Good morning. Glad to see you here this morning. It's a delight and an honor to be among some God's people. It's a wonderful thing to have a, in a word, I guess, a shared value system.
There are many aspects of our faith that the world knows nothing about, but the fallout or the implications of that faith are many. They are deep and broad and diverse. And one of the reasons, of course, that there is a teaching ministry is so that we can explore the breadth and the depth and the wonders of the grace of God in our lives amongst ourselves as the people of God. And I trust and hope and pray that what I have to say today will resonate in some way.
The Lord grabbed my life in 1977, and it wasn't long after that that occasionally, since my day job was also teaching people would grab me by the collar and say, can you take a Sunday morning. So I've been behind the pulpit for quite some time now. And there's one thing I've learned along the way is that someone would come off, and it's not unusual for someone to come along and say, that little thing that you said right there really spoke to me, and I thought that that was the smallest point in the entire sermon. I have no idea how it is that they picked up on that tiny point, but that was the point that ministered to them.
And I was glad that they were ministered to, but I leave, therefore, everything to the Lord. The Lord will apply, I trust, to your heart those things which you need. And perhaps the rest is, um, draw us in some of the things perhaps that I share of a personal nature are certainly in the category of a draw or semi-draws, but may the Lord be with us all in any case shall we pray father. We're glad that you have brought us here together that we can worship and think of the Lord Jesus Christ who went to the cross, who laid aside his glory, and who became obedient to death, even the death of a criminal's cross.
We pray that you would be with our hearts and minds and spirits this morning as we navigate through your word in Jesus name, Amen. I'm going to be speaking this morning on the Holy Spirit as an extension perhaps of my previous message in December on the Trinity. Charles Haddon Spurgeon has my respect because his personal secretary or sometimes his wife would find him, um, crumpling up a sermon at one o'clock in the morning. And the person who found him doing that would say, what are you doing?
You are, you are discarding a sermon at one o'clock in the morning. He said, the Holy Spirit is not leading me to give this message. I have to pray some more to find out what it is that God wants me to speak on. That wouldn't be me at one o'clock in the morning.
I take my hat off to Charles Haddon Spurgeon for, uh, for, for insisting that he know that the Lord is leading him in a word. He, he wrote and, he wrote a great deal. And he gave 3,500 sermons and the, the man with a voice like a bell, they said, tabernacle, uh, metropolitan tabernacle there in the old one near Trafalgar Square. Um, they, this is, you know, the prime minister came to hear him of England and, uh, it must be a testimony to the fact that if you are willing to allow the Holy Spirit to guide your words, the result is powerful.
The result is powerful. You see here a quote from him. You must believe that there's a Holy Ghost working in us. That's sort of 1800s language, holy, instead of Holy Spirit.
Both to will and to do, even though it is beyond our senses. That's quite a profound statement. Can anyone end that allusion to scripture? Both to will and to do, ah, ah, is good pleasure.
Philippians 2, 13, to will and to do. To know in our hearts what God's will is, is in itself, of course, something of a challenge. To know and then to act. That is a double challenge.
And it is not always the case that we can point to a verse and say, I'm going to make the phone call because of chapter and verse. Or I'm going to acquiesce on something that I was going to take action on because of another chapter or as you know, the Christian life doesn't always work that way. Although there are overriding principles and there are clear teachings about what is right and wrong in your Bible. I think that the topic of the Holy Spirit is neglected.
I grew up in Newfoundland in the 70s largely and when Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, there was a dispensation from the federal government of Canada that they be allowed to keep their denominational school system. So in junior high school, I was in a Pentecostal school with Pentecostal teachers. I'm ashamed to say that I made fun of some of them, but perhaps that goes with being 14 years old. And in Newfoundland, even to this day, I think there is still a sum to some degree, of course, quite strong when I was a teenager, but to some degree, there was the sense that in Newfoundland, there was the Catholics and there was everybody else.
And the one outsider to both the Catholic way of doing things and the Protestant way of doing things, he said, well, with the Catholics, there's the Father, the Son, and Mary. And with the Protestants, there's the Father, the Son, and the Bible. And of course, both of those statements leave out the fact that as we sang this morning, the Trinity is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It's important to have grounding in doctrine and to be balanced, understanding the Holy Spirit is important.
In around a year 150, a man named Montanis was the origin of a heresy which you can look up and read about amongst the various church heresies called Montanism. And the hallmark of that movement was ecstatic experiences, a hyper-emotionalism. And people saying that now that I am in my ecstatic experience, you should listen to me because I have a revelation from God. That extended then into prophetesses, female prophetesses, who would have ecstatic experiences and lead the churches down a wrong road.
And the emphasis on emotionalism is dangerous. And yet, when we think of the Holy Spirit, we do rightly think about the fact that the Holy Spirit gives us joy, gives us guidance, gives us insight into the Word, enables us to pray. When I use a similar slide on the Trinity, I put instead of the word hearts, I put mind. That's a good thing to keep in mind, that you should love God with your mind.
But does that mean that you should be a cold fish? Does that mean that your Christianity should be very, very doctrinaire? I don't know if you, the word existential has become extremely popular. It annoys me.
I think half the time the people who talk about existential and existentialism don't know what they're talking about. The origin of existentialism goes back to about 1805. To amending Soren Kierkegaard, and Soren Kierkegaard is probably one of the only three people that my father's country ever produced. And I can, famous people.
I can well understand by personal experience how a doctrinaire form of Christianity can lead to a dead doctrinaire religion that has no joy. Soren Kierkegaard grew up in a home very like my father's foster home. It was very cold, and yet very religious. And of course, what tends to happen, you can probably find millions of examples, is that a young man growing up in a home that is defined by rules and coldness and religion and going to church, the Lutheran Church, that's the state church in Scandinavia, Gluten den Mark.
They actually, you actually have on your check, your paycheck. Here's the deduction for keeping the churches up to scratch for the tourists, not for you to go and worship God, but so that the tourists can go to Grunvig Cathedral and see one of the most amazing cathedrals in the world. There's the deduction on your paycheck. You could be an atheist.
You probably are. Most of them are. And go to this back in the day when Grunvig Church was actually full. You have to go.
You have to go. And then to be as cold as ice at home and to be very, very business-like. I can understand something about that. And then he began to write, and he began to write about his relationships and his relationships to the Christian faith.
And his writings are included in his philosophy of existentialism from a pseudo-Christian point of view is in any university introduction to philosophy. It's a famous person. But what is the danger of that? I mean, first of all, you look at the history of that and you go, don't want to go there.
Don't want to be a parent like that. Don't want to raise children who view my faith as a bunch of rules and who view me as a cold-hearted person and living in a nice cold home of rules. What does that produce? That produces someone like Soren Kierkegaard who completely departs from the truth.
He's not interested in the truth, largely speaking. So that when it comes to question of doctrine, Soren Kierkegaard is not interested. He goes, the pendulum swings way the other way. And you have a person who says, all that matters.
All that matters is whether you feel floods of emotion, like the Montana's, the ecstatic, the emotional. That's all that matters. That's when the pendulum swings far away from the upbringing and the doctrine air environment. We can then find later in the history of philosophy another existentialist and he is famous for the statement, God is dead.
About almost 100 years later, 90, 80 years later, Fredric Nietzsche. Very dark. Well, that's where you end up. When you end up departing from the truth, you're going to end up departing from the truth all together.
Hitler had nothing but good things to say about Fredric Nietzsche. The idea that overpowering other people, the German word Ubermann, translates into Superman, the Ubermann, how I can organize society by force in order to achieve the goals that I want is from Fredric Nietzsche. And he made sure that his soldiers were acquainted with this philosophy of Ubermann. And that is the kind of philosophical fallout of departing from Christian truth.
I could go into more detail on what happened during the 1800s with Emmanuel Kant and so on. If you get an email from me, you see a quote from Emmanuel Kant at the bottom underneath my phone number. What we are now is not merely a turning away from what you and I might call legitimate religious truth. Where we are right now in 2025 is a post-moderist situation where the argument is there is no such thing as truth in the first place.
So there is nothing to argue about. They're not interested in arguing about whether Jesus died on the cross. That's just your narrative that you like. That's one narrative.
And then there's another narrative and another narrative. The fact that they may be completely contradictory doesn't seem to matter. But that is where post-modernism has taken us away from the very idea of truth. So we are well advised to know how to live.
We are well advised to understand that when we pray that we need the Holy Spirit, as we know from Romans, the groaning that takes place within us when we are praying is a necessary part of prayer. If you do not know of how the Holy Spirit groans with you, with words that cannot be expressed in writing, that cannot be spoken, cannot be written down, but that deep yearning for the things of God and for the will of God to be realized, then I think you should break down in tears. If our Christian life has come to the place where everything leaves us cold, we need to go to God with that fact. We need our hearts broken, maybe broken again.
In Galatians you see where Paul says, you started in the Spirit. Are you going to continue in the flesh? Unfortunately I think that can happen. We read in Revelation of leaving the first love.
There is a tremendous joy. There is a tremendous sense of the presence of God in the person's heart when they are first saved to be free from sin to worship God. But it is possible, all too possible, with the busyness of life and the pressures of the world to become cold and then to begin to live life according to the flesh. We need to bring that very thing to God.
Even though that is not the instinct when the flesh is beginning to take over, is that you are instinct to break down before God in tears and repentance. It is not your instinct. All the more reason to do it, to ask God to confess to God, I have become cold. We sung many songs this morning in which we rejoice in our salvation.
We rejoice in the name of the Lord Jesus. When you hear the name of the Lord Jesus in this room, it thrills your heart. You go out of this place and you hear the name of the Lord Jesus and it breaks your heart. They have no idea who he is.
I'm so glad to be amongst people who know who he is and what the name means and that he is our source of worship. There are three powerful passages that I want to go through as quickly as possible that actually do not, on the face of them, directly deal with the Holy Spirit. But that's part of the beauty of it and that's why I'm sharing it, is because you can see the Holy Spirit in these passages, even though it is not the thrust of the three famous passages. The three famous passages are Hebrews 1, speaking of the Lord Jesus, taking away our sins and sitting down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, that passage.
The other one is Colossians 1, in which your soul is transferred from the Kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of Light. Speaking of the fullness of God that dwelt in the Lord Jesus who accomplished that for you, the Plaroma. And the third one is John 1, these three passages speak volumes about the nature of our redemption in Christ, the activity of the Father, and if you look at them, the activity of the Holy Spirit, that watch for them. I put them in red letters, but the invisible God.
Oh, the one who gives life. Yes, you need life, don't you? You need more than physical life. The one who declares, the one who fills, the one who speaks, the one who anoints.
We are so much in need of these things. John 1, we go John, Colossians, Hebrews, opposite order, but I don't know if you've ever talked to a Jehovah's Witness who claims that Jesus was created by God. But this verse 3 makes that absolutely impossible because anything that is in the category of having been created was made by Jesus himself, in which case, how can Jesus make himself? Well, there's a verse to destroy that theology at a stroke and it's going back to creation.
In him was life in reference to creation and John's experience of walking with the Lord Jesus. The appearance of the Lord Jesus in the Old Testament in theological terms is known as a theophany. The Lord Jesus appears in a physical body in the Old Testament multiple times and it is called a theophany. Have you ever thought of God, it says, is a life-giving spirit?
Genesis 2, 7, in the Lord God, for man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And man became a living soul. I'd say there's a theophany, there's the Lord Jesus breathing into that lifeless body. His life, he is life.
He gave Adam life. He gives you life. And if you know the Lord, he gives you the life in God and of God. You have the Holy Spirit within you.
And when you encounter as John did in walking this scene, actually in Israel, but on the earth with the Lord Jesus, and then when you're an aged man, you reflect back on what it was like to walk around with the Lord Jesus and you write these words full of grace and truth. How many people do you know that you would ever say that? That someone is full of grace, full of grace and truth. That's not a nice cold person.
That's not a doctor and he has such to be full of grace tempering the truth. That's our goal in life, I think. The Apostle Paul spoke in 13 1 Corinthians about faith, hope and love. And if your love can govern your truth so that you become gracious, that you live in grace and you know the grace of God and all your interactions are governed by the grace of God, you are becoming more like Christ.
John looked back on the life of Christ and the person of Christ and he said he was full of grace and truth. Why? Well, that's because as we read in 3.34 of John and I put it up on the screen in a minute, the Lord Jesus was filled with God's spirit without measure in a measureless manner. That gives me some glimmer of hope that if I allow the Holy Spirit to govern my life, maybe I can become more gracious and know how to temper the truth with grace.
No one has seen God at any time, the only begotten son which is in the bosom of the Father, he has declared him so that the Lord Jesus, that his life and his words and his actions were all a unity and declared God. What a profound life the Lord Jesus had. How is it that he had this life? How is it that he was full of grace, that he demonstrated grace because of God's spirit within him without measure?
Moving to Colossians 1, the invisible God who is the image of the invisible God. Well, that's a reference to the Holy Spirit. And when it says later, after talking about the transference of your soul from absolute black darkness to the place of the redeemed, the kingdom of light, it says that in him, that it pleased the Father, that in him all that fullness should dwell. That fullness of the spirit was unlimited in the Lord Jesus.
And so we can meditate upon the character and life of the Lord Jesus that he declared God because the fullness of God was unlimited in the way in which he was indwelt by God as God the Son. And the wonderful passage that I alluded to, you know, the writer to the Hebrews, whoever he was, God who had sundry times and diverse manners, spake in times past to the fathers by the prophets. You have David in Psalm 22, speaking in the spirit of the crucifixion of Christ. That is the Holy Spirit guiding the heart and the mind and the pen of King David to prophetically point to the crucifixion of Christ.
When the Holy Spirit did that, did he hear words in his head? It was the leading of the Holy Spirit. Very often in the Old Testament, the prophet would say, God says, God says, the Lord says, and so it is actually written down what God said to the prophet. But equally so, you have the prophets in the Old Testament so powerfully guided by the Holy Spirit that there is no such statement.
David does not say in Psalm 22, I predict that all his bones will be out of joint. And God told me that his tongue will cleave to the roof of his mouth in a measure, in a sense, through the spirit, King David experienced those things. And that is why he wrote them down. He wrote them down because he was so full and guided by the Holy Spirit that he saw that experience and in some measure experienced it as a prophecy that God gave to him.
So when it says, God spake in times past through the prophets, whether it was that John the Baptist would come in Isaiah 40, or whether it was that the Lord Jesus would be born in Bethlehem in Micah 5 verse 2, God's Spirit was guiding these men. God's Spirit was revealing things to these men. And when the Apostle Paul speaks of men in an assembly prophesying, did you ever think of what that means? Does it mean for telling the future?
I would say generally no. But if the Spirit is guiding the heart and the mind, then the mind of God can be revealed. You can share the heart of God, the mind of God, if the Holy Spirit is guiding you. That passage pertaining to when he had by himself perched our sins sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on High, that passage is also bookended with the Holy Spirit referring to the anointing.
And so we have this J.B. Phillips translation of John 3, 34, for the one whom God sent speaks the authentic words of God, and there can be no measuring of the Spirit given to him such was the Lord Jesus Christ. And so this morning at this late hour, I was going to speak more about the Holy Spirit, but in fact, the invisible God is a Spirit in total. That is what God is.
So when we say the Holy Spirit, there is a sense in which we are saying God, and that is consistent with the idea of the Trinity. God is a Spirit and they that worship him must worship him in Spirit and in truth. It's marvelous to think about God's creation, which we also briefly sang about this morning. I was looking on a YouTube video of the James Webb telescope and they said to themselves, where is a piece of the universe where we can point this thing?
Because we're going to point it at the least likely place to find anything. And they showed at the end of it the whole sky. And this is tiny little square. As far as we know, there's nothing there.
Let's focus in with the world's most powerful telescope ever designed and keep looking and keep looking and keep collecting the light and collecting the light. There was something like 10,000 galaxies in that black spot. You just need to look. Our own galaxy.
It would take 105,000 years traveling at the speed of light to get across our galaxy. 250 billion miles. And then that's a big number. 250 billion galaxies?
That's a big number. In your body, there are 350 trillion cells. That's incredible. I'm sorry, it was 250 billion stars in our galaxy.
That's the number 250 billion stars in our galaxy alone. But you have more cells in your body than there are stars in this galaxy. And in every one of your cells is a nucleus, anomitochondria, anelisosome, anaribosome, and gogi bodies and all kinds of things that ordinary people like you and I don't have much idea about and they keep you alive. And when I think of going down from huge, huge, huge to small, small, I think about God holding that in the palm of his hand.
Another day named a nose German, Max Planck worked with Niels Bohr. Subatomic physics, getting the questions of quantum gravity. There is a scale called the Planck scale. Below the Planck scale, none of the laws of physics apply, as far as we know.
10 to the minus 35. All the way out to a galaxy that is 105,000 light years across, which has 250 billion stars in a universe that has uncountable galaxies. And I think of God as holding the whole thing. Am I in there?
How is it? How is it that I'm in there? How is it that the Planck scale is as open to God as the size of this room and that those galaxies that were never seen before are as open to God as holding a grain of sand in his hand? Our God is both enormously big and yet can perceive that which is unbelievably small.
That's the nature of our God. He's everywhere. That is the nature of God's spirit and the presence of God's spirit. The previous sermon I gave in December was associating God the Father with design, God the Son with execution, and the Holy Spirit with inspiration.
So we can look at some verses to think about that idea and what the Holy Spirit, how the Holy Spirit is portrayed, if you will, in your New Testament. Romans 812, but if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. The Spirit is life. Jesus said, the Spirit is life.
The flesh counts for nothing. Isn't that something? We spend our lives trying to survive and we're often thinking about the things of the flesh. But in fact, what gives life is the Spirit and I love Romans 814 because for all his learning, Martin Luther went through University, and I can't remember the name of the professor that caused him to doubt Catholic theology.
But it was one of his professors so that by the time he graduated, he had profound doubts about the Catholic system of theology. And so he was a very analytical man, and he looked at these things. It is written that when it came to it, when it came to look at him, looking at himself, and looking at doctrine, and looking at the doctrine of salvation by faith, that this verse was the verse that caused Martin Luther to say, I am not saved, because I know nothing about this. If I were a believer, I would know what it's like to be led by the Spirit of God and I know nothing about it.
And so he desired to be saved, and he was saved. And then God's Spirit really led him, and he became a man of great courage. So it is a hallmark of your Christian life to be led by the Holy Spirit, at least it should be. The Spirit of God was at work at creation, hovering over the face of the waters.
The Spirit of God was present at creation. Talked about that before. The Spirit of God is part of our experience of salvation. Someone read from Titus, verses just before this this morning.
But after that, the kindness and love of God, our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but by his mercy, he saved us by the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Ghost, which he has shed on us abundantly through Jesus Christ, our Savior. Redemptively, the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit is inherent to both redemption and sanctification, and your New Testament teaches you that salvation is both of those things. That salvation is, yes, knowing that the doctrinal justification, the doctrinal forgiveness of sins objectively, but your salvation is also the process of being sanctified. And so I have sanctificationally, there's a big word.
It is through the sanctification of the Spirit that we go on in the Christian life. And so I'm going to, I'm almost done. We're at a time of year when people think about New Year's resolutions, and I was thinking about this word. If you have the thought of having a New Year's resolution, you must fill yourself with resolve, with determination.
Resolve? What's the one I take that apart? Resolve? Are there other things in my life that I need to revisit that need to kind of like be solved again?
Problems in my Christian life which really should not be persisting. If I allow the Lord to work, if I allow the Holy Spirit to guide and to direct and to lead. And so I leave that thought with you. Do you have some resolve?
Will you allow the Lord to solve the things that you really need to get past in your life? Bring those things to the Lord. And we live in a society, my wife and I were talking about the educational system. It is a matter of public information from schools of education and so on, that modern great schools and so on are not actually, the teachers are not actually taught that the point of it is education.
They are taught that the point of it is therapy. They want to put your child under their therapy. That is not what we are paying them to do, but that's what they are doing. And one of the things that we see with young people as a result is a great deal of inward looking, teachers encouraging them to keep looking inside of themselves all the time.
That is not a good idea. Similarly, I think in the Christian life, if we are going to be kind of narcissistic and we're going to be looking inwards all the time and focusing on our own emotions all the time, then we're going to go down a wrong path. You know one of the ways that you can get past this? Do something.
Forget about how you feel. Take action. Therefore my beloved brethren, be steadfast, unmovable, abounding in the work of the Lord for as much as you know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. Get off the couch.
Serve the Lord and not focus on what's inside of you. In this day and age, especially in a Canadian winter, there's a tendency of good, I'm home close the door, heat up the house. You know, I know all about that. But we need to perhaps make an extra effort to stay in touch with our Christian brothers and sisters to reach out to those who need a visit, to reach out to those who would appreciate it if you would pray with them.
And then you find out that you started off thinking, well, I don't feel very spiritual. Maybe I'm not the person to do this. But at the end, you feel blessed. And you say, what was it that was bothering me?
I don't even remember anymore. I feel so blessed to have had fellowship with that person that I reached out to just out of obedience to the Lord. And now both they and we are strengthened as a result. And so I share those few thoughts with you this morning and pray that the Lord would give you a 20, 25, which is characterized by the leading of his spirit in your heart and life.
I see that our time has gone. Shall we pray? Father in heaven, we thank you that you have given to us, within ourselves, you are very self. This is a miracle.
This is inexpressible. And indeed, Lord, as we seek to pray, we pray that the inexpressible things, the things that weigh us down sometimes, that we see no way out, we see no solution. Help us to pray anyway. Help us to grow with the groanings of your spirit, to be enabled by you, to be led by you.
To be strengthened by you in 20, 25. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. I thought we would close with...