Northside Church - Sydney
The Other Guy ... Fills You Up
We're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. We live in an X Factor world don't you reckon. You know the scene, you get a kid preferably under the age of 15. Give him a haircut that's been straightened accordingly across the front, be brass, great girls, be brass, you know, kid from nowhere out in the suburbs, Campbell Town. He cut into the slow, slow-mo shot, there are eyes closed behind a microphone and a strumming guitar and there's anticipation and then he looks up and the whole crowd erupts in a great arena and his eyes light up like nothing had ever seen and he's out of his skin. It's an X Factor world. Here's what X Factor does. X Factor shortcuts to an experience that would otherwise only be found through very deliberate and disciplined pathways. You look at any great artist, great artist like Keith Urban for example. These guys have played pubs for years and it's been kilometres on the road and gig after gig after gig after gig and they're the sorts of guys that Philarena is not a 15-year-old from Campbell Town. They see socks off. And as a result I think what happens is that it lacks substance. I mean what happened to Samantha Jade? Does any of the Gen Y's here know what happened to Samantha Jade? She's just disappeared off. Did she get a song? It's on iTunes? Well I thought she was going to be the next Kylie. I thought you know what an Altian child, what happened to any of these sorts of guys? Like it's as quickly as the experience was manufactured, the experience fades. And I think say in some ways the deeper reason has been this rise of technology. We live in a technological age and the spirit of the technological age says let's commoditize everything. Let's packetize everything. Let's boil it down. Let's reduce it. There's facts. There's figures. You know they even made a hamburger patty the other day out of cultured protein. Hey how cool is that? It tasted absolutely hopeless. It was disgusting. So let's forget the cows now. We'll just culture protein into our hamburger pattys. It lacks substance. And in light of all this surface level stuff, I don't know about you, but I see in our generation a deep yearning for something deeper and something more real, something authentic. You know how we say it's just plasticky. We want something deeper beneath the surface. And there's this deep yearning for that type of experience. And so what is important for us to realize in this series is because we've been saying that Christianity is not something that you can just package or commoditize. In this series the other guy, we've been looking at the guy behind the guy behind Christianity. The guy behind Jesus, the other guy, the Holy Spirit. And it's not a topic that's talked about much in church. But what we've learned so far is that the Holy Spirit's a person and the Holy Spirit is the very lifeblood of God implanted into you. He indwells you. And as a result he then leads you in the steps of even greater joy and depth and struggle and wrestle. Remember last week we said that real Christianity is a bar fight. You know it grabs you. It wrestles with you. So in other words like Christianity is not doctrines or principles. Although it's not less than that doctrine is important but at the heart of it Christianity is an experience. And so as a result you look around the world all the churches that are exploding and that are growing are those that are tapping into this yearning for experience. Those at the side of the spectrum that we might call the Pentecostals for example that are more experienced already in church or on the other flip side is like the charismatic evangelicals of Latin America seeing this incredible outpouring of the Holy Spirit in their churches and it's growing and it's tapping into people's yearning deep down. And where we stand tonight and what this passage is going to teach us is that on one hand the other guy the Holy Spirit can fill that yearning that you might have tonight. You might not even know God. You might not be a Christian tonight. You just hang out here and you've got that yearning gnawing deep within you. And so we can learn that the Holy Spirit that that's what gives you that experience in Christianity. But on the other side of it you know some church some parts of the church sadly have they've commoditized it. And they give you the five guaranteed steps to experience the Holy Spirit. I'm sure if you've got a kurong you'll pick up a book like that. And just follow these five steps. And you can have this experience. You know what they're doing? They're X factoring Christianity. And so how do we find the balance between both? We'll go to the Word of God in Ephesians chapter 5. Turn with me now or you can watch on the screens. It was a passage we skipped over in the last series we didn't get to but it's absolutely crucial. Verse 15 of chapter 5 says, "Be very careful then in how you live not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity because the days are evil therefore do not be foolish but understand what the Lord's will is. Do not get drunk on wine which leads to debauchery instead be filled with the Spirit." Do any of you find it as intriguing as I do that Paul uses the example of drunkenness to describe what we're talking about tonight being the feeling of the Holy Spirit? That he compares and he contrasts the spirit-filled life to that of drunkenness. Now at first that was real conflict for me here because I thought is that going to be the underlying theme of the entire message tonight? Because I can appreciate that some people here may have come here because of it. Some people might be struggling with it at the moment. This problem of alcoholism and so my first instinct is just to avoid it all together. Let's dance around and let's not go there. It's one thing to understand the Bible. It's another thing to stand under the Bible. So my great tension as a preacher is to say, "Well am I going to understand it or am I going to stand under it tonight when we look at what Paul was doing here?" I guess what brings me a little bit of confidence in speaking into this is because, look, it's literally eight years to the day that my very own mother passed away from this disease. And so if you're struggling with it and it's a sensitive topic to you, then you and I both stand shoulder to shoulder tonight. But why does Paul use this analogy of comparing the spirit-filled life to drunkenness? And some people might say, "Oh well it's because the Romans, they were crazy. Have you seen the documentaries? They were crazy people. Now they're always on the booze. They're always going crazy. They're always going nuts." And so some people think that Paul was saying, "Hey, you're addicted to substances, so be addicted to the Holy Spirit." Or he could be saying that there was a lot of debauchery going on within the church culture or a lot of unchristian-like behavior. And so Paul's saying, "Look, you once were like that, but don't be like that now." But most likely what Paul's saying is that there's both similarities and dissimilarities between a state of drunkenness and being filled with the Holy Spirit. There's likely similarities, but there's dissimilarities because he says, "Don't be like a drunk person." Verse 18. And so therefore what is Paul saying are the signs of a spirit-filled life? What are the signs of a spirit-filled life? Here's the first one. It's a life under the influence. The word drunk here means to be soaked, to be saturated with, to be dominated by. I mean, how many times do you hear people say, "Oh, they can't handle their alcohol?" See, it's not about how much you take up with alcohol, but how much it takes you up. You could be a one-drink sort of person and you're gone. And so it's not the amount of alcohol. It's the effect. And so here's the principle in here that the principle is that the spirit-filled life like drunkenness is an unseen force that affects every faculty of your life. You know, drunk person, they think differently. Their bodies function differently. They're emotionally different. How many people do you think are gushy? Oh, I love you. No, I really do love you. I so love you. It affects all of the emotions, all of the body here. And so what Paul is saying here is that the spirit-filled life is absolutely and comprehensively influenced by the Holy Spirit. And so to take it deep, remember, we said if the Holy Spirit's a person, it's to be totally influenced by that person. And you think, "And how can you be influenced by a person?" I tell you how. I had to live with my grandmother for three weeks when I was eight years of age. Has anyone ever had to live with their grandparents before? Yeah. You know, you know, what we're going through. We're going to have a support club up the back of the auditorium once we're done. If it wasn't folding up the bath towel the correct way, you know, or if it wasn't stacking my dishes in a particular way when it was done, if it wasn't putting my shoes in the little shoe holder things that she had in the cup of the right way, you see, when I was staying with my grandmothers, I was under the influence of my grandmother. And so what I worked out as an eight-year-old is that I had to realize that very quickly, I had to understand what grandma liked and what grandma didn't like. You know, what grieved grandma and what pleased grandma. And slowly but surely I got it, if it weren't for the 15th time that I folded the bathroom at the right way. But you see, I came under hurt influence. And so it's really important because a lot of people can think that the influence of the Holy Spirit is this sort of mind-shocking body numbing, you know, you're on the floor type experience. But can you see when you come under the influence of a person, it's active, not passive. That I was deliberately thinking about the ways I could please and not grieve grandma. And so for us to come under the influence of Holy Spirit is to consciously and deliberately think about the ways that we could both please and not grieve the Holy Spirit, the other guy. A spirit filled life is a life where every aspect, your thoughts, your body, your emotions come under the influence of the other guy, the Holy Spirit. It's a life under the influence. And secondly, it's a life of discipline and control. You see, if you're a Christian, you say, yeah, of course it's a life of influence. But you might have been scared by churches that are like this. You might have seen crazy clips on YouTube that are like this. But you've seen people when they talk about the Holy Spirit and the feeling of the Holy Spirit, the people that are doing all sorts of crazy things. People in connect groups saying they've been in churches where people are running up the walls or they're barking like dogs and all these crazy sorts of things that can happen and they do happen. But Paul gets really sharp here and that sort of behavior is not really what he was getting at. You see, what's a drunk person like? A drunk person, they're out of control. They're out of control with their time. They're out of control with their judgment. They're out of control with their assessment of their own abilities. Ever notice how drunk blokes think that they're superheroes? When they're out and about on a Friday night, they think they can do anything. They end up getting hurt in the process. But a drunk person is out of control. And so what Paul is saying here is that a spirit-filled life is not actually a life that's out of control and all over the place and gone crazy, but rather it's a life of incredible discipline and self-control. A spirit-filled person has control over their schedule. They're balanced. A spirit-filled person has control over their body and how they use it. A spirit-filled person has control over their abilities. They know what they can and can't realistically achieve in a day or a week. But it goes deep in that even if you take it further look at the word debauchery here. It's the Greek word asotio, which means to be exhausted, means to be squandered, means to dissipate your energy in areas that have no value whatsoever. And so you can see people on lots of spiritual highs in churches and they're saying they're spirit-filled and they're in this intensity and there's energy and there's even fanaticism with what they're doing. But how do you know if it's for real? I guess like drunkenness, if Paul's making the comparison here, it eventually wears off. It eventually wears off. It's unsustainable. And I'll put it this way. Being drunk can make you feel really good at the time, but when it wears off you feel a heck of a lot worse in the morning. And so that means that there can be a heck of a lot of people. It could be you in ministry. It could be you in Christian life tonight that are running around with an incredible intensity. And yet if you feel I'm burnt out and you're feeling it just starts too much, you're feeling like I can't sustain this anymore, then it quite possibly could be your ego with the drives you. It could be other people's expectations that are driving you, but it ain't the spirit. It's not a spirit-filled life because the mark of the spirit-filled life is one of self-control and it's one of discipline. Real contrast to what we see in some places. But thirdly here, just another way that I see here, the comparisons, the contrast that Paul's drawing from this passage here, is that we see that the spirit-filled life is a life of clarity. What are some people get drunk in the first place? Some people do it because they want to feel joyful. They feel joyful when they do it. Others want warmth and intimacy. For some it's the only point in their life in which they can feel close to someone or open up to someone. Maybe some people want courage, they want to feel fearless. That's why they do it. But what's the underlying dynamic that's happening here? You see, pharmacologically, that means scientifically. The alcohol is a depressant. It's a depressant. So what's really intriguing is that people do this and they feel their life, they feel happy, they feel enhanced. Their life is enhanced. But it's enhanced. Here's how it's enhanced. It's enhanced by seeing less of reality. Think about it. Their vision's dull. Their thoughts are slow. Their body feels warm. Life feels good, man. But can you see what Paul's getting at? Here, the spirits are distinct contrast. Verse 18, he says, he uses the word instead. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to the boar tree instead be filled by the spirit. And so here's the different. The spirit, like alcohol, can enhance your life. But the big difference here is that the spirit enhances your life. The feeling of the spirit enhances your life, not by seeing less of life, but by seeing more of life. It's the 4D TV principle. Come on. Have you seen him in JB Hi-Fi? I was doing one of those lunchtime wonders. You want to take your lunch break just to get a bit of a head space, but you've got nowhere else to really go. So instead of going up a crow's nest, I wandered around JB Hi-Fi for an hour or so. And I didn't know what I was looking at. Few Blu-rays, few PlayStation games. And then I'm walking through the TV section. What is that? And it's the new stand for these 4D TVs. They're supposed to have something like twice, how many, twice, three times? Who's technical here? Four times a resolution of a normal HD TV. Absolutely phenomenal. I'm watching the demo thing. And you could see the hairs on the chin of some guy eating a hot dog. And even the hot dog looked appetizing at the time the TV was that good. You could see every single detail of a blade of grass that is showing through the demonstration thing. I was transfixed. I'd never seen anything like it. It works exactly the same way. It's a life of clarity. The picture was enhanced because you could see more. And a life of clarity is a sign of the spirit filled life. You know, let's get practical here. How does this work in the Christian life? I've seen many spirit filled moments in the past six to eight weeks in this church. I've seen people sing more of life rather than less of life here during the work series. And one of the girls in our connect group at Exchange came in. And she was just beaming. She was just brimming after we're talking about the work series. She's talking about ways that she's just seeing her boss differently now. And she sees her work differently now because it's contributing into the creation of God. And she's whistling while she's working and there's a joy about her. And she just sees things differently. And she discovered her boss as a Christian. And every single phrase he was using here was there to try and encourage her, but she never saw it in the first place. You see what I'm saying? She had a spirit filled moment because there was clarity for the first time. She wasn't seeing less of life. She was seeing more of life. And so the Holy Spirit, a spirit filled life gives you clarity. It helps you see things more clearly. Let me put it another way for you animal lovers. Now, I love the nocturnal exhibit at Tarongazoo. It's always been my favorite part of Tarongazoo. The nocturnal exhibit, if you haven't been there, you have to walk all the way into this incredibly dark room and progressively gets darker and darker as you go in. So your eyes can adjust, right? You've done that before, no doubt, moved into a dark room after plenty of light and your eyes begin to adjust. And you've got to sit in there for three minutes or five minutes, and you've got to let your body's own natural night vision take over. And so I'm in there with Kristen and we're sitting there and you can see a few of the exhibits. And as these minutes went past, we got this terrible shock because we're like, I'm standing right next to a snake. There's a snake right there. And then there's a little pygmy possum there. Oh, you're so cute. Oh, it's just gorgeous. You know, all these details are things we couldn't see because we'd been otherwise blinded to these things because our night vision hadn't adjusted. If your spirit field, if you feel by the spirit, your visions adjusted, you dwell, you spend time, you sit, you soak in the presence of God so much that your eyes adjust to what really is reality around you. You see things different, things pop out at you in a different way. And life is richer for it. Life begins to stand out for you in that way. And so it gets practical. I mean, think about it. If you lose your job, if you've lost your job, there are lots of ways you can get drunk without using alcohol. You know, you could go off, have a fling somewhere. You could just have an emotional overload. You could buy a whole bunch of different ice cream and start eating that until you feel full and sick of it all. You could go and squander all your money and you could go on a trip around the world and say, "I'm not even going to think about it." You see, what are you doing? You're depressing life. You're not seeing things clearly. And instead the spirit field life says, "You know, Psalm 21, I lift my eyes to the hills. Where does my hope come from?" You know, you Matthew 6 it. You hear the words of Jesus say, "Take a look at the birds and the bees in the field. If God's looking after them, how much more does He care about you?" You know, what's happening when you're doing that? You're adjusting. I can see that now. There's a piggy possum. What about the person who's been racked by grief? The some who might claim that their spirit field person might encourage them to say, "You know what? You've just got to give it all over to God. You've just got to be chipper. You've just got to claim victory in the name of Jesus Christ." And that person, they push it down deep and they struggle and they grapple and they wrestle and it gets to a point where they're like, "I'm over this and this hurts too much to deal with this anymore." And at times I often say, "That's it with the faith. I'm over. I'm done." But the truly spirit-filled person will sit in the pain and the grief as I have at times. And as their eyes adjust, they will see a God that loves them and cares for them and they will see the hope of life after death. And they will feel the strength and the present of God and their eyes will adjust so that the pain is no less real. It's, of course, it's real. But the reality of God swells to a level through the spirit that is so far beyond everything else that they're experiencing. A spirit-filled life is a life where the things of God, the reality of God so overwhelm you that in that case, you don't repress your grief, you don't shove your grief away, but the vision of God through the spirit becomes clearer to you. And even in the darkness, you wait and things become clear. The spirit-filled life is a life of clarity. And so I guess as we finish up tonight, the question is, "Well, how do I get this spirit-filled life?" And I'm glad you asked because here are my five easy steps guaranteed to how you're going to do it. I was thinking to this week, getting a spirit-filled life. And I'm still learning how this is happening. I'm still having these spirit-filled moments. But I find out I think a spirit-filled life is a bit like experiencing a tornado. And two things have got to happen. The first thing is you need to get yourself into the path of the tornado. But on the other hand, you actually have to work out what you're going to do to get there in the path. And so first of all, you've got to make sure you're in its path. And that is that the tornado takes you up. You don't take it up. Can we get that? The tornado takes you up. You don't take it up. The Holy Spirit takes you up. You don't take him up. If we walk out of this place tonight thinking that, "Oh no, I have a bit more spiritual experience tonight," then we're treating him like an it, not a person. And to experience a Holy Spirit is he takes you up like a tornado. But at the same time, you know, twist to principle, we've all seen that movie. It's one of the great classics of the '90s. And what are they doing? Twisters, a whole two hours around these funny people called storm chases. And storm chases are a unique breed. They have all sorts of computers that have been custom built into the dashboards of their SUVs. And I have all sorts of funny whirling radars on the top of their car. And there's all sorts of data. And there's all sorts of gut instinct with everything. But what I love about a storm chaser is it's no accident that they get into the path of a tornado, is it? They want to be in the path of a tornado. And they use every device at their fingertips to make sure that they are in the line of fire. And so on one hand, you need to be swept up by the Holy Spirit. But on the other hand, you need to be a storm chaser. You need to find every means you can to move into the oncoming path of God's Spirit. And biblically, that means that you need to get into the path of God and His Holy Spirit through what the Bible calls His means of grace. The word of God through prayer, through meditation, through doing church, through doing community, through connecting. All the faculties, all the means of grace that He gives us to get into that. And you say, well, that sounds boring. You always say that. You're the minister, you always tell us to do that every week. But the point is, I'm trying to say is that, look, that goose bumpy, that knock me over, that head spin, that crazy, whirly experience of the Spirit, which can happen, by the way. I'm not one of these people that's pooping in that. It can happen. But that experience of the Spirit is not the basis of the relationship. You know, it's like if a father was walking down the road with his little girl and for whatever reason, he decides just to turn to her and he gets down on his knees in front of her. And he says, Princess, I love you. And she says, I love you, Daddy. You're my hero. And they have one of these precious moments in the street in which they hug and they embrace and they cry. And she says, Daddy, I'm so glad you're mine. And he says, I'm so glad you're mine, too, sweetheart. And they embrace and then he gets up and they move on. They move on because the relationship can't stay in that precious moment forever. And Daddy's little princess, she can't hang off his neck for the rest of his life. That's not the basis of the relationship. But does the lack of that experience make her any less his daughter? That's not the basis for the relationship. And so, guys, if we think that the goose bumpy, cry, huggy, embracey approach to God is the way that we must always be feeling in our Christian life, then we've missed the point. God is God, the Holy Spirit is a spiritual tornado. And if you're chasing the feeling of the spirit in that way, then you're just not getting the basis of the relationship. You see, the joy, the wonder, the beauty of the relationship with God through the Holy Spirit like that, that goosebumps experience is that joy is a byproduct. It's a byproduct of the relationship. If you want that joy, then you have to seek something beyond the joy in order to get it. And so, in that way, if you really want an experience of the spirit tonight, then you'll need to want more than just a goose bumpy experience of the Holy Spirit. And so, friends, there can be lots of confusion. There can be lots of confusion in churches about what an feeling of the Holy Spirit like might be. There can be lots of confusion, but God's like the Holy Spirit is like a spiritual tornado. On one hand, he could sweep you up in an instant. It could overwhelm you. He may overwhelm you tonight. It's not out of his nature to do that. But on the other hand, we have to do everything we can to move by our own means, the radars, the funny swirly things on top of our life, the maps, the rain rate, the whole lot. We must be doing everything to move into his path so he can experience it. So, my question is, are you in his path tonight? Have you felt that infilling of that yearning, of that experience? Would you like that tonight? It's available to you through faith in Jesus Christ. For the rest of us, we need to work out every device that we possibly can. Yes, it sounds like boring. Like it's boring, like we always talk that each and every week. But it's just how he operates. It's the basis of the relationship that we have with him. So, Kamas, as we head into this time of ministry now, we're just going to pray that God's spirit will fall in this place. There will be things that will come to mind for you as we sing and as we pray. It will be the way that God will fill you and minister to you through his holy spirit. So, relax into that now as we have this time of ministry and just be open to the way that he might move, breathe and sweep you up in this funny thing we call the Christian life. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we're just praying tonight, Lord, that we just don't want to ex-factor our experience of you God. We don't want to manufacture something here and so Father, if your spirit falls, it falls. If we experience you, we experience you. We would know when we're confident we come before you now in boldness. Heavenly Father, with the gathering of your precious community, the church, we know if there was ever going to be a place in our lives that it's now, it's right now in this moment of ministry, Father, that you will meet us and that you will speak to us. Help us be, help us be real, help us walk that, that fine line, that balanced line, that nuanced line in terms of how we relate to you. On one hand, Father, we deeply desire more of your presence in our life. Heavenly Father, but at the same time, we know that you're a person, that you're dynamic, that you are unstoppable, uncontrollable. And we just ask that we might be each and every day swept up by you. And so Father, come now, come Holy Spirit, minister to us, speak to us. And we pray this now in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen. (gentle music)