Northside Church - Sydney
The Other Guy...Changes You
You're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. Last week actually Sam started a brand new series, Sam's on Lee by the way, gets back next week. He started a brand new series and it's entitled The Other Guy and it's a really clever way of talking about the Holy Spirit. The subtitle, Discovering The Guy Behind The Guy of Christianity and the study this week in your connection groups is going to be The Other Guy Changes You. We're looking to know the changes that are possible when somebody is gripped by the power of the Holy Spirit and somebody has the Holy Spirit as a living, breathing part of who they are, just with them constantly as a source of power and strength. I want to bring a reading from the Scriptures, if you've got your Bibles or your iPad or your smartphone there, you might like to follow on, Romans chapter 8, verses 11 to 17 and this is the passage that you're looking at in the connection groups this week. If the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from death lives in you, then he who raised Christ from death will also give life to your mortal bodies by the presence of his Spirit in you. Now already we've gone far enough to be able to unpack over about a six week series. There's just so much in that opening verse. So then my friends, we have an obligation, but it is not to live as our human nature wants us to. For if you live according to your human nature, you're going to die. But if by the Spirit you put to death your sinful actions, you will live. Those who are led by God's Spirit are God's children. For the Spirit that God has given you does not make you slaves and cause you to be afraid instead. The Spirit makes you God's children. And by the Spirit's power we cry out to God, "Father, My Father." God's Spirit joins himself to our spirits to declare that we are God's children. And since we are His children, we will possess the blessings He keeps for His people. And we will also possess with Christ what God has kept for Him. For if we share Christ's suffering, we will also share His glory. That's our reading for tonight. We're going to talk about the Holy Spirit, the other guy, and the changes that He wants to make in you and me. Let's join together in prayer, shall we? Well, Father God, you have spoken to us in so many ways already in this service. You come through loudly and clearly in these beautiful praise songs. You've come to us Lord through the testimony of someone like Hugh, and the vision, the missionary vision of someone like Sarah. In these and in so many other ways, even the people we greeted you in the mingle, Lord, you're touching us and touching lives in so many different ways, please, may we in these remaining moments hold under the things you've revealed already and be ready to receive even more information, inspiration, more material that will help us to connect with you, whether we know you well or whether we are far from you. We want to leave this place tonight, feeling as though we are your children, ready to serve, ready to live for you, children who are possessing the Holy Spirit in our lives. These things we pray in Jesus' name are men. Hey, guys, in every generation, superheroes have always been part of the scene. We love to think about superheroes. These are men and women with extraordinary powers. They're able to change themselves in some cases. They're certainly able to change situations in which they move. Now, as a kid, my introduction to superheroes came by way of this guy. As the first Superman, his name was George Reeves, and you didn't have to wait for his next feature-length movie to come out, he was on television every week in a half-hour show. In fact, if I were doing reruns, he'd be on three, four nights a week. Now, how many people remember George Reeves? There wouldn't be too many people, Graham Reed, fantastic. You know, Greg, interesting, I thought you were younger. Wow, that's George Reeves, okay? And he's a cool-looking guy, got the chisel chin right there, and we thought he was fantastic. Like you could get home from school and watch George Reeves. Unfortunately, that wasn't in color. It was in black and white, but of course, nothing like the really cool, really cool superheroes of today, like this guy, Ironman, absolutely cool as they come. And of course, his secret weapon, what's the guy's name? The guy, Anthony Stark, I have to write that down. I've seen one of the movies, and he fights corruption and injustice, and wherever and whenever he can, you know, this is a cool guy. And of course, his secret weapon is the power core right there, which apparently has the power of three nuclear reactors right there in your hand. Now, that's not that hard to believe when you think about it, actually, it's very hard to believe. Look, you know what, here's the thing, guys, the Christian faith, okay? The good news of Jesus Christ is about having power. It's about having incredible power, not external power, like a superhero, something far better, internal power, power that becomes part of us to cope with and to handle the rigors of life, power to change us, power to change others. And this power does not turn us into supermen or super or Ironman, but it's that internal power. We read about it earlier. Look at this verse again. "If the spirit of God who raised Jesus from death lives in you, then he who raised Christ from death will also give life to your mortal bodies by the presence of his spirit in you." Now, guys, the spirit of God was revealed as Sam reminded us last week in a spectacular way on the day of Pentecost, but the spirit of God had gripped people for many centuries before that under certain specific situations. For example, Gideon, one of the judges in his ongoing warfare against the Midianites, the Bible says he was gripped by the spirit of God. Same with David when he fought up wild animals to protect his flock, gripped by the spirit of God. And the same thing, if you watched the Bible two weeks ago, Samson, you know, pushing the column, bringing the whole thing down, his power was attributed to the fact that the spirit of God gripped him. But on the day of Pentecost, there was something special happened. The spirit of God, which had been the exclusive prerogative and possession of some specific people for specific reasons, all of a sudden became available to everybody. And that's the birthday of the church, Pentecost, and that's the day that changed the world forever. You know, in the early Christians being gripped by the spirit of God, they so turned the world upside down that in Acts 8, there's a guy called Simon and he's described as a sorcerer, a bit of a magic kind of witch doctor kind of guy, and he actually tried to pay for the gift of the Holy Spirit. He said to Peter and John, "Look, I'll give you guys money for this, you know." This is fantastic what you're doing. And that's where we get that famous verse when Peter says, "To hell with you and your money." You cannot buy the Holy Spirit, it only comes when people embrace the love and the grace of Jesus Christ. You know, in my years of ministry, and they're quite a number now, this doctrine of the Holy Spirit has been, in my opinion, the most controversial of all the doctrines I've ever looked at as a pastor, as I've looked at church life in various denominations, as I've traced the different waves of theology and the different movements within the people of God that have come and gone, most of them have revolved around people's understanding of the Holy Spirit. It's very controversial. Some of you have come from backgrounds where I know you've shared with me, there's been a lot of confusion and a lot of pain, a lot of hurt over this very doctrine. Why would that be? Why? This is not meant to cause pain, this is meant to liberate, this is meant to empower. Why has that happened? Well, guys, I want to remind us tonight, and for some of you, it'll be your first time, I want to revisit, revisit some of the foundational truths of what it means to have the Holy Spirit within our lives, the other guy. What it means for him to change us. What it means for him to empower us. You see, there are some things we need to be acutely aware of when we talk about the other guy. The first is this. The other guy is not the prize at the end of some postgraduate, higher learning, spiritual study program. That's not the other guy. Now, why I mention that is because that's the impression that's been given by some churches over the years. You sort of, you become a Christian, and then if you get into the right movement, into the right church, then you'll really be able to get a hold of the Holy Spirit, and you'll be able to show that you've got the Holy Spirit because you will have graduated into that upper echelon of Christians, demonstrating and showing forth the Holy Spirit in some rather spectacular ways. I was at a charismatic convention many years ago in Adelaide. It was a forerunner of the Hillsong Convention, actually. I was there because the guest speaker that night was a man by the name of Robert Schuller, known to some of you now in retirement, but he was quite a prominent tele-evangelist for many years here in Australia, and they'd invited him to be the speaker, and I was interested because I didn't realize he'd had those sort of charismatic tendencies. In those days, there was a much clearer line of delineation than there is today. You're either charismatic or non-carasmatic today, it's thank God it's all kind of blended into one in the sense that everybody acknowledges, well, most growing churches acknowledge the gifts and the power of the Holy Spirit. We certainly do here. So Robert Schuller was speaking, and I went along and he had a great address. It was a powerful address, one of the best I'd ever heard him give, in which he invited people to receive Jesus Christ. Point blank, said, "If you don't know Jesus Christ, you'd come forward tonight." It was powerful. And we'd sung one verse of the song when the host of the convention came up and said, "I just want to interrupt for a moment, please, before we keep singing, Dr. Schuller had given a great address tonight, but I just want to clarify something. If you're coming forward to receive Jesus Christ, we have ushers here tonight with blue ribbons, and we'd like you to make your way to an usher with a blue ribbon, and they'll look after you, and they'll pray with you, and I'll talk to you. If you're coming forward tonight to receive the Holy Spirit, would you please seek out an usher with a red ribbon because they'll pray with you, and they'll look after you. And I'm, what, what, you get, I'm checking on Acts again, I'm looking for ribbons, I'm looking for colors, I'm finding only purple, is that the color when you merge red and blue together? I mean, hello. Well, that began a huge controversy. I wrote a letter to our national journal, and people lit up, and it was crazy for about six or eight months. But that's how it was in those days, and you can still find some evidence in some churches that, you know, receiving the Holy Spirit's kind of like an upward stability. You don't receive, look, here's the first that, to me, just takes care of everything, it's Acts 2.38. Peter said on the day of Pentecost, people said, "What are we, what are we going to do? We've told us we've killed the Son of God. What must we do?" Peter said, "Repent and be baptized, and you will receive the Holy Spirit." He didn't say, "Look after somebody with a red ribbon or a blue ribbon or whatever." He said, "You will receive the Holy Spirit." Acts 2.38. So this is not meant to be the Holy Spirit. The other guy is not meant to be some way of distinguishing real Christians from ordinary Christians. That's the first thing that we've got to get into our minds tonight, not to be used in that way. Something else about the other guy. He provides us not so much with power to perform, but rather with power to persevere. Guys, look, I'm going to be real frank with you tonight, look, I can appreciate some aspects of the ministry of people like, say, Benny Hinn, I've watched him many times over the years, but I don't see a lot of what Benny Hinn does in the ministry of Jesus. Benny Hinn, if you don't know him, he's the guy who waves his jacket around. If you get hit by the jacket, you fall over, and this is all to do with receiving the Holy Spirit and experiencing the Holy Spirit. I find it hard to link that up with the ministry of Jesus, and it sort of looks to me like a kind of a performance, at least in some aspects of it. I was in a church in Queensland many years ago, when one of the opening comments of the minister was, "You've come to church on a great night tonight, we're going to turn the Holy Spirit loose here tonight." I thought, "Wow, that's great, that is exactly what we're going to turn the Holy Spirit loose tonight." Like you said, "I'm going to cage," or something, "I think we've got to bring it in. It's the Holy Spirit, we've got to turn it loose." It was crazy, you know. I know what he meant, look, there was some sign, there was some kind of weird stuff happened that night, and some good stuff, "Hey, some good stuff." I mean, they claimed the miracles that night, I got no reason to dispute that whatsoever. But look, when you turn the Holy Spirit loose in a church, you're not going to get a show. When you turn the Holy Spirit loose in a church, you're not going to get a show, you're going to get miracles, yes, and we've seen miracles in this church and every other church I've administered in praise God. Some of the miracles come in a very different form. They come in the form of people hanging in the spite set backs, "Wow, there's a miracle." People praising God despite facing major health battles, discovering gifts of service. Wow, that's turning the Holy Spirit loose. People going into an inner city area like Gleeb and rolling up their sleeves on a Saturday morning and ministering to some of the underprivileged people of our city, that's turning the Holy Spirit loose. Taking a team of people to go to Madagascar and sit in the degradation and the deprivation of some of the people of that city and minister and say, "We're here. What can we learn from you? What can we do to help you?" That's turning the Holy Spirit loose. I mean, people giving hundreds of thousands of dollars because they believed in the establishment of a ministry and a conference center like this, that's turning the Holy Spirit loose. Like if you want to show, go to Cirque du Soleil, go to David Copperfield if you want to show, but if you want to turn the Holy Spirit loose, then adjust your vision of what's likely to happen. He gives us power, not so much to perform, but to persevere. You see, you want to turn the Holy Spirit loose, get into a church where people want to honor God with their obedience, their service, their sacrifice and their perseverance. It's stating the obvious. Paul's life was no picnic. Paul talks about his hardships and his tough times a lot, and in Philippians chapter 4, you know it so well, many of you, he talks about the secret that he's learned. Philippians chapter 4, and verses the second part of 11 out of 16, have a look at this, he says this, "Yeah, there is that. Here we go. Here we go." She, on the edge you see stuff is, he says this, "I've learned to be satisfied with what I have." That's the problem with marking up your Bible, you see, I've got marks on every page instead of like it's hard to pick out. Here we go. "I've learned to be satisfied with what I have. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have more than enough. I've learned this secret so that anywhere at any time I am content, whether I am full or hungry, whether I have too much or too little. I have the strength to face all conditions by the power, Holy Spirit power that Christ gives me." He talks about shipwrecks, beatings, floggings, imprisonment. When he wrote this, he wasn't sipping a cocktail on a rooftop in Santorini. He wasn't staying in a villa on their Malphic host. Paul wrote this from a Roman prison, you know, like he was doing it stuff, and we're still able to make that great, give that great testimony, because here's something else, that's a perfect segue into something else. Here it is. "The most authentic expressions of the other guy's power and influence are relational, not rhapsodical." He's saying, "Hello, Graham. Here we go. You've invented a word to get the rhyme. No, I haven't. Those of you who are musically inclined," and I've checked with a few musos this week, "those of you who are musically inclined know this word rhapsodic." Rhapsodic is a reference in the first instance to a piece of classical music that is not regular in form. It's a little bit crazy, a little bit erratic, all over the place. In general terms, rhapsodic means, you know, like up and down, you know, emotional person, but very unpredictable, very, very, now look, here's the thing, and it's linked to what I've said already. "The most authentic expressions of the other guy's power and presence are relational, not rhapsodical." Okay? Doesn't mean to say that there aren't incredible expressions of his power and influence, but you've got to remember the fact that, you know, I'm here, I'm addressing the notion that those who have the Holy Spirit will have certain gifts and those gifts are relational. It's not a matter of being part of a certain type of church. It's not a matter of having certain types of gifts. Galatians 5, Galatians 5, 22 to 26, talks about the fruit of the Spirit. And guys, this is where the rubber meets the row. You want evidence of the Holy Spirit in a person's life? It's relational, not rhapsodical. Here's the key. Look at this. The Spirit produces what? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, self-control. There is no law against such things as these. And those who belong to Christ, Jesus, have put to death their human nature with all its passions and desires. The Spirit has given us life. He must also control our lives. We must not be proud or irritate one another or be jealous of one another. The most authentic expressions of the other guys' power are relational, not rhapsodical. They're not erratic and crazy. They're consistent. They affect people's lives. They're born out in how you relate to people. And sometimes I've seen a bit of a disconnect. What did Jesus say by this shall all people know you are my disciples? If you have love, one for another, that's the touchstone. That's the key ingredient among the people of God. Here's the last thing. The other guy's power to change lies not in us trying to be good, but in us ensuring we're surrendered. If we could do it, like if we could tidy up our own lives, if we could take care of our own sin and our own inclination to sin, there would have been no need for Jesus to die. I mean, that's the gospel. It's the fact that we can't do it. No matter how hard we try and I'm going to be good, I'm going to try harder this week. It's just not how it works. If you're trying that way, you're beating yourself up mercilessly, as Michael so powerfully described earlier, that's just not how life is, even for people who are in touch with God. We're frail. We're fragile. We're open. We're given to all kinds of inconsistencies. Some Christians try so hard, they actually remove the potential influence of the Holy Spirit and they think it's all up to them. In Jesus' day, there was such a group known as the Bleeding Pharisees. I think I might have made reference to these in the morning service. The Bleeding Pharisees were, and this is documented, were Pharisees? These who went around with blood on their faces because they would walk around with their eyes closed so as not to look on a woman for fear of committing the sin of lust, and they keep bumping into pillows and posts and they get like, "I'm trying hard, oh, he can throw the one, oh, no bang, oh," you know, like, I mean, you know, and you hear something like, "La, la, la," like, it's just, it doesn't work that way. I mean, it's not a matter of trying, it's a matter of saying, "Hey God, I can't do this. I really need you to come and fill me with your Holy Spirit, with the other guy." I've got something in the back of my Bible, which I carry all the time, so it's very appropriate. I refer it to it tonight. And it's a quote from a guy called Mike Yaconelli. Mike Yaconelli was tragically 10 years ago killed in a car crash, but he was a real guru when it came to youth ministry back in the '90s, Mike Yaconelli, and some of you might have heard of him. Look at his quote on the spiritual life, the power of the other guy in our life. Look what he says. This is powerful. The spirituality is not a formula, it is not a test, it is a relationship. Spirituality is not about competency, it is about intimacy. Spirituality is not about perfection, it's about connection. The way of the spiritual life begins where we are now in the mess of our lives, accepting the reality of our broken, flawed lives is the beginning of spirituality. Not because the spiritual life will remove our flaws, but because we let go, we let go of seeking perfection, and instead, we seek God, the one who was present in the tangledness of our lives. It kind of stands that whole thing of trying to be good on its head, wouldn't you agree? Let's check out Romans 8, 15 again, that last verse of our reading, "Those who are led by God's Spirit are God's children, for the Spirit God is given does not make a slaves and cause us to be afraid, because the other guy will change you, he will make you different and we need to be different. We need to be different." One of the most hurtful things that can be said of a Christian, "Yeah, I know Christians and they are no different than me. And even worse, I know Christians and they are even ... they are worse, they are crazier than me." I mean, there has got to be a consistency in our lives. And when you nail your colors to the master and you declare in whatever setting, work, uni, among friends, wherever you are that you are a Christian, I mean, like the reality is people are watching. Nobody is going to get the perfection, but people are watching. The other guy wants to change you, he wants to change me, it comes gradually in most cases. His little postscript about George Reeves, Superman, the guy I grew up with. He had it all, Hollywood career, popular, everything that goes with Hollywood. But the sonar of a powerful person, Superman, wow. Well on June the 15th, 1959, at age 45, George Reeves shot and killed himself in his home in Beverly Hills. And it was just a strange, ironic twist that this man who had it all, in terms of what the world would say, wow, fantastic, all that power, all that social connection, all that wasn't enough to stop him from taking his own life. And guys, not that everybody who doesn't have Jesus sort of takes that extreme step, but it's a powerful reminder that you want real power in your life. You want something that's going to get you through the tough times. You want something that's going to help you and enable you to live as God intends you to live, you need the other guy. You need Jesus Christ. And part of receiving Jesus Christ is to receive into our very selves the gift of the Holy Spirit. Do you know Jesus tonight? Are you living in that power tonight? You can. That's why we're in business. We're in business to connect people to Jesus Christ. You can do that tonight as we have our ministry time. Just indicate that one of the priors, you know what, I want to do what that guy said, I want to receive Jesus Christ, we'll pray with you a specific prayer. It'll mean you'll be on the road starting point of discovering all the risk to discover about life in Jesus Christ. Will you do that tonight if you haven't done it? It might mean that you've got to come back because you've been drifting. You've been wanting to try to do it on your own, try to be good. It's not about perfection, it's about connection. Get back in touch with Jesus tonight. your need as we invite you to come and join us for the prayer time that is down prayer shall we?