Another Comforter - Just Like Me // The Holy Spirit and Me, Part 1

The plan of God is to pour His abundant love; everything He is and everything He has and all His peace and His joy; His plan is to pour that out upon your life. And that … that's why He's sent the Holy Spirit.

 

How Thirsty are You?

We are starting a new series this week on Christianityworks called "The Holy Spirit and Me". For most of my life I haven't been a Christian. My early memories of church as a child were hard pews and filtered light through yellow windows and the Latin Mass and then as I grew up, a German Mass. And for me as a child, it felt like the whole thing was just droning on. I don't mean to criticise but for me as a kid, the whole Christianity/religion thing – it just didn't work. It all seemed pretty much irrelevant.

In fact, I remember in church, sitting as a young child, I knew my father could wiggle his ears and I thought, "Maybe I can do it too" and the biggest thing I got out of that time – sitting still for me for an hour on end was just a terrible thing as a kid – was learning to wiggle my ears. And as I grew up, I'm your typical baby-boomer – you know, I was into career, into money, into having things and I discovered I was very good at what I did so, I got onto the treadmill of life and the whole religion and rules and church thing, by and large, for me, was just irrelevant – particularly as a baby-boomer.

So when I came to that time in my life, about eleven years ago, when God started to stir things around inside of me; began to develop a sense of my own spirituality, I thought, "I only want this if it is real, if it's relevant, if it's here and now, if it makes a difference." The notion of church and religion to me was vacuous and out of date and irrelevant. If there was a God I wanted to know Him and if not I thought, "I can do without all that other palaver" – you know.

I don't know if you have been at functions or events or cocktail parties when you are standing around and you have a discussion with someone and it's all superficial and you wander off and go and get another drink and you talk to someone else at all this superficial level. It's so different to having a great meal with some close friends where there is a depth and a reality to the relationship. And I guess to me, that was the distinction between the whole churchy/religiousy thing on the one hand, which I saw as superficial and the depth of relationship on the other which is what I wanted with this God – with this Jesus, if He was who He said He was. A friend is someone who sticks by you through thick and thin. A friend accepts you for who you are, good and bad.

So I thought, "If I am going to be a Christian I want a deep, passionate, real relationship with God." I remember having a cup of coffee not many months after I gave my life to Christ and this man was my pastor – a wonderful man – and he saw how excited, how passionate I was about this new relationship that I had discovered with Jesus.

And he said to me, "Berni, you know, it's not always going to be like that. There will be days when it's bad," and in a sense he's right, there are some tough days in life. But I went home and I was really angry with what he had said and I remember praying, I said, "God, if I am going to be a Christian I want to do it with my all and I want it to be a real, powerful relationship and I want to know this peace and this joy and this love and this excitement every day of my life."

Now, there are three types of people in this world – those who enjoy a relationship like that with God – and I would encourage you to stick with us today because it will be an encouragement to listen to what we are talking about with the Holy Spirit. There are those who believe in Jesus – the second type – but they don't have that sort of relationship. Somehow the Christianity thing is hollow; it's empty. The third…the third are people who don't yet believe in Jesus, who don't have that relationship and maybe you are asking, "Well, does He have anything to offer?"

So today let me encourage you – we are going to open up a box here and look at what Jesus says about the subject of having a relationship with Him and for you to evaluate that and decide for yourself whether that's the sort of passionate relationship you would like to have.

Way back in the Old Testament, to the prophet Jeremiah, when God's people, the people of Israel were going through some really tough times – God always seems to show up for Israel during the tough times. And He makes really powerful and far-reaching and exciting promises and this is one of those times. He says:

Look, after all this is through, I will put My Word inside you. I'll write it on your heart and I will be your God and you will by my people and you won't have to teach each other and say to each other, 'Know God' because you will kn