The Hope Summit II

Before I begin the message, I want to say that at times when, as Rob sort of shared with us, honestly and transparently, his own little journey through the day, it frees us, doesn't it, to also recognize that none of us are perfect either and some of us have tough times. But isn't it interesting how that makes almost an invitation for God to come in a special way. I sense that. It's when we think we don't need the Lord or we're self-sufficient or we're doing just fine that we're least likely to really experience what God has for us. And so I appreciate that. It's not been an easy week. We've had a couple, a very young infant passed away on Labor Day evening or Sunday before and that was a difficult situation and Bob Gottschalk, a long-time friend and member and their family had been part of our church for years and years, passed away on Thursday and there's just been a, you know, life. It's life and the end of life and those are things that you all don't necessarily know about. When we come together, we just have to be ourselves and that song, as simple as it was that Adam sang, that's going to make a difference between this being life-changing and just being some more information. How many of you vote for life-change, all right? Let's pray for that. Father, as we come to Your Word now, I thank You for the honesty of the teams here and for their selflessness that brought us to this place, Lord. We're giving up much of their week in different times to make preparations for these families and to prepare for this weekend. Lord, we're ready. But God, without You, what I have to say won't matter at all. But if You choose to anoint this, Lord, it can begin to change this whole church, this whole community, perhaps the city because it's Your Word. It's living and active. And I pray now that it would have fertile soil in each of our hearts, in Jesus' name, amen. Let me invite you to take your outline out of your notes. We're going to refer to it as time goes along and if you have your Bible, you can also be prepared to turn there as we get to the text. Well, we are in the second message in the series that we've called The Hope Summit, a direct nod to the upcoming G20 economic superpower gathering right here in our city, less than two weeks away. But I have to say that our true superpower was out Thursday night. Amen? Yeah, and we knocked the Titans back to Tennessee, sulking and glooming, but off to a great start. The Steeler Nation rises once again, great beginning. But today we're going to look at the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, the source of the hope that helps us to live day by day. You know, I wish you could be with us when we go through the process of choosing these messages and which members of the team teach them. It's not like you might think, you might think, you know, after 20 years, I bet Pastor A just tells who's going to teach what and, you know, he's like, you know, the head guy, so he just tells Scott when he's going to preach or Ken or Doug or Mike or whoever, you know. Well, that's not the way it seems to work. In this particular series, actually I think it was Pastor Scott Stevens' idea to talk about this hope in the reference to the summit and so, and he was going to kick off the message last week, but he got overwhelmed with things and he asked Pastor Kent to step in, who I thought did a great job just sort of setting the foundation for it and giving us sort of a focal point about how important hope is to our daily walk. And then we looked into the text, John 14, 15, and 16, there's a lot into the Jesus said about the Holy Spirit, and week two and three was about the Holy Spirit. And all four of the guys looked at me and said, Pastor, you can take the Holy Spirit ones. It's kind of like, you know, like if you're playing a game of tackle football and, you know, we're going to do a sweep right and on the left, I'm the blocking right end and they're going to do a sweep left and James Harrison's there and they say, Pastor, you take James Harrison, we're going to go left. I mean, why is that? Well, because I don't think there's a more difficult topic to sort of summarize in a brief period of time with such a broad diversity of opinion and understanding. I mean, we all understand and agree, don't we, that God the Father has revealed Himself. And I doubt we have much disagreement about Jesus the Son and what He did on the cross that we're going to celebrate a little bit later in communion. When He died on the cross for my sin and for yours, He made a way that we can know the Father and be one with Him. But when it comes to the Holy Spirit, your perception, and by the way, not necessarily your experience, but your perceptions might be, that's when the weird stuff comes out. The Holy Spirit, especially if you use the King James word, which is Holy Ghost, then all of a sudden people start getting really antsy. You know, if you're worshiping with us in Oakland right now, you're backing toward the door right now because of the Holy Ghost. I know, I've heard about churches like that. That's where weird emotional things happen and I somehow work up a sweat and throw my coat off and things get out of control and stuff happens that you don't understand. And I know all those thoughts and feelings go with this topic. Just again, to repeat myself, some of you don't know this, but I spent some of my growing up years in the Catholic Church and the majority of them in the Presbyterian Church. And I can tell you neither the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit was present in either of those places, at least very much, and not much else happened there either. And that's not true of all such churches, but it was the ones I was part of. But I want to share with you why this is an important connection, this connection between the Holy Spirit and hope. And I came across this and regrettably this is one of my great confessions as a pastor and teacher. I tend to do my best study too late to help anybody get things ready, but this verse says it all. And if the guys would put up in respective venues, Romans 15, 13, look at this verse by the Apostle Paul. Here's what he says. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in Him so that you may, look at this, overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. You see that? If you want to overflow with hope, you do it by the power of the Holy Spirit. I just want to let that sink in. Being a student, I looked at some other translations. I don't know why this one just caught my attention, but I guess it's maybe something to do with the G20 Summit being all about, you know, ecologically friendly. And this is literally how the message translates. Would you put the message, this is the message paraphrase. Oh may the God of green hope, that's what it says, fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace so that your believing lives filled with life-changing energy of the Holy Spirit will brim over with hope. I have no idea. I'm going to try to figure out tonight why it says green hope. I mean, there's no way, right? But it's what it's, you know, maybe he was on an ecological binge or something and thought it was important. But the important thing is this, the connection between the Holy Spirit and overwhelming, overflowing, brimming over hope in your life. That's what I want you to see. That's the key to grabbing hold of what we want to say. Here Paul establishes that in a way that's just undeniable. And you know, I'm not sure why some of us lean into this topic and some lean away because it's really clear as I read Scripture, and you have too, that the disciples prior to being filled with the Holy Spirit were fearful, they were powerless, they could barely do anything significant without some special directive of the Lord, and they were marginalized. I mean, they, you know, locked behind closed doors, that kind of thing. Once they were filled with the Holy Spirit and the book of Acts and moved forward, they moved forward with great power and authority. They touched and healed people. They did the kinds of things that most of us sang about today when we worshiped. They touched and healed people. They changed lives. They touched their generations. They did things that Paul writes in Acts 17, 6, that they turned the world upside down. So if you're going to be a Christ follower, do you want to be one that's got the Holy Spirit working in you or one that's kind of barely making it as you get along? Now today's message, I just want to lay a foundation and give you an overview of why this is so important, and then next week I'm going to go just a little bit deeper because I recognize, as I said earlier, there's a broad sort of spectrum of understanding here. So let me just back up a little bit and explain to you how this, how we got to where we are. My personal conviction is that the misunderstanding or fear of coming to grips with the Holy Spirit is the primary reason why the church in America is losing its influence. And make no mistake about it, it is. Just like it's completely lost its influence in Europe, it's also losing its influence in America. And it's because we've just sort of stayed away from this. You know, it's just gotten a little too controversial. Interestingly enough, that's not true around the world. In contrast, around the world, the church in many places is exploding, especially where the Holy Spirit has been embraced. And his landmark study in the book The Next Christendom, The Coming of Global Christianity, Philip Jenkins wrote this, and here's a direct quote out of that book. It's about six or seven years old. Can we see that one together? Let's read it. The theological coloring of the most successful new churches reminds us once more of the massive gap in most Western listings of the major trends of past century, which rightly devoted much space to political movements like fascism and communism, but ignored vital religious currents like Pentecostalism. So he's talking about what happened in the churches in America. Yet today, fascists or Nazis are not easy to find, and communists may be becoming an endangered species, while Pentecostals are flourishing around the globe. Since there are only a handful of Pentecostals in 1900 and several hundred million today, it is not—is it not reasonable, rather, to identify this as perhaps the most successful social movement in the past century? Did you leave that paragraph up? No? Okay. Yeah. There are hundreds of millions of Pentecostal Christians around the world. Could it be the most successful sociological movement of our time? Now, the next paragraph, please. According to current projections, the number of Pentecostal believers should surpass 1 billion before the year 2050. Friends, where people are open to the Spirit, God shows up and does amazing things and changes lives. Wow. And that's from a much more authoritative person than just your pastor. Now, why isn't that true here in America? Why isn't it even true as much as we'd like it to be in our own church? And here's my simple theory. I had a rather interesting exchange with Congressman Jason Altmeier at the last car cruise. He just brought his family, didn't have a big canopy or a big show. But I said, well, you're going back to a pretty controversial time, aren't you? And he said, well, yeah, we are. He said, and the way things tend to work in politics is there are loud voices on both sides. There are loud voices on the left, and they get a lot of attention, and there are loud voices on the right, and they get a lot of attention. But in the end, he says, usually, we in America end up somewhere in the middle. Now, of course, the obvious question I want to ask is, well, where in the middle are you going to end up? But I didn't go there. I felt like it was a fair answer. And actually, it's a pretty good metaphor to the Holy Spirit, because throughout church history, there have been a lot of loud voices on one side that have basically said, I mean, if I could summarize it this way, that the Holy Spirit did indeed come to birth the church and to give the church its launch, and there were these dramatic experiences that we read about in the book of Acts, and all that's right and true, and it got going the way it should. But once that happened, the Holy Spirit's presence and experience was no longer directly needed because now we have the church, and especially about 350 or 70 years into it, we had the canon of the Bible. We had God's Word. So, since we've got the Holy Spirit in us anyhow when we receive Jesus, and we've got the Word of God, we don't need all those other things to validate the church. Now, I know I'm summarizing and simplifying, but that's really a position that is held to this day by quite a number of Protestant and Catholic churches and theologians. Now, on the other side are those who say, well, wait a minute, I mean, the Holy Spirit birthed the church and caused these great things to happen and change lives, and I don't read anywhere where the Holy Spirit now laughs and said, now take the Bible, and you don't need me anymore. In fact, we think that we should have more of this kind of stuff. There should be more people with the Holy Spirit, and it should be overflowing more, and we should have more expressions. In fact, these people even tend to get a little bit pushy about it, and the times can say, and if you're not experiencing those things, then I'm not even sure that you're really part of us. And so they got sort of extreme, too. And so do you see the picture? You've got these people over here saying, well, I'm not sure that you people really know the Lord because you're not demonstrating anything. And these people are saying, oh, yeah, we've got...and we think that you're just a little wacky over there. And that's been the way it's been, friends, for almost 2,000 years. Now, let me just fast forward to the last 40 or 45 years. For those of you who aren't historically mine, I just want to just make this as clear as I can. Right around 1965 or so, people had been praying, and the Holy Spirit moved in a very powerful way throughout our nation. And interestingly enough, in the Roman Catholic Church, a movement started right out of a prayer meeting in Duquesne University here in Pittsburgh. That was called the Catholic Charismatic Movement. And a lot of the people that believed that the Holy Spirit was still for today and that He wanted to fill people and some of the expressions that are talked about in Corinthians and Romans and other places, you know, prophetic words and words of healing and those kinds of things were for today. That kind of thing began to be talked about openly in certain circles of the Catholic Church. And then it spilled into some other churches. A man by the name of Dennis Bennett wrote a book called 9 O'Clock in the Morning. He was Episcopalian. And that book started a little wildfire amongst the Episcopalians about, well, we should have that same kind of experience, shouldn't we? Shouldn't that be for us? And then the Presbyterians got on the bandwagon. And pretty soon, by the 70s, almost every major denomination had a component of it that was charismatic or walking in what was called the spirit-filled dimension. This side of that sort of metaphor that we talked about. Now, the only ones that were just a little bit feisty were the Baptists. And I know we got some Baptists in here, and I just can't help you people. But it's just, that's just, no. There were some Baptists as well that got on board. And this powerful movement for almost 30 years shook up the church as we knew it and changed the church as we knew it. And by the way, listen up, also gave birth to many churches like North Way all around the country, churches where, you know, we weren't bound by old ways. We were saying, Lord, what do you want to do now? What's, what's the word, your word for today, the rhema? And that was a significant departure from where things had been. Now, these people over here were still critical. I could name names. I'll name one. John MacArthur, very popular radio teacher, who just lobbed bombs every day on the radio over to these people and said, you charismatics are nuts. You, what you believe is just an extreme distortion of what the Scripture teaches. And, and once we got the Bible, we didn't need any more of that and so on. And, and interestingly, one of my mentors in, in seminary was a man by the name of Jack Hayford, who was a Foursquare. Foursquare is a sort of an offshoot of the Pentecostal church. He was over here, and he, his church was three miles away from John MacArthur. And he had a national ministry as well. And he would try to reach out and try to bring some reconciliation. And it just, it finally happened. It was years in the, in the, in the doing. It was quite a long thing. And over time, and let's fast forward today, a lot of these people have dried out because they didn't have much of the Spirit in their life. And a whole lot of these people have flamed out because without some balance, without some people speaking of their life, they got off into some crazy things that were wrong. And unfortunately, made some big mistakes, and they were public mistakes, and a lot of you know who I'm talking about, and that hurt the whole movement. And so that's sort of a thumbnail sketch of, of, and I know leaving out tons of important details probably. I'm not meaning to do that intentionally, but that's just the way it is. But here's the important thing now. Let me shift gears. So much for the history. Where are you, friend? Now, where are you? Would you say you're over on this side, and you say, you know, I have Jesus in my heart, and I believe I've got the whole package, and I've got the Bible, and I believe there's a Holy Spirit, but I don't want, I don't want to get into that crazy stuff. You know, like, like tongues and those crazy things. Or are you over here, and you're saying, you know, I, I have the Bible, but I want the Holy Spirit, and I want everything the Holy Spirit will give, and in fact, I think everybody should have, like, overflowing doses of the Spirit, and there should be all kinds of expressions, and we shouldn't have a meeting without expressions, and I don't know. On and on we could go. Where are you? And some of you may say, you know, I don't have any idea what you're talking about. I, I, I'm not in either one of those places, and I could understand that. It might be that you're a person that's never really wrestled with this or even heard it explained the way I just did. Well, let me just say you're in the right place, because we're going to understand this together. We're going to grow together in this. We, as a church, have landed in a place that I believe has served us well, because North Way from its inception, I would say, lean this way, believing that the Holy Spirit indeed desired to fill the people of God. Ephesians 518 says, be being filled, continually be filled with the Spirit. It isn't a one-time event that happens when you receive Christ. It's something that you, the Greek word is in the present perfect tense, which means keep being filled, keep being filled, keep being filled. But we didn't go to the extreme of saying, hey, if you're not doing all this, then somehow you don't belong in the church. And one of my greatest joys was to see some of our more expressive elders who had a background over here, loving some of our Baptist and less expressive elders over here. And to see love, hello, please catch this, to see love be our highest value. Amen? So important. Not one's theology about the Holy Spirit, but love. And so the question now is, are you someone that has discovered the indwelling reality of the Spirit? You do that. Romans 8 and 9 says, unless you're born of the Spirit, you're none of His. So without the Holy Spirit, you can't belong to Jesus. And some of you have never really had that experience. In a few moments when we take communion, I'm going to invite you to consider your need for a Savior. And when you pray honestly to receive Jesus, it's the Spirit of Jesus. And I shared this with somebody once, and they said it really helped them. You see, the problem that many people have is when we segment out or, you know, make three separate distinctive little tents, as it were, one for the Father, one for the Son, one for the Spirit, instead of seeing that the three are one and that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus. Now, I'm not going to tell my story this week. I'd like to tell a little bit more of my story next week and how God took a rather skeptical Presbyterian seminary student and taught him something he didn't know about the Holy Spirit. But for today, just ask yourself this question, have you allowed God's Spirit to not just indwell you, but to empower you to live a life full of hope? Because that's what we're all about. We're looking to be overflowing with hope. Let's take a quick look at the text. This will take just a minute. All right? By the way, for those of you who wondered where I was, the cessationists are the ones over here who think that the movement of the Holy Spirit has stopped. And the experientialists, on your outline, those are the ones over here who think that every time you meet, there should be something dramatic happening, just by way of wrapping around that. Now, here are the words, and I'm just going to read a couple of verses from our text. Rather than read the whole passage from the book of John, chapter 14, verses 15 through 30, just let me read a couple of verses. Let's put those up, beginning John 15, I'm sorry, 14, 15. It reads this way. It says, Then it goes on, and we won't read the rest of it for today. There are three key words in this passage that jumped out at me, and I just commend it to you for your further study after today. The first one is that the Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth. And if you're filling in blanks, that's the first blank. The spirit is the spirit of truth. I don't know about you, but one of the things that I think is badly needed in our culture these days is not tolerance and not sort of, you know, a consensus, but truth. What is truth? How do we have an absolute sort of sense of direction, and how do we know what way to go? The spirit of truth will lead you. How many of you would love to have a personal OnStar? You know, that OnStar feature that I think it's the General Motors folks have developed. You push a button, and you get connected right to a person who says, how can I help you? Well, I need to get directions, you know, to this restaurant. And okay, well, let me get that for you, or whatever. Wouldn't it be great if you had a connection in your heart that you knew the moment you began to pray that there was a spirit, there was someone, not just a mystical, gaseous ghost, but a someone who would say, who would lead you by speaking to your heart. That's what Jesus said, the spirit of truth, He will be your counselor. Later on, down in, look at verse 26, we'll read this one together. This is, this is powerful. I'm sorry, 25. It says, all this I've spoken while still with you, but the counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I've said to you. So, the ongoing process of growing in faith comes by the Holy Spirit teaching you the Word of God. Pause. How many of you know somebody? I'm asking about you, but how many of you know somebody that seems to have just sort of stagnated in their faith? They're the same place now where they were like five or ten years ago. They go to church periodically. They're nice people, but they really don't serve anywhere. They don't talk about the Lord that much. Their time is their time. They don't make much investment in anything to reach people or to share the faith. And then you know somebody else who just can't stop talking about what God's doing in their life. They're excited about who they're sharing with. They're, they're looking for ways to serve. They're going out of their way to go, you know, to get involved. What's the difference? Right here. It's the Holy Spirit, Jesus said, teaching you all things and reminding you of the things that He wants you to know. I think this is critical. It's very important. And if you find yourself feeling stagnated and your church is just a chore, friends, please hear. God's telling you right now what's missing in your life. It's that relationship with the Holy Spirit. Second thing that jumped out at me was the word, letter B, orphans. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. You know, that word only appears twice, here and in James 1, 27. Where James says that God loves those who care for the fatherless and the widows, the widows and the orphans. You know, we have a wonderful orphan care ministry that's been developing here at North Way. And whatever campus or venue you're part of, you can be part of that ministry. But you know what? I think Jesus wants us to understand this. You can be born into the kingdom of God and be a Christian and feel like an orphan. You can feel like nobody really knows you, like you don't belong, like you don't have a family, like nobody cares. You know what happens to those kind of folks, generally speaking? They drift away from the Lord and from the church, and they begin to doubt that anything ever happened to them. And I want to submit to you that Jesus carefully chose that word, only appears, this is the only time he used it, it only appears one other time in the whole New Testament. He chose that word because he wants you to know that he wants you to be part of his family, not an orphan, not alone. And it's very likely wherever you are worshiping right now with us, whether there's 200 people in your room or 2,000 people in your room, you can feel very alone if the Holy Spirit's not somehow bearing witness that you belong. You belong to that family. You belong to the family of God, and you belong to this family. God says here in his word, I don't want you to feel like an orphan. It's not right for you. The ministry of the Holy Spirit is a ministry that builds intimacy with God. And Jesus said, don't stay distant. The third word doesn't really appear in what we read, but it is throughout this entire passage. It's the word obedience. And I've noted on your notes where it appears at least four or five different times. And this one really struck me. Why obedience? Because, see, obedience applies some sort of conditional experience, doesn't it? I mean, if you obey, then you'll experience. You got that? Listen, this one's kind of tricky. Some people think, you know, once I've opened up and said, Lord, just, you know, I want everything you have for me, and you have some sort of experience, and then life just goes on. Let me just say, Jesus says, if you obey my commandment, then you will receive and my Father will reveal himself to you. This is something that is conditionally expressed over and over again by the Lord in these verses. I love what Rob said earlier here and during our time. You know, I didn't hear this in the other venues, but it was a powerful moment when he said, you know, I had a bad day. But the Bible doesn't say, offer to the Lord praise if you have a good day. The Bible says, offer to the Lord a sacrifice of praise, good day or bad day. It's something of your will. It's something you obey, you choose to do. That's the key here. I have a neighbor who has been battling very, very serious cancer. And I've been keeping in touch with him. I just talked to him, oh, maybe 10 days ago. And interestingly enough, he, through a series of different relationships, knows someone in our church. And he said to me, thank you for praying for me. He never said anything to me before about prayer prior to this whole incident with this cancer. And he said, you know, my wife and I are thinking about coming to your church. And he might even be here. I don't know. It was a very warm exchange. He said, but he said this, he said, but our kids, I don't think, they're not ready to leave us yet. They have two smaller children. And we don't think, you know, we don't want to disrupt people. And here's what I said. I was able to say to him. And by the way, everything in me kind of didn't want to bring up the whole thing of coming to church because they know I'm a pastor and, you know, they're kind of waiting for me to drop the pastor question, like, come to church. I just want to know I cared about it. He brought it up. And then I had the chance to say to him, well, you know what? We have a worship cafe at 11 o'clock where some families bring kids that just are a little not ready for the kids ministry yet. And they stay with them for a while. And it gives them an opportunity to feel secure. Or, you know what? You can even come out and sit out in the atrium if you're out here in Wexford, which he is. And you can participate, you know, just out of ways, but still participate and be part of things. And he backed up and he looked at me and he said, that's really cool. We got to try that. And I left that little exchange. And I had intentionally driven down to his house to see how he was. And, you know, let's face it. My arm's not long enough to reach down and pat myself on the back too much. But I felt really great about having obeyed that nudging of the Lord to go share, just to see how he was doing. Friend, Jesus says that. If you obey those promptings, God keeps giving them to you. And you will grow in your sensitivity to the Spirit. So, as we conclude, there's plenty more to see here, and see how hope just grows as the Spirit is released in your life. Here's my simple question for you just to meditate on through the next week. Have you been indwelt by the Spirit because you've received Christ? You know that you're a Christian and you think you are, and therefore the Spirit's in you. Or have you been empowered by the Spirit, and you know that God's Spirit is leading you by His counsel, by His truth, by His availability on star, so to speak. Do you know that the Holy Spirit is right there with you going through each part of your day? Do you know that you belong to the family of God? You're not an orphan. And are you obeying His promptings? Next week, we'll talk about how that can be your experience in a very specific way. I hope you're here, and I hope you bring someone with you. Let's stand and pray. Father, as we come to the time of sharing the elements together, I thank You, Lord, for this journey that so many of us are on of becoming more like You. And we know the Holy Spirit is so central to that. Help us, Lord. Help us, I pray, to be open to what You want to do, to transform us, to fill us with overflowing hope because of Your Spirit's presence in our lives. In Jesus' name, amen.