We’re turning now to our series in the Holy Spirit. We’ve been looking at that over the last few weeks. It’s going to be a bit like a Bible study tonight, because as we do something topical, we’re going to go to different passages.

The verses will be on the screen, but just by way of setting the scene, and it’s always good just to take a bit of God’s word at the beginning of a message like this. Let’s turn to Acts chapter one, and if you do have a Bible, you can read with me in Acts chapter one. I’m just going to read from verses one to eight.

(0:38 – 1:06)

In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of 40 days and spoke about the kingdom of God.

(1:06 – 2:37)

On one occasion while he was eating with them, he gave them this command, do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptised with water, but in a few days you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit. They gathered round him and asked him, Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel? He said to them, it is not for you to know the times or dates the father has set by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes and a cloud hid him from their sight. God bless to us the reading of his inspired words. Well, as we’ve said over the last few Sundays, we’ve been thinking about the person and the work of God, the Holy Spirit.

Colin introduced us to the subject, the divinity and the personal nature of the Holy Spirit. And last week, David showed us how Jesus, the perfect human, was utterly bound into and dependent upon the Holy Spirit. And this week we’re coming to the Holy Spirit’s work in forming and empowering the church.

(2:38 – 3:58)

And by church, because it’s good to get our definitions straight, we mean the family of God, the gathering of those who are trusting Jesus as their Saviour and their Lord, the community of people who are united in Christ, Christians, both in its universal sense of Christians in all times, in all places throughout history, and in its local sense, as Greenview would be one of those expressions. The church which began publicly and formally 10 days after Jesus ascended into heaven, where we’ve just read in Acts chapter 1 on the day of Pentecost, and the particular event, of course, that lifted the curtain on the church age in which we live was the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the lives of those first followers of Jesus. The new age of the Holy Spirit being given, not just to kings and to priests and to prophets, not just on a temporary basis for certain purposes at certain times, but something that would be given to every believer, something that had been promised and foretold in the Old Testament, indeed was going to be the sign of the New Testament.

(3:58 – 7:37)

And when we talk about testament, that’s just another word for covenant, or we might say agreement. In one sense, the New Testament is the new agreement or the new arrangement that was going to come with the coming of Jesus, the time when every one of God’s people would be indwelt by God personally. Jeremiah put it like this.

The verses will be on the screen. Chapter 31, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and with the people of Judah. This is the covenant I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord.

I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbour or say to one another, know, the Lord, because they will all know me from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord.

Ezekiel describes it like this. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.

And I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. And then most famously, Joel, in the second chapter of Joel, which was quoted then in the day of Pentecost itself, the prophet Joel, and repeated by Peter, the apostle, said this. This is what was spoken by the prophet Joel.

In the last days, God says, I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions.

Your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days and they will prophesy. And then later on in that same sermon, Peter says, repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

This is an amazing step change. Very easy for us as New Testament Christians to take this for granted. This announcement, this reality that fallen humans, with all our sin, with all our uncleanness, and we know our own hearts, we know the thoughts that can pass through our minds, we know our past and our dark secrets, that people like us can now be inhabited by God Himself.

Every Christian, a little temple with God inside. And no exceptions. From the least to the greatest person, humanly speaking, we can all be personally and directly connected to God.

No more of those Old Testament barriers. No more of the big keep out signs in the temple. No having to trek back and forth to priests in order to relate to God properly.

But access to God whoever and wherever I am. Because as Jeremiah put it, they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. And of course, this church age, this giving of the Holy Spirit, only happens after the cross and the resurrection and the ascension, because it’s only possible because of Jesus.

(7:38 – 9:23)

Because He is the one who took away all those barriers. One who took away our sin, who clothes us in perfection, who sits us at God’s own table, restored to your heavenly Father. And Pentecost, the coming of the Spirit that day and upon the lives of every Christian since, is the evidence of that reality.

That Jesus has done that work. That sin has been dealt with. That guilt has been taken away.

That in Jesus we are now new creations. And in pouring out the Holy Spirit on Christians, on those members of the church, I guess there are three wonders that are at work in the lives of Christians. The first wonder, as we’ve said, is that every Christian is directly connected to God and indwelt by God.

Secondly, Christians are unified, because we are held and bound together by the same Holy Spirit. It’s good to remember that, isn’t it? As we look at each other, the same Holy Spirit that is in me, is in you, and is in every other person. We’re not in a competition.

And thirdly, as well as being connected and unified, Christians are empowered. Empowered and enabled to become more like Jesus. Empowered and enabled to be used by God to serve and to evangelise with spiritual effects.

(9:25 – 10:24)

And it’s that last point that we’re going to focus on tonight. The way in which the Holy Spirit empowers Christians to serve and to bless others. I noted this great wonder at Pentecost, and indeed the great miracle and blessing of the church age, is that every person who becomes a Christian becomes a dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.

So to be a Christian is by definition to be inhabited by God, the Holy Spirit. Paul couldn’t be clearer. Again, the verse is on the screen.

Romans chapter 8, if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, they do not belong to Christ. Good to remember that. Sometimes being at gatherings of Christians or seeing gatherings of Christians where almost the service begins with a summoning of the Holy Spirit.

(10:25 – 13:56)

Come down, Holy Spirit. Come upon us, Holy Spirit. Well, if there’s Christians there, be assured the Holy Spirit is already very truly present.

And so in one sense, we could define the church as the gathering of all those who are indwelt by the Holy Spirit, because that’s what it means to be a Christian. Theologians sometimes call this universal outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the democratisation of the Spirit. This is what happens in the New Testament.

No longer are there any hierarchies or special categories of people, but everybody is included. And one of the ways that that would be evidenced according to Joel and according to Peter was that ordinary believers would experience what had previously just been the preserve of a few. So you notice in Acts 2, when we read those verses from Pentecost, that it speaks, and Peter speaks, and Joel prophesies of all types of people, young, old, male, female, servants, having dreams and visions and prophesying.

Now I don’t think that means that Joel or Peter was telling us that every person would have those exact type of experiences, but it’s a picture of the democratisation of the Spirit. Rather like me, I guess. Imagine somebody had left some astronomical sum of money to the members of Greenview, and next month we were due to get our share of this huge inheritance.

And I would be standing here and saying, folks, this time next week, we’re all going to be driving Rolls Royces. I don’t mean literally everybody’s going to go out and buy a Rolls Royce. It’s figurative, isn’t it? We’re all going to have a share in this great wealth.

And by talking about visions and prophecy, Peter and Joel are saying everybody’s going to have a share in this outpouring of the Holy Spirit. So nevertheless, while I don’t think he’s saying we will all see or experience visions or prophecy personally, the Bible nonetheless tells us that every Christian will receive a manifestation of the Spirit in some form. 1 Corinthians chapter 12, again, it will be on the screen.

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them. There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone, it is the same God at work.

Now to each one, the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one that is given through the Spirit, a message of wisdom. To another, a message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit.

To another, faith by the same Spirit. To another, gifts of healing by that one Spirit. To another, miraculous powers.

To another, prophecy. To another, distinguishing between Spirits. To another, speaking in different kinds of tongues.

And still to another, the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of the one and the same Spirit, and He distributes them to each one just as He determines. To each one, a manifestation or the manifestation of the Spirit is given.

(13:57 – 15:07)

And in the context there, that manifestation is clearly Paul talking about receiving spiritual gifts, Holy Spirit-given gifts. Verse 4, that is abilities given and empowered by the Holy Spirit for the blessing of others. And note, of course, in that passage that whatever those gifts are, there is no one who’s not going to receive something.

Note the language there of everyone and to each one. And the New Testament gives us a number of lists of those type of gifts, those type of manifestations. Again, there’ll be a little table on the screen coming up, just a little summary table of some of the main passages there.

You can see in Romans 12, there’s kind of two lists in 1 Corinthians 12. There’s one at the end of the chapter as well. There’s a list of gifts, offices that have been given in Ephesians chapter 4, and then there’s a little summary which we’ll come back to in 1 Peter chapter 4. So you can see immediately just by looking at that, that there’s quite a variety of things there.

(15:08 – 16:25)

Some of them seem to be skills. Some seem to be particular kind of roles or responsibilities. Some seem to be miraculous powers.

There’s other parts of the New Testament where gifts are almost seen as kind of life situations. For example, in 1 Corinthians 7, Paul talks about celibacy as being a type of gift. And you’ll also see that some of those things seem to be quite ordinary or common, like teaching or hospitality, whereas some of them seem to be quite extraordinary and rare.

Miracles, we might add in speaking in tongues. And that’s something which has caused Christians over the centuries to divide around these gifts. Around the question are all these different types of gifts still in operation? And the two sides have kind of divided around that subject are known as the cessationists and the continuationists.

Cessationists say, no, they’re not all in effect or operational anymore, where continuationists say, yes, they are all operational even up to the present time. The people who say no, the cessationists argue that such gifts are no longer really needed in the church. They were just for the apostolic periods.

(16:25 – 24:41)

They were a bit like kind of booster rockets on a spaceship for liftoff. But now the church is in orbit. They’ve kind of fallen away and it’s able to kind of propel itself without that extra kind of energy.

And they argue that the gifts faded away in the early church. They see perfection, the perfection that will come at the end of chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians, where Paul talks about when the perfect comes, all these gifts will fade away. They see the perfect as being the New Testament, you know, the Bible being completed.

And that’s all we need going forward. That’s the perfect rather than the perfect being, the coming of Jesus himself. Others, on the continuationist side, cards on the table, including myself, don’t find those arguments overly convincing.

They don’t see, however cautious they might be about claiming such gifts or citing examples of them, a really strong biblical case for saying that there is no possibility that these gifts could be in operation today. So take miraculous healing, for example. I think all Christians still believe that God can heal.

We pray for exactly that at most prayer meetings for certain people. And we know of amazing stories of people who have come back from really hopeless looking health situations. But of course, we don’t presume that God will just heal.

Even in the New Testament, those who clearly had a gift of healing, people like Paul and Peter, couldn’t just do it automatically. Paul had bad eyesight. He left trophimus ill in Miletus.

He tells Timothy to take some first century meds for his stomach problem. So could God do a miraculous healing through someone today? Yes, I personally believe so, but I wouldn’t expect that to happen often. There’s also some gifts in those lists that sound quite super spiritual at first glance, but may actually be a bit more commonplace than we sometimes think.

Take the gifts of knowledge or wisdom or revelation. Often those can sound and be presented as quite mystical things, which is not to say that on occasions they wouldn’t involve some remarkable insights. But I wonder often if those are just ways of describing slightly more commonplace and less dramatic experiences.

I had a call with a Christian brother just in the last couple of weeks, and talking various things, and he had come to faith in a very strongly charismatic church, had been in a very strongly charismatic church for about the first 10 years of his Christian life, but now he was in quite a conservative evangelical church. And we were talking a little bit about the strengths and weaknesses of those churches and his experiences, and while he valued greatly a lot of the strengths of conservative evangelical churches, I guess like Greenview, one of the things he said frustrated him a little bit was there was very little openness to sharing what he described as a prophetic word, giving somebody a kind of word from the Lord. And I said to him, I wonder if that’s sometimes just an issue about vocabulary, that in both those types of churches people often have the same kind of experience essentially, but they’ll express it in slightly different ways.

So we would tend to say things like, the Lord has laid this on my heart, maybe I could share this with you, or I was praying about this and I just felt quite strongly maybe this is something to think about, whereas our charismatic brothers and sisters are maybe more likely just to say God spoke to me, or I’ve got a message from the Lord for you and go a bit more route one. The conservative Christian, I guess, has put a bit of a safety valve on what they’re thinking and feeling, a recognition that they might be fallible, or they are fallible, and they could be wrong, that’s good. But equally, maybe we can at times so blunt the axe that the cut through of those things is a bit lost.

We were talking about this at our community group on Thursday night, occasions where you feel prompted to do something, or to help, or to say something, and then you kind of quash it, and it kind of slides away. I’m going over to Belfast tomorrow, and I’m meeting a pastor that I spoke to again fairly recently, and he described an experience quite recently, he’d a church very much like this in many ways, where at the end of the service he felt very strongly he should say, there’s somebody here who needs to speak to me, if that’s you, don’t go without doing that. And he said, but he’s not really given to that kind of thing, and he usually just brushes it off and ends up saying something like, I’m available to chat if anybody wants to speak to me at the end.

But it was quite a strong feeling, so he said this, he said, there’s somebody here who needs to speak to me, don’t go if that’s you. And he walked to the back of the church to the door to shake people’s hands, and a man immediately walked up to him and said, I guess I’m the guy that needs to speak to you. Well, long story short, he led him to the Lord.

But how might the Holy Spirit’s gifts be manifest in Christians perhaps in more ordinary and common ways? We’ve noted those gifts like having a teaching ability, being able to meet a particular practical need, perhaps being the person who does have a bit of insight and wisdom when discussions are taking place, and hospitality and sharing your faith. And of course, one of the questions that comes up with that is, well, aren’t those just natural abilities? I mean, after all, non-Christians can do those kind of things or show those kind of attributes at times. In what way are those type of things, especially spiritual or Holy Spirit-given? Well, I think the first thing to say is, yeah, there is a common grace element in many of the gifts, might even say that in all of the gifts to some extent, in that they originate in simply being people who are made in the image of God.

They are hallmarks of our divine making. But in Christians, that is people who have been reconnected to God and are now indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Those things are remade, can be re-empowered, rededicated, repurposed for spiritual outcomes.

Wayne Grudem, the theologian, puts it like this, and the quote will be on the screen, a spiritual gift is any ability that is empowered by the Holy Spirit and is used in any ministry of the church. He’s going to say this broad definition includes both gifts that are related to natural abilities and gifts that seem to be more miraculous. And I guess the key features that turn ordinary activities into spiritual ones are that they are empowered by the Holy Spirit and they are given for the common good.

As we read in 1 Corinthians chapter 12, they are given in order to build others up. Because remember, even the miraculous gifts can be faked or misused, maybe through even demonic activity. There’s other religions that have a practise of tongue speaking.

So even those things could be deceptive, but where they are empowered by the Spirit and for the common good of Christians, they become spiritual gifts. So teaching is no longer just communicating data, but it is communicating life-changing truths about God. Hospitality isn’t just food or friendliness, but it is putting the arms of God around somebody.

(24:42 – 25:11)

Processing PVG forms, fixing a radiator, no longer just chores, however cheerfully they are done, but they are guarding and caring for precious souls. You see, that’s the difference between the manifestations of the Holy Spirit among us and just doing stuff. And remember, as we look at these gifts, the value of the gift is not in its kind of high status or its wow factor.

(25:12 – 26:45)

In fact, Paul is very clear that some of the gifts that on the face of it look about eye-catching and quite impressive. We could think of something like tongues, for example, very clear that if we’re not careful, those very things can be of quite low value or even occasioned almost no value when it comes to actually building others up. If we had a time, we could start to look at the individual gifts in more detail.

Maybe that’s one for the podcast. But I think it’s not unhelpful just in the short time that we’ve had just to stick with this big point. And indeed, I think it’s Peter who sums up very nicely in chapter four of his letter.

He says, each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, they should do so as the one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things, God may be praised through Jesus Christ, to Him be the glory and the power forever and ever.

Amen. See, Peter’s very helpful there. I think he kind of categorises all the gifts probably into the two main categories that are speaking gifts and serving gifts.

(26:46 – 27:18)

But his point is, whatever gift you have, whether it’s the ability to cook a meal, to paint a door, to make a spreadsheet, to prepare a Bible lesson, to organise a kids club, to play an instrument, to grit an icy path, to write a health and safety policy, just the gift of being able to listen. That’s a rare gift, being able to listen to somebody and to pray with them. I mean, that’s worth a hundred hours of tongues if you can do that.

(27:19 – 29:36)

Whatever gift you have, and everybody has at least one, do it for the good and the blessing of others as the Holy Spirit enables you, so that, as he puts it at the end of 1 Peter, so that in all things, God may be praised through Jesus Christ, to Him be the glory and the power forever and ever. Amen. Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gifts of the Holy Spirit. We thank you that the risen Jesus, as he ascended into heaven, fulfilled that great promise that he would send another advocate, a comforter, and a counsellor, one who would come upon us, who would indwell us, who would connect us directly into your very presence, to the very throne room of God. That as children of God, we have the Holy Spirit within us, and that we know you, our Father, for ourselves.

And Father, thank you for all the ways in which the Holy Spirit works in us, empowering us and enabling us. Thank you for the manifestations of the Spirit that we experience here in Greenview and in our lives day by day, for the multitude of ways in which those gifts, those acts of service, those words spoken, bless and build up and care for the family of God that are for the common good. So Father, we thank you for this great inheritance and this great gift.

Father, we pray that we will use our gifts in that way to bless each other, to build each other up, to be appraised to your name, that this place might be strengthened and bear witness to Jesus more brightly day by day. Father, thank you for all that you teach us from your words, and we commit it to our hearts now that the Spirit himself will continue to strengthen to lead us for your glory. Amen.

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