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 Note: Preached also as Lord’s Day 19 in TruroJohn 16:5-16Belgic Confession Article 11December 15, 2004
The Power of the Holy Spirit
Text (B.C. 11)
Theme: The Holy SpiritGoal: To teach about the Holy Spirit. Need: Who is the Holy Spirit?
Sermon
Theme: Walk in the Power of the Holy Spirit.Goal: To encourage the congregation to walk in power of the Holy Spirit Need: Unbalanced understanding of the Holy Spirit.Form: Didactic - ConfessionalSermon OutlineI. Some Common
Perceptions
of the Holy Spirit.II. The
Person
of the Holy Spirit.III. The
Power
of the Holy Spirit.My Brothers and Sisters in ChristHow many people here have played the game of golf?Did you take lessons first? How did you learn how to play?If you’re like me you learned by watching and imitation. I learned watching professionals play ontelevision. Saturday and Sunday afternoons I would find golf on TV and I would see how they stood…where they looked…how they swung the club…Then I would go outside and try to do the same thing. I would grab an old broken hockey stick and I wouldswing it over and over again at whatever almost round object I could find.When I got older I bought my first set of clubs. 10 dollars at a garage sale. Wooden shafts. Rusted irons.One of the grips was replaced with hockey tape.I played my first game with those clubs. 9 holes at Sandy Row in South Mountain, Ontario. I took thoseclubs to the driving range and practiced that swing over and over again. Since then I’ve played more golf atdifferent courses. I’ve been to driving ranges and practiced and practiced and practiced.And for about 10 years, without fail, every time I hit the ball. Slice – off to the right.Someone once posted a sign out on an old dirt road in Manitoba that reads “Choose your rut wisely. You’regoing to be in it for the next 60 miles.”Sort of like life isn’t it…bad habits…ruts…they’re hard to break…and they’re easy to get stuck in.Like my swing…every time I practiced I was reinforcing bad habits. I had no idea how to swing a golf club. No one ever taught me. I just saw it on TV and imitated what I saw. And after years of practice I perfected my bad swing.
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We learn a lot of things that way – through imitation and practice. How to swing a golf club. How to drive.How to sing. How to behave around other people. How to be a parent. How to treat your husband or your wife. Sometimes we have good role models and imitate well. Sometimes we perpetuate bad habits for another generation. In either even that is one way that human beings learn.The things that we believe are shaped by this same learning mechanism. Our picture of God is shapedcertainly by what we find in Scripture but it is also influenced and reinforced by everything around us.Every song that we sing and hear. Every prayer that is made by parents, pastors and elders. Everycongregational meeting tells us about God and what the community that we imitate believes about him.Tonight we are taking another step down the road of life and talking about the Holy Spirit. Of the personsof the Trinity the Holy Spirit is the most subject to this kind of learning. In Scripture there is a greater senseof mystery about who the Spirit is and what the Spirit does. While the Father and Son are most often thechief actors in our Bible the Holy Spirit rarely takes centre stage.So most of what we know about the Holy Spirit comes from what we experience around us. From prayers,and hymns, and what we see down the road with more “Spirit Oriented” denominations.And some of what we’ve picked up is good stuff. Being part of a confessional church means that we dohave a way of examining our beliefs and the people around us are more likely to think and pray and actaccordingly. But as we move farther and farther away from this we do run the risk of picking up badtheological habits.So tonight as we look at our doctrine of the Holy Spirit we are going to look at some of these bad habits,what we learn from the confession, and how a corrected view affects our Christian walk with God.Or to make it easy for us 3 P’s…1. Some Common
Perceptions
of the Holy Spirit.2. The
Person
of the Holy Spirit.And finally 3. The
Power
of the Holy Spirit.
PERCEPTIONS, PERSON AND POWER
I. So let’s start first with some common PERCEPTIONS of the Holy Spirit.
Have you ever had to answer this question – maybe from a child – how do we know that God exists whenwe can’t see him?Someone wise once told me to ask how we know that air exists even though we can’t see it. To point to atree as the leaves are rustling. And to explain that even though we can’t see air, we can see its effect aswind.In the same way we can believe in God because of his effect in the world and in the lives of people.
i. This is one way that we perceive the Holy Spirit – we can perceive the Spirit as God’s power shown in theworld.
This is something that makes a lot of sense. The Hebrew word for Spirit that we find way back in Genesisis Ruah which means literally wind or breath. Something that comes from the mouth of God and makes theworld move.For many people the Holy Spirit is the invisible made visible through its effect. God acts in the world andwhen we see the leaves move—when we see creation groan, when we see the nations rise and fall—weunderstand that to be what we mean by the Holy Spirit.
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ii. A second way to perceive the Holy Spirit is like a spiritual oxygen tank.This is a really common view among Christians and I found it especially present in Pentecostals and other charismatic evangelicals. Taken right from Acts 2 when the Holy Spirit came down and fired up the churchat Pentecost many Christians believe that the Spirit’s job is to come down and breath life into the church. Now the Holy Spirit’s proper place is in the worship service. That is where God’s people gather and wherethings happen.People come to church in order to breathe deep the blessings of God so that they can make it through theworld. They describe the experience of speaking in tongues or being slain by the spirit as an experience of extreme peace in a busy life. They come back week after week in order to recapture this feeling andrecharge for the next battle.Each week they come in and take a deep breath of the Holy Spirit and then run out into the world andexhale the fruits of the spirit that we find in Galatians chapter 5. And for the young whose spiritual lungsare less mature there is worship on Wednesdays.The Holy Spirit is the experience of being in the presence of God. Like seeing the Holy Spirit as God’swind in the world…perceiving the Spirit this way is seeing God’s breath in our lives. Neither of these ways of perceiving the Holy Spirit is wrong. When we see the wind blowing the trees weknow the air is there. When we feel our lungs getting full we know that the breath is there. The activity of the Holy Spirit in the world while not emphasized is well documented. The gifts that come from the HolySpirit that we read about in 1 Corinthians 12 are not fiction.But we have to understand that these views by themselves are not quite right either and to see this we needto take a look at our second P – 
II. The PERSON of the Holy Spirit.
One of the most confusing things about the Trinity is the fact that we use the word Person. It comes fromthe Latin of the council of Nicea just under 1700 years ago where the Trinity is described as 3 personae in 1substantia. (3 Persons – 1 Substance).What confuses the issue is that we are able to picture the Father as a person – walk over to the Lambtonmall – survey 20 people about what God looks like – and you’re likely to get the same general description
Old guy, white beard, robes and sandals.It is even easier for us to picture the Son. Most artwork depicting Jesus Christ portrays him in a similar way. Hold up a picture that fits the general description of younger guy, long hair and a beard with robes andsandals will get you almost unanimous votes.The Holy Spirit – no beard, no robes, no sandals. We just don’t think about the Spirit that way. Instead theclosest we get to a picture is the symbol of a dove we find in Jesus baptism that we read about three weeksago.YET WE STILL CONFESS THAT THE HOLY SPIRIT IS A PERSON OF THE TRINITY.When we say person we really mean something different and to understand this we need to look at
what the Belgic Confession
tells us about the Holy Spirit in Article 11:It tells us how the Holy Spirit relates to the Father and Son – 
“[proceeds] from the two of them”
There isa sense in which the Spirit is connected to the Father and Son. There is a necessity in this relationship and itis understood that without the Father and Son the Spirit could not proceed.
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