The Spirit Is At Work As Often As You Breathe

The following text is the raw, unedited transcript from a sermon given on February 4th, 2024 at Christ Our Hope Anglican Church in Olympia, WA. You can also listen to the audio. Better yet, subscribe to the podcast! 😄

We are actually going to spend a little time in Acts 1, which, due to what we'll call a holy miscommunication, is what I'll be speaking from. It's actually last year's passage, but Anglicans are really organized and sometimes over-organized, and there's lots to get mixed up. But it's all the Bible, right? It's all God's word. It's relevant to any and every time and season. In the Matthew reading today, Jesus says, Go, therefore, and make disciples. There's an interesting parallel between that and the Acts 1 passage, where Jesus says, You will receive power when the Holy spirit has come upon you, and you will be witnesses of me in Jerusalem and Judea and so forth to the ends of the earth. That being that I think the emphasis gets put on the wrong syllable. In Matthew, we tend to think or we tend to hear that the active word is go. Go or be filled with the Holy spirit. That's the main emphasis of the thing. And yes, we are to go. And yes, we should be filled with the Holy spirit. But interestingly, those are not the active commands in those two passages. In Matthew, the word for make disciples is one word.

It's disciple make. And that's like the imperative command. So really, what Jesus is saying is As you are going, as you're living your life, as you're going to work, going to school, driving down the freeway, and somebody cuts you off, who knows what it is. As you're going, disciple make, teaching them, so on and then so forth. In Acts, when Jesus says what he says and he ends in talking about being witnesses unto me, that again is as a result of being continually filled with the Holy spirit. It's not just a go and a one-time thing, nor is it a Holy spirit, kabam, once and you're good forever. This is a lifelong following Jesus process. And I thought that was just really fascinating that what I would like us to end with today or walk away with today is knowing how to get that emphasis fixed. So that as we are going, as we are doing whatever we're doing, we know how to refocus. And remember, this is following Jesus and being in the spirit is not just a Sunday thing. It doesn't just look like A, B, or C thing that we see on church or on TV or whatever YouTube video.

It's pretty mundane. It's pretty almost boring from the outside. Not always. Sometimes it's a spectacle, but that has its purpose. But I'm getting ahead of myself. So what is Jesus talking about when he says that you will receive power? Well, again, Jesus has to correct his guys because their emphasis is on the wrong place. They ask him in verse 6, Lord, will you at this time restore the Kingdom to Israel? They're like, Now? This thing we've been waiting for for generations and you've come and we didn't expect the whole death and resurrection thing. But now that that's done, are you going to do the thing we thought you were going to do? And he says, No. Shut up. You're missing the point. Again, I would 'oy ve', I'm sure Jesus said that phrase a lot. What we know is what he said is, It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But, verse 8, you will receive power when the Holy spirit has come upon you. This word for power, it's dunamis. It's where we get the word dynamic. It's actually That's also where we get the word dynamite from.

It's energy at work. It's not static, it's dynamic. One way to understand that difference is I'm not a rock climber. I've been rappelling a couple of times in my life, but they talk about how when you are on a line, it's called a static line. This line is rigid, it doesn't flex, it doesn't do anything, and you don't want it to because you're hanging from a cliff. It's a static line versus something that would be a dynamic line, you could say it would be like a bungey cord. So that when you stretch a bungey, you are adding energy to it, and that energy is ready to go as soon as you let go or as soon as you jump off a bridge, which is insane, and become a human yo-yo. But when you take that plunge, that dynamic energy engages, and it's at work. You can see and feel and experience at work. That's the energy. It does something. It goes somewhere. That's the power that Jesus is talking about. You will receive this energetic power when the Holy spirit has come upon you. Now, what does that look like? What does that mean? Does it always look the same?

Is it a one-time thing or is it an always thing? Because the first one we see is pretty spectacular. Like, They go and they pray and they wait. Then this crazy stuff happens with things that look like tongues of fire landing on them, and they start speaking other known languages. They didn't speak gibberish. They spoke whatever languages existed at the time because the people who had come, the Jews who had come to Jerusalem for this big feast, came from various places and spoke a variety of languages. Now, I want to point that out. It wasn't just They weren't like, whoa, you guys... Some people thought they were drunk, which when you see some of the stuff on TV and YouTube, you're like, what did you guys have before you came up on stage? That is wrong. Some people thought they were a bit drunk or messed up, but others heard them proclaiming the goodness of God. It was not to draw attention to the people who were doing it. The point was to draw attention to God. And it worked because the people say, what must we do to be saved? But Peter preached this sermon about, hey, you know what?

You know Jesus, you guys killed him. Not a seeker friendly message. You just killed Jesus, the Messiah, but you can be saved. And so they are convicted and want this salvation and pursue the same thing. It always points to Jesus. And I think Every filling of the Holy spirit does that. Now, this might be a language that is uncomfortable, but hopefully I will help it to make sense. Because we see, as we read Acts, we see more than once, more than twice, it says, And Peter filled with the spirit. Well, where did the first one go? Was he emptied of it? We did Is it like a gas tank and you run out and you have to be... It's all of the above. It's both a one-time thing and an ongoing thing. The word for baptism, whatever we're talking about, water baptism or spirit baptism, it's interestingly the same word you would use to describe the process of making a pickle. You have a brine and you put the cucumber in. I'm going to share how stupid I was growing up. I didn't know that pickles were cucumber. I thought pickles were pickles and cucumber were cucumbers, and they happen to look similar, like Zucini, but I don't like vegetables, so I don't pay attention.

But you put the cucumber into the brine and it just sits in there, doesn't it? It goes through this transformative process, and then you take it out, and now we call it a pickle. Pickled eggs, gross. Pickled onions, probably also gross. But that's what it is. To baptize means to immerse, to go through some process where you are changed. And whether we take a shell and dip it in water and pour it on somebody's head like we tend to do indoors, because we don't have a tub, we don't have a river right here that we can go to for living water to be poured over somebody. The point is the same, is that there's this transformative process that happens. Now, from the Holy spirit perspective, Is it always visible? Not always. Is it always instantaneous that you just suddenly you're like, I'm filled with the spirit? Not necessarily. And even if you are, it doesn't mean the next person has the same experience. Because the spirit God God works through all of us the way that we are built and the way that we are wired. And I think that every time you see, whether it's in scripture or genuine experiences today, the Holy spirit at work, what you see expressed always fits the moment.

And the times when you see spectacles where it doesn't fit the moment, I can't say, in my opinion, I don't know that that is the Holy spirit at work. I'm not going to say it's not. I'm just not sure that it's not because we people like spectacle. We like big things and bright lights and entertainment, and that's It's what the Holy spirit is reduced to at times. And I don't know that that's him. He's not a Vegas show person. He's not a headliner. The Holy spirit is really the guy who cleans up after. But I digress. Anyway, I think when you see the Holy spirit at work, it fits the moment, which is why sometimes it's boring. It doesn't look like anything from the outside, but when you're inside of it, it's powerful. It's transformative. For me, if there is a gift of the Holy spirit that I tend to operate in, it seems to be words of wisdom, which is ironic because I'm not smart. Just for whatever reason, if I'm engaged in a conversation or there's some scenario that needs fixing, I call it the Holy spirit drops a nugget, and it rattles around in here and comes out.

For whatever reason, it's the thing that needs to be said. I can't explain it. I don't know what it is. Does that mean I have the gift of the word of wisdom? I don't know that anybody is given a gift like they're given a bicycle or they're given a thing. I think it's God, and I've said this before, it's God handing a person a tool to use for the moment to fix whatever's broken, and then you might be handed another tool later on in another moment. I really think that's what the gifts of the spirit are. They're expressions of God's power, that dynamic power in use that draws people to God. That, again, when it's words of wisdom, somebody's looking for an answer to something that's usually a God question, and it doesn't The focus doesn't become on me, becomes on, Oh, that's what God's trying to say, or that's what God's trying to do. It's connecting dots. If it is something like speaking in tongues, and it's an individual thing that that gift, I believe, is still active today. When it's genuine, I think it's people speaking a language they didn't know or study for the sake of the gospel, not for the sake of showing off or spectacle.

So words of wisdom, words of knowledge, gifts of healing. Again, I think if somebody is, I have the gift of healing, well, then you should be at the hospital just slapping people on the head, going down running from room to room or whatever. I don't know that it is the gift like that, but there are times when God hands somebody that gift of healing and a person is healed, and then maybe that person never heals anybody ever again. Don't know. Again, the point is this walking This going in the power of the spirit, this going and as we go making disciples, this you receive power when the Holy spirit comes upon you, and as a result, you'll be witnesses unto me wherever you go. Is something that we have access to all the time. We just don't always intentionally operate in it. And maybe we don't know that we can. And maybe that's new to you, that you can You can make it a choice. You can make it a habit to pursue that. To be a God, what do you want to do through me right now? Some people object to the phrase being used.

I don't have a problem with it. God use me. For some reason, that's demeaning. But guess what? We're servants. Side note, you can tell how genuinely servant-hearted you are as a person, if you think you're servant-hearted, when somebody treats you like a servant. You can't Can you give me? Oh, maybe you can, and maybe I need to grow up in that. But again, that's another sermon. What I want to do is have the person I call the Amazing Jess, come up to the other microphone for a few minutes and talk about how using breathing can be a useful reminder for choosing to get recentered on the Holy spirit. Because the word spirit means breath. When we talk about the spirit of God, we're talking about the breath of God. Jesus breathed on them and said, receive the Holy spirit. When God breathes, he speaks, he does something. So breathing is something we should do all the time, shouldn't we? And if somebody's not breathing, well, that person's, to be blunt, dead. So, yeah, Jess is going to share us a little bit about breathing itself. And something you can put in your tool belt to keep focused on the spirit in Jesus.

So breathing, physiologically, we all do it, right? I'm fascinated that it is an intentional part of how God created us to breathe because he built in several benefits, particularly for this. It's a moment of pause when you intentionally breathe. It's really trendy to be mindful, right? This is mindfulness. It's a moment of an intentional pause when you focus on the act of breathing. When that happens, actually, it cues your nervous system to calm down, which is fascinating because usually if we're spinning out or struggling, our nervous systems have taken over and we're no longer functioning in a way that God created us to function. I could go on about that for a long time. Also, physiologically, interestingly enough, when you breathe, your diaphragm sits right here along part of your colon. And when you breathe, your diaphragm stimulates your colon, and it can actually improve your digestion. But here in this context that we're talking about, spiritually and keeping in step with the spirit, spirit and walking with him as a lifestyle. What really, I think, was important to grasp as a practice is in the moments where you can tell perhaps you're not in step with the spirit or you're at a loss.

I don't know what to do here in this time. I need you, Lord. Recognizing your need is to pause for even 30 seconds and do a practice of breath prayer, which I'm actually going to teach you. So you get to play along with me. Breath prayer actually is a really old practice, and it is just praying in rhythm with your breath. So to pray for the Holy spirit's filling and meeting of your need in the moment, a very simple breath prayer, and those of you who are in my liturgy and motion class are familiar with these, is, Come Holy spirit, fill me with whatever it is, is your need at that moment. If you want to think of a fruit of the spirit that you're needing, or maybe it's insight or peace or any of those things, your heart tells you what you're needing from the Lord. If we pause, I'm going to make you do it. Close your eyes, and we are praying. So breath, prayer, you would in your mind, inhale, Come Holy spirit. And on your exhale, fill me with, fill in the blank. You're slowly breathing in, praying, Come Holy spirit.

Filling up your belly with the air and exhaling, emptying the belly, being filled with the Holy spirit, fill me with. And come, Holy spirit. Exhale, fill me with. Can you do that as long as you need to be filled and equipped? Amen.

Thank you. Just to emphasize the importance of this, you could say that doing this is a command from scripture. If you want something to read later today, please do read Galatians 5, but a couple of verses to highlight and wrap up this point. The apostle Paul says, But I say, walk in the spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. That's both a command and a promise, isn't it? So when you're in those moments where, you know what? If you can be self-aware in a moment of crisis that the flesh is taking over, it's like, I need to walk in the spirit so that I will not gratify the desires of the flesh. Now you have something to use. Now you have this breath prayer that you can do. This is the passage where the fruits of the spirit are listed for us, at least some of them. He goes on to say, And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Paul really loves to talk about that picture of having been crucified with him. Jesus He did, of course. But Paul seems very explicit about it, that when you think about it, if we have died and now we are living in him, we now have a new breath.

We now have a new rhythm of breathing than we had before Christ. And he says, If we live by the spirit, let us also keep in step with the spirit. Walking, keeping in step, keeping in rhythm. And I don't know about you, but if you have to walk for extended periods, you need to breathe. It just happens. In fact, the breath sometimes goes up because you are maybe going up hills or down hills or who knows what in the snow, both ways, whatever. But walking requires breathing. So as we walk, as we go, as we are filled and refilled and rebreathed breathed with the Holy spirit, keep this in mind that God can use you at any time in any circumstance if you make yourself available to him. On purpose. Sometimes God uses us by accident, and that's cool. But I'd rather be a person who walks in such a way that God uses me on purpose than by accident, because usually by accident, something dumb happens, and it's good for God, but like, Oh, it was stupid. But on purpose is better. That's my point. Let's pray. Lord, thank you, as always, for your word.

Thank you for your faithfulness. Thank you for your mercy. In your grace. But above all, that this is not something that we do on our own, that you have given us your power. You have given us your spirit. You continue to give us your power and spirit. That that through the centuries, your people have relied on your spirit to go and to make disciples and to go and to preach the gospel and to simply just be believers in communities, in workplaces who represent you, who have unique giftings and callings. And you created us uniquely and wired us uniquely to be effective to build your kingdom. That's our ultimate goal is to build your kingdom, not our own. And help us to please redirect us when that goal is amiss. We love you and we thank you, and we pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.