| Andrew Lim
27 July 2008 - Ezekiel 37:1-14
At Pentecost / fifty days following the resurrection of Jesus
God created a new Israel
He baptized His people with the Holy Ghost and fire
their tongues were loosened / the curse of Babel was reversed
their fear gave way to faith / their disunity dissolved into unity
their cowardice passed over into courage
they hearts were transformed / their spirits renewed
It was the birthday of the church
But at the center of this whole drama
was the divine person who transformed them
This divine person is no one else than the Holy Ghost
the Spirit of the living God
the Spirit of holiness who raised Jesus from the dead
the Spirit of Christ
But just Who is the Holy Spirit?
The Creed calls Him / the Lord and Giver of life
If you have ever been moved by Jesus to hand your life over to Him
you know the presence of the Holy Spirit
If for years / you walked away from God
and one day your ears became attentive you heart receptive
the Holy Spirit touched you
If quite suddenly / you find that the glitz and glamour of this world
begins to leave a bad taste in your mouth
the Holy Spirit has touched you
If you have a greater desire than before to spend time alone in prayer
the Holy Spirit prompted you
It is the Holy Spirit Who kept you going
when you walked through that dark patch in your life
It is the Holy Spirit Who gives you hope in despairing circumstances
It is the Holy Spirit Who comforts you in your deepest heartache
and assures you in your weakest hour?
If at any time you are in touch with God
it is by the Spirit's power that you are in touch
If this is the case / we need to know Who the Holy Spirit is
The Spirit is somehow known to us and unknown to us
He is closer to us than our heartbeat
but at the same time He is incomprehensible
The Spirit is the very breath of God / He exists before creation
It is His very nature to move / to renew / to refresh / to anoint
Where the Spirit of God is / the air is not stale / the water stagnant
Like gushing wind and running water
the Spirit seeks to rip and shred our old nature open
so we may come out of ourselves and move into God
Like fire / the Spirit consumes and purifies
When we go through deep sorrow and grief
the Holy Spirit helps us / comforts us / and encourages us
The Word of God says / “the Spirit helps us in our weakness
For we do not know how to pray as we ought
but the Spirit himself intercedes for us
with sighs too deep for words”
Further / Jesus tells us that the Holy Spirit will teach us all things
Have you ever thought of it this way
that it is to the Holy Spirit we owe the Bible itself
because all Scripture is given under his guidance and authority
The Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit of God
And it is through the Bible / that the Spirit teaches us about God
When we read and study it
the Spirit illumines our minds / with God’s truth
The Spirit takes us out of our ignorance and leads us into the truth
Where the Spirit of God is / shackles are broken
minds are renewed / bodies receive healing / people are forgiven
- set free to relate peacefully with one another
The Spirit is the Spirit of Love
He teaches our hearts to love
It is not unnatural for the human heart to love / but we easily love
either the wrong things or the right things in the wrong way
The Spirit teaches us to love the right thing in the right way
The Holy Spirit teaches us when and how to pray
The Spirit Himself prays in us / with words and expressions
beyond our ability to understand or to speak
Not only does the Spirit pray in us / He prays for us
It is the charge of the Holy Spirit to charge and convict the world
of its sin and coming judgment / Jn 16: 8
He informs our conscience
Only through Him do we know right and wrong
In fact / were it not for the Holy Spirit
we would have little taste / if any / for holiness
Our strongest natural desire id gratification / not purity
And it is through the Spirit’s power / that we overcome
those natural desires and grow a desire for purity
If you have a hunger for God and holiness
it the Spirit who makes you hungry
If the Spirit does not prompts us to worship God
we would have totally no desire for worship
and whatever worship we may bring to God is droopy and sickly
and despicable and repugnant to the holy God
If the dove of the Holy Spirit is not fluttering over our church
then we have a huge thick wet-blanket thrown over us
everything becomes such a drag and oppressive
we lumber in our praise / we limp and paddle along
To God / our singing is mere noise
But when the dove of the Holy Spirit hovers over our congregation
our worship is celebrative / contemplative / meditative / joyous
our preaching stops becoming a bore / it begins to breathe life
And it is the Spirit Who empowers us to live each day
2 Corinthians chapter 10:3
“Though we walk in the flesh / meaning though we live in this world
we do not war after the flesh
for the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly
but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds”
Paul is saying you and I have to be living in this body in this world
But he says “I know this well / I know that the war we fight
we don’t have to fight it in the flesh
Because we have mighty weapons that God has given us
by the power of the Holy Spirit
And they're powerful strong weapons
We live in a world / charged with unseen demonic forces
that daily seek to destroy us
Who is the first / to approach our Lord
straight after He comes out of His baptism in the river?
Not an angel / not a seraph / not an emissary
but Satan the prince comes to Him / and standing full-frontal
before our Lord / he tries to pull Him down
to derail Him from His mission
But to his frustration
he finds himself without the power he thought he had
to accuse / convict / prosecute / and execute the sentence
against the Son of God
Instead / it is the Spirit / Who has the power
to accuse / convict / prosecute / and execute the sentence
against all those in rebellion against God
And Jesus gives us the good news that the devil’s cause is a dead cause
He’s as good as dead / as far as our Lord is concerned
Referring to Satan the prince / Jesus insisted / that this strong man
has been bound / and we may now plunder his kingdom
Remember when the disciples came back from a successful mission
and reported to the Lord about the success of their mission
what was the Lord’s response
“I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven”
But it is only by the power of the Spirit
that the battle against Satan is fought and won
because the battle is not against flesh and blood
And you and I will be better off / if we realize that we are at war
I don’t want to appear simplistic / but I am convicted / that the real battle
in our lives / our communities / our nation / is spiritual
At the root of all our grief / personally and as a community
is that Satan has people / in his tight grip
and will not release them free
Of course / the struggles we have / evidentially appears to be
sociological / political / racial / economic and cultural
but these are mere the visible manifestations
of a more sinister struggle men and women have had to fight
The Bible is abundantly clear
We do not wrestle against flesh and blood
but against powers / principalities
against the rulers of this present darkness
Our problems have been given a human face
we see the people who have been unjust to us / unkind to us
we see the face of the pimp / selling the young girl for a good price
we see the face to a political dictator / a mean boss / an abusive father
But you will always be on the retreat / if you cannot for the life of you
look behind those faces / and see the grim and surly face of Satan
And you’ll always be on the retreat
because you’ll always be fighting the wrong guy
It is none other than Satan we war against
and it is only by the power of the Spirit / that we can prevail
You know as well as I do that we all have demons in our lives
that we fight against / some on a daily basis
- some of us are afflicted / by the lure of power
- some / the seduction of the unholy pleasures
- some / the temptations of acquiring great wealth
other of us / we fight with daily depression / threat of ill health
- children walking far from God
- shaky marriages / uncertainty of the future
There are many demons that afflict us all
But all is not lost / we have the Spirit of God in us
And the Word of God assures us
that where the Spirit of God is there is power
* Acts 1:8 / “You shall receive power when the Spirit comes on you”
* Micah 3:8 / “Truly I am full of power / by the Spirit of the Lord”
* Zechariah 4 / “Not by might nor by power / but by My Spirit”
* Luke chapter 1:35 / The angel said to Mary
“The Holy Spirit shall come upon you
and the power of the highest shall overshadow you”
* Romans 1 / Jesus was raised from the dead
by the power of the Holy Spirit”
You have the Holy Spirit / you have power
As a Christian who has the Spirit of God living inside you
you possess the power to overcome sin
Apart from the power of the Spirit of God
we have no power to deal with sin
But where the Spirit of God is there is power
If you're not having victory in your life over a habit
it is not due to a lack of power
but an unwillingness or ignorance to unleash that power
But because many Christians have chosen
to walk in the flesh and not in the Spirit
they go through life limping
they’re debilitated / flat and looking quite defeated
And Romans 8:6 says / “To set the mind on the flesh is death”
and we always end up paying for it
and the payment almost always boils down
to these four basic plagues: fear / guilt / hostility / and emptiness
Fear shows us as worry / anxiety / dread /or timidity and ill-confidence
Guilt shows up as shame / a sense of self-hatred / self-righteousness
Even your perfectionist behaviour
can be an attempt to smooth out some deep-seated guilt
Hostility reveals itself as hate / resentment / bitterness / cruelty
Emptiness mostly crop up in your life in the form of loneliness
depression / discouragement / despair
a sense of rejection and purposelessness
But the Spirit is here to give us life / and peace
If death brings fear / then life brings trust / hope / and confidence
If death brings guilt / then life brings acceptance / security / and assurance
If death brings hostility / then life brings love / warmth
kindness and gentleness and humility
If death brings emptiness / then life brings a sense of well-being
fulfilment / zest / excitement / vitality
But on top of life / God promises us a second reward / peace
that inner calm that everyone secretly longs for
a quiet sense of contentment / equilibrium / poise / and tranquillity
Now / if those are signs of a person who walks in the Spirit
then many of us show signs that we’re not walking in the Spirit
for evidentially most of us do not have our lives
marked by a spirit of peace and tranquillity
Many of us are worried sick about many things
we feel harassed / we’re anxious / we’re driven
Even in Christian company / you quite often sense
such an intense feeling of unrest / dissatisfaction / hostility and anger
I suspect that the majority of Christians
are walking in the flesh / and NOT in the Spirit
and that for many of us / the flesh stubbornly refuses to die
Remember the day the prophet Ezekiel was conscripted by God
and taken down in a valley full of nothing but bones
dry bones / bones of people
more suited to pages of National Geographic and Archeaology
than anywhere else
And Ezekiel was told to preach to those bones
to say “O dry bones / hear the word of the Lord!
Behold I will cause breath to enter you
that you may come back to life
And I will attach tendons to you and make flesh grow back on you
I will cover you with skin
I will put breath in you / and you will come to life
Then you will know that I AM the LORD”
And as the prophet was prophesying / there was a noise and a rattling
and the bones came together / bone by bone
And the tendons / the sinew / and muscles appeared on them
and skin covered them”
But as Ezekiel could see / there was no life in them
just a pile of corpses / lying there
And God said to the prophet “Pray now to the Wind / Son of man!
Pray to the Spirit / and say to the Rhuah
Come / Holy Spirit / and breathe over these dead bodies
that they may live”
Ezekiel tells us that as he prophesied
the Breath of God was breathed into them / and they came to life
and they stood up on their feet / a mighty army
What a vision! / One after the other / the corpses all come to life
Its the same today / God brings life to a dead people
The world lies in a valley full of dry bones / dead in sins
Our relentless compulsive activities mask the real spiritual death
Galvanized corpses may have muscular movements
but in spite of their twitching/ they are really dead
People who do not walk with God are dead while they live
We have the outward form of a living body and yet to have no life
because we will not be touched by the Spirit of God
As a community we can end up being a bone-yard full of bones
no different from being caverns full of corpses
- everywhere we see bleached bones lying lifeless
shimmering in the heat
Jesus once confronted a church that was sleepy / lukewarm and self-sufficient
What did He tell them
He says to them / “He who has an ear
let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” / Rev. 3:22
It is the Spirit Who puts us right and renews us
Only the Holy Spirit can set ablaze with purifying flames
such things as lust of the flesh / lust of the eyes / and pride
The church often seems so totally debilitated
and we are often anaemic and powerless
- we are ineffective in our evangelism
- we shy away from people when we should be
aggressively confronting them with the Gospel of Christ
- and the church often looks more like a hospital
than a base for as commando unit
and the church limps along
when she should be marching on with strident steps
Churches can be so perfectly organized / and yet perfectly dead
We can articulated our beliefs so correctly / we’re dead correct!
and haven’t got the spiritual vitality / that’s meant to go with it
We do not sense that we have touched God or be touched by God
We are powerless over the bad circumstances of our lives
When you’re asked to give a testimony
you find yourself reaching back a couple of years
to come up with something to share
If we would fess up we’d have to say / all is not well between us and God
Of course there are pockets within the Christian community
in which you will be able to find
people who have a vibrant throbbing spiritual life
- walking with God / living for God / serving God
- people whose lives are marked by a sense of freedom & spontaneity
- great joy / coupled with a depth of genuine authentic spirituality
O yes you will be able to find pockets of such people
but you will not find them everywhere
Most Christians live rather mundane / prosaic / commonplace lives
I believe with my whole heart / that to a large measure
its because the power of the Holy Spirit of God
has been blocked from flowing through us
There’s all that power out there / the power of God
But instead of that power / coursing through our veins
surging through our spirit / and flowing through our lives
it fizzles off / and stops dead / as soon as it touches us
But if the Spirit of God / now lives within us / in all His fullness
things have got to be a lot more different from what it is
Like the butterfly emerging from a cocoon / we'd be metamorphosed
There was once a young man who felt called to the ministry
He had the most severe speech impediment one could ever come across
He stuttered badly / he stammered hopelessly
he even spluttered sometimes / embarrassingly
And no matter how hard he tried / he just couldn't shake it off
And your first reaction / when you hear him speak
you'll say to yourself:
“No way that guy is going to go into the ministry of preaching”
So as politely as they could / friends and relatives tried to restrain him
But he stopped his ears from listening to them
He had such assurance that he'd heard the call of God
And what that poor man had to go through
to pit himself against all those dampening voices
But he fought hard every step of the way
- he ploughed through Bible seminary / he graduated
and he went into the ministry
And today he is one of the finest expositors of the word of God
But you know something - he still stutters
And on some bad days / from the beginning to the end of the message
But the amazing thing is this:
Whenever he spoke / the people would hang on
to every intelligible syllable that came from his mouth
Why? Because his heart was filled with the Spirit of God
and because of that he preaches with the unction of the Holy Spirit
When he has spoken / its as if God Himself / has spoken
And therein / lies all the difference
And because of that / he is / in a sense
one of the most lucid speaker / any one will ever hear
God wants much more than for us to be just converted
He desires for us to be fill with His Spirit
But why aren’t we always filled with the Spirit ?
Because there is a civil war raging within your life
Its a was that’s being fought every waking hour of every day
Every day / dozens of times a day
your flesh wage war against the Holy Spirit within you
And at any one time you are either walking in the Spirit
or you're walking in the flesh
And when we walk in the flesh / we grieve the Spirit of God
The Holy Spirit is a Person and He can be grieved / I Thess 5:19
You grieve the Spirit when you allow your sensual life to get out of hand
You grieve the Spirit when pit your will in open revolt against God’s will
You grieve the Spirit when you doubt Him and distrust Him
You grieve the Spirit when you refuse to submit and surrender to Him
You grieve the Spirit when you disregard His voice
You grieve the Spirit when you cherish an idol in your heart
You grieve the Spirit when you neglect and dishonour the Scriptures
You grieve the Spirit when you hate your brother
In short / whenever you disobey God / you grieve the Spirit
Are you filled with the Spirit of God / or are you grieving the Spirit of God?
An old retired missionary / once spoke in a huge stadium
to thousands of people
He was nearing his eightieth birthday
And his frame showed the marks of a lifetime of spiritual warfare
That evening / he did not give any pat answers to life's problems
He concluded his talk by saying these words:
“If you do not tend your fire
it soon dies and become just a pile of ashes”
Everyone needs a fire for warmth
But there are those who build their own fires
Isaiah says:
“If you live in your own light
If you warm yourselves from your own fires
and not from my fire / you will live among sorrows” / Is 50:11
The Lord wants to build an inner sanctuary within your heart
an altar within your heart
a place where His Spirit may meet with your spirit
that's the place where his fire burns
that's the place you go to be filled with His Spirit
that's the place from which you may draw life
If you try to warm yourself by the fire of your own making
not only will you not be warmed
but you will suffer the chill of spiritual death
For there is no life outside the Spirit of the Living God
I want to know more of the Spirit’s power for my work
I want to be more fully guided by the Holy
The life-giving refreshing Wind of the Spirit is blowing
and I don’t want to be caught with the sail of my life’s boat down
I want to unfurl the sail of my heart
and feel the pure breath Holy Wind of God in my life
“The wind blows where it wills / and you hear the sound of it
but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes
So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” John 3:8
We need to raise our sails into the Holy Wind blowing on us
I like to see broken hearts healed / shaky marriages restored
love for Christ fanned into fiery flame
people set free from habitual sin and addiction
passion for the lost ignited
But let’s not turn to the latest book / hottest seminar / video or program
Let’s surrender to the Spirit
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