26th January 2025

The Spirit’s Work in bringing us all that we have in Christ

Passage: Colossians 2:9-10, Romans 8:9-11
Service Type:

The fullness of God dwells bodily in Christ, and through Him, believers receive everything needed for salvation and spiritual life. When we come to Christ, we receive not just a portion of God’s presence, but the complete indwelling of His Spirit. Just as Jesus experienced being born of the Spirit, anointed by the Spirit, filled with the Spirit, and raised by the Spirit, these same happenings are granted to all who trust in Him. Our journey is not about acquiring additional blessings beyond Christ, but rather discovering the depths of what we already possess in Him.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] This morning our emphasis was in looking at the fact of the sufficiency of Christ, the fact that Jesus is all that we need. Now obviously we have other needs and he meets it, but there is a truth to be said, to be understood, that salvation is really all in Christ. And part of how that came about is because what is all in Christ is all that God is. And then this morning I was answering the question, does that mean that it’s just Jesus and he’s the same as the Father, same as the Spirit? Well although it’s true, they share the attributes of deity, they are different persons of our one Godhead. Otherwise Jesus couldn’t have prayed the Lord’s Prayer which begins, our Father who is in heaven. That’s why Jesus, when he died on the cross and bore our sins, could cry out, my God, my God. He in his being the God-man, having the Father as God. And he says, my God, my God, how you have forsaken

[00:01:13] me or why have you forsaken me? It’s the reason why when he was raised from the dead, he was raised from the dead, he had said somewhat that he had power to take his life again but the actual methodology of it happening was that the Spirit came on him and raised him from the dead. The Bible teaches his death was something done by God. So there is a bit of a mystery here that we are to understand that in Jesus is everything of God and yet that’s not to negate the fact that he is a part of being the Son of the Father. In fact, he’s a Son in more way than one. He always was the eternal Son. But when he came to earth and took on humanity, he was born. Wow. And the Bible pictures God talking about this day, I have begotten you. There’s a sense in which Jesus is someone and the early creeds kept this really in mind when they talked about Jesus as begotten but not created or

[00:02:19] not made. There’s something begottenness about him that is and they worded it eternally. He’s been the begotten Son. So they came to be in theological circles a phrase, the eternal generation of the Son. We put that, you know, onto the doctrinal basis of the Baptist Union but then we had people complaining that we were putting forward as though Jesus had a beginning. But no, he never had a beginning. He’s always been begotten of the Father. That means somehow the Fatherhood is behind his being a Son. In fact, you can’t have a Son without there being a Father or yeah, you understand that there’s a mystery in this. We can’t fully untangle. It’s just there. But even though he is Son, and he’s Son in two ways, one eternally he’s always been Son and will be Son but it’s also because he’s taken on humanity and become begotten as well. The actual phrase an only begotten Son, I better note that often the Bible uses that to be more

[00:03:27] talking about who has the inheritance. So it is the only begotten Son, it’s talking about the only one who’s going to inherit everything is Jesus, but it’s not negating the very physical picture of the fact that Jesus was born and in that sense became begotten in a way that he never needed before to be. He became, let me say that better, he’s always been the Son that was not made, but now he was a Son who’s come into existence by the work of the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary. So there’s really something very difficult to understand that I wanted tonight to take you more deeper in and to see if I can do this by explaining about what happens when we come to Christ and we come to the One who is totally God. I didn’t mean to shut out the Father from being God, don’t forget his baptism when the voice of the Father was heard, this is my beloved Son in whom I’m well pleased.

[00:04:30] I’m not shutting out the Fatherhood or the Holy Spirit and the mystery that we call the Trinity, three persons in one God and in the Old Testament the Jewish people were called to rehearse about that and they would say, our gods, it was the word Elohim which is the plural word in the Hebrew for God, our gods, then they’d use the verb is, equivalent to our is, a singular verb, our gods is one and the one is not a one of solace being solacy, it’s a one of unity and the one of being alone, there are no other persons who are God, he is the only true God. But that’s a mystery, you can’t unravel, the Jewish people recited that, some of what they had to do all the time without ever fully understanding it, because it is something that will blow your mind to do with Trinity, our three gods. No, see I said it wrong, our three persons, not human persons, but three persons in one God and if you try and rationalise

[00:05:43] that and tease it out so you reduce it to be simple to accept, you will lose real Christianity, or if you refuse to believe it, you won’t experience real Christianity. And there’s something here to be said and taught in churches, that we might all be people who go deeper in what is our faith. I found coming to this church that some of the nearby churches, they’re all different qualities but some of them told their people to be aware of us, because they said they don’t talk about life, they only talk about theology. Well the silly thing about that statement is that when you talk about Jesus, you’re talking about theology. After all, he is the one person in whom the fullness of the deity, according to Colossians 2, it’s on your screen, because of of the fullness of deity dwells in him bodily. And so in the person who is the son having taken on humanity, it’s not just the third of God as the son of God who’s gotten into

[00:06:55] a human body and that’s him. No, in Christ all God is has come to be in him physically bodily. Isn’t that a marvellous thing? Well, that is something very important for us today and I wanted to tease that out tonight to show you how it applies and how we can understand what has happened to us. For when we come to Christ, we come for the forgiveness of sins that he worked on the cross. When we come to Christ, we come to the power of his life in us having come to Christ. You go on being a Christian with the help of this Jesus and one of the central doctrines is called this doctrine of having Christ in you, the hope of glory or the expectation of the salvation being worked out in glory. And the Bible teaches that to be a Christian is how you become a son of God in the spiritual sense. You are a son of God already from creation. We’re all sons of God, everybody who’s a human

[00:08:06] because God has made us as such but we fell and we’re sinful persons and we need to have reparation done and we need also to be people who are made spiritually sons of God and that happens when we come to Christ and take him as our saviour, put our faith in him. And in that time we not only trust in him and get the salvation but listen, listen, we get him and the teaching of the scripture is that if you receive Christ that’s welcoming him for whom he’s been sent, the one who is the saviour of the world. When you welcome him as your personal Lord and Saviour, he comes within your person and you get Christ, the one who has all the what you call God in him bodily, the one to whom has been given all authority. Look at this verse and you have been made complete, the word is, it’s the word plerio, the very opposite of the kinio, you know how when Jesus emptied himself and came to earth that’s kinio, he took away all of his place of authority.

[00:09:18] But the opposite of it is not kinio, but the opposite plerio means to be made complete, to be made full and when you come to Christ you are made complete in him and this one in whom you’ve been made complete, he is the head of all rule and authority. What an amazing thing, it’s not only, and the Bible goes on to say he’s the head of the church but his being head of the church is only a part of what he’s head of, he’s a head of everything. And you have him, what more do you need? Is there a blessing over and above knowing Jesus? What a foolish idea it is if someone made you think you’ve only got a third of it or someone made you think you need something about the Spirit and something about some other part or you know, no, in Jesus he has the fullness of all the Godhead bodily and when you have Jesus in you, you have the one who is the head of all rule and authority all around the world and time and place and future. The fantastic thing now, I wanted to just take

[00:10:36] one of those things that we get when we come to Jesus and show you how you need to apply some of this teaching to make an understanding of how what happened to Jesus corresponds to what happens to us when we become Christians. Sometimes we talk about what happened to Jesus as salvation history history, in certain events that he went through as a part of what he had to do, bring about our salvation, includes dying on the cross and rising from the dead. That salvation history is one thing, but sometimes we talk about also the steps of our salvation. People get a bit mixed up because they think they don’t distinguish those two ideas of what did Jesus do to work our salvation, and what happens to us to get saved. It is what happens to us anything further than to do with Christ, that’s the question. One of the mistakes a lot of the Christian groups make is to know about what Jesus did

[00:11:42] but then to suggest that the certain steps that you need to have, the most common one is that you need to find Christ and become a Christian, but then you need to have an experience with the Holy Spirit. When I was a young man and going street fishing a lot in town, and I used to do so at the Queensland University, and there was an enthusiastic fellow from another denomination, I liked him, I believed in his enthusiasm, but he was wrong on this simple fact, that if he found someone who is a Christian, he would then change where he spent his time to try and talk them into this second blessing. In fact, I had a team of 26 young people who used to meet for prayer in the city, and then we go and do things, and we go as a preaching team to different churches.

[00:12:32] We came to this church and spoke to the young people in the hall at the back, that’s many years ago. Some of them came in contact with these ideas who taught them that you’ve got Christ and some of them were really good soul winners on my team, I had great respect for their enthusiasm and some of them were gifted in it. I had great respect for them, some people told them that you’ve only got Christ, and you need the Holy Spirit and there is an experience you can have, where you got qualified by knowing Christ to start off with, but then you receive the Holy Spirit or you receive the power of the Spirit, it’s worded differently by different people. And although there are spiritual happenings all Christians experience to do of the Holy Spirit,

[00:13:20] I’m not knocking out that there are further things God does with you and the spirits involved, I’m just saying that there is no salvation needed, pass what Jesus has provided, and pass what you get by being in him and him being in you. He’s the one who’s the head of all rule and authority. Don’t give it away to anybody else. And I want to show that in terms of just some of the elements of what happens when you come to Christ. And so I’ve picked on the fact that a very well-known thing about people coming to Christ is we understand that that’s true, that we need to be born of the spirit.

[00:14:04] And question it asked why do we need to be born of the spirit. Well, Jesus came as a human, and he needed to be born of the spirit, or he was born of the spirit. I should take the word needed out, because he wasn’t a sinner and there wasn’t anything lacking. But it was the will of God, that he should be born of the spirit. And so we’ll look first to see Jesus being born of the spirit. And I think we need to go to my next verse, If they’re in the right order, yeah, they’ll do.

[00:14:33] OK, this is Luke chapter 1. And in Luke chapter 1, it’s talking about Jesus. And it’s talking about the fact that he is a person who was born of the spirit. The Bible says that. And if we read it together, and the angel answered her, 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 called Holy, the Son of God.

[00:15:06] And behold, your relative Elizabeth, there’s a sort of cousin, but an older lady, in her old age has also conceived a son. And this is the sixth month, so she’s six months due. Not like Shona, my daughter, who’s in labor a little bit, I think, or starting to right now. In the sixth month with her was who was called previously barren. She’d not been able to have children, and God had heard the prayers.

[00:15:35] And she suddenly had a child. It was going to be John the Baptist. For nothing will be impossible with God. Oh, by the way, I could preach a whole sermon on that little statement. Nothing will be impossible for God. One of the things we need to help us go on believing and learn to trust more deeply is to take on board. There’s nothing too hard for God. Just trust Him.

[00:16:02] You’d be surprised at how it relieves an awful lot of worries we have. Anyway, nothing is impossible with God. And this is to be a sign for Mary, with the barren woman who’s six months pregnant. That’s pretty good, a sign, isn’t it, don’t you think? And Mary said, behold, I am the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word. And the angel departed from her. Now, if you go on reading the title,

[00:16:27] we don’t need to read too many verses, but you know the story of how the Holy Spirit came on her. And that is how the eternal Son was communicated to her womb. But not just that she was one third of pregnant with God, but somehow it was all that God came as Jesus came, because He has the fullness of the Godhead. And when He had the Holy Spirit communicate God to Him, then He had all that God is. And there’s a mystery there. I can’t untangle all the words, but in Jesus

[00:17:08] it’s not just a third of the Trinity. It is all that God is. In Him bodily, you get the point, it’s not just a spiritual thing. Well, it is a spiritual thing. But Jesus is born of spirit. Now, one of the things the Bible teaches for us to become Christians is to have a spiritual birth. And so it’s very important to know that it has happened to you if you’re a Christian. It’s a rather awful thing to go through life saying, I hope that I have been born again.

[00:17:40] And every now and then I do have people ring me on the phone and say, Jim, will you pray with me? And we usually come down the church and pray. And some of those people are people who’ve never been certain they’ve been born again. And I leave them in a prayer. Sometimes you can’t really understand their feelings and their spiritual background for you to say what they are. No, I don’t try to be in that role. But I explain to them, it’s a faith thing that you put your trust in Jesus, that he has come into your life and you are indwelt by Christ.

[00:18:18] And even a lot of children are like this because sometimes they did have a genuine wanting to come to Christ. But the understanding was very small. And someone asked them to make a response. A matter of fact, now I’m talking, I’m what? Because the conventions, my parents used to go to Christian conventions. My dad often being a speaker, there’d be a children’s thing. And sometimes the enthusiastic children’s workers would give us a little gospel message and then ask us if you want to have Christ, put your hand up. And I’m remembering now in a convention, this is in Perth, West Australia, I put my hand up. And someone clapped me on the back, they might have led me in a prayer, I don’t know,

[00:18:59] but I don’t think anything happened, frankly. But I didn’t know what to think. And that was not my moment. There was a later moment at the age of nine, there was a Billy Graham crusade, when I did come to Christ. And after that happened, I knew that I knew him. It’s just different. And if I meet a person who’s similar to how I’d been, I don’t say, well, maybe you are, maybe you’re not. I say, well, here’s a prayer we could pray.

[00:19:34] Oh, Lord Jesus, I want to know you in my life when you’ve said that if I give you the invitation, you’ll make me a Christian. If I come to you in faith, you’ll take me. He that comes to me, although I know why it’s cast out, Jesus said. And so I lead him in a prayer, Lord, if you haven’t come into my life before, come in now. And then I tell him this, I said, tell me this, does Jesus ever lie? And when they’re children, they say, oh, no, he never lies, or who’s the liar or the devil? I’m glad they don’t say their parents are with you, but the devil. I say, Jesus never lies, and he promised that he’d gave you eternal life if you came to him. He promised if you believed in him, you’d be safe with him.

[00:20:23] He promised that if you trust him and if you receive him as your Lord and Savior, that’s more than just his coming into your lub-thumb, that’s him becoming your Lord and Savior. If you ask him, he will do it. Now, if Jesus doesn’t lie, what does that mean he’s now done? I’ve just led them in a prayer, Lord, if you haven’t come in, come in now. And they look up and say, oh, of course, he has come in. And I said, just go on believing him in his promise. And so it’s important for us to understand the faith involved in receiving Christ. That’s what makes it happen. It’s not your emotion or you go down the front in a meeting or anything to do with the church and how it seeks to operate.

[00:21:07] In fact, there’s nothing wrong with giving a call. I think that’s the part of evangelism. And my background is in order to go to meetings and then put people on the spot to respond to Jesus. That’s what evangelism is. It’s not appropriate with every scenario to put people on the spot, but there is a moment that is appropriate when Jesus calls people, which right through the Gospels there are illustrations thereof. Anyway, you become a Christian because you have prayed to Jesus and you’ve been born again. Now, how does his what happened to him, Jesus, align with and match up with what happens to you?

[00:21:49] Well, you discover that the scriptures spoke about Jesus being born again, born of the Spirit. That’s how he became here on earth. He was the Holy Spirit brought him and it was happening within the womb of Mary. And if you read the story lines of the scriptures where Mary prays and, well, I don’t know about praying, he just obeyed and Joseph was the one who was told that the Holy Spirit will come and overshadow the womb of Mary and that which is born in her will be the Son of God. So it happened to Jesus, but it happened at his birth. That’s number one point. Now other things that people sometimes talk about in terms of us being Christians, it’s

[00:22:39] not only being born again, but there’s another one that’s very much debated about as to how it happens and to whom it has happened and it is the question of being anointed of the Spirit. If I were to come with this microphone and come down there, I’m not going to do this, but if I would have come and hold it in front of you and say, have you been anointed of the Spirit? What would you say? Is that just a one-off experience or is it that there is being born again one thing and there’s another thing, being anointed of the Spirit, how does the fact that Jesus at a time different from his birth, obviously, he was anointed of the Spirit.

[00:23:19] Now I better quote to your Bible verse and we better do Acts 10. Is that what I’ve got on the list? I made up lists for the morning and the evening and I mixed them up somewhere, but in Acts 10 and verse 36, yes, that’s what you’ve got. And here is the evidence that the first apostles were told to preach about Jesus being anointed. And for the word that was sent to Israel, preaching good news, that means gospel, good news of peace through Jesus Christ, peace with God. Here’s Lord of all, you yourselves know what happened throughout Judea and beginning from Galilee and after the baptism that John proclaimed, how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth. There it is, Jesus had an experience.

[00:24:13] Now let me be careful of one thing, when I say experience, I don’t just refer to some emotional feeling. I’m referring to a happening. Take the word experience to mean it’s the happened. Generally you’re aware of it through your senses and through your self-awareness, but by experience I mean this is something that occurred to him. And one of the important things for us to understand that you’re going to get out of tonight is whether or not you have been anointed. I’m not talking about whether you’ve felt it, there are times when you recognise that the Spirit is on you and you have an anointing.

[00:24:53] And not always every time, certainly in preaching I know there are times where I just know that it wasn’t me and something came over me and something happened. But there’s other times and I just gave whatever I had and then someone came to Christ and they come and tell me how did you know, how did you know, what are you talking about? And they refer to something about them that they didn’t know, and they thought I knew. I don’t know what I said that made them think that. But there is a happening, let’s use that word , where the spirit comes on anybody who is going to be involved in preaching the Good News, where the spirit is the one that takes over. That’s an anointing. And you can use the word that there’s been an initial anointing and that’s the case with

[00:25:37] of Jesus if he were to go through the gospels. It began in that time when he was in the synagogue. And he said, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, and he has anointed me. And Jesus went out from there and says, God was with him. There is such a thing as where the Spirit comes on the person that’s come to God and takes over clothing himself with them to God. Clothes the Spirit, clothes himself with a person, and uses them as he directs.

[00:26:12] That’s a very normal Christian experience. It’s not always recognized as what went on. And sometimes as we go deeper into Christ, we get more sensitive to being available for that to happen. But this happened after John’s baptism. Jesus Christ was anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power. And he went about doing good and healing and healing all who were oppressed of the devil. For God was with him. And one of the features of Christians

[00:26:45] who’s anointing has become obvious, let me put it that way, is the fruits. You can’t be anointed with a spirit without there being something that happens. It’s not about feeling. Sometimes you feel it. Sometimes you don’t. I don’t know whether you like reading. I like reading the older stories of the saints. By saints I mean people like praying hines.”

[00:27:08] He said his name, the fellow in India, and he used to pray so much that he got stuck in the prayer meeting. He was meant to be the speaker. They’d send people to get him a big convention with people all waiting for the sermon. And they’d have to drag him out from the prayer tent because he was lost in prayer. As he’d come across one occasion, he was coming across to the tent, he was still praying while they were dragging you, and as he got to the tent, he let out a bit of what he was saying to God, oh God, oh Father, and as the people heard it, a wave of spiritual action went right across the crowd.

[00:27:48] Somehow that contagion of the closeness of the Holy Spirit anointing him affected the people. Those sorts of things don’t just happen in India. They can happen in Brisbane, Australia, But they happen usually in more revival times where people really get keen and pray for God to bless us, and there’s a movement of the Spirit, and sometimes there be such a movement at an area where people coming into the area, like in The Greatest Awakening in America,

[00:28:16] The Greatest Revival in Western Christianity is The Great Awakening in America, Jonathan Edwards being the fella at the heart of it. But there was such a movement of God’s Spirit in an area, the people riding horses into it suddenly came under conviction of sin, and we’ll get converted. That’s what the anointing of the Spirit does. It’s a work by God that’s a part of Jesus’ ministry because he got it himself in the first place. Now I’m making a point, and I’ll get to the end of a bit of a surprise to some of you, although I reckon most of you will guess it along the way, but Jesus was born of the Spirit, but another moment Jesus is anointed of

[00:28:53] the Spirit, and it’s the explanation for how he had such power. We’ll go further quickly to the third thing that the Bible speaks about it to do with us and the Spirit, and this one is in Luke chapter 4 verse 1. I’m going through about happening in Jesus. Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from Jordan. Now you know he’d had a very deep experience in the desert, and he was tempted, and the Lord led him to be able to answer through the Holy Spirit. He was full of the…when he came back from the desert, it says he was full of the Holy Spirit. Now there’s a lot of similarity between being anointed of the Spirit and being full of the Spirit, but the words are not exactly with the same meaning. Full of the Holy Spirit is when God God takes you and he is the one who makes you not only do the miraculous things, the anointing I talked about, not only the power of God being through you generally, but things

[00:29:59] happen that are because you are filled with the Spirit. In our last two centuries of Christianity, people have had all sorts of unusual ideas as to what it means to be filled with the Spirit. Some people have associated it with certain gifts of the Spirit, which is not entirely wrong, because the gifts of the Spirit need to be operated with someone who is filled with the Spirit. There is such a gift called speaking in tongues, because the Bible teaches there is one. They’re a gift’s plural, charismatic. And one of them is speaking in tongues. I don’t speak in tongues, but I don’t disbelieve it.

[00:30:44] I used to have to be honest with you, because my background in Baptist circles was with more of the old idea that the whole charismatic thing was a lot of emotion, and you don’t believe it. God had to spank that out of me, and it happened in Tasmania, where I had two crusades that went through. I was the state evangelist, so I went through two crusades. And the second one of them was interrupted by the fact that Michele and I had a car crash. And I had a broken hip.

[00:31:18] And I took my way out of the hospital, but I had no power at all to put any weight on this leg. And I had crutches that I hopped around on, and the deacons at the church, at a central church in Launceston would sit behind me while I preached, and if I wobbled, I all went like this, ready to catch. I finished the crusade anyway, and we had two or three days, a Sunday between or so before we went to the next crusade in another church in Launceston. In that time, people tried to pray for me. I went and decided to go to another church because I wasn’t a preacher, so I said, let’s go and there was no one who knows us. So we went to a little charismatic church in the centre of the city, and the man there

[00:32:05] saw me come in on crutches. I admired his keenness. You could see he switched his message to healing. The moment he saw me, there wasn’t anybody else on crutches, and he called and he had a well to call, calling for the people who did heal. You went on calling and I didn’t move. I didn’t wake up to the fact that I was the one he was calling for. And so the time finished and we went home. It was a very lovely church and they were friendly and one family invited us home for supper and they kept talking, you need to have someone, let someone pray for you, we’ll lay hands on you. And I said no, no, no, because I was aware they were church more charismatic than I understood. Anyway, as we came to go, we were driving in a borrowed car because mine was crashed. And I was using my left leg both on the accelerator and it was an automatic brake.

[00:33:02] And so we get down to the car and I’d throw the crutches in the back and then hang on to the seal so I could slide myself in. And while I’m still out there on one leg holding on to the seal, the door is open, Michelle’s in her side, the two people, lovely people from the church, took their opportunity. They’d been asking me to let them pray for me and I kept saying no. But when my hands were like this, I couldn’t do anything, they put hands on me and prayed before I could stop them. And I prayed under my breath, Lord, I accept nothing that does not come by way of the cross. And nothing happened. And I got in, so I went away. But I’m telling you how I came to change some of my attitudes about things. And anyway, then we went to the new church. Now they had a man who was the mayor of Launceston who was the chairman of the crusade committee and he had a lot of good managerial skills.

[00:34:00] And things were zooming with that crusade. But they’d arranged to have at the Easter time a televised service that would go all across the northern Tasmania. And they had a cross put up at the back. They wanted me to walk under the cross and give a sermon on the cross because it was Easter. But I had a broken hip. I couldn’t put any weight on it without letting out a wince in pain. But on the Wednesday, they had the church come along and have a mock meeting to practice it. And the cameras would take lots of spots and they’re going to splice them in. You know how you get a picture of the people in the crowd, but some of it was going to come from Wednesday. And Friday was a good Friday service. But on that Wednesday, they had a prayer meeting in the morning and one of the big points they prayed for was my hip. And I went hopping into that prayer meeting, and I went walking

[00:34:53] out at the end. And I’ve never had another awareness of hurt or anything from that broken again. And when you sort of turn down other offers for prayer, but you go to your Baptist church, and they were just normal Christians, Baptist people, but they weren’t, you know, I fly holy rollers like some people call them, but they were just normal people. I really had no defence from my traditional Baptist view to say, oh, something’s happened. And I don’t know whether it was a gift or anything, but God answered the prayer. And that was another miracle that happened. It was the second time I’d been healed, only to tell you one was a child, so it wasn’t really my doing. Anyway, and there’s been a third time. I know it won’t go on about me, but I was given two years to live at one stage and to do with a heart problem. And I was asked to preach at a church down the Gold

[00:36:00] Coast, and I was teaching at the college and getting very tired. I often lay on the floor in between and pinch an extra five minutes before I went back to the next lecture. But on Sunday I’d drive my car down to Helensvale. And at Helensvale I used to roll the car right back, so I was lying as horizontal as you can get. That was less work for the heart. And drive down there. And they had in the office, a previous pastor had left, and so they had an office with a bench in it that was free. And I’d lie in there and listen to the service happening. And when the preaching time came, I’d come on out. I’m not hopping any well, but I was still weak. I’d come on out and give a sermon. And those people saw how weak I was. And without it being official, there’s a group of them who said, we’re going to pray for Jim. I was there for a whole year filling a pulpit since they had

[00:36:54] no other pastor at the time. And during that year, something happened. I just got stronger. And I had a regular appointment with a cardiologist. I used to do the bit on the treadmill and then they’d do the ultrasound and they’d look at the pictures. And the man went, looked at the pictures from this time. This is up in Brisbane now, and he got up and ran. This is a very good heart doctor. He got and ran back to where he had all these pictures. And he got the previous years. And he came back and he showed me. And And he had two sets last year and this year. And he says, it’s changed. And from that moment, I kept getting stronger. Even the next year, I was still preaching there.

[00:37:47] I got stronger and stronger. And I can tell you that God healed me of a technical healing because they measure your ejection fraction. And if it’s over a certain point, then you’re normal. He actually said, I’ve got some good news for you. He said, today I can tell you that you’re normal. And then we both laughed, me for different reasons because I’m very rarely called normal. But I enjoyed being called normal by God stepping in. And being full of the Holy Spirit

[00:38:25] is something that’s often promised, just like we talk about being anointed. And one of the things that is promised in charismatic circles is that if you come to the Holy Spirit, you come to Jesus. He’s the one to dive for your salvation, but you come to the Holy Spirit to be filled with the Spirit. And that’s actually wrong, which I’m going to explain to you. And probably you’re getting the picture along the way. But Jesus was certainly filled with the Spirit

[00:38:57] and a different time from when he was anointed. So he was born at one time. he was anointed at another and then in the temptations it was demonstrated of him being filled with the spirit. Well there’s another thing that happens to Jesus and that occurred, you’ve probably guessed it, when he was the least looking of being in control, when he’s lying dead in the tomb. What happened to Jesus when he’s lying dead in the tomb was certainly nothing to do with his will, not while he was dead. And it is told us the storyline in the book well, in the book of Romans, gives us the theology of it. And we’re looking here at Romans 8, are we? I hope so, yes. But you are not as the flesh, says Paul. You are in the spirit

[00:39:55] of, but you are in the spirit of God. I presume it is. How does it sound on your screen? But you’re in the spirit, full stop. If in fact the spirit of God dwells in you, and if you have the Holy Spirit, and if you’ve come to Christ, part of what the apostle Peter promised the Day of Pentecost, if you repent and believe in Jesus, you not only receive the forgiveness of sins, but you receive the spirit of God. So the gift of the Holy Spirit, and the forgiveness of sins, the twin blessings of coming to Christ. If that’s happened to you, then you have the Holy Spirit. You may not have registered or come to realize his presence. You may be a young Christian and are yet to know how to evoke his power and a trust in his presence. But nonetheless, you have the Spirit whether you know it or not. Although the body is dead because of sin—oh, by the way, you have the Spirit of Christ—but

[00:41:02] if you don’t have the Spirit of Christ, excuse me, you don’t belong to him—having the Spirit is the thing that shows whether or not you are a real Christian. There’s no such thing as being a Christian without having the Holy Spirit, having invaded your person and made your person somewhere in residence. Remember about the three persons in the Trinity — the Father, Son and Holy Spirit — while your someone that the Spirit of God has come to. But not only are you someone in whom the Spirit is but when the time comes for you to be in in the same condition Jesus was when he was laying in the tomb, it says in verse 11, “…with the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead,” So in Jesus case he not only was born of the Spirit, he was also someone who was anointed of the Spirit,

[00:42:01] he’s also someone who is filled with the Spirit and now we’re going to be told he’s someone who was raised from the dead by the Spirit. And if the Spirit of God raised him, goes on to say if he dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give you to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. He’ll make you alive as well. So this fourth thing that happened to Jesus by the Holy Spirit was that he was raised to life

[00:42:32] by the Spirit. Now you can turn that into a metaphor and talk about the spiritual life we have as Christians, but I think it doesn’t rule out the major meaning it has there is that at the end of time if before Christ returns you happen to die, more likely to happen to me than you. But if you die, your death is just a temporary thing because when Jesus comes he will raise you to life. And that which happened to him is going to happen to you. Now these four things the Holy Spirit did to Jesus. One he was born of the Spirit, two he was anointed of the Spirit for a special purpose, three he was filled with the Spirit, on and off the filling of the Spirit comes at God’s

[00:43:18] initiative and you never know when, it’s what he decides when he’s got something to do through you. We can make ourselves more amenable to it, more close to him, but it still is God who decides when and where he fills you with your Spirit and does some of his works. But if the Spirit of Christ who raised Jesus from the dead, dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. And so there are the four thing God did for Jesus. They are across time and one of the mistakes people make is that they think we get results are becoming a Christian across time. It is true that God takes you deeper and deeper

[00:44:06] in time. It is true that you get that initial justification where he takes you, as if you’ve never seen, that’s a moment that he does. But what happens to your justification is your sanctification, that’s a process. And it continues till the moment, where this being raised from the dead happens when you’ve died, he raises you from the dead and it’s what the spirit will do. So there are four things that happen to Jesus and all of them become what’s going to happen to us. Some of it right immediately as we come to him. And some of it of course when we die and are ready to go to glory. Now the important point to notice is that they’re not in our experience all spread out just the same as Jesus. They were necessarily spread out for him. He got born of the spirit in Bethlehem’s manger, he’s there getting born. He was anointed of the spirit when it was time for his ministry to be unfolded.

[00:45:12] He returns from being tempted in the devil but he returns filled with the spirit and immediately God is with him. That happened through his life of God the Father being with him. And then at the end after he died on the cross for our sins he was raised from the tomb alive by the Holy Spirit. And all of those things become accredited for what’s yours. And what you have to do is recognize one that when he died on the cross that included your sins. You have to come as a sinner who recognizes that Jesus died for you. And that your getting into the grace of God is something as a pure gift because of what he has done. And your living out a Christian life later is likewise because of how he helps you. And most of us who become Christians go through times of being rather barren. Umpt in a dozen books of great saints of all sorts who discovered that they were having a bit of a mess of being a Christian

[00:46:20] and then they cried out to God for help. And they recognized it wasn’t through their power that they could do it being a Christian and when they made that recognition they discovered that they had it all in Christ. Because that which he did across time is what you get by simply coming in faith and letting him be your Lord and Saviour. And our journey as a Christian helps to prosecute the progress of our discovering all of that, especially as we get sanctified along the way when we come and say, Lord I’ve made a mess again, I’m sorry. But please let your Holy Spirit help me. And you grow and despite your failures, he keeps leading you to go further and further and closer to him. Because all the blessings of the Godhead are in him bodily and he is in you. It’s not that he makes you do things and they get to earn you any righteousness.

[00:47:24] There’s no righteousness that we earn. And if he helps you do something because his spirit is in you, that’s credit to him, not you. He’s always by faith. Faith one, entrusts that he’s made you righteous by what he’s done. And two, he will make you powerful by what he does in you. And the more you learn to rest in Jesus power in you, the more you’ll discover it’s beginning to happen. The more you’ll praise him for what he’s done. And when you come to some point of realising that all that God is, the whole of the Godhead is in Christ and the Christ is in you, you’ll understand the verse I actually skipped over our first verse, which was one carrying on from the morning. I’ve been talking about verses that talk about the fullness of Jesus and the fact that we are in Christ. And Christ himself is the supreme person for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.

[00:48:33] And realising that there’s nothing absent from Jesus of the fullness of God, know that that word fullness means to be made complete. Now in our church we had someone come from overseas who I had the joy of helping a little bit along the way, some of these things we’re talking about. And she got a book somewhere along the line in her travels and her ups and downs as a Christian by a Methodist missionary man who had tried as a Christian to go overseas. I think he went to India to be a missionary and he had a nervous breakdown because he just couldn’t make it happen. So he came back to his headquarters and back to his denomination and they tried to do what you do to help a person out of having had a nervous breakdown. But then they sent him back, but they actually sent him back before he got over anything and he had another one over there. But he read through the Gospels, not Matthew, Mark, Luke and John alone, but also the book of Romans. And something that I’ve been preaching this church for almost 20, 18 years, how long it is, that the Gospel is not only how to come to God in the first place, it’s how to walk with Him in follow up. And to be a disciple occurs when you do what the book of Romans tells us is a part of the Gospel in Chapter 12. I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to Him.

[00:50:15] And then it goes on to say that you will discover the will of God. And that particular fellow discovered his missioning in India worked as he rested in Jesus, as he handed over all of his issues to Christ, including his mental nervous breakdowns. In fact, I think he had a long time, I don’t know what it was, 30, 40, 50 years, whatever it was. And other people of his denomination said, how come you are always at rest and no hassles anymore? They just couldn’t understand. It’s because he rested by giving it all to Christ. Because in Jesus there is the fullness of God, and when you rest in the One who’s got the fullness of all that God had bodily in Him, when you rest in by the Spirit, He’s been put in you, then you’re resting in where the power is. And you’re resting in the power that’s in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Through Jesus, the Bible says we can do all things. There is nothing too great for God.

[00:51:25] And when you’ve had a bit of a failure, everybody has failures. Everybody has times where they don’t know how they’re going to last the distance of trying to live for God. And when you come to that desperation of sort of realizing the failures are your failures. But if you give it all to Jesus, including all your hopes, including your worries, including what may look like your failures, or people who worked against you and you got out of what you were meant to be doing. You give that to him. Surrender, I beseech you therefore brethren, by the mercies of God, that you surrender yourselves, your bodies, as a living sacrifice to him. And you’ll discover that his fullness, that word can mean completeness.

[00:52:20] It’s a beautiful word. That sense of everything is complete with you. He will work it out. And when you keep in mind that nothing is too difficult for God, even though it looks like you don’t know how this is ever going to work out, just tell the Lord that’s his problem, not yours. And he will do what is his plan for you. I sort of have a feeling tonight, maybe everybody needs this a bit, but maybe there’s someone here. I’m not going to ask you to come out in the open or anything.

[00:52:58] But God has destined for you to hear that God is big enough for you. And Jesus has all the blessings in him, all of them. And if he is yours, and you rest at him, and you follow Romans 12 – go home and read Romans 12, the first four or so verses – and surrender yourself to him and leave yourself in his hands and say, Lord, I’m going to take on board that nothing is too hard for you and you can have the lot, and that’s where it’s going to rest, and you don’t know where that prayer will take you. Heavenly Father, I thank you for the opportunity to proclaim about Jesus. What an honour. What a privilege it is to tell people of the one who is the supreme Lord of Lords,

[00:53:56] not only of the Church as the Bible does say, but of everything of over all authorities, is Jesus. And to yield oneself into His care and to His hands and to His power is not a mistake to do. May whoever this message has been designed for answer and let you be the Lord and leader and the one who leads them to where you want them to go. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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