Taking Out the Garbage // The Holy Spirit and Me, Part 2

So often we look in the mirror and realise, that we're simply not worthy to come before the throne of grace. And yet, because of Jesus, nothing more needs to be done for you and me to walk boldly before God into His throne room and say 'Father, I love You; I want to be in Your presence.' Nothing more needs to be done!

 

Experiencing the Truth

These days we don't just want to know God – we just don't want to know Him in our heads but we want to experience God and historically, as we look back, Christians have made, I guess, two extreme mistakes in living their lives out with God. The first is that they focus just on truth – truth as head knowledge, studying the Bible, knowing lots of things, getting doctrine sorted out in their heads but you know, that ends up being really dry and there is no joy or peace in that head knowledge and it becomes like "religion".

The other extreme – right at the other end of the scale, people have said, "You know, we are rejecting that, we are sick of that kind of dry, "head knowledgy" kind of "God" truth. And we want to experience God – it was a reaction to the dryness of the head knowledge. And so those Christians kind of emphasise God's wonderful spiritual gifts – prophesy and healing and worship and that's really exciting.

But there is a risk that you do that and you de-emphasise the truth. And that form of Christianity ends up becoming kind of whacky and unreliable and at its worst, emotional manipulation. But somewhere in the middle … somewhere in the middle there is an answer. Somewhere in the middle there is God's Word and His truth and all of His goodness but also the spiritual reality of experiencing who God actually is in the middle of life.

And you know, when you look at Jesus, Jesus lived in that middle ground. At times in His ministry it was full of emotion; it was from His heart – you know, when He was healing lepers, when He was weeping over Lazarus, when He was weeping over Jerusalem. And at other times in His ministry, He taught on the hard issues – the Sermon on the Mount, the hypocrisy of the religious leaders. Jesus was in the middle ground – He believed in the truth of God's Word and yet He lived it out in a reality that was, well, so real; so human, so Jesus.

In Matthews Gospel chapter 4, verse 23, it says this:

Jesus went through Galilee teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom and healing every disease and every sickness among the people and so His fame spread through all of Syria.

See, Jesus was into, yes, teaching and preaching and knowing God's Word. But He was into touching people's lives and healing them and changing them and bringing them new life as well. And because of both of those things, His fame spread – people came from far and wide.

It's really funny – if we try and just stick to Biblical truth alone; that sort of very head-knowledge kind of truth, we can end up missing out on who God really is. We can end living out a faith which is "religious", which is rule based, which is critical, which is, I don't know, it's not freedom.

On the other hand, if we end up just in the "experience" camp, we can end up right off the rails because God's truth about who He is and what He wants us to do and how He wants us to live our lives out – God's truth is so important. And sometimes you will hear a preacher from one camp criticising a preacher from another camp and I'm thinking, "What's that about?" They stare at each other across this divide and the Jesus that I know; the Jesus that you discover in the Bible was a Jesus who passionately believed in the truth of God's Word and a Jesus who passionately lived out that truth in such a real way.

This Jesus laid all of His glory aside, even though He was the Son of God, and He walked on this earth as a man and yet He had such a wonderful and powerful and dynamic relationship with His Father in heaven through the Spirit. Jesus used to get up early in the morning and go out on His own and pray because He had this wonderful, real relationship with God in heaven.

Last week we looked at what Jesus said to His disciples on this subject. In John chapter 14, beginning at verse 15, He said:

If you love Me you will keep My commandments and I'll ask My Dad and He will give you another advocate – this is the Spirit of Truth whom the world cannot receive because it doesn't see Him and it doesn't know Him but you know Him because He abides in you. Those who love Me will keep My Word and My Dad will love them and we will come and make our home with them.

Isn't that beautiful? Being a Christian is loving Jesus and loving Jesus is knowing the truth and obeying Him. And then we experience Him because He says: