Wired For Life V, Hot-Wired to Heaven

I invite you to take your outline out of the North Way Notes, and we're going to talk today about how God's spirit in our lives can change how we relate to the people in our lives. I've entitled the message, Hot-Wired to Heaven, having a direct relationship to God and his power. Let's read together Ephesians 5. If you have your Bible, you can turn in your own Bible, and this is the NIV version, but I did put on the top of your outline today just to make it easier for us all to read. So let's read God's Word together. Ready? Be very careful, then, how you live, not as unwise, but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit. Speak to one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. Sing and make music in your hearts to God, always giving thanks to him for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Be filled with the Spirit. Have you ever been placed in a situation where you wondered, you asked yourself the question, do I have what it takes to make it through this? I mean, do I have the essential tools to come through this? Ever had that happen to you? Hopefully, you've had it a number of times, but I can think of one time in my life, more than any other, that I asked that question. Less than one year out of college, I was accepted in an officer training program for the United States Marine Corps. I was shipped off to Quantico to see if I had what it took to be a Marine officer. Well, I was young, and confident, and fairly well organized, and decently athletic, and I thought, you know, this isn't gonna be all that bad. It took me about two hours to realize I was in over my head, big time. Nothing in my background had prepared me for what I was about to experience. Not the nuns in my Catholic elementary age teaching, not my Boy Scout leader, my basketball coach, or band director, or even my dad. I'd never fired a serious weapon before, just BB guns and the like. I never ate potatoes with a knife, and I never wanted to kill anybody, except maybe my organic chemistry professor in college. On the fifth day of desperation in my training, another candidate, as we were called, saw me reading my Bible just before lights out. He came over to my bunk, and he said, what are you doing? It was a moment of truth for me. I said, well, I'm reading my Bible. He said, why? I said, well, because I have a relationship with Christ, and I just want to walk with him. And there was this pregnant pause for a couple seconds, and he said, that's cool. Made it. It turned out, you see, he was the most respected guy in the platoon of our 45 candidates. He was one of only two enlisted men that had been given an appointment as an officer. The rest of us were ROTC or college graduates who had gone into the program. He had served two tours in Vietnam. In his second tour, he had rescued his entire squad from death and had received, as a result, the nation's second highest medal of valor, the Navy Cross. This guy was a bad dude. He knew more about military life. I mean, weapons, strategies. I mean, all the shortcuts about inspections, all the rest. I mean, and we were totally different. Here I was, this college geek, trying to make, pretend like I knew what I was doing. And he was a true Marine in every respect. And the neat thing was, he liked me. I don't know why. He had no reason to. But we began to connect. He came around me on a regular basis and showed me things that I didn't understand how to do, and taught me how to do things that, otherwise, I probably would have fumbled my way through, maybe not even made at all. I learned some things quickly and began to do pretty well, even competed in some levels of things. And as we went on through the ten weeks of basic and six and a half months of officer training that followed, we became very good friends. I respected him a lot, and I learned a lot from him. And we became so close, as a matter of fact, that he was in my wedding. We have a picture, a 30-year-old picture, I might add. There he is. That's Joe Crockett, right there. And now, don't look at that guy. Put him on. Okay. That's his Navy Cross. There were times being stopped in the Marine Corps base, because people, other officers on the base, couldn't believe that an enlisted guy had that award. It was so prestigious. The reason I bring up that story today is because Joe Crockett represented for me, and has stood as an image in my mind for three decades now, of how the Holy Spirit works in our lives. The Holy Spirit is not this ghost, you know, that sort of enters the room. The Holy Spirit isn't this weird thing that no one... The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit, Jesus says, comes alongside. His name in the Greek is Paraklete, not Parakeet, Paraklete, from the Greek word Parakaleo, which means to come alongside, called alongside, to help us. In the same way I, as a fumbling Marine recruit, needed help, the Holy Spirit comes alongside of us, as fumbling Christians, because we need help to live the way God wants us to live. The Holy Spirit was given to help us walk the walk that Jesus commanded of us. His way of working in us is not just to be somewhere out there, but to come inside and fill us with his presence, and he makes such an enormous difference in the Christian life. And I want to stop right now and say, there aren't a few of you here, rather there are a number of you here, who have lived a rather defeated Christian life, maybe even sort of a indifferent Christian life, because you can't figure out how you're supposed to do this. You keep trying and you keep failing, or you get into situations where you don't know what to do and you know how to turn for help, and the reason is because you've never laid hold of this truth of the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit in your life. You must know that. That's why we're looking at this little passage in Ephesians 5 today. It's so critical to the success of your Christian journey. And some of you see, I mean, the Holy Spirit, I want to be real clear about this, because theologically we have to know, if you belong to Christ, Romans 8 and 9 says you have the Holy Spirit in you. You can't be called his unless the Holy Spirit comes in. So he's there. But just in the same way that I can invite Joel into my house and have him stand in the foyer of my home, and then walk away and just sort of do my thing, some of us have invited the Holy Spirit in because we've received Christ, and we've left him in the foyer. Rather, we need to say, come on into the entirety of our being, as if I would say to Joel, come on in, Joel, and sit in my family room, and come into the kitchen and get something to eat, and over, you know, into the living room, and you know, go on upstairs and look around. In fact, Joel, you can even look in the closets, because you're welcome in all of my house. Loved ones, some of us have invited the Holy Spirit in, but we've kept him in the foyer. And some of us invited him in and said, you know, Holy Spirit, I want to have everything you have for me, but that was 15 years ago or 10 years ago, and you've lost the joy of the Spirit for life. The verse that we read here in Ephesians 5 says, be filled with the Spirit. On your outline, I've made this note. It's in the Greek present imperative tense, which means an ongoing experience, best translated, be being filled. Say that with me. Be being filled. Every day, you need to be filled again. In fact, regularly during the day, you need to whisper to God, fill me once again, Holy Spirit, with your presence. It's not a once-and-for-all experience. And so many people miss the power of that. Let me share with you four benefits of the Spirit-filled life. Four reasons why today you ought to just make a personal pathway to God and say, Lord, fill me with your Spirit. Number one, he gives you the power to live in God's purposes. And that's really what we're talking about. I mean, this whole passage here is about purposeful living, isn't it? Be very careful, Paul writes, in how you live. Not as unwise, but as wise. This is a world in which there are many unwise things that you can do. Isn't that right? You can waste your life. I regularly talk to people who are just lost. This week, I met a young guy, a friend of Jonathan's, and we were just kind of chatting about his future. And Carol asked him the question, he said, well, what do you really hope to get out of this career you're in? And he said, well, you know, I just, he scratched his head a little bit, he said, I hope to make a lot of money, buy some property, build a house, and just sort of rock on my rocker, and fish, and drink a lot of beer. Wow, what a neat life. And of course, he was overstating it. Somebody, he's typical, I mean, he doesn't really know what he wants to do. Life's so much more than just passing the time, isn't it? And I can also tell you, there's a lot of boomers, and people that are my peers, who are now in the middle, or starting in the second half of their life, and they're saying, you know, I want life to have significance. I want my life to count for something, and they're wondering, how do I make wise decisions? You want to know how? Get in touch with the Holy Spirit. Jesus said this, look in your outline. He said this, the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things. You see, He's going to open your mind, understand what the Lord wants you to do. He'll remind you of everything I have said to you. He promised that he would give you wisdom, if you simply ask for it. There's a great search in these days for wisdom, and people know that the Holy Spirit, if you know that the Holy Spirit is giving you that, He'll not only give you the understanding, He'll give you the gifts. In the same way that my hanging around with Joe Kroc had enabled me to learn some things that I had latent inside of me, the Holy Spirit hanging around you, helps you to release the gifts that God's put in you. Every one of you has gifts. Not just a few people that come up here in the platform, everyone. Turn to someone right now and tell them, you're gifted. Look right at them and say, you're gifted. You're gifted. You have something to give, and God wants you to know that the Holy Spirit will release that gift. And folks, in our church, we're committed, as Pastor Scott said earlier, we have classes to help you discover your gifts. People like, I just, I don't want to leave out anybody, but I want to highlight somebody. I don't even think she's here today, so it's not like I'm trying to, you know, tickle her. But Ginger Pillar. I mean, she pours her life into these young ladies that come up every so often and lead a dance ministry. And no one gives her a lot of credit, but she has a gift. She helps the young ladies discover their gifts, and they honor God with it. It's that way that God works. Second, the Holy Spirit, when he's released into all of your life, and his fullness covers you, he gives you a passion. And I want to add this, a compassion. A passion and a compassion for the lost. Now, this is an entire message. I grieve. I grieve in my own life at how calloused I become toward the condition of the people around me. Listen, we live in a nice community, don't we? We have nice things. We know nice people. Many of you are going to go to a nice graduation party. Or maybe after the service, we all go over to a nice little shopping center, and have a nice little lunch over there at Panera's, and have a nice little expresso, and talk about nice little things, and a nice little day that we have. And we go on and on like that, and there's nothing wrong with any of that, of course. But listen, people matter to God, and people are lost without Christ. And every day we need to say, Lord, give me your heart for people. And how do we do that? Well, the Holy Spirit fills us. When the Holy Spirit fills us, you begin to have a burden for people. You see them in their condition. I was with a person earlier this week, who was just sort of, I mean, it was, I was sort of an observer to a conversation. I was part of it, but not really engaged that much in it. And the Lord just opened my eyes to see the broken-heartedness of this man in his early 30s. And the Spirit just nudged me to ask him the question, how is your mother doing? What a dumb question for someone who didn't know this guy. And he said, well, she's doing better, thank you. How did you know? I said, well, I didn't tell him what I thought. I just wanted to know. It turns out that she had had cancer, and she was recovering, but he was very, very burdened by her condition. You see, and the Lord just showed me his heart. This was a Jewish man, I might add, not a believer. It was a moment, I said, wow, Lord, you've got work to do. You want to do work in that man's life. And that's all. I mean, I didn't go on from there. It was just a moment, and he said, thanks for asking. How did you know? See, the Holy Spirit quickens us if we know. And here's the problem. You see, in our culture, so many people think they're okay. You find that? Everybody thinks they're just fine. The Bible calls Satan the great deceiver, and people, everywhere I go, are deceived to think that they're just okay. Spiritually speaking, their condition's not that much better or worse than the rest. I'm just okay. Isn't the hardest thing that maybe you face when you get into a conversation is, how do I help people to see what their true condition is, without appearing to be pointing a finger at them, or saying, you know, kind of like the drama, like, oh, this is not, you know, you don't want to be that way. But on the other hand, are people okay without Christ? No. Without Christ, they're lost. You see, it was Jesus, not me, or North Way, or anyone else on the planet. Jesus, who said, I am, as we sang, I am the way, the truth, and the life. And you know what the problem is? Our culture has now come to value tolerance more than truth. So it's better to say, well, everyone's okay. I don't want to force my religion on you, when in fact, Jesus said, you know what? Everyone's not okay. And without God, we're lost in our sin. The Holy Spirit will give you, if you're really spirit-filled, it's not so much about gifts of revelation, and all these things. It's about this one thing. The Spirit wants to fill you, so you will be a witness. Acts 1.8 says, you will be my witnesses, when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. What does a witness do? Does a witness buttonhole someone and say this? Does a witness describe answers to all the questions of a mystery? What does a witness do? Witness tells what he or she has seen or experienced. That's all they do. If you were called to testify as a witness in a court case, you'd say, hey, this is what I saw. This is what I know. That's all the Lord calls you to do, and the Holy Spirit empowers you to do that with freedom. That's what a witness does. Witnessing is just the overflow, let her be, of the normal Christian life. Not something you have to work at. You can be equipped. Pastor Scott is offering a class in less than two weeks. I want to encourage you, invest a few hours in learning how to be a better witness. You need to do that. I need to do that. I want you to watch this little video clip. You remember Arthur Blessed? We've showed his clip on another topic a few months ago. Well, this man walked around the globe carrying a cross on his back. That was what God called him to do. Now, God's probably not calling any of us to do that. But along the way in his normal course of things, the Lord used his normal life, the overflow of that, to touch people in a powerful way. Watch this little clip and see how God just used what he was doing to reach somebody at their point of need. Let's watch this. I was carrying the cross in New Zealand, getting near Wellington, and as I walked along the seaside, the road took an upward turn up a mountainside. Just as I started climbing that mountain, I noticed a single lady jogging on the beach. I stayed focused on the road because it was very narrow. After a bit, I heard someone screaming, and I looked up, and the lady that had been jogging on the beach was now running toward me along the side of the road, having gone up a path ahead of me. When she approached me, she was out of breath, and I thought she was angry at me. And I was saying, it's all right, ma'am. I said, I'm not protesting anything. I just carried the cross for Jesus. Breathing heavy, she set the cross, the cross, and then she said, Two and a half years ago, I moved here to the beach. Got out of the city. She looked about 35 years old. She said, I came to find life, and this morning I came to the total conclusion that I would kill myself. I'd do one last run, and then run into the sea and drowned. And she said, I did a run, and I stopped, looked at the water. And she said, then I cried out, and I said, God, if there is a God, I need life. And I turned around to look, and she said, I saw the cross going up the mountainside. And she said, I've come to the cross. I need life. I shared with her that that's the very reason Christ gave His life on the cross, was for her and for the whole world. And we prayed together, and the resurrected, living Christ came to live in her life. And I pray, and I have thought so many times, I just want to be there, available, lifting up the cross, lifting up Jesus for others. And this is true for the whole world. The world needs life, and may we show that Jesus is there to give it. I just want to be available, he said, to lift up the cross. That's all the word. He's just looking for people to be available to Him. Do you have a passion for the lost? We need to have that rekindled in our hearts. Third, the Holy Spirit, when He fills your life, will give you a clear perception of God's will. Look at Ephesians 5, 17. We just read this, Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord's will is. People ask me all the time, I don't know how to discover God's will. Where do I find God's will? Let me tell you, first of all, 95% of the will of God that you need to know is right here. This book, the scriptures, which by the way, some of you were not encouraged to read this book in your early religious training. Here at North Way, we put a high premium on understanding this book. We're going to offer you many classes early in the fall that you can dig into this book. But you don't even have to wait until then. A lot of these study Bibles are like mini seminaries. And then there's Bible software on the computer. You can learn this book. And you know what? The most important thing is, who inspired this book? The Holy Spirit. Aha. So the same one who inspired it now lives in you. That means he can help you interpret it and make sense of it. People say, before I became a Christian, I couldn't understand. And when I received Christ, it started making sense to me. Why was that? Because the Holy Spirit started to interpret it to you. So don't let this sit on the shelf from Sunday to Sunday. Open it every day and let the Holy Spirit make God's will alive to you. And the other way that you sense God's will is by having an open line of communication for those times that aren't real clearly spelled out here. You see, Jesus said, I only do what I see the Father doing. I came to do the Father's will. So how did he know? Well, he was filled with the Spirit. And he had an open line of communication. And the difference between Jesus and you and me is that he didn't have any sin cluttering up his communication. That's the problem. Unfortunately, we do. How many of you have a cell phone? Cell phones are everywhere. I hope it's not on right now. Cell phones are everywhere. But have you ever had your cell phone out and you've been driving in the car and you'll get away from a tower and your connection starts to get all fuzzy and isn't that irritating? And then if you really go too far out, you know, you get dropped. And all of a sudden you're talking to yourself for 90 seconds and you're like, wait, there's nobody there. Ever have that happen? Well, you see, that's sort of a picture of what happens with our communication with God. It's not cell phones, it's sin. And sin sort of just gets a hold of our life. It creates static and we can't hear God very clearly. And sometimes we get so much sin, we just get dropped. I mean, we just don't communicate. And that's a scary moment. You can't know God's will if you're not in communication with Him. The Holy Spirit wants to give you that fullness. Listen, the Lord wants to lead you. He wants to put you in places where you'll be effective. You just need to hear those promptings to sense His will. Trust that He's going to lead you there. Jesus still wants to touch people. Listen, if He could, He would still go to all the places where people are in need. But He's now up in heaven. His plan was to send you and to send me. That's why we're called, listen, His body. That's not just a phrase we made up to sound sort of like organic and like a family. We're His body. So we are to be Jesus' hands, His feet, His heart, His compassion, sent by Him. Early in my Christian journey, I was affected by a man who was a Christian leader by the name of Richard Halverson. He was the pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church just outside of Washington, D.C. in Bethesda, Maryland. And he became the chaplain of the United States Senate in the 80s and early 90s. And Dick Halverson said this phrase that really just has marked me for many years. He said this, and I've used it before and I want to say it again. Every place you are is someplace Jesus wants to be. When you go out of here today and you head off to lunch, wherever you are is someplace Jesus wants to be. Someone there, God wants to use you to touch them. When you go to a graduation party or some other concert or some event, the Lord wants to go there with you. When you're in the checkout line, you're in the corporate boardroom, you're in the airplane, you're in the classroom, everywhere you are is someplace Jesus wants to be. He wants to be flying life through you. The Holy Spirit gives you that life. And finally, the Holy Spirit brings forth praise by His presence. Well, I'd love to talk about this one for an hour, but I won't. Worship and praise just naturally and joyfully overflowing from us is so pleasing to God. Look at the next verse. Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything. You know, some of us come into this church and say, you know, I just wish I didn't do all that music. It just gets, I mean, there's a little too much music there. In fact, some of you feel so strongly about it you don't come until most of the music is over. Let me say, we understand that dissonance in some people. And here's why. I mean, I grew up, you have to understand, I grew up, as many people say, I'm not that kind of person. I see, they'll tell me, I see people down there they'll lift their hands and do all those, they call them strange things, which by the way, all of the things that you see are in the Bible. If it's not in the Bible we're not going to do it here. If it's in the Bible we're going to say, if it's in the Bible it makes sense. The Bible says to lift up holy hands and bless the Lord. That's one reason why we do it. People come and say, well, I'm just not that kind of person. What kind of person are we talking about? Are you the kind of person that wants to please God and do what he says? Well, yeah, but I'm not that kind of person. Oh. Well, here's the truth of the matter. This isn't something you reason your way into. It's something that the Holy Spirit releases in you. And if you have difficulty, if you're one of these people that, you know, you go like this and it doesn't feel right and you get to here and you say, oh no, I can't do it. It isn't a matter of understanding. It's a matter of heart. It's a matter of releasing. I have been on this journey. I want you to know that. I know from whence I come. I was, you know, Catholic and Presbyterian. Those are my two major background elements. Neither of those are particularly known to be expressive. And I went through all the intellectual arguments that all of you have gone through. I've been down all those roads. And believe me, in seminary, it's no better. But in the end, you see, in my heart, I wanted to please God. And when the Holy Spirit filled my life, it was like a river of living water and I couldn't help it. I wanted God to know I loved him. Does that verse not say sing and make music in your heart to the Lord? Well, if God says it, then I'm going to do it. And you know what? There's a joy in it. Because it's not something I'm forced to do. It's something that God enables me to do by his Spirit. Love, when some of you just, I mean, here's how a lot of you look. I mean, you come in here and it's like, man, I've been beat up all week long. And I'm just not into this, but I'm going to come anyhow because I, you know, my parents made me come or my wife made me come or whatever. Just take a look around you right now. Anyone got this kind of body language going? I mean, this is a tough thing. What you need to do is to be filled with the Spirit and you have joy in your life and you can praise the Lord and you can just rejoice. This is a little lame. I'm going to put it down. Our staff just didn't believe I'd do it, but I tell you. Don't let the world around you squeeze you into its mold, Paul writes, but let God remake you so your whole attitude of mind is changed. How are you filled with the Spirit? Well, that's another whole teaching, but let me leave you with these three thoughts. Number one, re-examine your heart. Is the Holy Spirit just in the foyer? Is he just sort of in the beginning, in the outer part of your life or have you really welcomed into your whole being? Second, once you've done that, then you have to take the very difficult step of releasing your control. This is so hard to do because we're just a little bit afraid. Listen, the Holy Spirit is a gentleman. He's not going to force you. He's just going to open life to you, the life of Jesus. And finally, once you've taken that step, well then you're free, by God's grace, to receive by faith. And I stumbled over that point for a long time because I thought, well, you know, I've examined my heart and I really want all this, but you've got to do something. Something has to just fall on me and make it all... And you know what? Sometimes the Lord graciously does that and sometimes he doesn't and you just, by faith, step into it and then you see that it happens. I don't know why that is. It's different. Every person... See, God just works different in you and different in you and different in me. Different in you and different... But he works. And you're here today. I want you to know he wants to work in you. He wants you to know the joy of a spiritual life. Let's stand together. Some years ago I had the privilege of meeting John Wimber who sort of epitomized a person who was once kind of bound up and then released into the fullness of the Spirit. He led what was called the Vineyard Movement. Nearly 500 vineyard churches around America right now. John's now gone on to be with the Lord but he was a songwriter. He wrote great music. In fact, he wrote and produced music for the Righteous Brothers and other secular groups and then he took that gift, you see, the gift of the Spirit in him and wrote wonderful songs like this one. Songs about the fullness of the Spirit in our life. Let's sing it. Oh, let the Son of God enfold you with His Spirit and His love. Let Him fill your heart and satisfy your soul.