The Promise Of His Presence

Hello there friends!

I hope you all are doing good! We are in week 3 of our series “Reframe: Focusing Our Lives On The Promises Of God”. As we continue into the new year of 2021, now more than ever, we need to base our lives, our families, our hopes, our reactions, and our futures on something, or SOMEONE sure and solid and steadfast! By learning to lean into the promises and teachings and faithfulness of Jesus, we can see the world around us through God’s eyes and therefore find perseverance and peace regardless of what comes our way. It’s not always easy but my goodness it is so worth it!

Peeps, I am SO INCREDIBLY EXCITED because over the next two weeks we are going to dive deep into the amazing promise of the Holy Spirit! Now originally we were only going to spend one week on the Holy Spirit but, after some prayer and study I began to see SO MANY of God’s promises to us are wrapped up in the Holy Spirit. And I just couldn’t cover all of that in one message! Truly, the Holy Spirit is so deserving of His own series haha, but we will get to that sometime I’m sure.

Now for some time, the Holy Spirit has been a touchy and confused subject in the evangelical church world. For instance, many people think of Him less as Person of the Trinity and more like a spiritual mist or thing or even a ghost, referring to the Spirit as an “it”. I know I have called Him an “it” many times and sometimes I still catch myself saying “it”. (If this is you also, don’t worry, I don’t think the Holy Spirit gets too offended by that. Remember, no condemnation!) But because some individuals have wrongly abused the Holy Spirit and turned Him into a mythical genie in a lamp, large portions of the church world-wide have shied away from talking about Him. At times He has become almost a minor part of the Trinity, with people thanking God the Father for His power and provision, Jesus Christ the Son for His love and sacrifice, and just sort of mumbling something about the Holy Spirit quietly, relegating Him to barely an afterthought.

But the truth is the Holy Spirit is so important to our lives today! Indeed, our walk with God would be impossible without the Holy Spirit in our lives. Even last week when we look at Romans 8: 1-4, we learned that, “For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death”. So even our freedom in Christ was accomplished for us because Jesus worked through the Spirit of God!

Now the reality is there is so much to say about the Holy Spirit that even with two whole weeks, we will really only be doing a brief overview. Obviously most of what we will talk about will come from scripture itself and the Holy Spirit’s guidance (haha), but some of what I will share comes from a chapter in a book call “Gospel Centered Discipleship” by Jonathan K. Dodson and “Forgotten God” by Francis Chan. Both are excellent books that are perhaps a little dry but very helpful and formative books on our walk with God. After my prep for our conversation about the Holy Spirit, I think it will be helpful to look at all this from two different angles (with some overlap): the presence of the Holy Spirit and the power of the Holy Spirit. This week we are going to look at the promise of the presence of the Holy Spirit and how He affects us. Alright lets make a start of it!