The Holy Spirit in Our House V - Bring Me Another Vessel

Go on with the teaching this morning. And it's always a blessing when you come into a teaching and the Lord is ministering and you know that he's prepared a word. I'm going to ask someone to bring up a glass of water. I hate to do that in the beginning, but I need that pretty badly today. Okay. Hallelujah. Let's pray together for the Word, and then we'll go on with the teaching. Lord Jesus, we love youe today. And, Lord, we know that when we draw back all of the covering of the world, Lord, and all of the busyness of our lives and all of the right responsibilities that we bear as parents and students and workers. And, Lord, as people given charge for many responsibilities, Lord, when we draw it all back, Lord, when we stand before youe, we see that all that there really is is, is Jesus. And, Lord, we thank youk that today youy Word will speak and minister to us. I trust, Lord, that yout'll use this vessel. And, Lord, I recognize that it is an earthen one. But I praise youe for the transcendent glory that lies within because of Jesus, and may he be seen by all in his name. Friday night we had my son David's 5th birthday party, and they seem to get better every year. But we're not going to have another one until next May 20. Friday was May 21. I know you're thinking, but it was a family arrangement kind of thing. How many of you know what day this is, what birthday this is in the history of the believers in Jesus? No, it's not Martin Luther. It's Pentecost. Gee, I didn't know that. Did you know that sixth Sunday after Easter? I may be wrong, folks. I've given up following all these things. But I thought it was six Sundays after Easter. That's where we are. Any liturgical people here that know for sure want to set me straight? Don't be technical, Bruce. Praise the Lord. Well, okay. Rosalie informs me that it's next Sunday. The important thing is that we're talking. I'll tell you, you don't know what a release it is to not be in bondage to some calendar. It is a little embarrassing to not even know what's on. I confess that. But anyhow, today we're talking about the Holy Spirit, Pentecost or not. And I wonder, as we talk about the reality of the Holy Spirit. This is, as I understand it from today, the last message in this five message series on the Holy Spirit. I wonder today how many of you confronted a situation this past week, a person or a circumstance where you know that you needed the enabling of the Holy Spirit to get you through all right. Now I hope that it's not just a lot of yeah, I'll put mine up, too. I hope that you all know when I did this, I was thinking I prepared my notes today. I was thinking I'm going to have someone stand up and tell us what it was. Anyone want to do that? It was the Holy Spirit, Bob. I was right up to the hospital. Night. Praise the lord. All right. And I'm sure that countless different ones of us somewhere and listen, if this week went by and you didn't confront a situation where you were consciously dependent on the Holy Spirit, then listen well today, because we all Beloved, if we're walking in obedience, we're always going to be facing the situations. The Lord led me today to a passage which is very you're going to say, what does that have to do with what we're talking about? But turn with me to Second Kings, chapter four. Let's read it. I'll read it out loud. You follow along. Because I know there's so many translations. Now the wife, second op. I still hear pages turning. Second Kings, Chapter four. Now the wife of one of the sons of the prophets cried to Elisha, your servant, my husband is dead. And you know that your servant feared the Lord, but the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves. And Elisha said to her, what shall I do for you? Tell me, what have you in the house? And she said, you, maidservant, has nothing in the house except a jar of oil. Then he said, go outside, borrow vessels of all your neighbors, empty vessels, and not too few. Then go in and shut the door upon yourself and your sons, and pour into all these vessels, and when one is full, set it aside. So she went from him and shut the door upon herself and her sons. And as she poured, they brought the vessels to her. And when the vessels were full, she said to her son, bring me another vessel. And he said to her, there is not another. Then the oil stopped flowing, and she came and told the man of God, and he said, go, sell the oil and pay your debts, and you and your sons can live on the rest. Now, beloved, there are many who would say that the Old Testament is out of date and is unimportant for New Testament Christians. But I want you to listen to Romans 15:4. Just listen. Don't turn there. For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the Scriptures, we might have hope. I believe that God knew what he was doing when he put this passage in and gave us this little story about this widow and the prophet Elisha. There are five principles here that the Lord quickened to my heart this week to share with you about the ministry of the Holy Spirit, your life. And I pray that it will be an encouragement and perhaps a conviction to many of you. Now, let's look at these things. The first thing that we see here is that there is a debt to be paid. The woman had a debt to be paid. By the way, the sons of the prophets, I might mention to you, this woman wasn't particularly endeared to Elisha, the sons of the prophet. If you read in First Second Kings, chapter two, they were critical of Elisha and kind of taunted him just before Elijah died. And so this lady wasn't necessarily one of the in crowd is what I'm saying. But she recognized that she had a debt and she went to Elisha. And this is a crucial point of beginning. Beloved, when it comes to the Holy Spirit's ministry in the church today, we need to see that the church of Jesus Christ, the body of believers, as exemplified here at Northway, has a debt to be paid. How many of you have heard the sentence or the phrase, you can't earn your salvation? How many of you believe that it's true? How many of you know that you can in no way repay God for what he did? The Bible says that we've been redeemed not by gold and silver and perishable things, but by what? The precious blood of Jesus. And there is no price on that blood that you'll ever be able to repay. So if we don't repay God, if we don't have a debt to God, to whom do we have a debt? Beloved, many Christians don't understand this, but we have a debt to the world we owe the world. What do we owe the world we owe them? The Gospel of Jesus Christ. Do you remember Paul in Romans 1:14? And he said, I am under obligation to. It's the same word, debt. It's translated debt. In the King James. I am indebted to the Greeks and the barbarians. I must take this word to them. You see, it isn't just something that we choose to do, beloved. When we come to Jesus, he gives us free salvation, but we exchange our life for that right. It's an exchanged life. And then we take upon ourselves a debt to be paid. Now there's a Lot of people here who hate debt. There's some people here who are in debt and wish they were out. There's some people who hate debt so much that they'll work two or three jobs to be out of debt. But many Christians don't recognize that we have a debt to be paid to the world. You say, well, I didn't borrow anything from the world. They didn't give me anything but a lot of heartache. Why do I owe them anything? Well, you see, beloved, our debt to the world is to help them to see their indebtedness to God. Our debt to the world is to help them to see that they owe God for their sin and that Jesus came to pay their debt as well. That the wages of sin is death and we are constrained. Beloved, it's an obligation. It's not a suggestion. The Great Commission is not the great suggestion. It's a sending forth, it's a commission. And that's what we've been called to do. And I look around here at Northway and I see what we've been given, beloved, we've been given rich relationships. We've been given the word of God in abundance. We've been given home groups that are encouraging and strengthening and life giving. We've been given a wonderful place to meet. We've been given the worship ministry. And beloved, we have a debt to the world that we've got to discharge. And I don't believe for a moment that God gave us all these things just for us to get high on them and to lavish ourselves on them and to be all fired up about how great it is to come to church. God's given us these things. And now he says, my beloved ones, pay your debt to the world. Now you say, well, I really don't know how to do that. And besides, I'm not sure that I know that I have anything to do it with. And what's going to happen if I don't? And I look around in the world today and I'll tell you what I see. Look at verse one. The creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves. And because the church of Jesus Christ is not paying its debt to the world, beloved, we're losing our children. The creditor has come and he's taking the lives of our children. And sin and evil and darkness is so packaged today, it's so appealing, it's so luring and tempting that young people and some of them sitting here today are buying lock, stock and barrel and are blinded at the front Page of the Pittsburgh Press this morning that talks about a 16 year old girl raped and beaten and killed and dumped off the side of the road in Mount Washington after a party. Party, that's all I hear. Party. Let's go to a party. And the week before that an 18 year old after a beer party, stabbed to death. Beloved. Young people, you listen. The wages of sin, you cannot get away from paying it. And I love you enough to stand here and tell you if you keep walking down that road smug and rebellious, you're going to fall. And I pray it's not too late for. And this generation is going down, not up all of our intelligence. I just, I'm astounded at how blinded we are that our education and our political reform and all the rest. And yet the fabric of our society continues to erode. Now I look around and I see young people here and I want to say God has changed many of you and I rejoice in that and I'm not despairing of everyone, but I want to say to you, beloved, unless the church pays its debt, that the creditor will come and take our children. And those of us who have children know what a struggle it is to face the things of the world. Now how do we do it? Elisha said, well, what do you have in the house? She said, I have nothing except a jar of oil. The woman was basically stripped of all of her possessions. She had given everything to try to pay off this debt and had nothing. She was a widow. She had no means whereby she could pay. All she had was a jar of oil. I don't need to go into too much than this, I'm sure, but oil all through the scriptures is symbolic of what the Holy Spirit. And I want you to see today, beloved, that lesser ways will not pay the debt that the church has. Activities, drives, fundraisers, social programs, sales and all the rest will not pay the debt that Jesus has called us to pay. And it's true at Northway Christian Community, beloved, that we don't have anything. We don't really have all the trimmings that a lot of the churches have. And I believe that when you get down to the end of a church and all that's there has been taken away and, and all that you have left is the jar of oil, it's then that God can begin to move that church where he wants it to be. And I rejoice today. Beloved, I want you to know something. I want to say this out loud and with great rejoicing and freedom. Some of the Home groups are struggling, and there was some buzzing going on this week. And I. I praise the Lord for someone's heart being soft enough to make confession publicly. You think that's an easy thing to do, you're wrong. But many others, or several others, several others were buzzing around, and there's a little murmuring about. Some of the home groups are having a hard time. But, beloved, you know what's happening. God is stripping away all of it, all the relationship kinds of things and all of the gimmicky things, and they're getting down to the bottom line and seeing that all that we have in our home group is a jar of oil. That's all that we have. Just the Holy Spirit, he's all that can hold us together. And now that we're at the bottom, we've got to depend on him. And I praise the Lord. If that's where the home groups are going to be, then so be it, because God will meet you. He'll do it. Without the Holy Spirit, without the jar of oil, the debt will never be paid. Why do you think Jesus was so plain to the disciples in Acts 1:8, where we spent many of our other weeks, when he said, wait in Jerusalem for the promise from on high? Now, listen. You just think for a minute. Is the last words that someone says on this earth. Are they usually significant? Many, many times, those are the words if anything's going to be recorded from their life, it's the last thing they say. And here's Jesus After his three years of public ministry and 33 years of life, ascending before the Father. And the last thing he says is to wait. The last words out of his mouth, wait for the promised Holy Spirit. He knew that they had to have that jar of oil. He told him to wait. And it's true in every area of our corporate life, Beloved, it's when we've exhausted our resources. I know something. Some of us are exhausting our resources and looking for a substitute place, if the Lord has one, for Northway. But it's when we're exhausted that the Lord is going to come down and say, now, I'll give you what I've prepared for you. I remember when Dwight Moody was reading about when he was a young preacher, and he had done everything he could and he was going out to the people and he was preparing terrific sermons and giving these messages, and nobody was responding. And he went back into his closet after months of this, and he said, God, I've had it. I can't do it anymore. I give up. And the Lord spoke to his heart and said finally. And then he was free. And then the Holy Spirit came in power in his life and he began to have a wonderful ministry. By the way, we get exhausted, but the Lord never does. At this birthday party I mentioned on Friday morning. Yes, I'm really having a hard time with the days. Friday evening's birthday party, we were singing the chorus. I will call upon the Lord who is worthy to be praised. And then at the end it goes. The Lord liveth and blessed be my rock. And let the God of my salvation be exalted. The Lord liveth and blessed be my rock. And let the God of my salvation be. And the little children were saying, exhausted, I think the Lord might have been by the end of that birthday party. I was. I know that. Alright, what's the next thing that we do? Beloved, there's a debt to be paid. It's the oil of the Holy Spirit. The jar of oil. Now let's look and see. Here's where you and I come in. Elisha tells the woman. Then he said, verse three, Go outside and borrow vessels of all your neighbors. Empty vessels and. And not too few, you see, it's not enough for the Holy Spirit to be given at Pentecost for the church. But beloved, empty vessels are required for the Holy Spirit to be poured into, to be received into. That's what the Lord would be doing among us even today, is pouring that oil of anointing into empty vessels, containers that can then dispense that oil where the debt needs to be paid. Now listen, I had an experience I've got to tell you about. Last Sunday we left here at Northway and a long planned trip, many times canceled because of the snow. We finally went out to see Carol's aunt, whose name is Sybil. Aunt Sybil who lives out in Oxford, Pennsylvania. And we packed everyone in the car and made the ride and got out there and she lives in a 100-year-old brick house on the main street of Oxford, Pennsylvania. It's an eight bedroom house with an attic on the third, you know, one of these three story jobbers and eight bedrooms on the second floor and you know, extra apartments added on and 100 years and this house has been there and she's lived in it 50, 50 years in the same house. And I went into this whole situation with not really knowing what to expect. 76 year old aunt, lovely person and really quite sharp and so on. And as we began to visit in the house, we were absolutely astonished by everything that she had accumulated over 50 years. And it was like it was its own garage sale right there. Every room, you know, the bookshelves had books sideways on top. And I've never seen so many knickknacks and things. And I opened one. You know, there's. I'd say there's got to be 75 doors in that house, literally, you know, counting the closets and everything. And I'd open the door to get up the steps because some of those big houses had two sets of staircases, you know, And I'd open a. Opened the back door out of the living room to go up the back way. And each step had just nicely piled stacks of memorabilia all the way up. So it was full. I mean, I could not imagine a house being that full. And she laughed when Amy wanted to go up to the third floor and she said, no, there's no room up there, so who knows what was up there? But you see, I saw how clearly what a picture that was of the Holy Spirit to me, how I could have walked into that big house and been ushered right into the drawing room off to my left, where there was nice furniture and so forth. And I could have just. If I were the Holy Spirit, I could have just been welcomed in and just put right there. Thank you very much. Enjoy your stay. And the whole house would have remained unexplored and beloved. A lot of us, when it comes to the ministry of the Holy Spirit, have been just like that. Just like that. We've let the Holy Spirit come in. We said, sure, I want the Holy Spirit inside of me, but we've told him to stay in the drawing room. And by the way, she had a grand piano in the drawing room so that he could sing choruses and have a good time. But you see, the Holy Spirit wants to get back into the kitchen and back into the workroom and upstairs into the bedrooms and even into the closets and all the way up to the attic. And he wants to get inside of every room of our heart. And two things prevent us from letting him do that. One is fear. What will he think when he opens the door of this bedroom and sees what I've got in there? And what will the Holy Spirit think when he finally gets up to the attic and sees all the junk that I've accumulated in my life? And we're afraid. We're afraid that somehow we won't be able to cope with being filled with the Holy Spirit, of letting him have control of our lives. We're afraid. And the second thing is, we're full of pride because we feel like if I let go of that other room, Holy Spirit, then really I'm completely out of control. If I let you in, I mean, you can go anywhere else, but I've got to remain here. I've got to keep this door closed. It may be the door to your job, it may be the door to your children, it may be the door to your investments or whatever. It may be the door to your leisure time, but we don't let the Holy Spirit in that door because we hear all these voices that say to us, listen, so far you've been okay. So far you've managed to go to this community and get together, as Bob King said last week, with these weirdos and still be acceptable. I mean, I can still have my regular job and I can still be a pretty good person and my neighbors still think I'm not too strange, even though we don't get home until after 1:00 clock from church. But beloved, you see, it's so much more than that. It's so much more than that. And the Holy Spirit needs to control every part of our hearts. And I was struck by Acts 3:19 and just hold your thumb and and turn over to Acts 3 to see this verse. This is what some of us need this morning. 3:19. Repent, therefore, and turn again that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord. Beloved, the only way to move into this fullness is by repenting. What does repentance mean? Okay, the Greek word is metanoia. The two words metanoea. Meta means to change or alter. Noeh is the word from Nus n O U s which means mind. To change your mind. When the Bible talks about repentance, it's talking about a change of the way you think about things. To repent means I'm going to change my mind about how I view what God's going to do to me if I surrender to His Holy Spirit. I change my mind and I trust you, Lord. I change my mind and I fling open the doors. And I empty out the rooms. And the Lord this week spoke to my heart that there are people here who want to be filled with the spirit of God, who want to have the oil flowing. But you've got junk cluttered up in there and you need to be emptied. And emptiness only comes through repentance, pouring out and saying, lord, I repent of this and I repent of that that I'm holding onto, and I repent of this fear and that pride, beloved, it has to happen. And none of us like emptiness. You know, I thought about this. An empty room is a bit of an incongruity. It just doesn't seem right, does it? When you walk into a room and there's nothing furniture in there and there's not decorations or pictures on the walls or there's not drapes. We don't like empty rooms. And so we're afraid that if we empty out our hearts before God and say, lord, I repent of this and I want to clean up my act in this area. We're afraid that God's going to leave our room empty and we'll have nothing. And the promise of the Word is that if we empty ourselves, if we repent, that the Lord will send times of refreshing, the Holy Spirit will be poured out. You see, to us, emptiness means barrenness and it means exposure and it means vulnerability and it means people can see the cracks in our walls. But to Jesus, it means, here's a room without clutter, here's a heart without confusion, here's one that's prepared to receive in fullness. The glorious truth of the Word is, beloved, that God will not leave you empty for long. And as soon as you can surrender your will, he'll step in and fill one other word here. Look at verse six back in Second Kings. Would you flip back there? If you've come fully into the God's anointing and some pastime and you don't sense the presence of God in your life now, could it be, beloved, that verse 6 would speak to you? The vessels were full. And she said to her, son, bring me another vessel. And he said to her, there is not another. Then the oil stopped flowing. You see, when there's no more empty vessels, then the oil stops flowing. It's as simple as that. Now, okay, verse four. Empty vessels. Then go in and shut the door upon yourself and your sons and pour into all these vessels, and when one is full, set it aside. Why did he say to her, go in and shut the door? Why would he say that? Why is this something that she should do in private? Do you ever wonder about that? I'll tell you why I believe it's so again, because of the sovereignty of God and inspiring the Scriptures. But I believe this, that he was putting his finger on this truth, beloved, that the real barometer of your relationship with God is what you do with him behind closed doors. It's not how glorious you can be. When we're together here in worship, it's not how kind you can be when you're out in a group of people. The real barometer of your relationship to the living God is what happens when you're alone with him. Well, I have a hard time praying someone would say. Or I find that after a few minutes my mind begins to wander. Or I really just can't stick with times of worship on my own because I don't know how to sing. And all these things come up. And beloved, you know what it's saying? It's saying that there's a need in your life to deepen your communion with God if your times with the Lord are boring or perfunctory or quick, or if you get antsy just because you're there for 15 minutes and you don't know what beloved, it's saying that there's something that needs to be happening behind closed doors. You can't just go with the flow then, because you are the flow. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said that we ought to fear community. We ought to fear community when we cannot live with God by ourselves. And the reason he said that was because you can insulate yourself and think that you're doing okay just because you're going to church and going through the motions. But instead, beloved, we need to be alone with him. Behind closed doors, experience takes place in a crowd, encounters take place alone. Experiences take place in a crowd, encounters take place alone. Let the Holy Spirit be poured into the inner recesses of your heart. Behind closed doors. There's not really. It's been a wonderful thing these last weeks to hear the testimonies of. Some people come up and say, you know, I was. One of the ladies isn't here. I'd like to have her say it herself, but she said, I was just alone in my home, beside my own bed. My husband was out of town. And suddenly there it was. There what was? Well, I encountered the reality of the Holy Spirit in my life. And you see it's happening. That's happening. And God wants it to happen for you. All right. And finally, what happens when we're filled? Verse 6. All right. We read that when the vessels were full, she said to her son, bring me another vessel. And he said to her, there is not another. Then the oil stopped flowing. In verse seven, she came and told the man of God, and he said, go sell the oil and pay your debts, and you and your sons can live on the rest. And I see three things there, beloved, three things that happen when you're filled with the Holy Spirit. The first is that Sanctification Sanctification is experienced, not completed, but it's experienced. To be sanctified means to be set apart unto God. All right, three things that start with S. You're set aside. You're set aside. Number one. And I think it's lovely when God does this. I think it's tremendous when something happens between you and God that's so gripping to you that you say, you know, I feel like the Lord has something special for me. I love it when a young person comes up and says, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with my life, but I think the Lord has something special for me. I don't say to him, no, he doesn't. Not you. I think it's great. I had a fellow, you may remember, Fred Mosbaugh, that we prayed for a few weeks ago on our. Our Tuesday night meeting, who called me long distance from North Carolina. He said, I don't know what. He talked for a while and he said, I don't know what's happened. He said, but I think the Lord really has something special for me. And I don't know what he's changing. I rejoice in that because he's going through the process of being set aside for the Lord. And I trust that each of you want that for your life as well, because he does have something special for you. The second thing that we do with this oil that's been poured into us is that we sell it to pay the debt. We go and pay the debt to the world that we owe with this oil. Beloved, it's the life of the Holy Spirit poured out. Because, you see, it's the Holy Spirit the Bible says, that convicts the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. We don't have to do it, but the Holy Spirit poured out through us a life full of the Holy Spirit affects the world and changes it. And I want to tell you this. If you were once filled with the Holy Spirit and you sensed this anointing in your life, but now you're dried up, what do you need to do? You need to come back, write down this scripture. Don't look it up. Ephesians 5, 18, 19. And there the Bible says, be filled with the Holy Spirit. And it's the Greek future pluperfect tense, which means be being filled, be continually being filled. That means every day. Actually, it means every moment that you sense that you're not stop what you're doing and say, lord Jesus, I surrender afresh to you. Fill me with your Holy Spirit. Alright, that's something that probably would be worthy of another whole teaching. But we need to see it as a way of life. Selling that oil, in other words, going out and paying the debt with that oil of anointing. And finally we're satisfied. I love when isn't it like the Lord, go sell the oil and pay your debts and you and your son, your sons, can live on the rest. You see a life that's been surrendered to the Holy Spirit pays the debt to the world, but you can live on the rest. You're satisfied with what's left over. I don't know why it is, but people who surrendered and given their hearts fully yielded to the Holy Spirit tend to be people by and large who are satisfied in their own lives with the Lord, their own walk. Even though they encounter struggles and problems like everyone else, there's a satisfaction that comes up. And you know what it is? It's the Holy Spirit. It's just what's left over filling that need in their heart. Are you an empty vessel today? Do you know that you need to be emptied out? Beloved, I rejoice that Jesus has called us to be his people. And I think that God in His graciousness is working in many hearts. But some of us today need to take a step of faith and to empty out, to be repentant before the Lord for hanging on to parts of our lives so that he might pour the oil in that jar, the oil of His Holy Spirit in us, so that we might pay the debt and that we might be satisfied with the rest. Let's pray. Lord, you know the ones for whom this message was prepared in heaven. The word that yout spoke, Lord, I pray that yout'd quicken it to them this week, that they'd have the courage to walk with youh through the rooms of their heart, Lord, and in humility and in brokenness, Lord, to empty out whatever they're holding onto, that they might in the end, Father, know the joy of that oil outpoured in their own lives and that they might go and be expeditious in paying off that debt, Lord, that they cannot pay any other way, and that they might be satisfied to live on the rest in Jesus name. Praise the Lord. Amen. Hallelujah. Yes.