Introducing the Holy Spirit Rich Nathan February 12, 2012 Holy Spirit: 40 Days to Experiencing the Spirit Series Joel 2:28 - 32

Back in the 13 th century there was a German emperor named Frederick the Second who wanted to know what language children would speak if no one ever spoke to them. So he chose several newborns and he instructed the nurses to feed them but to provide them no cuddling or talking. What language do you think the children grew up speaking?

They didn’t grow up at all. All the babies died before they could talk. The rate of infant mortality called “marasmus” among orphans has sometimes reached incredible proportions. Back in 1915 a doctor, who was investigating infant mortality in American orphanages, said that 90% of American orphans died. After World War I a famous doctor, Fritz Talbot, studied marasmus, infant mortality, in German orphanages. He watched an elderly German woman carrying babies on her hip. One of the hospital workers said this, “Oh, that’s old Anna. When we have done everything medically we can do for a baby, and it is still not doing well, we turn it over to Old Anna and she is always successful.”

Dr. Talbot published his findings. He said, “Here is the lesson. Orphanage workers need to touch, hold and carry and mother every baby in the orphanage several times every day.” As this message of touch was spread to American orphanages infant mortality went from 90% to 10%. That’s why today nurses working with prematurely born children in neo-natal units are taught how to therapeutically touch babies.

We human beings thrive when we are touched. One doctor investigated the health of the elderly who were confined to nursing homes. He found that elderly people who had a pet were healthier and lived longer than elderly people who did not have a pet. Even a pet we can hold and who rubs against us does something positive for our health.

Marilyn Monroe once gave an interview to a reporter. She was asked about her childhood. She broke down in tears. She was shuttled from foster home to foster home. She said she never really knew love growing up and she was rarely touched. She said one of her happiest memories was one of her foster moms was putting on her makeup. Young Marilyn came into her room and asked what she was doing. The woman turned around and began to playfully touch her face with powder and put lipstick on her. It was one of the happiest memories of her childhood. Being touched; made to look pretty.

There was a study done of successful basketball teams that suggest that successful basketball teams communicate affirmation to each other through touch way more than unsuccessful teams. Kevin Garnett, of the Boston Celtics, and Steve Nash, from the Phoenix Suns are “world- class- touchers”. You see them constantly putting their arm around a teammate who is feeling down, or who has just blown a play; high-fiving it with other teammates.

We need to be touched. And most of all we need God’s touch.

Here is what we read in Romans 5:5:

Romans 5:5 And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

The Apostle Paul says that the thing that secures you, that gives you joy in the face of incredible trials, is this direct experience of love poured out in your heart by the Holy Spirit. The idea is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the profusion, the abundance of this Spirit is something you don’t have to guess about. There is no uncertainty here. What we need is to be assured; to have God reach down from heaven to touch us in a way that we know that we know that God is real and that God loves us. That the Christian story is true; that there is a reason to hope; there is a power to resist; something that goes beyond our intelligence, our deducing, and our reasoning. We need God’s touch.

The way God touches us is by the Holy Spirit. The way that anyone today in the 21 st century experiences God is by the Spirit.

Gordon Fee, one of the great New Testament scholars of the last century, wrote a massive book on the Holy Spirit called “God’s Empowering Presence”. He opens the book by saying this:

I am convinced that the Spirit in the Apostle Paul’s experience and theology was always thought of in terms of the personal presence of God. The Spirit is God’s way of being present, powerfully present, in our lives and communities as we await the consummation of the kingdom of God. Precisely because Paul understood the Spirit as God’s personal presence, Paul also understood the Spirit always in terms of an empowering presence and an experiential presence; whatever else, for Paul the Spirit was an experienced reality. Without an experience of the Spirit, we are living sub-New Testament lives.

But many folks today are like the people that the Apostle Paul preached to in the city of Ephesus way back in the 1 st century. Here’s what we read in Acts 19:1 -2:

Acts 19:1-2 1 While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples 2 and asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” They answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit .”

I’m starting a new series today on the Holy Spirit. The series is titled 40 Days to Experiencing the Holy Spirit. I’ve called my message today very simply, “Introducing the Holy Spirit.” Let’s pray.

Let me read to you Joel 2: 28-32:

Joel 2:28-32 28 “And afterward , I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. 29 Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days. 30 I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. 31 The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. 32 And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance, as the Lord has said, even among the survivors whom the Lord calls.

Joel is an Old Testament prophet. We don’t know exactly when he prophesied. That’s one of the most controversial things about the book of Joel – trying to set a date for this prophet’s writings. But we know that Joel prophesied hundreds of years before the birth of Christ. And in this text Joel speaks about a future time he calls “afterward.”

Joel 2:28 “And afterward , I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.

And he says about this future time that it is going to be a time of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The future, this afterward time, what the New Testament calls the “end-time” is going to be the age of the Spirit. The end-times are going to be characterized by a profound experience of the Holy Spirit.

End-times experience

Now, Joel in this prophecy speaks about all of the signs and wonders in the heavens and the earth.

Joel 2:30-31 30 I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and billows of smoke. 31 The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.

The imagery that he uses here is taken from the book of Exodus and the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt; the time when God turned the Nile River to blood; where hail and fire smote the land; and when Mt. Sinai was shrouded in smoke from the fire of the Lord’s presence. Just as God delivered the Old Testament people of Israel from their captivity in Egypt, so in the end-times God is going to work a new deliverance, a new salvation not just for the people of Israel, but here we read for all people.

Joel 2:28 “And afterward, I will pour out my Spirit on all people . Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.

And in Joel 2:32:

Joel 2:32 And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved; for on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be deliverance, as the Lord has said, even among the survivors whom the Lord calls.

The characteristic of what the Bible calls the “end-times” is that the end times are supposed to be the age of the Spirit.

Let me bring this down for you. Some Christians spend all of their time studying and writing about what is called “the end times.” And so they draw up these elaborate charts, graphs, and pictures, and claim to show you how obscure scriptures, lifted out of context from a prophecy in Ezekiel, or Daniel, or the book of Revelation, is being fulfilled today in what’s happening in the Obama Administration, the European Union, or in Israel. They write these incredible stories about the end-times and millions of people buy their books at Wal-Mart.

The average Christian reads the book and says, “Well, I don’t really know what this verse from Ezekiel means, but who am I to argue with these folks? After all, they are so much smarter than me and they’ve made millions of dollars selling books and making movies. So if these folks say that the third horn on the beast is one of the Clinton’s, they must have been let in on some secret information that I don’t have. They must know that this prophecy against Babylon really is referring to the Iraqi War that’s being fought today.”

Other Christians say, “Forget about the end times, all this stuff is so speculative. We have a job to do. We need to go out there and share our faith with people

around the world. We have a job to do, the job of evangelism, the job of missions. People need to be saved.”

Those of us living in the 21 st century can be forgiven for not really understanding the biblical message of the end-times. Jesus’ own disciples were confused about the end-times. Here’s what we read in Acts 1.6-8,

Acts 1:6-8 6 So when they met together, they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

What was Jesus saying to the disciples? What is Jesus saying to us? Jesus is not saying to forget thinking about the end-times. He is saying I want you to think about the end times. You are right in asking me about the breaking in of the kingdom of God and the end of time. The end of time has begun with my resurrection. But I don’t want you wasting your time discussing speculative nonsense about date setting and focusing upon impossible-to-interpret events in the world, or obscure verses about ten horns and three-headed beasts. Reading the Bible is not supposed to be like reading tea leaves, or reading someone’s palm. You don’t have to be part of a special elite group in order to understand the Bible.”

The end times is the age of the Spirit. The time we live in is all about the Holy Spirit.

The great end-time gift of the Holy Spirit awaited Jesus being resurrected from the dead, and ascended to heaven where he was glorified and crowned as King by God the Father. The gift of the Holy Spirit; along with the forgiveness of sins, are the two great gifts that people who go to Jesus receive. I want you to see this. People say, “Well, what can I expect if I go to Jesus Christ? What will Jesus give me?

In John 19, John records a little event that is not in the other gospels. He tells us that when Jesus died on the cross, a soldier came up and ran a spear through his side. We read in John 19:34:

John 19:34 Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water.

Now, putting the medical aspects of this aside, there are some physical, medical reasons why blood and water would have flowed from Jesus’ spear-pierced

heart, but John clearly wants us to read in the flow of blood and water great symbolic significance. For the blood of Jesus symbolizes nothing other than the forgiveness of sins. The water symbolizes nothing other than the gift of the Holy Spirit that flows from the heart of Jesus.

This is what the end-time gift of the Holy Spirit is all about. The kingdom of God is about inheriting the precious promises reserved for the end of time and enjoying those promises now – the forgiveness of sins, the writing of the law of God on your heart, the experience of a measure of the healing of your body, the experience of the reconciling of relationships, the spreading of justice on the earth, and salvation, regardless of race, ethnicity, or age. God has come to live inside of human beings by His Spirit. The beginning of the end has come to planet Earth. And we know this by the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit of God is the down payment on all that we are going to inherit when the Kingdom comes fully. God gives us right now in seed form what we are going to fully receive when the Kingdom comes in power. The Spirit is a great end- times gift. And the Spirit is the gift not only of the end, but the Holy Spirit is the gift of experience.

The Holy Spirit is the gift of experience

I used the term “experience” very deliberately because throughout the New Testament the Holy Spirit is not presented to us as simply a doctrine that is added at the end of a Creed. The reason I believe that Christianity has so little real impact on the way that Christians really live their lives and therefore on the way that Christians express their faith to the world is because for many Christians Christianity is presented simply as a series of propositions to be believed.

What does it mean to be a Christian? For many people it simply boils down to would you put a checkmark next to certain propositions? Do you believe that God is a Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Check. Do you believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Savior? Check. Do you believe that Christ died for your sins? Check. Do you believe that Christ rose from the dead? Check. Do you believe in the Holy Spirit? Check.

Many people have been told that if you believe these things your life will change. Many of you have been told that. And then you look at your life and you say, “But my life hasn’t changed.” What’s wrong?

There is more to Christianity than some thing to believe. There is also some one to receive, someone to experience.

Now listen. The church has always had creeds, statements of faith regarding what we Christians believe. There is a move today in the 21 st century away from

creeds, away from propositional faith to a kind of cafeteria Christianity. You know, you go to a cafeteria and you say, “Well, I’m going to choose the fried chicken. I’m going to choose to have salad with that. I don’t really like olives, so I won’t have olives. I’m going to choose the sweet potatoes, but I’m not going to pick the greens. I really don’t like greens.” Many people are cafeteria Christians. We pick and choose the statements of faith that we’re with which we are most comfortable.

21 st century Americans are most particularly guilty of this approach to the Christian faith. We say, “Why should I have to believe something just because the Christian church has always taught this for 2000 years? I’m an American and what’s most precious to me as an American is consumer choice. Just as I have a choice of 300 kinds of cough medicines and 150 different kinds of toilet paper, I ought to have a choice in my Christian faith. Who cares if something is in the Bible presented to us as the truth or that the larger Christian community holds to a certain view of God or Christ or the way of salvation? As an American I am exercising my choice to pick and choose the elements of faith that I like and to reject those elements that I don’t like – those that don’t seem modern to me, or tolerant, or comfortable or whatever else it is that I value.”

Listen, Christianity has certain truth content to it. Ever since I embraced Christ, I’ve always made it my aim to as much as possible to embrace all of Christ – all that he is, all that he does and all that he taught. Part of this embrace of the whole thing is that I’ve always thought, “I need help in living life.” If I could do life perfectly well on my own, then I wouldn’t need Jesus. But the truth is I can’t do life perfectly well on my own. I need help with my relationships. I need help with my emotions. I need help dealing with forces within me that are too strong for me to handle. I need help to hope for the future. I need a way to deal with the guilt of the past. I need power to help me to love people that I don’t love. I don’t know about you, but the reason why I turned to Jesus was because I needed help with my life. And frankly, I’m not smart enough to figure out what things that Jesus taught that are essential for my life to be whole and well, and what things that Jesus taught that are optional – like a built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) in the car. I don’t know if I rip out this business of forgiving other people, or praying regularly, or worshipping God, if I’m tearing out the engine that makes my life work.

What you consider optional, friend, in terms of your faith and practice, may actually be the engine or the drive train that Jesus intends to make your life really function.

Cafeteria Christianity just doesn’t work. Christianity has a certain truth-content to it. We don’t make it up as we go. It’s not our thing; its God’s thing.

With this in mind, Christianity goes beyond creeds and beyond propositional content. It involves the experience of the Holy Spirit. The church today needs to

regularly invite people to experience the Spirit. There is a growing hunger inside of people for experience. Hundreds of thousands of people have run after the New Age movement because it at least promises some kind of experience. People are going out into the woods, pounding drums, sitting in sweat lodges and then racing to jump into icy water. Why? Maybe it’s because they want some kind of experience. People want to feel something.

Other people seek experience through some sort of altered state of consciousness or the use of alcohol or drugs. Folks seek experience through ever-more exotic sexual practices.

What the Christian faith offers is an experience, not just a creed, and an experience of God through the Holy Spirit.

Acts 2:1-4 1 When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. 2 Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

We see in the case of the disciples that the experience of the Holy Spirit was a felt-experience.

The disciples heard something like a freight train, which shook the house. Not only did they hear something, they saw something:

Acts 2:3 They saw what appeared to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.

Not only a sight and a sound, but there was also speech:

Acts 2:4 And all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Filling with the Holy Spirit is the experience of the felt presence of God. Some people in the church today are told to forget about experiences. Don’t worry about whether you felt anything or not. Concern yourself with the truth, and that is sufficient. Now, on the one hand, I think that is partially right. You don’t have to wait for a feeling to obey God, or to do what is right, or do to what is loving, or moral. You don’t have to be swept away with a feeling for you to determine not to lie, cheat on a test, gossip, or slander someone, or to steal someone’s client. The Christian life is not a life of waiting around for a feeling to do what is right or

good. We do act, based on the truth. We know what God’s Word says about telling lies, or sleeping with your boyfriend or girlfriend, or slandering, gossiping, stealing, or helping the poor. We know what God’s will is regardless of our feelings.

But if you have never felt, or rarely felt God’s presence, something is wrong with that. It is true that the Christian life is not based on feelings. But if feelings don’t ever accompany your relationship with God, then we would say that you have a defective Christian experience. I’ve used this illustration before, but relationship with God is like a great marriage. Imagine if I came home at night after work and said to my wife, Marlene, our marriage is not based on feeling, but if it’s not accompanied by feeling, something is dreadfully wrong. If you don’t experience the felt presence of God through the Holy Spirit, you are not living out New Testament Christianity. The gift of the Holy Spirit, this great end-times gift, was given to us so that we might have an internal experience of God.

Internal experience

One way that the end-time gift of the Spirit was described by the prophets was that the Spirit would give us an internal experience with God. That’s what the prophet Jeremiah predicted nearly 600 years before the birth of Christ.

Jeremiah 31:31-34 31 “The days are coming ,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt, because they broke my covenant, though I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord. 33 “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time ,” declares the Lord. “I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts . I will be their God, and they will be my people. 34 No longer will they teach their neighbors, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” declares the Lord. “For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”

Jeremiah speaks about a coming time in which our relationship with God will be radically changed, unlike the relationship that the people of Israel had with God where God was their husband. But it was an unhappy marriage. Israel didn’t want to stay in that marriage. They broke covenant with God even though God was their husband. God says, “I am going to make a new covenant with people. One in which folks will want to stay married to me. I’m going to bring you into a one-on-one relationship with me so that you will know me. I’m going to put my will inside of you. My law, what I want from human beings is not just going to be written on stone. I’m going to write my will on your heart so that from the inside of you, you will want to do what your husband, God, asks you to do.”

How would God’s law be written inside of us? Ezekiel 36:27 tells us:

Ezekiel 36:27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.

Friend, if you consider yourself to be a Christian, have you ever felt the Holy Spirit internally prompting you to do God’s will? Have you ever felt from the inside? I feel like I need to go over to that person and encourage them; I need to say something that will bring comfort to them. I need to give a certain amount of money for a tithe or to meet a particular need. I need to say “no” to myself concerning a certain activity, a particular desire.” It is not that I’m reading a list of rules and trying as hard as I can to obey. Friend, have you ever felt from the inside God molding your heart so that you want to obey? That you like to do the will of God? That more and more you find great joy in doing what pleases God?

If you have any of those impulses, they come from the Holy Spirit. An experience of the Spirit is an internal experience.

The experience of the Spirit is also an empowering experience.

Empowering experience

In the text that we looked at before from Acts 2 when the Spirit of God came on Pentecost as the great end-time gift, it says that he came in what seemed to be tongues of fire.

Acts 2:3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.

Now they didn’t have actual fire coming into the room. It says in Acts 2:3 that they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire. Incidentally, the funny hats that you see the Pope and Catholic and Episcopal Bishops wear that are real tall and have a crease in them are called a Bishop’s Mitre. They are always shaped like a tongue to remind the church that the church represented by the Bishop is brought to birth by the fire of God’s Spirit.

What is a Christian? A Christian is someone who is set on fire by God’s Spirit. The Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard put it so powerfully when he said:

Christianity is fire setting.

A Christian is a person who is set on fire by the Holy Spirit. When you look out at the church in the 21 st century and at all the problems facing the church – declining church attendance, attacks from without, cynicism around institutions,

moral corruption from within – what the church needs is men, women and children who are set on fire by God. Our supreme need is not better techniques; it is not a more powerful website, it is not better marketing or better graphics; it is not a slicker presentation on Sunday morning. Our supreme need and the need of the church are to be set on fire by the Holy Spirit.

Jesus did not leave us in the trenches to slug it out on our own. We read in Acts 1.8:

Acts 1:8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

Jesus did not simply give us marching orders to go out into the world spreading the gospel. He said, “I’m going to go with you. I’m going to give you power to perform the mission that I gave you. I’m going to fill you with the Holy Spirit so you can carry out my marching orders in this very difficult world.”

Craig Keener, in his very helpful book titled, “Three Crucial Questions About the Holy Spirit,” uses this illustration.

He says imagine visiting a town at night that appears to have no lights, no televisions, not even alarm clocks. People are out on the streets beating their clothes against rocks. They have torches lit. They are cooking over charcoal. When you go into their houses you discover that all of the folks have washing machines, electric ovens, electric lights, air conditioners, and TVs. You also find out that the town has an infinite power supply. But nobody told the members of the town that the appliances won’t work unless you plug them in to the wall. Wouldn’t that be a silly place to live?

And yet, this is the way that people live today trying to do the commands of Jesus when we’re not plugged in. We don’t have the power of Jesus enabling us to live the life he wants us to live. The gift of the Holy Spirit is all about plugging you into the power source, so that instead of beating your clothes against a rock, or rather, beating your head against the wall, wouldn’t it be nice if you had power to change, power to overcome what oppresses you, power to break the addiction that is in your life, power to bear witness to Christ in your home, with your loved ones, your roommates and coworkers?

Now, you know that the church today spends so much time arguing about the timing of when someone gets plugged in. Most Christians think about the plugging into the power source in one of two ways. Either coming from a Reformed or Evangelical tradition, a person is plugged into the power of the Holy Spirit at conversion. Or coming from a Pentecostal or charismatic tradition, they

are plugged into the power source after conversion through a special empowerment. Both groups line up their favorite Bible texts to prove when you get plugged into the power of the Spirit. I’m not tremendously troubled to have people in either camp, so long as the person is plugged in.

To people on either side of this divide I would simply say: Do you feel like you have all the power of the Holy Spirit that you need in your life right now? Are you a person who says, “I don’t need any more power from God to do what God wants me to do. I don’t need any more power.”

As part of this series we’re going to be doing a series of follow up experiences over the next two months. If you are a member of Vineyard Columbus, I’m going to ask you as your pastor to go to at least one of these follow up meetings.

In your bulletin is a list of events. I would ask small groups, women’s groups, men’s groups, coed groups, support and recovery groups, and Bible study groups that you pick at least one of these meetings to try to go together to as a group. Imagine if in two months this church hit a tipping point in which the majority of us experienced a fresh encounter with the Holy Spirit.

Finally, this great end-time gift of the Spirit is not only an internal experience and an empowering experience; the Holy Spirit is also an embracing experience.

Embracing experience

Here is what we read in Acts 2:16-18:

Acts 2:16-18 16 No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel: 17“‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.18Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.

Peter is explaining what happened on Pentecost when this great end-time gift of the Spirit was poured out. The inclusiveness of the Spirit in this end-time age of the Spirit is radical when you compare this with the Old Testament. In the Old Testament the gift of the Spirit was only for certain people, chosen leaders like King David and Gideon, and chosen prophets like Micah. And the gift of the Spirit was confined to the people of Israel. But here we see this in Acts 2:17:

Acts 2:17 17“‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people . Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.

This great end-time gift of the Spirit is not racist. You know whenever the Spirit of God is poured out, all the human ways of dividing people up and excluding certain folks from a share in God; all of the humanly made distinctions disappear whenever there is a powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Let me give you an illustration.

In the decade prior to 1906, the lynching of Blacks in America reached their height. It is estimated that well over one thousand Blacks, mainly Black men, were lynched – hanged or shot, sometimes buried alive - in the United States. Millions of people in the United States of America had joined the Ku Klux Klan. That same year, 1906, the Spirit of God was poured out in a powerful revival in Los Angeles known today as the Azusa Street Revival. Under the leadership of a Black man, William Seymour, tens of thousands of people from all over the world, all walks of life, rich, poor, men, women, Americans, non-Americans, Black, White, Asian, Latinos, folks from all over came by car, by horse and buggy, by train, by boat and they encountered the Spirit. In a year of lynching, what people observed were Blacks and Whites embracing each other as beloved brothers and sisters in Christ.

The historian of the Azusa Street Revival said this:

The color line is washed away by the blood of Jesus Christ.

Not only is the Spirit not racist, but the Holy Spirit is not sexist.

Acts 2:17 17“‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.

Wherever the Spirit of God is poured out women are set free to be and to do all that God intends individual women to be and to do. Let me read to you a brief summary of the ministry of women in the world today where God’s Spirit is being poured out. This is from Fawn Parish, a researcher of women’s ministries in the 21 st century.

Two-thirds of the pastors in the unregistered church in China are women. A majority of effective missions in North Africa is being conducted by single young women. Historically, single women missionaries have courageously braved death, spoken hard truths, been the recipient of hard criticism, and have many sheathes of harvest to lay at the feet of Jesus.

Where the Spirit of God is poured out many of the old human distinctions break down. The Spirit of God is not racist. He is not sexist. And he is not ageist.

Acts 2:17 17“‘In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.

The Spirit of God is not given as a gift just to adults. God’s Spirit comes on children. There has been discussion over the last five years about the “4/14 window” between ages four and fourteen. There is a tremendous openness to God in that age range. But the window frequently closes in the teen years. The older people get the more resistant they are to God, to receiving Christ as Savior, and to receiving the Holy Spirit. Some of you may want to bring one of your children to one of the Holy Spirit experiences. Pray for your kids. Lay hands on them. Talk to them about experiencing the Spirit.

Finally, the Spirit of God is not elitist. He is poured out on male and female slaves.

Acts 2:18 Even on my servants, both men and women , I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy.

The gift of the Spirit is a blow for justice. The gift of the Spirit is a blow for inclusion in a world that is divided, that is partisan, that is bickering, and that is full of hatred and ethnic strife and division. God says that he is pouring out his Spirit in these last days bringing healing to this troubled planet. Let’s pray.

Introducing the Holy Spirit Rich Nathan February 12, 2012 Holy Spirit: 40 Days to Experiencing the Spirit Series Joel 2:28-32

I. The end-time experience

II. A gift of experience

A. An internal experience

B. An empowering experience

C. An embracing experience