Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

August 12, 2007

The Holy Spirit

Luke 11: 5-13

It has been hot, and everywhere I go, one of the first greetings that someone gives is something about the heat and getting out of the heat. So I thought just to help us feel a little bit cooler, I would start with a Christmas illustration. The movie, A Christmas Story, always comes on TNT for 24 hours each Christmas. It is a story of Ralphie who wants a Red Ryder BB-gun. I think most people probably know this. The scene that I want to mention is Christmas morning when Ralph and his brother, Randy—Randy, if you remember, is the one who sticks his face in the mashed potatoes earlier in the movie—are opening presents. As they rip open the boxes, they come to things like socks from an aunt. They take them, look at them, look at each other, thrown them over their shoulder, and go for something else. That is a common experience, I guess, for a ten-year-old boy. I don’t know many ten-year-old boys who put socks, underwear, or things like that on their Christmas list. It is always appreciated, always needed, and surely some other family member has told the aunt they really need this so someone has taken the time to go out and buy it, but not many young boys put it on their Christmas list, and they are typically not overjoyed when they get it. They throw it over the shoulder and look for the Red Ryder BB-gun.

I don’t know what the equivalent would be for girls, but there is probably something that you get from a distant relative that you think, “Thanks,” and look for what else might be under the tree.

I think that is a little bit like the prayer that God always answers that we have listed for today. The scene is Jesus is teaching, and he teaches the disciples. They have said, “Teach us to pray as John taught his disciples to pray.” He teaches them the Lord’s Prayer, and then he tells them this parable. He talks about it is night, and in the Mid-East, hospitality is tremendously important. Someone has a guest come in the middle of the night, goes to a neighbor’s house, and knocks on the door.

In our mind, we see a house something similar to what we live in, 2500 square feet or more, you are in the back of the house, and go away. But that’s a little more than what would have been a house in Jesus’ parable. My guess is that if you could the wooden area that you see up here behind me and square it up, that would be about the size of the house. The people live there in the day and sleep on the floor or mats during the night. So you can imagine two or three generations of people, maybe even an animal or two and they are laid out on the floor. Somebody comes up and knocks on the door, and the man—the father—speaks out and says, “Go away. We have just gotten the baby asleep and I can’t get up and step over everybody to get to the door. Go away.”

“I just had company come in and I really need your help. Do you have any bread left over from dinner?”

He says, “I cannot help you. I am going to have to step on somebody. You are going to wake up the baby. Go away.”

Jesus says that because of the person outside knocking, because of their boldness, or most Bibles will say, persistence, because if he doesn’t get up and answer the door, the man is going to keep on knocking until somebody is awake. So because of the persistence, he gets up, and he helps him.

Then he goes on and he teaches and he says, “If you who are evil,” if you will notice in the Gospels, at one time Jesus is called Good Teacher, and Jesus says, “Don’t call me good. No one is good but God alone.” Jesus is saying, “You who have mixed motives,” and we are all tainted by sin, “if you know how to give good gifts to your children, and if you would get up in the night just to make somebody quit knocking on your door, how much more than that would God give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?”

The Holy Spirit, that’s what God wants to give us. That is a prayer that God always answers.

To the casual Christian, to the average Christian, maybe to most Christians, that sounds a little bit like getting socks for Christmas. The Holy Spirit. I was really hoping for enough money to be comfortable, and I was really hoping for a guarantee on health when somebody in my family is sick, and you tell me that what Jesus says God wants to give me is the Holy Spirit?

Well, the problem I have with that is that I don’t understand the Holy Spirit. Sometimes when I watch TV preachers, I’m not sure I really want it because they scare me sometimes when they are talking about the things they do with the Holy Spirit. I really want an inside track on how to get good grades on a test when I pray or to make the person that I am infatuated with love me back or any of the other things that we normally pray for. And you are telling me that God wants to give me the Holy Spirit? And Jesus even compares this to the good things. He says, “If you can give good things, how much more, how much better, how much beyond is it that God would give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?”

It would be beyond my ability to give you a full dissertation on the Holy Spirit. So let me just try to say this in 30 seconds or less. We make this so much harder than it needs to be. It sounds like a mystery to us but the Holy Spirit is the way we experience God when God touches our lives. It is the way we experience the God of all creation when God comes to my life and puts a hand on my heart. So sometimes I experience the Holy Spirit as the spirit of truth because it helps me understand what is right and what is true. Sometimes I experience it as the spirit of convicting me because when I come into the presence of God, I am aware of my sin. We say the spirit convicts of sin. Jesus talks in the Gospel of John about being the comforter and in times when I am so distressed and God touches my life and gives me peace, I experience it as the spirit of comfort. And always in the Gospel of Luke, the spirit is how God touches me to empower me to live for Christ, to live and to serve. What is it that Paul says later, “No one can even say ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” It is when God comes and touches our lives we experience God this way. We make it harder, I think, than it needs to be.

The key to this passage and our understanding is what do we really want when we pray? What is it that we really want God to give or do for us when we pray? Do I want what God can give me or do I want God? Do I want guarantees for wealth, health, good weather when I have an outside wedding coming up or do I just want God because God is good and because God is great and because God has already demonstrated love for me through Jesus Christ when Christ died that I might have forgiveness of sins? What do I really want when I pray? Do I want what might be in God’s hands or do I just want God?

Let me try to help us decide what it is that we want. Let’s think of a choice. On this side is Choice No. 1. Choice No. 1 is the promise of upper middle class comfort all your life. On this side is also good health until somewhere past the age of 90 so that you can enjoy life to the fullest as long as you live. But also on this side is the promise that you will never, never feel the presence of God in your life, that you will never have peace, that you will never sense the abiding joy. That is a choice that you can make. I am putting these together; it’s not that they go together. That’s Choice No. 1.

On this side, you are promised daily bread but nothing more. No guarantees on health, but also on this side you are promised that there will never be a day when God is not real to you, that there will never be a day when God’s presence is not obvious, when God’s abiding love is not experienced in a powerful way. So on this side, you get what is in God’s hands but not God, and on this side, you don’t know what’s in God’s hands but you are promised God. Which one would you choose?

I honestly believe everybody came to church today because it was important. Everybody came to church today because there is something that was drawing you here even if you just came for another family member. There was something that you said, “OK, I am going to come today,” and I believe we would all choose this side. I believe that we would all want God because at some secret place in the heart, we all realize that is really what we want. I could live without all the other things if I knew that I was going to have God and God was going to be real. I think most of us, if asked, would be afraid we had chosen the wrong side, but I think most of us probably, deep in our hearts, really want the right thing. If given a choice, God or the devil or somebody could stand there and say, “OK, you’ve got to make a choice today. Do you want what’s in God’s hands or do you want God?” I think most of us would say, “I couldn’t live without God. I could not live without God.”

So the teaching of Jesus is this: if that’s what you want, that’s what God wants to give you. How much more than anything as parents we might give an overflow to our children and spoil our children? If all those things are good things, how much more does God want to give presents, peace, and a touch on the heart to those who ask? God wants to give the Holy Spirit to each of us, that God would be real and powerful and empower us to do whatever it is that God calls on us to do? That’s a prayer that Jesus says God will answer.

So today, we now have a sense of one more thing that God wants us to pray for so that God can answer that prayer. How many of us, for all the times that we have prayed for a million other things, how many of us have ever said, or made it a point every day to say, “God give me yourself and I shall be satisfied.”

Here we have this example, we have this promise that God wants to keep. You pray and be ready to receive the Spirit.

Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome

The Holy Spirit

Luke 11: 5-13

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