Consumed:Reign

 June 9 2024

Acts 2:42-44

         How many of you can remember drivers-ed classes? Do you remember thinking that there was a lot more to driving then you could ever imagine? Perhaps one of the hardest parts of driving, for most people, was getting your feet to operate the pedals. (And this was without having to learn how to use a clutch and a manual transmission so most of us should be thankful for that.) I mean, just getting the hang of how to speed up and slow down in a way that didn’t get people killed was kind of a big deal. Perhaps one of the hardest aspects to learn was to just use one foot for both the accelerator and the brake. For first time drivers it is a real temptation to let your left foot stomp the brakes and the let your right foot to step on the gas. But there is probably no more dangerous way of driving. I had a friend who never did give up this bad habit and one day when he was in his seventies, drove his car into a store front in downtown Dover. Luckily, no one was hurt but my friends confidence in driving was never the same, and it was all because he couldn’t stop using one foot for the brake and one foot for the gas.

         Well, in our spiritual lives, we often do something very similar to this dangerous practice of driving with one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas. We love to hold on to that quote that tells us that if the Son sets you free you will be free indeed, the equivalent of stepping on the gas, but then be so unsure of what to do next that we stomp on the brakes by now trying to keep a list of do’s and don’ts. Or we may just believe we can now just do whatever we want, now that we are free because God’s got us covered yet to do so just places you right back to where we started. So this kingdom life is as difficult, it seems, to figure out as it was for us to figure out how to drive. I mean, just what do we do when the Spirit answers our prayer and we suddenly find ourselves able to spiritually move in ways we never thought possible?

This is what we are taking a look at, at how the Holy Spirit was poured out upon the world on Pentecost. We are told that the disciples entered into a time of intense prayer.The prayer they cried out was the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer in Luke’s version that simply goes, “Father, your name, holy; your reign, come; give us the amount of bread that is fitting for us today; and forgive us our sins; and we forgive those who are indebted to us; and do not bring us to trial.” After Jesus taught his disciples this prayer he further taught them that the answer to this prayer was the Holy Spirit given to us by the Father through the Son. This is why this series of messages is called, “Consumed”, because these disciples were consumed in their passion for God to answer their cry. These disciples were desperate for what only the holy fire could set loose in their life. You see, only the Spirit can fulfill our hearts cry for our Father because only the Spirit is the Spirit of adoption, the very one who brings us home to live forever with our Heavenly Father. Jesus took upon himself our place in death, tasting death for all of us, so that we might be able to live where he has always lived, there in the presence of the Father. Through grace, the Father receives us in and he blesses us with the promise of an eternal inheritance. 

         Well, the Holy Spirit not only answers our cry for our Father, the Spirt of Holiness is also the only one who can bring peace to our hearts.This is what God promises to us in the thirty-sixth chapter of Ezekiel where God tells Ezekiel that his name would be vindicated as being holy when he would take his people from among the nations and bring them into the land God had promised to them. This promised land was always supposed to be more than just a plot of ground but was instead to be a place where the people of God would find rest and peace, where every day could be said to be like a Sabbath. This is the holiness of God, his being able to draw people to himself and create within their hearts a peace and confidence that just cannot be found anywhere else on earth. The power that produces this confidence is the power of God’s holy love. God’s love removes our fear, and when our fear is gone then faith can enter in. This is what is being proclaimed every time a person is baptized in the holy name of Jesus. In the name of Jesus a person rises up out of the water in the power and confidence of the resurrection; in the holy name of Jesus there is indeed, peace.

         Now it is very important that we begin to see how the Lord’s Prayer is structured so that each petition builds upon what has come previously.This means that we can expect that the reign of God to be centered upon knowing God as our Father and having the peace of Christ in our hearts. With that in mind we must be at least slightly intrigued at just, how will the Holy Spirit fulfill God’s reign and rule our world? The surprising answer is found in this idea of freedom. It sounds strange, perhaps, to say that God alone rules with freedom yet this is very much what we must understand about where our Father desires to bring us. We also need to know that when freedom is spoken of in the New Testament it is not referring to one big, free-for-all, where anything goes, hardly. No, freedom is more about being able to move, to go, without anything being able to stop that movement. We hear this in what Paul writes in the third chapter of Second Corinthians. There Paul speaks of how a veil, we might say a blind-fold, was placed over the eyes of the people of God, because their hearts were hardened. What caused their hearts to turn to stone was that they were people under the Law under what Paul called, “the ministry of condemnation”. It is easy to understand what Paul means, isn’t it? We all know that the minds of those who are law abiding people are focused on judgment, deciding who is in the right, and who is in the wrong, who measures up and who clearly has not made the mark.These are the people who begin to believe that, in the hands of the right people, the perfect life outlined in some perfect law is actually possible; and, of course, they are those right people. It is these law abiding people that Paul describes as being those who are completely in the dark about what life is all about. And when you are in the dark there simply is not much freedom, is there? But all is not lost because Paul goes on to say, that only through Christ is that blind-fold lifted and people can indeed see what real life is all about. Life is not about condemnation unto death but instead it is a welcome into life by our Heavenly Father. Life is not about some do’s and don’ts that need marked off of a check list. No, life is about a loving relationship with your Heavenly Father, joining him and our brothers and sisters in the blessing of the world.

         So, there is no freedom to be found if one somehow believes that life is all about trying to accomplish some long list of moral choices. Such law mentality is centered on judgment and condemnation which divides people into neat little categories tearing apart the living unity of the family of God. If we pray for the reign of God to come and somehow believe that this means that we are able to become good, law abiding citizens well the Spirit may desire to set you free, stepping on the gas, but you will be in the dark, pumping the brakes and going nowhere.

         So if we want to be free then we had better not somehow believe that it is going to happen by following a set of rules. No, instead of judgment and condemnation we now can find freedom in the welcome and grace of our Heavenly Father. Yet there is another way that people pump the brakes in their experience with the Holy Spirit. In the eighth chapter of John, Jesus says to some people who had believed in him that if they were truly his disciples they would know the truth and the truth would set them free. Now, this was unsettling to hear Jesus tell them that contrary to what they had thought of themselves, they were in fact slaves. They were slaves, Jesus tells them, because they were bound to sinning, which seems kind of confusing, doesn’t it, because, after all, they were called disciples of Jesus? What helps make sense of what Jesus is saying here is for us to know that Jesus explains, in the sixteenth chapter, that sin is to be defined as not believing in Jesus. So these disciples were now being told by Jesus that they had a problem with  believing in what he said. Jesus, says to them, that they had instead listened and believed in the devil, the very father of lies. As Jesus told them, if God were their Father, then they would love Jesus. Here is where the problem lies. You see, if we say God is our Father, then we must love Jesus and to love Jesus is to love the peace for which Jesus gave his life to bring about. So when Jesus says that their father was really the devil, the father of lies, he was saying to them that they refused to believe that the only peace to seek after was the peace that was brought about through the holy love of God which loves all people equally, all of the time. How very different is the lie the devil tells us that peace only comes with the elimination of ones enemies instead of peace occurring by being reconciled with ones enemies as Jesus did with us upon the cross.  

         So we can not pray for the kingdom life and receive the Holy Spirit only to turn back to try and live life in a law abiding mindset bent on keeping a list of rules. To do so would be stomping on the brakes just when the Holy Spirit is gearing up to go. No, we must know that now life is all about the welcome and grace of the Father which brings us into a family of blessing. In the same way, if we pray for the kingdom life and receive the Holy Spirit and refuse to trust that the only real peace that this world can know is through the holy name of Jesus, then again the Spirit will desire to propel us forward all while we have the brakes all locked up.

         The Holy Spirit counters these attempts we make to brake by being the Spirit of truth. Now in our modern understanding, truth is like a statement of fact, like two plus two is four, this is a fact, it is the truth. But in the days of Jesus, to say that something was the truth was to say that it was real, it could be seen, and touched and heard. So to say that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth means that the Holy Spirit brings about a new reality that can not be denied; it is undeniably the truth. In this new true reality, God rules through freedom that is found in his light. It is the Holy Spirit who brings people into the light, the light of the welcome of our Heavenly Father and the light of the peace found in the holy name of Jesus. This is what Luke records at the end of the second chapter of Acts.They did not merely devote themselves to the work they were doing, no, they were people continually doing these actions with intense effort. Luke wants us to get this image of what truly free people look like, a hive of busy people focused with clarity of purpose, moving in the freedom that is found in light. They were immersed in doing just four activities, the apostles teachings, the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and prayer. The apostles teachings simply meant that the disciples who had been taught by Jesus had now become his spokespeople, teaching others just as Jesus had first taught them. Most certainly this meant that they instructed those who had been baptized on Pentecost the basic, core teachings of Jesus. Whereas Luke has scattered these teachings through out his gospel account, Matthew has those teachings in what is called the Sermon on the Mount, found in the fifth through the seventh chapters of his account. What is very interesting is that at the very center of those core teachings is where Matthew places the Lord’s Prayer. This confirms that the heart of what Jesus taught is his prayer and the foundation of that prayer is the cry for our Heavenly Father. So it appears that the apostles have gone from praying the Lord’s Prayer to now, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, they are teaching others about this prayer and how they should pray this prayer also.You see, the way into freedom is to know the prayer to the Father and praying fervently that prayer. To hear and  experience the welcome and grace and favor of our Heavenly Father over and over again leads us ever into light and life.

         In a similar way, the Holy Spirit fulfills our cry for the reign of God to come by bringing us into the freedom found in the peace of Christ. Freedom and unity seem to contradict one another however the peace of Christ brings about the seemingly impossible. We are told that the people on the day of Pentecost were intently focused on the breaking of bread and fellowship. The breaking of bread is another name for what we call Holy Communion, where the one loaf, representing the body of Christ, is broken so that the many people who make up the body of Christ might be made one. As Paul says in the second chapter of Ephesians, Jesus himself is our peace, he has made us one, and has broken down in his flesh the wall of hostility that divided us. Those of us who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. This is what is remembered every time God’s people gather around the Lord’s table. Here, out of this peace of Christ grows the communion and fellowship of the saints, the true witness to the truth that the peace of Christ is the only peace, for it is the peace that testifies to a holy God.

         So this is what the reign of God looks like, the freedom of people knowing and growing in their relationship with their Heavenly Father. The reign of God looks like people living in the light of the truth, that the peace of Christ is the worlds only peace for it is a peace that has come out of God’s holy love that was witnessed upon the cross. Here in this reign we discover freedom in the Spirit, a freedom to where we can grow ever closer to our God and to each other in a movement which the world will never be able to brake check us. To that let us give God the praise! Amen!