Pentecost Sunday, May 28
Pentecost Sunday 2023 - Law of the Gap, Spirit & Lid
May 28th, 2023
Psalm 78:70-72 (NIV) “He chose David his servant and took him from the sheep pens; 71 from tending the sheep he brought him to be the shepherd of his people Jacob, of Israel his inheritance. 72 And David shepherded them with integrity of heart; with skillful hands he led them.
6 Lead Up Circles
Ourselves.
Our Families.
Our Church.
Our Community.
Our Workplace.
Our World.
3 Main Lead Up Hurdles…
1. Satan opposes all God movement.
2. The leaders with the most potential rarely realize it.
3. It’s easier to go with the flow than lead a movement.
Spiritual leadership is spiritual influence!
The Law of the Gap
Are you experiencing a gap in who you are and who God is calling you to BE?
Are you experiencing a gap between what God is calling you to DO and your ability to DO it?
The Law of the Spirit
Joel 2:28,29 “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.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets. Part of the Nicene Creed
A great way to understand the role and power of the Holy Spirit is that He is the “one that fills our being and doing gap”
The Law of the Spirit
When God looks at you and me, He sees more than who are in the moment and what we are capable of by ourselves. He sees who we are in Him and what we are capable of when we are filled with the Power of the Holy Spirit.
The reason why Satan is so effective in crushing our spirits (little “s”) is because everything he says about us and our circumstances hits some brokenness or insecurity in our lives.
Romans 8:1-11 (The Message) 1-2 With the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah, that fateful dilemma is resolved. Those who enter into Christ’s being-here-for-us no longer have to live under a continuous, low-lying black cloud. A new power is in operation. The Spirit of life in Christ, like a strong wind, has magnificently cleared the air, freeing you from a fated lifetime of brutal tyranny at the hands of sin and death.3-4 God went for the jugular when he sent his own Son. He didn’t deal with the problem [sin] as something remote and unimportant. In his Son, Jesus, he personally took on the human condition, entered the disordered mess of struggling humanity in order to set it right once and for all. The law code, weakened as it always was by fractured human nature, could never have done that. The law always ended up being used as a Band-Aid on sin instead of a deep healing of it. And now what the law code asked for but we couldn’t deliver is accomplished as we, instead of redoubling our own efforts, simply embrace what the Spirit is doing in us. Yes!!!!
5-8 Those who think they can do it on their own end up obsessed with measuring their own moral muscle but never get around to exercising it in real life. Those who trust God’s action in them find that God’s Spirit is in them—living and breathing God! Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life. Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God. Anyone completely absorbed in self ignores God, ends up thinking more about self than God. That person ignores who God is and what he is doing. And God isn’t pleased at being ignored.
9-11 But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin [the being/doing gap]—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s!
Acts 1:4-9 4On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: "Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. 5For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit." 6So when they met together, they asked him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?" 7He said to them: "It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8But 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." 9After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
Acts 2:17-18 “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. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days and they will prophesy.
The Law of the Gap applies to everyone – you are not alone. The Law of the Spirit is available to anyone – you are not exempt!
The Law of the Lid
New information
Misunderstanding
Fear
Sin
Sin always over-promises and under delivers. Dump the sin. Embrace the Spirit!
“If God has more, why would you want less!”