you another Helper, another of the same kind. Specifically, another of the same kind is Jesus, which meant God.

This is a reference to the fact that the Spirit is God, just like Jesus is God, which is, of course, a reference to what we call the Holy Trinity. Now, I realize that the Trinity is an exceptionally difficult doctrine to understand. In college, I obsessed about this doctrine. I mean, literally, I obsessed about it, and then one night in the middle of the night, I woke up about 3 a.m., and it totally all made sense. I understood how there could be one God who existed eternally in three persons. It made total sense to me, but unfortunately, I did not write it down. So now, I can't remember all those great thoughts, and so it's still a little foggy.

I'm kidding about that. I have never really felt like I totally had a great grasp on this doctrine. I have a Ph.D. in theology. I hope that doesn't mess you up, the fact that I still can't seem to really understand it. But there are just some things that are true about God that you and I don't necessarily believe because we understand them. We believe them because that's what God revealed about himself. You see, essentially, the doctrine of the Trinity is this. There is one God who has existed eternally in three persons. One God who has existed eternally in three persons. It's not three Gods, like a little God family. That's what the Mormons believe, polytheism. There's a little God triad up there, and God's got sons and daughters, and they got sons and daughters.

It's not a God family. It's not three different Gods. It's not one God in three different modes. You know, one God who keeps changing costumes. So in the Old Testament, it's like, hey, I'm the judge God. And in the New Testament, it's like, hey, I want to be a baby.

So he slows on some diapers and comes to Jesus. It's not one God in three different modes. It is one God who has existed always in three persons, always. The idea that God exists in different modes is a heresy in the church called modalism or Sibelianism. The Holy Spirit is not just a God force. That's a heresy in the church called Socinianism. That's what a lot of liberal Protestants today believe. It's not one person, you know, of the Godhead.

It is like a God force or a God feeling. The Trinity is that there is one God, only one God who has existed eternally in three persons. Look at the various ways that Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit in this one passage. I mean, they're almost contradictory. I tried to point that out to you a little bit as we went through, but look, verse 17, Jesus says, I'm going away, and when I go away, he, the Holy Spirit, will come to dwell with you.

Now, that's distinction, right? I'm going away, he's coming to you. But then he turns around in verse 18 and says, I will come to you, talking about the coming of the Holy Spirit.

So it's not him that's coming, but it is him. Or how about this one, verse 23, if anyone loves me and keeps my word, Jesus says, the Father and I will come and make our home with him. In the Spirit, you also get the Father and the Son.

The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are distinct persons, so you can talk about them all separately, but they're all God, so that in having one of them, you've got the presence of all three. Does that make your head hurt? It should, but your head's not hurting, you're not listening to what I'm saying. Yes, you know, one of the most helpful things I ever heard on this was from a 19th century Oxford professor. Wrote this book called Flatlands, his name was Edwin Abbott. It made a kid's movie out of it. But Edwin Abbott postulated, he said, okay, what if the world that God had created was only a two-dimensional world? So that, you know, all that existed were two-dimensional creatures who moved around in this two-dimensional plane like dots on a page. But the God who created them was a three-dimensional God, he was a sphere, like a basketball. And so this three-dimensional sphere God wants to reveal himself to the two-dimensional creatures he has created.

So how does he do that? Well, he can't really describe, you know, the third dimension because they have no capacity to understand it. So he said, let's say that the three-dimensional sphere God decides to pass through the plane of the two-dimensional creatures. What's that going to look like, you mathematicians? It starts as a dot, expands to a circle, then shrinks back to a dot. He said, imagine the poor little two-dimensional dots trying to explain what just happened. Is God a circle or is God a dot?

He can't be both. And then Edward Abbott asked this question, he said, what do you think is greater, the gap between a two-dimensional dot and a three-dimensional sphere or the gap between you, a finite creature, and the almighty infinite God? You see, we don't believe in the Trinity because we are able to explain it. We don't believe it because we have invented it. We believe it because that's what God has revealed about himself. You know, in total honesty, the word Trinity is not ever found in the Bible because what God did is he just revealed himself these things. He is one God. That is very clear in the Bible. There is only one God.

There are these different persons. And so the Trinity is the best way that we can explain it. Christianity, listen, is not a invented religion. It is not a dreamed up religion. It's not a discovered religion. Christianity is a revealed religion.

If Christianity were an invented religion, you would certainly not invent things in it like this that nobody can explain. We believe this because this is how God showed himself to us. And so we're always sitting around demanding explanation, but what God gives us is revelation.

So my encouragement to you is to not sit around and get hung up on things that you probably don't have the capacity to understand anyway. My encouragement to you is to behold and experience God as he revealed himself. The God who sits on the highest throne is God the Father. The God that we saw with our eyes was God the Son.

The God we feel moving in our spirit is God the Spirit. Three in one. One in three. The one in the middle died for me. The one in the end lives inside me.

However, you've got to understand it, if the point is not for you to be able to dissect the Godhead the way that you would in math equation, the point is for you to experience and behold God as he revealed himself. That's who he is. Right? Number two. What he does. What he does. I'm going to list five or six things here for you over the next several minutes, depending on how much time we... Oh, who actually believes that?

I'm going to do all these, whether we've got time for them or not. Number one. Number one. He inspires and he illuminates. That's in verse 26. He inspires and he illuminates. Verse 26. He will teach you all things and bring all things to your remembrance that I have said to you.

Now, that is two different promises there to two different groups of people. To the apostles who were hearing this live, this is a promise of inspiration. Everybody say inspiration.

Inspiration. Jesus was promising that the Holy Spirit would bring back to the minds of the apostles everything that Jesus had said flawlessly and help them record it so that future generations could have a record, a reliable record of the things that Jesus said, taught and did. Not only that, Jesus said, he will also teach you all things, which means he'll help you understand it. He will clarify it for you. The reason that's important is because one of the questions that people have about the Bible is how we can trust what men wrote.

Right? I mean, the books of the Bible are written by men and men are fallible. Maybe they corrupted it. Maybe they had their own agenda.

Maybe they didn't understand certain things. But the promise that Jesus gives in verse 26 is that he would supernaturally guide their minds and their pens as they wrote so that it would be reliable for you and me so that we could know what Jesus said, taught and did. The Bible, you see, is simultaneously the work of man and the work of God. That means that each book reflects the distinctive personality of its author. So the books that are written by Peter sound like Peter. Books that are written by Paul sound like Paul. If I had been selected to write a Bible book, it would have been filled with dumb humor and Waffle House stories. All right? But I wasn't.

But if I had, that's what it would sound like. So each book is simultaneously the work of man, but it is also the word of God. You say, well, how could that be?

How could it be the word of man and the word of God? Here's an analogy I use. I've got four kids, as many of you know. And my youngest, our first son, just turned two recently, and has been slow on everything, including learning to walk. And I think that's because his sisters carry him around everywhere. But he's just getting to the place where he can start to walk. And you know how kids are when they walk. They do that kind of awkward toddle thing where they got their little gangly legs are all walking around.

They're always falling. If I were going to have him walk on this stage from point A to point B, there's no way that I would just let him do it. Because he would teeter over and he would just fall off the side. So what I would do is I would hold his hand and we would walk together. And his, you know, goofy little legs would be walking like this. And it would be him that are taking the steps.

All right? So whose feet are the ones that are actually taking the steps? His. But who determines where exactly he goes?

Me, because I'm holding his hand. The Holy Spirit promised that while it was the words of men that were being written down, he was guiding the destination that those words got to. So the bottom line is what you hold in your hands is a reliable record of what Jesus said and did.

That's very important for you to understand. Because you see, it would have done us no good for Jesus to have come to earth and die for us and raised from the dead if we did not have a reliable record to be able to base our lives upon him. Jesus promised the disciples that this helper would both remind them what they had been taught as well as bring clarity to it.

You're listening to Pastor JD Greer on Summit Life and the first message in our new teaching series called Rushing Wind. Okay, JD, something that we've noticed is that while most Christians believe the Bible is true, so many people don't really spend time studying it on their own. We prefer to have a pastor walking us through it and then telling us what it means, right? But our goal is to help our listeners learn how to read and understand 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? All 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. 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 in 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. We'd love to get you a copy of that book by Pastor JD today to help you build a better and deeper understanding of the Holy Spirit. This devotional resource is our way of saying thanks for your financial support that makes Summit Life possible. When you give to this ministry, you're helping us stay on your radio station and other stations around the country. And did you know that you're making an extensive online archive of resources and sermons possible free of charge so people around the world can dive deeper into the Gospel every day? If you'd like to join the team that makes Summit Life possible, give us a call today. And when you give at the suggested level of $25 or more, remember to ask for your copy of Pastor JD's devotional about the Holy Spirit called Rushing Wind. Call 866-335-5220.

Or you can give online at jdgeer.com. I'm Molly Vitevich. I'm so glad to have you with us. Be sure to listen again next time when we continue our new series called Rushing Wind on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.