04-30-17 Outflowing: The Power and Presence of the Holy Spirit

I recognize that for some of you, this unseasonably cool and overcast weather is a downer --  rest assured, it’s supposed to warm up a bit this weekend, and even more so next week.  But for those of us who enjoy this sort of weather, it’s been glorious!  My dog has loved just standing out on the back porch, facing into the wind...

Hey, let me invite all of you to join us for some upcoming events.  Our Ladies’ Craft Night is coming up this Friday evening at 6:30.  That’s always a great time of fellowship, and it gives everyone a chance to catch up on the various projects that they’ve been trying to finish for months.

Oh, and please be praying for our Youth Group as they play paintball to benefit the Haiti Missions Trip this Saturday.  Everyone’s always very careful, but we’re still talking about little balls of paint smacking youngsters at roughly 300 feet per second, so we want everyone to come home happy and a bit bruised, but otherwise healthy. :)

And then this Sunday, we’re having our monthly Brown-Bag-It lunch after the service.  Again, this isn’t a potluck, and you don’t have to prepare anything large or fancy -- just bring a sack lunch and spend some time with your fellow FCCers over a sandwich.  It’s a great time to interact with people and remind one another why we’re family together.

And later on this Summer, we invite you to take part in a daytime Bible study with Marge and Carol Beall on the Parables of Jesus.  Please let her know if you and/or any of your friends would be interested in meeting each Thursday afternoon at 1:00 for some quality time together in God’s Word.

In our message this week, we continued our series looking at the roles and personality of the Holy Spirit.  In Scripture, the writers make it very clear that He’s more than just some “force” behind God’s work -- He’s God Himself, just as much as Jesus is.  And John in particular even breaks with Greek grammar to remind us that He’s a “he,” not an “it.”

The Holy Spirit is a person, with a personality.  We’re told that He has His own mind and thoughts, that He can be lied to and grieved, and that He loves.  We’re told that He empowers us, and that He lives within us when we by faith accept Christ as our Saviour and let Him wash us clean so that we might be adopted into the family of God.  But we’re also told that at times, He can fill us to overflowing -- supersaturate us with His presence and power and direction.  As Athenagoras poetically put it, the Spirit blows through us like a master musician blows through his flute.  In fact, in Genesis 1, Job 33, etc., we see that the Spirit created us, and in Titus 3, we see that He’s essential to our salvation. 

So when we say that the Spirit lives within you as a Christian, we’re not saying that “God empowers you” or “God pricks your conscience” or the like.  We’re saying that God Himself -- the God who sculpted you, the God who saved you, His personhood, everything that He is -- God Himself lives in your heart and shares your life with you on a deeply and genuinely personal level.

How should that change the ways that you speak, act, think, and live today?