Prepare for Life

Today I want to talk about worship. Taking the time to worship God each week is so important. You can worship in church, you can worship at home alone. Worship does not have to be reserved for one hour on Sunday morning, you can turn in your heart to God’s heart in worship when you wake up in the middle of the night. Worship can be part of your lifestyle.

How do we develop strong vibrant spirits? Just as in the natural we need to exercise in order to to strengthen our bodes, so in the spiritual there are exercises we can do that will strengthen our spirits and deepen our relationship with the Lord. In the words of Galatians, we sow to the Spirit. These exercises are tiny daily seeds we sow as we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord. They are sometimes called spiritual disciplines. I like to think of them as Disciplines of the Heart.

We have spent the past several weeks getting to know the Holy Spirit, learning about who He is and what He does. But there is another spirit who often gets overlooked and ignored—your spirit, the human spirit.

The Bible teaches we have a triune nature — spirit, soul and body. I Thessalonians 5:23 lays this out for us, “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

As we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord we have a guide, the Holy Spirit. He leads us and helps us stay on the ancient paths. He knows about the twists and turns in the road ahead and He will be there to lead us through. His companionship is a treasure that means we will never be alone or forsaken by God. He teaches us and comforts us. We would be like an orphan if it weren’t for the Holy Spirit.

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about whether we are always called to share the gospel. My first thought was, “Yes, of course we are.” Jesus left us with the Great Commission to go and make disciples of all the nations. I Peter 3:15 tells us to always be ready to give an account for the hope that is in us. Ephesians 6 explains that putting on the full armor of God includes having our feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. So it seems that we should always look for opportunities to speak to others about the Lord.

But then I had a second thought. We are always to “walk in the Spirit” according to Galatians. This means we are to lean into the Spirit, pray for His direction, listen, yield to what He says. Wait on Him. Follow Him.

A normal man can walk or run 15 miles a day. What we see around us are not normal people but average people who think if they walk to the fridge they have gotten their daily exercise! Just because we all aren’t running great distances doesn’t mean that it is not normal to do so. We have learned to settle for average which is really subnormal.

I think the book of Acts depicts the normal Christian life. Just because we don’t see healings and miracles, signs and wonders in our daily lives doesn’t mean that it is not normal to do so. We have just settled. So today I want to look at an obscure man in the book of Acts and see what we can learn from his life about normal Christianity. His name is Ananias. You may not remember Ananias because he is not a lead character in the Acts narrative, he is only mentioned in a few verses in two chapters. You might easily overlook him. He was not an apostle or an elder of the early church. If he were alive today he would not be a blue check. He was just a regular guy. We may be able to identify with him and that is why I want to focus upon him.

Many of you may be waiting on the Lord right now… waiting to hear a doctor’s report, waiting for a wayward child turn back from walking away, waiting for some answered prayer. Waiting can be so hard!

There is a great example of waiting on the Lord given to us in the book of Acts. We can learn a lot from the example of the first disciples. Forty days earlier Jesus had been crucified, died, buried and was resurrected. As the book of Acts opens the last thing He told His disciples before He ascended into heaven was not to leave Jerusalem, “but wait for what the Father has promised, for John baptized with water but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses…” Acts 1:4,8. The disciples were instructed to wait until they were fueled by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Lamps, Wine and Fire - As we walk on the ancient paths with the Lord through our lives we are discovering how important it is to stay close to the Holy Spirit. Initially we might have a hard time relating to Him because He is a spirit, He is mysterious; but the Bible helps us to understand Him by giving us metaphors that tell us what He is like. We learn how to relate to Him. Today I want to help you get to know the Holy Spirit better by looking into three more of the metaphors that describe Him.

As I continue to introduce the Holy Spirit to you I want to tell you more about Him. I want all of us to have a deeper understanding of who He is and what He is like. The Bible helps us in this endeavor by giving us many different metaphors that explain a different aspect of the Holy Spirit. Let’s explore some of these today

If I wanted to introduce a friend to you, how would I do that? My friend is someone I have gotten to know and I think you will want to know him too. We usually begin introductions with the person’s name and then we might tell something about what they do and what they are like. Today I have the joy of beginning to introduce the Holy Spirit to you.

I feel inadequate for this task because He is mysterious. He is God, we cannot reduce him down to our size. We will never fully understand Him. He has such depth and fulness that our finite minds cannot grasp who He is. A.W. Tozer in his book, The Mystery of the Holy Spirit, said you can discover more about the Holy Spirit in five minutes on your knees adoring him than in five years in a seminary. So we must approach this topic of the Holy Spirit prayerfully.