The Father’s generosity is not limited to earthly good things but extends to the giving to us of the Holy Spirit Himself. There is no second blessing, for the Spirit’s coming is part of the one great blessing heralded by the gospel given to all who trust in Christ. Luke’s wording reminds us that the Spirit is both the gift and the means through which the Father answers prayer. Obedience, as seen in Joseph’s silent faithfulness, proves more valuable than words or status, for God’s purposes unfold through Joseph’s immediate and humble trust evidenced in simple obedience.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] Alright, now this morning in the service we were looking at the Gospel of Matthew and in the Gospel of Luke there’s the same statement that is carried across in both except that Luke has one addition to it and Luke’s part, or Matthew’s part, is talking about, you know, the Father gives good things to his children but when you read it in Luke it’s much the same but it says how much more will the Father give the Holy Spirit to those who are his children I’m not quoting it exactly but I want us to notice something first of all about the difference between Matthew and Luke in terms of how we’re going to interpret it it’s not as though I can say to you with great assurance that this is exactly what it means

[00:00:54] I’m actually now needing to point out to us that there’s a choice that we have to make in interpreting where when it comes to Luke and he adds the bit how much more shall the Father give the Holy Spirit to those who are his children it’s worded in such a way as to have open another interpretation and I hope you don’t mind if I bring you what is another interpretation from what I gave this morning This morning I was just making the point that the gospel does start with the birth of Jesus So the Christmas event is the beginning of the gospel narrative But Luke is saying that the gospel narrative comes to the, you know, fulfillment With the promise of the Father giving the Holy Spirit to his children And so that when you understand the gospel you should understand it

[00:01:48] Not just come to Jesus and you get to go to heaven You know how often with children we give them a simple version of the gospel or one that they can take on board. And we give the idea if you come to Jesus you’ll be saved. Now certainly these passages are talking about salvation. They talk about it being salvation. But sometimes we just say to kids if you know Jesus you’ll be saved. And that’s all we say. But if you add in Luke’s little extra bit, how much more shall the Father give the Holy Spirit? Then obviously that salvation is something that needs to include. The gift of the Holy Spirit is what you get when you come to Christ. And this is a very important thing for us in terms of understanding what is the gospel that we do propagate. It may start with the Christmas story.

[00:02:38] But do we need to include about the Holy Spirit? And this morning what I was trying to make the point was that the Holy Spirit business is not something that is a second blessing. It’s not something that’s an addition. You’ve got the gospel here to get you right with God, but then you’ve got the Holy Spirit as like an extra if you need to have a bit of Zoom in your tank for being a Christian. No, the gift of the Holy Spirit is actually a part of the gospel. What that means is that there isn’t any such thing, let me say this carefully and don’t jump to any conclusions too quick. There isn’t any such thing as like a second blessing if you mean by that here’s the blessing through Jesus and the cross and here’s a blessing that is something that is coming another way through the Holy Spirit

[00:03:27] no there’s only one blessing the blessing of coming to God through his gospel and the conclusion of it is that you can receive the Holy Spirit it’s a part of the first gospel so it makes all the talk about the Holy Spirit it’s not something that you store up for a second blessing And those theologies, those churches that announce a second blessing, which, and they do it in a way that means that Jesus and the cross is the one way, but this is another way, you might get by praying hard or get by all sorts of things. If there’s a second blessing, there is no second blessing, there’s the first blessing, which includes the Holy Spirit. Now, but having said all that, I do need to be honest with you to say that there is an alternative interpretation of this second passage.

[00:04:19] Can you put the, please, the Luke one up? And so, yeah, see, and thank you, that’s good. And the Luke one says very much the same things about asking you shall receive and what father is there that would give you a serpent when you wanted a fish. All those sorts of things are the same as Matthew. But this one finishes, how much more will the heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? And that’s the addition that Luke has. Now, the only thing I’m pointing out, keep that slide there for the minute, is that there’s one word in the English up there that is not in the Greek and therefore begs of us to give some qualification to what I was saying this morning and I’m going to go on from here in a minute from this point. Who’d like to guess the one word that’s up there on the screen?

[00:05:12] that’s actually not in the Greek and begs of interpreters to know then what to do. Come on, anybody, you can take a guess. Which word up there on the screen is not in the Greek? The Greek is the original document of the Gospel and in Luke’s case, it appeared to be, this whole bit is a bit of an addition to what Matthew has, but one of those words is not in the Greek. It makes a difference to how you interpret it. Say. Him, no. Who? Hey? Who? No. No? This is interesting. Say it again louder. Those, no. Ask. No, no, you’re not right, no. Sorry. It’s a little word, the. Little word, the. And if you look it up and if you were to type in Luke 11, verse 13, it’s the final verse, and then put, next, Greek, and then put interlinear, what your machine will do for you, if it’s wide like mine,

[00:06:35] will put up the verse and it will show that the word the is in brackets because it’s actually not there in the original Greek. It’s just assumed to make sense. However, there is an alternative interpretation and the alternative interpretation is that, and some people who are biblical exegetes, people who spend their lives working out what’s the best interpretation, say that what that means is it’s really emphasising, yes, it’s through the Holy Spirit that God is going to answer and give to your request. But because it doesn’t say the Holy Spirit, it just says give Holy Spirit, that it can be taken to mean via the means of the Holy Spirit, you get the answers to what you’ve asked. So it’s keeping the truth of the statement, but broadening it to be not just about the person of the Holy Spirit

[00:07:30] that you get when you ask him to be yours, but it is actually whatever it is that you’ve asked, you’re asking the Father to give to you, and he’ll do it by his Holy Spirit. And that is a very valid alternative interpretation. Why I think it’s valid is my dad, who was a theologian, that’s what he used to teach in the college when he was the principal, Baptist College. And so the interpretation is that God wants you to come to him with your request. It’s a bit more generalised by leave if the thee is not there and that you take it not as the person of the Holy Spirit is coming to be yours at request to the Father, but you take it that there may be a whole range of things that you bring to the Father and he’ll answer them through the agency of the Holy Spirit working.

[00:08:26] Particularly is this the case if there’s a difficulty in what you’re being asked to do, living out the Christian life and that there’s a sense in which you’ve found in yourself a failure or if you’ve found in yourself an inability to live out the Christian life and you plead with God and there’s many a Christian who has found that the pathway to really getting to be what a Christian is has gone through a lot of failures that’s caused them to go to God and say, can’t you help me, Father? and when God our Father hears the request of a son or a daughter, which is you lot calling out to him because you’re not finding yourself adequate to get it all happening and you call out, he’s quick to answer by the Holy Spirit coming and helping you

[00:09:23] now it doesn’t contradict the other interpretation I was giving this morning because it’s certainly true that the way you get to be a Christian is coming to Christ for forgiveness and asking for God to operate in your life and that’s when you get the Holy Spirit by the way, it’s the Holy Spirit who brings the residence of Christ listen to this, into your person Christ is someone that you come and take him as your saviour so if I were to ask you, have you come and found Jesus as your own personal saviour the answer to that would be yes you’ve come and done business with Jesus about being a sinner and you’ve admitted that you need his forgiveness and you thank him for dying on the cross in order to get you forgiven and you ask him to be your Lord and Saviour

[00:10:12] now all of that’s an awful lot of little inferences there but the way that all happens to you in terms of what comes into your life is the Holy Spirit I’m not going to try and prove this to you from the Scriptures tonight but if you’ve got a question mark at this moment and when you get home and say, Jim was saying, you know, that when we prayed and come to Christ that the way Christ came was through the Holy Spirit coming into us. Yeah, that is what I’m saying. The way that you get Christ is the Holy Spirit comes and makes his indwelling in you as a person. But the first thing that he does is that he brings the rule of Christ and the spirit of Christ. There’s a connection between Jesus and the Holy Spirit and he doesn’t physically jump into your body when you become a Christian. You know that, don’t you?

[00:11:03] Otherwise you might have some extra, no, I shouldn’t say extra bumps. The body of Jesus doesn’t come and get into us but the spirit of God brings the person of Jesus to live in our hearts and so if you were a child when you came to Christ and someone led you to come to Jesus and all they told you if you’ve now asked Jesus into your life. It was a bit of an approximate way of saying it. But the actual happening was that you came and did business with Jesus. He forgave your sin because he’s already died to pay for the price of all your sins and he forgives you and the Holy Spirit is put in you and he brings Jesus to be indwelling in you. And that’s why if you read the book of Ephesians, if you want a follow-up lesson for this to give yourself when you get home,

[00:11:49] read in the middle chapters or chapter 2 of Ephesians, I think it is, about how it’s the Spirit of God that enables us to catch the presence of Jesus in our hearts. So you can’t really have the Trinity lined up. There’s the Father. He’s the one that answers your prayers. And here’s Jesus. He gets into your heart when you pray. And then you get the Holy Spirit hopping in as number three. That’s not how it works. This is very important. When you come to God, you come to the three persons of God, the Father, the Son and the Spirit. And you do business with him to get converted and be a Christian. And as you pray for your forgiveness, he not only forgives you, but he gives you the gift of his Spirit, which is what, if you take Luke, the way I’ve been teaching this morning,

[00:12:41] how much more shall the Father give the Holy Spirit to them who ask him. That moment, the Holy Spirit comes into your person and the first things that he does is it makes it possible for you, the little finite human person, to have the capacity to receive the impact of the Lord of lords and the King of kings, Jesus. The Holy Spirit makes it possible for you to have the strength to know the indwelling of Christ. You read the book of Ephesians in chapter 2 and 3 and that’s a part of what it’s saying. And I got confused by that Ephesians for a long, long time. Who gets in first to your life? Because I was led to Christ as a child and I just had the idea of I asked Jesus to come into my life. But actually, who came first? Now, the truth of the matter is that Christ, I hope I’m not confusing you all,

[00:13:42] but Christ, in the person that he is, is all three persons together. All the fullness of the Godhead bodily is in Jesus. And when you get him, you get the lot. In actual fact, it is the work of the Holy Spirit that makes it possible for your little finite human frame and person and little mini spirit that we have. I wasn’t belittling you. I was just saying we all are folk who are not exactly very enormous in terms of measures of our powers. You need the Holy Spirit to strengthen you to take the indwelling of the most holy person, the most powerful one, the one in whom all the fullness of the Godhead is dwelling bodily, that one for him to come and indwell in you. It takes the power of the Holy Spirit in you to help you even survive it. I don’t know how to say this, or it’s a little bit coming out,

[00:14:48] not so clear. And so that’s how the idea of, there’s no the really in the text, it’s just how much more shall Holy Spirit be given to those who ask him for whatever it is you’re asking. And it’s an alternative interpretation of the Luke passage. It’s really saying that when you pray to God, he answers by the Holy Spirit coming and helping you. I think both of them are true. I can’t distinguish. And so when you do what I just told you before, if you write in your phone Luke 11 verse 13 and then write Greek because you want to have the Greek version come up, but then you write interlinear, interlinear means the Greek and the English will come along parallel. And you’ll be able to see from what comes up and then you’ll look and see the words for the English are there and the words for the Greek are there.

[00:15:42] But in the words for the Greek, in the English where it says the, they’ve got a bracket around to show that it’s not actually present because there is no Greek word for the at that spot mentioned. There is a Greek word that you can translate as the, but it’s not there in that verse. All right, now I hope I haven’t left you confused, but you can track that down for yourself and what my father used to teach and I just kept this in reserve because I had to work out for myself how much of what he taught I was going to follow that it’s an alternative interpretation of Luke. It’s really saying it’s via the Holy Spirit God will answer your prayers and that doesn’t contradict the other way of interpreting it because the other way is just simply more just the gospel that if you come to Jesus you’ll get the Holy Spirit

[00:16:34] and the day of Pentecost was approving of that for the development of the church, etc. Now, all of that was my introduction that I had to do because this morning I had not mentioned that in order not to confuse it for the morning people but I had something else I wanted to say tonight which I won’t take too long. Are you able to take a second dessert? All right, so the second thing is I think it’s always unfair when you do Christmas stories and you emphasise Mary and you emphasise Mary who’s the one who’s going to be the mother of our Lord and all right, but I think that there’s necessity to give a bit of treatment to her husband. Now, when I say husband, not the one who’s the father of the child, Jesus, but nonetheless he’s the one that she marries and does he only have a minor part

[00:17:38] or does he have a significant part? And it’s rather interesting about Joseph to see what sort of part does he have in this wonderful beginning of the Gospel in the Christmas story. So we’ll start with, please, let’s, hmm, what did I tell you before? Not only that verse, yeah, that’s the Matthew one and you’re doing good because you’ve got the Luke one. Yeah, you have. All right. Now, when they had departed, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, Rise and take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child. I’m not going to bring up about the storyline of Herod finding, getting a hearing with the wise men, finding out where the child had been born and then trying to get all the kids under the age of two

[00:18:41] because they’d taken two years travel time to get there and kill all those babies. And God knew that. And he says to Joseph in a dream, Rise, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt and remain there until I tell you, for Herod is about to search for the child to destroy him. And he rose and took the child and his mother by the night and departed to Egypt and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfil what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, out of Egypt I have called my son. Jesus is the son. You know there’s a double meaning of that because the children of Israel were called God’s son back in the original time of being in bondage in Egypt and he called his people, Israel, out of Egypt and that was his son, the nation was his son, but it was also because Jesus was going

[00:19:41] to be called out of Egypt. Amazing. Now, what’s interesting, we’ll go on to the next passage and that is in our list that I gave you Matthew 2 is this? No, you’ve got 2, 13. I need another passage. What have I done? Matthew 2 16 to 21 Let’s see if that works. Alright, that’s only about the killing off of the babies but I think we’d better go further. I might have written down the wrong spot. We’ll go to another spot and we’ll interpret it when we see it. Mark 1 verse 8 Mark 1 verse 8 Okay, no we don’t need that one for now. Alright, I’ll tell you what you’ll find. If you track down the narrative as to what happens when the news comes of Herod trying to get the baby killed what God does is speaks to Joseph and when he speaks to Joseph Joseph all he does is he just obeys and if you read the narrative right through what really struck me

[00:21:21] the first time I look to see I want to know what part did Joseph play it’s all very good for Mary to be such a wonderful person what about Joseph this is why I was doing it and what I discovered is that the text doesn’t record of him as saying anything Joseph isn’t known for what he says now that raised in me a really lot of questions what sort of person was Joseph or is it the text doesn’t bother recording any of his words he probably did have time to say things but they never got written down but what is written down about Joseph is actually very telling of his character because if you find the spot where it’s saying what happens when Joseph was there’s another Joseph when Joseph was spoken to by God he just does it the angel says take the child and his mother back to land of Israel because Herod’s been killed or something or other and he just gets up and goes

[00:22:37] yeah you’ve got one when Herod died behold an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt this is in Egypt saying rise take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel for those who sort the child’s mother are dead and the death and he rose and he took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel but when he heard that Archelaus was running over Judea in places of his father Herod Herod’s the one that killed the babies he was afraid to go there and being warned in a dream he withdrew to the district of Galilee and he went and lived in the city of Nazareth so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled that he would be called a Nazarene. All the action that Joseph does but the scripture doesn’t contain any of his words. There came a time I was really glad of that

[00:23:35] because it underlined the thing that really made it work for the survival of baby Jesus was a man who acted and a man who just obeyed God. If you had to rank the things that make you useful to God being someone that’s a sprouter I suppose I’m one someone that’s a talker that’s one thing but something far more important and needed for the man the father of the family at least of baby Jesus was someone that was obedient and just acted. And God counts it more important that you just obey him than you become someone who can do all the special things. You know in church life we put a fair high usefulness or would be a good way to say on people who can participate verbally and a lot of what we do in church life we have communion and different people take communion and whatever

[00:24:43] and also there are those who operate over here it’s not only verbal but also banging the drums you know all the things that happen there and those of us who may be not quite that’s not our spot to be able to do things are admiring how there are people from that corner who do such a good job and they seem to be getting better since you’ve been there I’ve got to say sorry to thank you Phil it’s actually wonderful to see the growth of our church in the leading because you know what counts when you’re someone like in my role when you’re watching that’s very important but even more important is that I watch the people and we’ve been here 20 years now and if you go back the number of those years they had some pretty good things come they actually used to have not this stagey area done

[00:25:38] but they had a little thing that went right across and flowers and everything and the people on the stage had to be behind the flowers I always thought that was silly because you couldn’t see everything the same with all the flowers but anyway but what’s more important than what you see as the people who are presenting the music is what you see in the people here. And there has come a dramatic change in what I see in our church from the people. Worship is what’s coming from this lot to God. Not just the leaders only. They help. They do a good job. But there have been times in this church when there wasn’t bad music but there was nothing coming back after at least not that I saw. They probably had better times earlier. But something has happened in our church and there’s a sense in which

[00:26:33] there’s worship coming from the people and that to God is more important than the skills. The skills are good. He gives skills. But understand the worship he wants is the worship of the heart and that response to the worship that we give. And that’s been growing. I think that’s really made me very encouraged. and so I find it in the scriptures too that maybe there’s Mary and she was taken by the spirit and made some prophetic statement you know her cry and she does some talking and there’s other people who are relatives who have prophecies in the temple this Christmas story is rather fascinating the different things that are said but there’s one person who if he didn’t do what he did Joseph the baby Jesus would have been killed probably and what he did is he just obeyed it didn’t matter how big a move it was

[00:27:37] down to Egypt back again not stay in this spot find another one and it’s because of his obedience that the whole Christmas story continued to come together and that has really hit me it’s more important to me that I obey than it is necessarily all the other things that may be good but without obedience God’s got to go around and rework your steps if you didn’t obey get you back on track obedience was what Joseph gives as his example in the Bible he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel but when he heard Archelaus reigning over the Judea place of his dad he was afraid to go there and being warned in a dream got a dream and he obeyed it he withdrew to the district of Galilee he went and lived in the city of Nazareth which is why Jesus ended up being called Jesus of Nazareth.

[00:28:49] So that which was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled, that he would be called a Nazarene. God needs people who make obedience just what they do. That’s my message for us tonight. And my earlier part was just talking about there are two options to interpret how Luke has a bit more in it about the Matthew when it comes to how much more shall the Father give Holy Spirit to those that ask him. And I think both interpretations work, that it is a recitation of the Gospel that when you come to God for forgiveness and you ask him to make you a Christian, you’re asking him for his Holy Spirit to do something in you. It’s called your regeneration, you’re born again. And when you ask him, he will give his Holy Spirit to regenerate you and it just needs you to ask him. Or the other way to interpret it is

[00:29:51] whatever might be what you need. Might be as a strong Christian that you’ve had something that’s made difficult for you to progress, then go and pray about it. And the answer God will bring will be via the Holy Spirit. Because it’s his Holy Spirit who comes to answer prayer. That’s a fantastic thing to know. Let me pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you for the Scriptures. I thank you for the joy that some of these things were for me to learn in different times back in the past. I thank you for the promise. How much more shall the Father give Holy Spirit to them who ask him? Whatever it is he gives, he’ll come by the Holy Spirit. And how true it is that when we come to do business with Christ as Saviour, when we do that, we can receive the Holy Spirit into our lives then. And that is a part of the one and only blessing of the Gospel. It’s all because of Jesus. We thank you for that in his name. Amen.