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Yes I Will
We Three Kings of Orient are
Beautiful Star of Bethlehem
The Holy Spirit

Genesis 1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was without shape and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the watery deep, but the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water. God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light! God saw that the light was good, so God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.” There was evening, and there was morning, marking the first day. God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate water from water.” So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. It was so. God called the expanse “sky.” There was evening, and there was morning, a second day. God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place and let dry ground appear.” It was so. God called the dry ground “land” and the gathered waters he called “seas.” God saw that it was good. God said, “Let the land produce vegetati…”

Introduction

[INTRO]
Good morning, welcome to the last sermon of the year 2024...

We’re going through a series called the sword

Over the last few weeks we’ve discussed a method to read the bible, and we’ve laid out some rules and guidelines for you to follow so that you can accurately handle God’s word.

Real quickly, here are our three rules we discussed

Be aware of your surroundings
Don’t assume you already know the answer
Don’t come to a conclusion until you’ve gathered all of the facts.

And then we have been slowly been working through the process of studying a passage of scripture by understanding where it fits in the context of the larger bible story.

We looked at how to understand the passage in the context of the Bible’s grand narrative

We zoomed in and looked at studying a passage at the genre level, at the book level.

and then last week we took our passage from Luke 1 and we practiced studying the chapter it fits in, and the immediate context.
And worked our way to the level where we were looking at individual verses, looking at different translations, picking apart the language used.

And if you were here last week, part of that process, as we were reading through chapter 1 we were circling things, writing question marks in the text
Making notes at places we wanted to put a pin in, and study later.

And at some point, something you find in scripture is hopefully going to prompt you to dig a little deeper on a particular topic.

For me, and this will be the focus of our study moving forward, I had notes around verses 15, and 35

Luke 1:15 NET 2nd ed.
for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even before his birth.

Luke 1:35 NET 2nd ed.
The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called the Son of God.
In both of these verses the Holy Spirit is mentioned as being intimately involved in the birth of Jesus, and John the Baptist.

And so moving forward we’re going to study the Holy Spirit through the Bible Topically.
See there are two different ways that you can study the Bible, or preach the bible

The first is called “Exegetical” which is just a big fancy word that means “you pick a book and you go through it from beginning to end”

And the second is called “topical” where you pick a topic in the Bible—like love, or faith, or the Holy Spirit…and you go through what the bible has to say about it.

If you’ve been here for any length of time, you know that I don’t typically do topical sermon series’s

I was looking back through my old sermons, and counted exactly 5 topical sermons over the past two and a half years.

And there’s a very simple reason for that.

There are a lot more ways to get it WRONG when you study the Bible topically than there are when you study it exegetically.

When you study the Bible book by book, the way we do, you’re almost guaranteed to get the context, because you’re reading a book of the bible from beginning to end. It’s built into the method.

When you start studying the Bible topically you can run into all sorts of errors if you’re not careful.

but what you miss when you study book by book, is that you’re never getting “what the whole bible” says about a topic. You’re just getting “What the book of Matthew” says about it.

As we’re studying the Book of Luke, the only information we get about the holy spirit is what “luke chapter 1” says about the holy spirit.

And so moving forward, as we study topically about the Holy spirit, we need some more sword safety rules.

1. Get your answers from the Bible alone

This one is important. when we want to know about the holy spirit, we could go to theology, or we could go to creeds, or what different church documents say about it.

the Nicene creed states that the holy spirit is

Historic Creeds and Confessions Nicene Creed
Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.
And that’s an ok definition. none of it is UN biblical.

But it’s also a very incomplete definition.

We don’t want to know the clif notes creed version about the holy spirit, we want to know what teh Bible says about the holy spirti.

2. Ask open ended questions

This one’s important, because as you study through a topic if you ask a “yes or no” question, you’re going to get a “yes or no” answer.

And if you ask the Bible a leading question, you’re usually going to find answers that confirm what you already beleive.

so as we study the holy spirit, the one I hear the most is the question: Does the holy spirit give christians today the gift of speaking in tongues.

that’s a yes or no question.
And really it should be split into three open ended questions

What does the Bible say about the Holy Spirit
What does the Bible say about spiritual gifts
and what does the bible say about speaking in tongues.

More often than not, the question you should ask is “what does the bible say about...”

3. Pay attention to the flow of the Bible

AND really what I mean by this, is, as you’re studying your topic you want to pay close attention to how the bible talks about it in the different parts of the bible.

Here’s a perfect example. Let’s say we wanted to know “what the Bible says about government”

Well, we would go through the Bible, and we would find in exodus that there’s a pharaoh who’s a bad king, and God demands that he let the israelite people go.

And then later on the people are governed by Judges, and their government was very loose and scattered.

And then they ask for a king, and God tells them they shouldn’t want a king.

But then god allows them to have a king.

But then later God annoints a king, and supports the kingdom.

until the kingdom becomes corrupts and stops following God, so God supports a dictator foriegn nation to come and conquer israel.

But then, God punishes the dictator foriegn nation for conquering israel.

And then we get into the new testament, and we have the roman occupiers, and the sentiment is “obey them, be subjected to them”
See how there’s a flow, and at different times of the Bible there’s a different sentiment about government.

You can’t just take one instance and get a complete picture of what the Bible says. you have to take the whole thing and draw out the bigger principle.

And in this case, the principle that runs all the way through all of these situations is—no matter who is in charge, God’s truly the one in charge.

and you wouldn’t get taht if you didn’t pay attention to the flow through the bible.

So with those rules in place, on top of the previous three rules, we want to study what does the Bible say about hte holy spirit. Where do we even begin?

Step 1, is going to be

Get the list of passages to study

This can be as straightforward or complicated as you want it to be.

It can be as simple as doing a google search of “what are all the verses that talk about the holy spirit”

If you have a concordance, I know a lot of you have concordances in the back of your Bible, you can look up the word Spirit in your concordance.

you have to be careful with your concordance in some respect, because depending on your translation you won’t get all of the verses you’re looking for.,

Some of hte older translations—king james for example—you might want to look up “holy spirit” and “holy ghost”

so you just have to be careful there.

I use computer software, I find it really helpful

there’s a lot of apps on your phone that work.

But if you’re not computer savvy, another great resource is

Nave’s topical bible

There’s a lot of great resouces you can use, and when we start up our midweek bible study we’re going to be talking about how to utilize a concordance and a topical bible, and digital tools, and all that stuff.

but however you do it, you’re going to want to get the list of resources.

Step 2

Read through the verses and their surrounding context in Bible order

Key here is “And their surrounding context”

You can’t just have a list of verses and read through them one by one

you have to do the work, go through each verse, read the context, read the chapter it shows up in.

you’re going to want to follow all of the steps that we followed when we read a passage.
you’re going to want to locate the verse in the context of the whole bible, you’re going to want to pay attention to genre, cultural, historical context. All of that still applies.

And finally, step 3, you’re going to

Make General observations, and only come to a conclusion at the end.

And what will happen is that you will eventually have multiple ‘BIG IDEAS’ or themes, or concepts that you draw out of scripture. and it will give you a much clearer picture.

---

so, with that said, here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to go through the bible, in the coming weeks, and we’re going to do exactly that, with one difference.

We’re not going to go through in Bible order.

In theory if you were doing this, you would go through in Bible order, and you would be taking notes and writing down concepts, and eventually those themes would develop.

you would go through genesis and see that the spirit is associated with prophecy

and then through exodus, and see that it’s associated with God’s authority

and then through judges, and see that it is associated with God’s empowerment.

and then you’d go through the prophets and find more evidence that it’s associated with prophecy.

and it’s a very chaotic, very sporadic process until you get all the way through the bible.

We’re going to go through the major themes that arise. But i need you to know that the process by which we get there is by wading through the bible, and doing the work, from genesis to revelation.

so…with that rather long introduction out of the way, I would love if you would turn in your bibles with me to Genesis chapter 1.

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The big idea we’re going to look at today is that the Holy Spirit is a source of Life.

Genesis 1:1 NET 2nd ed.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Context, here, we can’t get any more straight forward, this is happening at the beginning of all things.

Before time, before space, before existence.

Before anything had ever happened, god was, and God is.

The phrase here, “the heavens and the earth” is what’s called a “merism”

It’s a poetic technique where two opposite ideas stand in for everything in between.

It’s like when we say “from the east to the west” the implication there is, “and everything in between”

And the north and the south too, for that matter.

Everything from the heavens to the earth, God created it.

Genesis 1:2 NET 2nd ed.
Now the earth was without shape and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the watery deep, but the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the water.
Now, that’s a connecting word, we’re getting a description of what it was like when God began to create the heavens and the earth. now.
Genesis 1:2 NIV
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
Genesis 1:2 ESV
The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
Genesis 1:2 NRSV
the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

See the word, in hebrew “Ruach” and the greek word pneuma, both have a range of meaning.

The word can mean spirit

the word can also mean breath

and it can mean wind.

The image you’re supposed to be imagining when you picture the spirit of god moving over the face of the earth, is that the very breath from God’s lungs—metaphorically—is encircling the earth. Ever present, ever powerful. What God perceives as a breath, we perceive as a mighty wind.

That’s why in John 3, Jesus says to nicodemus

John 3:8 NET 2nd ed.
The wind blows wherever it will, and you hear the sound it makes, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

God creates this world, his spirit, his breath is hovering over the surface as he makes the land and the sky and the trees and the birds, and all of creation. and then

in chapter 2 7 it says
Genesis 2:7 NET 2nd ed.
The Lord God formed the man from the soil of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Faithlife Study Bible Chapter 2
The Hebrew phrase used here, nishmath chayyim, occurs only this one time in the OT. Genesis 6:17 uses the Hebrew phrase ruach chayyim, which is regularly translated “breath of life.” Genesis 7:22 has a close parallel that combines both: nishmath ruach chayyim, which is also often translated “breath of life.”

And we learn very early on, in the Bible, that the Spirit of God, the Holy spirit is a necessary component of life itself.

It’s not just an inanimate nebulus thing that kind of floats around on the earth like the wind

The spirit of God is the thing that makes the difference between life and death.

And as the story goes on in genesis, Adam and eve choose their own ways rather than God’s ways.
They’re expelled from the Garden.
In Gen 6 it says

Genesis 6:1–8 NET 2nd ed.
When humankind began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humankind were beautiful. Thus they took wives for themselves from any they chose. So the Lord said, “My Spirit will not remain in humankind indefinitely, since they are mortal. They will remain for 120 more years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days (and also after this) when the sons of God would sleep with the daughters of humankind, who gave birth to their children. They were the mighty heroes of old, the famous men. But the Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind had become great on the earth. Every inclination of the thoughts of their minds was only evil all the time. The Lord regretted that he had made humankind on the earth, and he was highly offended. So the Lord said, “I will wipe humankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—everything from humankind to animals, including creatures that move on the ground and birds of the air, for I regret that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord.

Now, as we’re doing our study, it’s tempting, so tempting, to want to talk about the nephilim, and what it means that the sons of god and the daughters of man married each other.

But if we were doing this study, through the bible, what we would do is circile that. And put a question mark above it.

if these things come up later, in other passages, that’s an indication that they are somehow realavent to the study of the holy spirit.

If they don’t then it’s a good indication that it’s a separate topic that we would need to study more later, once we’ve finished this one.

I’ll save you the trouble, they’re not related, not relavent for our specific study.

But we see, that at this point in bible history, God is taking his spirit from people. He’s taking their breath back out of them, limiting their years to 120.

Genesis 6:3 NET 2nd ed.
So the Lord said, “My Spirit will not remain in humankind indefinitely, since they are mortal. They will remain for 120 more years.”
Genesis 6:3 NIV
Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”
In most translations you’re going to get some form of either “remain” or “contend with”

It’s not certain exactly how we should translate the word. it could mean both.

God finds favor in noah, he commands noah to build the ark, and in verse 17 he says

Genesis 6:17 NET 2nd ed.
I am about to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy from under the sky all the living creatures that have the breath of life in them. Everything that is on the earth will die,

As we go through the bible, one of the themes we see is that God’s spirit is directly associated with life. And not having it with death.

in the book of Job, job’s friend elihu says to job.

Job 33:1–6 NET 2nd ed.
“But now, O Job, listen to my words, and hear everything I have to say. See now, I have opened my mouth; my tongue in my mouth has spoken. My words come from the uprightness of my heart, and my lips will utter knowledge sincerely. The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life. Reply to me, if you can; set your arguments in order before me and take your stand. Look, I am just like you in relation to God; I too have been molded from clay.
We’re dealing with poetry, here.

The spirit of God has made me
the breath of the almighty gives me life.

These are parallel ideas.

And in the context, the point that elihu is try9ing to make, is basically that he thinks job isn’t anything special,

he says look, every one, you me, we’re all allowed to live by the grace of god

We’re all, just like adam, molded from the clay. Created by the spirit

and elihu’s point, is that we’re all on equal footing in that regard.

And when it comes to what he says about the spirit, it’s very telling.

The spirit of God made us

The Ruch of the lord is what keeps us alive.

Conclusion

Now, in our study, one of the impportant rules we had, was that we gather all the facts.

So far, the facts we have are from the old testament, with regard to the spirit’s association with life, and creation, and breath.

And in chapter 6 we learn that God has said “My spirit will not remain in them forever”

And if we stopped there, we’d only get a piece of the puzzle. And we’re going to fill in that piece later in the series, but i can’t just leave us on that note.

In the new testament, we are opened up a way to receive the holy spirit, to receive the source of life. To receive the breath from God once again.

All of those who are in Christ, who have been clothed with Christ, receive the spirit of God.

Don’t neglect that.

You, as a christian, have the breath of God, the spirit of God, living within you.
And it’s the only thing separating you from death.
- - Luke 1:15GS-NETBIBLE
- - Luke 1:35GS-NETBIBLE
- - Genesis 1:1GS-NETBIBLE
- - Genesis 1:2GS-NETBIBLE
- - Genesis 1:2GS-NETBIBLE
- - Genesis 1:2GS-NETBIBLE
- - Genesis 1:2GS-NETBIBLE
- - John 3:8GS-NETBIBLE
- - Genesis 2:7GS-NETBIBLE
- - Genesis 6:1–8GS-NETBIBLE
- - Genesis 6:3GS-NETBIBLE
- - Genesis 6:3GS-NETBIBLE
- - Genesis 6:17GS-NETBIBLE
- - Job 33:1–6GS-NETBIBLE
I Gave My Life for Thee
Gratitude
Hallelujah

The Holy Spirit

Luke 1:15GS-NETBIBLE

Luke 1:35GS-NETBIBLE

Genesis 1:1GS-NETBIBLE

Genesis 1:2GS-NETBIBLE

Genesis 1:2GS-NETBIBLE

Genesis 1:2GS-NETBIBLE

Genesis 1:2GS-NETBIBLE

John 3:8GS-NETBIBLE

Genesis 2:7GS-NETBIBLE

Genesis 6:1–8GS-NETBIBLE

Genesis 6:3GS-NETBIBLE

Genesis 6:3GS-NETBIBLE

Genesis 6:17GS-NETBIBLE

Job 33:1–6GS-NETBIBLE