Lecture

Greetings, dear friends, Steve Macchia here. Welcome back to our course on Becoming a Healthy Disciple. I hope that the introduction gave you a good comprehensive idea as to where we’re headed.

And now we’re going to start our deep dive into each of the 10 values or the 10 traits of a healthy church, a healthy disciple. And we’re going to begin with one that actually surprised me, ended up on the top of the list. I thought worship would be on the top of the list, but instead it was God’s empowering presence. And the reason for that, we came to believe, is that most people, when they become believers they want to know, so what now? How do I live my life now? And it’s incumbent upon us as we disciple others, as we lead others, as we encourage others to grow in the knowledge and lifestyle of God, to understand the triune God, the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and particularly the work of the Spirit, the presence of the Spirit, the power of the Spirit, the peace of the Spirit. Those gifts that the Holy Spirit gives to us as beloved children of God.

And so they belong together. It’s the power of God that unleashes our own humanity into the understanding of what it means to follow after God and be filled up with God. It’s the peace of God, because we are to be men and women who are pressing peace into every troubled relationship, every troubled circumstance. We’re to practice a preference for God. We’re to practice the presence of God.

And when we are doing so, we are learning what it means to entrust our lives into the ministry of the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit then comes in and takes over every crevice of my heart and life and my lifestyle of obedience is lived through the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. And Jesus said to His disciples, I may be leaving, but I’m going to send you a Comforter. I’m going to send you the Holy Spirit. And this Counselor, the Holy Spirit, will be there to guide you, to protect you. And so we see the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.

Those are comforting words from Jesus to His disciples. And they are powerful words indeed, because who among us as followers of Jesus, doesn’t want to know more about what it means to be fully alive in God, to be fully advancing the Kingdom of God through the Ministry of the Spirit, the Ministry of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And learning how to depend upon the Holy Spirit brings us to greater intimacy with the Trinity, the triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit.

I was reminded of this recently on a trip that I thought I was going to St. John, New Brunswick, Canada from my home city of Boston. But I ended up instead in St. John’s, Newfoundland, which is a province and a time zone and a half away from where I was coming from. It was an alarming experience for me, the details of which I don’t have time to tell you about, but I ended up in the wrong province. It was a good province, it was a beautiful place, but it was the wrong place. Why was it the wrong place? Because I had hopped on the wrong airplane and ended up in the wrong destination at a time when I needed to be in New Brunswick, not Newfoundland. And I was reminded in that experience that here I was going again, taking matters into my own hands, doing my own thing, and blaming the people around me for the mistake that I had made. And instead, I needed to recognize— did I really give that trip back to God? Did I really pay attention to every detail of what He was inviting me into, including the destination? You see, many of us go throughout life ending up on wrong airplanes and wrong destinations, figuratively, not literally. And because we do, we need to back off a little bit and say, huh, how could I have done that differently? How could I have had that conversation end up differently or that decision or that responsibility? Are we practicing a preference for God? Are we saying, God, what do You want? What is Your desire? Because we want to end up in the place where God wants us to be, not in places that are contrary or out of sync with the will and the purpose of God.

So we have talked about the presence of God’s Spirit, overseeing and protecting our life. What does it mean to have the Spirit of God undergirding our strength, leading us forward, sustaining us from a bad error or a mistake or a fall? And how aware are you to the ministry of the Holy Spirit in your daily life, relationships, responsibilities, and experiences so that you can give your life continually back to Him? It reminds me as well of God’s presence and power in all of our lives. From Psalm 139, the great “omni” Psalm: His omniscience, His omnipotence, His omnipresence. He is all powerful. He is all knowledge, all knowing, and He is ever present with us. So what does this say? This says, we can trust the Spirit. We can trust Him because He’s here. He’s here now. He’s in this space that you and I are sharing electronically. He’s in your heart, He’s in your home. Do you recognize Him? He’s tapping you on the shoulder of your heart 24 hours a day, seven days a week simply to get your attention. And instead, He’s tapping and we’re flicking, or we’re stiff arming. We don’t want it. But, in essence, that’s the best way for us to grow in God and to fulfill His promises for us, is to recognize His tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap on the shoulder of our hearts because He’s an initiator, He’s a lover, He’s a giver, He’s a forgiver.

That’s God. And we want to know God, and we want to know the ministry of the Spirit of God so that we aren’t left as orphans, but instead, the Spirit of God is empowering us with a sense of purpose, a sense of His presence, a sense of His beautiful, peaceful protection. That’s what the Spirit of God loves to do for His people. So yes, we do need to dig in. We do need to understand more clearly the ministry of the Holy Spirit and not be afraid of it. It’s not a topic that we should say, “Oh, I don’t want to go there.” No, you do want to go there because the triune God has loved us so much that He has invited us into the experience of the Trinity. It’s remarkable. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, often described as being in this perichoresis, this dance of life together. And He’s inviting us into that dance, into that experience.

And so we’re to go with boldness, knowing that the ministry of the Spirit will convict us of our sin. It converts us from a life of oppression and self-absorption into a place of freedom. The Spirit of God counsels us and heals us. The Spirit of God comforts our hurts, consoles us with His love and grace, and the Spirit of God cooperates with the Father and the Son as the third person of the Trinity. And it’s the Spirit that quickens our hearts to remain in alignment with His word, His will and His ways. And it’s the Spirit of God that completes the work of renewal within us, so that our posture can learn to become more Spirit-controlled than self-controlled.

So many of us, friends, are living with “clenched-fistedness.” We want to own, we want to control, we want to manipulate. We want to get our way. We want to be the author of our own lives. We want to dictate every aspect of our lives. That’s “clenched-fistedness.” What Jesus is inviting us into as beloved disciples is to just open up and let go and release, to be ready to receive, so that “if you love me,” Jesus says, “you’ll obey what I command.” And so His love for us is that initiating love. We’re to receive that love and then to offer ourselves back to God and back to the people around us. All of life is learning how to trust God. All of life is learning how to open up my hands for the ministry of the Spirit to enter into my heart and life, change me from the inside out, and then lead me out to love and serve others in His name with open, outstretched hands, not clenched fists.

So let’s unpack a few of these particulars as it relates to the ministry of the Holy Spirit. What does the Spirit invite us into? And where is it that the Spirit is doing His work in us and through us, giving us the ability to live that lifestyle of loving obedience? Because the more we attend to the voice of God, the more we lovingly obey Him. So, five big ideas for you to consider in this first value. Number one, we want to exemplify the fruit of the Spirit, the nine lovely things of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. It’s the fruit of the Spirit. It’s not the fruit of Steve; it’s not what I can create. It’s what I ask God to do in me and give me the ability to love and to give and to serve another. So the Spirit of God delights in giving us His fruit and the fruit of the Spirit. Another word for fruit is the word “evidence.” The evidence of the Spirit in you is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That’s the evidence of the Spirit being lived out through you in every part of your life.

So you’ll want to think about what does it mean to understand what the fruit of the Spirit is? And to know that every single one of those Greek words in the Galatians passage is to articulate to the believer that you cannot do any of this on your own. These are all Spirit-empowered words. So to love, for example, agape, you cannot love in an agape way on your own strength. It is only when God gives you the ability to love another unconditionally. And so we need to understand the work of the Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit, and how our lives are, or are not, evidences of the Spirit in our wider world.

The second thing we want to understand is that we are to offer our thumbprint, God’s thumbprint of us, on our wider world. So in our conversion, we move from the old way of living to the new life in the Spirit. That’s what it means to give up the aspects of my life that need to come clean and be confessed before God. And then we invite the empowering presence of the Spirit of God to forgive us, to restore us, to renew us, and then to release us back into the fullness of our walk with God. And so we become aware of God, what’s often called “God sightings.” And we want to be aware of God all around us, and we want to praise God for His love, His infinite matchless love, His power, His presence, the gifts that He delights to offer. And that’s done uniquely. There is only one you; there is only one set of thumbprints, and it’s yours. It’s especially for you. And so you need to understand what it means to be that gifted, empowered individual in the context of your family, your church, your workplace, the wider places that you have contact in this world.

The third one is a special attribute given by the Holy Spirit to members of the body of Christ according to God’s grace for use within the context of the body of Christ. Those are our spiritual gifts. There are several places in the biblical text that you can look to learn more about spiritual gifts. I would ask the people who know you best and love you most, “Are these my gifts? What else do you see in me that expresses the fruit of the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit in the places where we connect with one another?”

The fourth is to envision God’s call. What is your vision? What has God placed on your heart that He invites you to passionately pursue as His beloved disciple? Do you have dreams, do you have desires? Those are things that you need to pay attention to and give them to God. Say, God, as I see my future, this is what I see as a preferred future. Is it something that you’re inviting me into or is it something that I’m making up on my own? God gives us a uniqueness. There’s only one you; there’s only one face of yours. It’ll never be replicated. There’s only one set of thumbprints that will never be replicated beyond you. That’s how uniquely creatively God has built you, made you for this life that He invites you to live. So we’re destined to fulfill a piece of His overall vision for the world, and we want to discover that call. That’s our ongoing pursuit. God, where are you inviting me to make my thumbprint known?

And number five is to experience the presence of God. What does it mean to experience His presence? Well, I want to ask you a question similar to the question that the disciples asked of themselves on the road to Emmaus, when they ended up in the home of two disciples. As Jesus slowly emerges in their midst and they begin to see Him they say one of my favorite questions in all of Scripture: “Were not our hearts burning within us?” When he made Himself known through the breaking of bread, through the breaking of the Word. He made Himself known, sort of like the slow indistinguishable drip of presence that Jesus provides. And their eyes were opened; their eyes and their ears were attuned. Their hearts came alive. And that’s what the Spirit of God does; it does such a deep work in us that we say, “Wow was not my heart burning within me when I was in that worship experience? When I was praying with that friend? When I was seeing the beauty of God’s creation?” When our eyes were open and our ears were attuned and our heart was sensitized to the work of God’s Spirit every day of our life. That’s what it means to be a healthy disciple that’s alive in the Spirit. Will we get there immediately? No. Will we get there over time? Yes. All we need to do is to say, “Come Holy Spirit, do Your work in me. Evidence Your fruit through me, Your gifts through me, Your empowering presence through me.” And then watch what God does as a result as you are transformed from the inside out. God bless you, friend.