Sharing in the Anointing

SERMON: 2015-09-27--s0415--sharing-in-the-anointing-part-1 SOURCE DURATION: 00:41:16.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: The opening segment [0] begins the theological exposition of the sermon. The closing segment [363] concludes with a prayer and final exhortation, which are integral parts of the overall sermon structure. Both boundaries capture continuous core material. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, I pointed out last week that the same anointing of the Holy Spirit that empowered David to fulfill the purposes of God in his generation in Christ is also made available to you and me so that in turn we can fulfill the purposes of God in our generation. And if I were to ask you this morning what is it that God is about in this world, what would you say? Well, you'd probably say he does all kinds of things, but underneath all kinds of things there is an overarching purpose of God, as I trust you know, and that is to reconcile a fallen world back to himself. We read in Scripture, 2 Corinthians 5 19, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people's sins against them, and he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. As you know, God created Adam and Eve in relationship with himself. They rebelled against him. This is the world that we have inherited. He'd labors under sin and brokenness. God's whole agenda in Scripture is to restore us to himself, to bring us back to fellowship with him, and in order to do that he uses people. And so in the Old Testament, as we have been seeing, he raised up David, empowered David with the Holy Spirit to serve God in his generation, and today through the Holy Spirit by faith in Jesus, he empowers you and me to be about the business of the kingdom. God is seeking to bring people to himself, unite them in relationship with him, unite them in relationship with each other, so that God's will will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And what I want to do with you this morning in the time that is available to us is try to trace that process a little bit of how that anointing that was on King David through faith in Jesus Christ also comes upon you and me, so that with confidence and with surety, we can know that God is not only with us, but we can step out into everyday situations of life, and we know that God is there and he will help us to serve him as we'll see later as prophets and as priests and as kings. So let's go back for a moment to the history of David. If you're familiar with his history, you might recall that after all the battles that he waged once he was established in his kingdom, God comes to David through Nathan the prophet, and God enters into a very particular covenant with David. And under the terms of that covenant, God promises him two things. The first thing that he promises, and we can have that slide up, please. The first thing that he promises is that his offspring will succeed him as king. The second thing that God promises is that his throne and his kingdom would last forever. Here is how the prophet Nathan, speaking for the Lord, summarizes it for him in 2 Samuel 7, 16. God says through Nathan, "Your house and your kingdom shall endure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever." That is a huge, huge promise. Now we know from the New Testament that this promise is fulfilled, of course, in the person of Jesus Christ, because think ahead to the Christmas story. The angel Gabriel comes to the Virgin Mary in what is known theologically as the Annunciation. You're going to have a child. What does he say to Mary? Well, here are the words, "You will be with child and give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the son of the most high. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and his kingdom will never end." Jesus is heir to the promise that was made to David, and one of the reasons Matthew and Luke in their gospel accounts spend so much time delineating the genealogy of Jesus, his family history, is to demonstrate that Jesus is indeed of the house of David and therefore is worthy to receive his throne and his kingdom. The promise made to David, let me say it again, was fulfilled in Jesus. Now think this through with me. How much time do you think passed between the promise made to David over here and the fulfillment made to Jesus over here? Anybody want to wager a guess? A thousand years give or take a little bet. Now what happened during those thousand years? Well, you know, diagrammatically we can picture it this way again. During those thousand years, Israel came to the height of its glory first under the reign of David and then his son Solomon. The Queen of Sheba comes from far away because it is just such an exciting thing to know that God is at work in Israel, but then in the reign of Rehoboam, Solomon's son you will recall, the kingdom gets split in two. And the northern kingdom has kings that are almost all bad and so in 720 BC they get carted off into exile to Assyria. Most of them have never come back to this day. Then many years later in 586 BC and years beyond that Nebuchadnezzar takes Judah and they get taken into captivity and now for 70 years the land lies fallow and barren. Just as an aside by the way, just this year there has been put up in the nation of Israel a biblical display displaying an extremely rare find of clay tablets that are business transactions of Jewish communities in Babylon during the exile. There's a hundred of them. They are incredibly detailed. They show what life was like in captivity. Wasn't all that bad for some of them. They really prospered well and this archaeological find is said to be the most significant archaeological find in the Middle East since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. That's just a little historical aside for you here. So this is what happens. Eventually to come back to the promised land as you know, put that back up, they build, they rebuild the temple that's not part of this picture here but then we have these hundreds of years of silence and then of course all of a sudden the silence is broken by the angel coming to Zechariah who becomes the father of John the Baptist and the angel coming to Mary that Jesus is going to be born. That is a thousand year spread but now remember this, remember this, that promise that David received here was originally made to Abraham and that's in other thousand years earlier. So now you're looking at a two thousand year history where God has made promises and people are just standing by wondering is God going to do anything about what he has promised and you thought your faith was giving you trouble when your prayers didn't get answered after three weeks. Imagine waiting a thousand years. Imagine waiting two thousand years. It explains the words of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, when his mouth is opened and John the Baptist is born. Here's what he says, "Praise," we need to get these words up people, "Praise be to the Lord the God of Israel because he has come and has redeemed his people. He has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David as he said through his holy prophets of long ago, 'Salvation from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us to show mercy to our fathers and to remember," here you've got the word, "his holy covenant, the oath he swore to our father Abraham," there you've got Abraham, "to rescue us from the hands of our enemies and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days." And those last two verses really capture the heart and the essence of Jesus' ministry. Why does Jesus come into the world? Well, to rescue us from the hand of our enemies and to enable us to serve him in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. Jesus is born to complete the promises that God made throughout the course of history that he plans to redeem his people. Now here's a big question. How does Jesus go about doing that or a better question is, what enables Jesus to rescue us from all our enemies and to make us righteous and holy before the face of God so that we can truly serve him? And the answer is the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Because what happens when Jesus is ready to begin his public ministry in the gospel story? Well he goes to John the Baptist who has been raised up as a forerunner to prepare the people for the coming of Jesus. He's baptizing everybody. Jesus goes to him for baptism and as Jesus gets baptized here is how the gospel story writes it. Mark 1, 10 and 11 as Jesus was coming up out of the water he saw heaven being torn open. That phrase struck me for some reason. That's Mark's kind of language. Mark is always very violent. It's like stuff is really happening here people. Like heaven is torn open and the spirit descending on him like a dove and a voice came from heaven. You are my son whom I love with you. I am well pleased. Now here's Jesus. He is born of the Virgin Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit. He does not share our sin but shares our humanity without sin and yet to engage in his ministry. Understand this with me please. In order to do the work that God has called him to he gets baptized with the Holy Spirit. Got that? He's baptized by the Holy Spirit who's going to give him the ability to do the work of redemption. Now what does anointing mean in scripture? We talked about it last week. Means two things. You're set apart publicly for service and number two you are empowered by the Holy Spirit. So when this dove which represents the Holy Spirit comes on Jesus this is God's public declaration. This is my son. I'm well pleased with him. The implication is you better listen to him because he represents me fully. Not only that but I am anointing him with the spirit of power so that he can be about the business of the kingdom. And it's really fascinating to me that hundreds and hundreds of years earlier the prophet Isaiah looking forward by the spirit saw this day coming when he says in Isaiah chapter 11 a shoot will come from the stump of Jesse from his roots a branch will bear fruit. Jesse of course was David's father and the picture here is that of a tree that has been cut down because that's what happened to David and his descendants. There wasn't a king in Israel for all those hundreds and hundreds of years. It was like God's promises that disappeared. In fact read Psalm 89 and you will see the struggle of the psalmist trying to rationalize and explain away that on the one hand God has made all these promises that somebody from David's house would sit on his throne forever and yet you've abandoned us or armies are gone we're defeated we're lost in captivity. Isaiah says a shoot a shoot will come from the stump of Jesse from his roots a branch will bear fruit and then this the spirit of the Lord will rest upon him the spirit of wisdom and of understanding the spirit of counsel and of power the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord and he will delight in the fear of the Lord. What enabled Jesus to know the mind of God to know the strategies that he needed to follow to accomplish the purposes of God what imparted the faith and the encouragement and the perseverance that Jesus needed to run the race so that he could win the salvation of the whole world it was the empowerment of the Holy Spirit. He was anointed by the spirit of God. That's why biblically he is called the Christ. When we say the name Jesus Christ it's not like Christ is his last name rather it is his title Jesus the anointed one the Messiah and I love the way one of our confessional standards as a denomination the Heidelberg catechism puts it when it asks this question why is he called Christ meaning anointed now listen carefully to the answer because you will see the threefold offices of prophet priest and king are fulfilled in this answer why is he called Christ meaning anointed because he has been ordained by God set aside set apart and has been anointed with the Holy Spirit to be first of all what our chief prophet and teacher who fully reveals to us the secret counsel and will of God concerning our deliverance remember in the Old Testament God sent prophets to declare his will to his people all the prophetic anointing of history rests on the shoulders of Jesus who comes to declare the word of God concerning our deliverance but then it goes on our only high priest who has delivered us by the one sacrifice of his body and who continually pleads or cause with the father remember the priesthood in the Old Testament they taught the people the way of God not only but they stood between a holy God and the sinful people they made sacrifices so that a holy God and the sinful people could hang out together Jesus makes the ultimate sacrifice of himself so that God and us can be reconciled that is the second element of his anointing and then as our eternal King who governs us by his word and spirit and who guards us and keeps us in the freedom he has won for us so Jesus fulfills this role of David remember in the Old Testament was prophet priest and King David was the king others were priests others were prophets they're all rolled into the Messiah Jesus is all three he declares the word of God he offers the ultimate sacrifice of himself and he comes to be the boss he delivers us from our enemies he makes safety and security for us and he tells us how to live in ways that honor gone and that established peace Jesus is anointed by the Holy Spirit into this threefold office while some of you are saying where are you going with this well it has incredibly practical significance for you and me because if you're a believer in Jesus in this date what are you called you're called a Christian what do you think it means to be a Christian to be a Christian is to be a follower of Jesus who is the Christ you know what that means that means that the anointing that was on Jesus is now on you so that you can do what Jesus came to do and what David and the prophets and the priests did long before him listen to how the Heidelberg catechism goes on to answer this question why are you called a Christian because by faith I am a member of Christ and so I share in his anointing I am anointed what to confess his name what office do you think that is prophetic you are anointed to speak for Jesus you are anointed furthermore I'm anointed to present myself as a what as a living sacrifice I am a royal priesthood I present myself to God and I interpose between God and an unholy people pleading the bread of Christ that God will not judge the world but that rather he will redeem the world and then to strive with a free conscience against sin and the devil in this life and afterward to reign with Christ over all creation for eternity I am anointed in Christ to become an overcomer to be a man or a woman of courage to step into the situations of life where God calls me to step and to know that I can make a difference because Jesus has said I am with you always even to the end of the age this anointing is ours by virtue of faith in Jesus this anointing is what equips us to understand the heart and the mind of God this anointing gives us the ability to discern the strategic moves that need to be made for men and women to come to faith and for lives to change this anointing is what gives us faith and courage to step out and walk on water in places where everything inside us says I can possibly do this because this is not who I am and this anointing gives me the perseverance to stick it out as Israel had to stick it out through thick and thin and ups and downs for a thousand years before Messiah finally showed up isn't that something the anointing is the power tools of the kingdom it's what Jesus talks about in Acts chapter 1 verse 8 when he says to his disciples you will receive power dunamis dynamite when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and on all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth look at the early church before Pentecost before the resurrection they were cowering in fear Jesus gets raised from the dead pours out the Holy Spirit to the early church and one after the other marches to the ends of the earth to proclaim the good news of the kingdom they all historically tradition tells us end up being martyred but not until their lives have run the course and they have accomplished the purposes of God as I said this anointing this is the power tool of the kingdom and think of it this way here's a field and you want to grow a crop and it's filled with weeds and brush and whatever else and you want to cultivate it now you can do one of two things you can take a shovel and you can start digging and if you work hard enough and long enough you'll eventually get the field done but it's hard work we have behind our house a little garden I try to make it smaller every year it's maybe oh it's less than 20 feet wide I would say and maybe only 10 feet deep and as I said I'm trying to bring in the edges all the time and every so often my wife sends me out there with a shovel to dig it out I'm not a farmer I may be a farmer's son but I'm not a farmer and it never gives me much joy early in the spring to till bad soil with a shovel so and Vandenberg is one of her good friends she is one of these little rototillers and she offers now to come out every spring and she and in five minutes she does what takes me hours to do you see you can dig by hand or you can get a tractor and a plow and you can plow the field in a fraction of the time that it would take doing it by hand a lot of Christians not aware of their anointing in Christ are like the farmer who is trying to plow the field with his old dull shovel what God wants to do is let us now listen there's this huge tractor sitting in my backyard and it's got a huge plow behind it and here's the key to it go drive it and make it happen make it happen that's the anointing of the Holy Spirit biblically these are spiritual gifts and allow me just to say a couple of very practical general things about spiritual gifts before we wind up this morning just to whet your appetite and to clarify a couple of things number one spiritual gifts are precisely that they are gifts that means it's freely given the fact that it's freely given means two things you don't earn it the Holy Spirit isn't given to you because you're good you've behaved well and you're high up on the religious ladder or because you have worked for it the Holy Spirit is given by faith in Jesus as a free gift but you know what the other side of that is God gives the Holy Spirit is a gift to some pretty funny people and their character can be very immature even while they operate in the power of spiritual gifts we have to keep those two things separate because spiritual gifts without character almost always blows up people's lives the reason God chooses David over Saul is because David had character that could contain the anointing Saul did not same anointing on both of them Saul self-destructed because his heart was not set on the things of God never confuse the fruit of the spirit with the gifts of the spirit they are separate things you can have the one without the other and you can have the other without the one there's a lot more that we could talk about but let me just throw that out there very quickly secondly spiritual gifts are sovereignly bestowed by God 1 Corinthians 12 one of the key passages in this kind of information all these that is the spiritual gifts are the work of one in the same spirit and he gives them to each one just as he determines the way it works I believe is this Jesus has everything at the Father's right hand he has the fullness of the spirit underneath here's the body of Christ and he deposits part of his priestly prophetic and kingly ministry and he gives it to you and to me as he chooses and so some of the gifts of speaking some of gifts of serving some of gifts of prayer some have gifts of doing miracles Jesus pours them out as he sees fit and what that means is that it is determined entirely by him in what gifts we get to operate in my experience there's almost always an overlap between natural gifts and spiritual gifts take David for example after the Holy Spirit comes on David he is a man full of faith and he marches out there and he takes that uncircumcised Philistin Goliath and he knocks him to the ground cuts his head off everybody is amazed at his gift of and his boldness in doing that and that's because he's been anointed by the Holy Spirit but long before he was anointed by the Holy Spirit what did he practice on he practiced on a bear and a lion so there is a natural gifting of courage and boldness and faith in David's life but what the Holy Spirit does is he multiplies that by infinite amount of degree and while it is true that it isn't always that the natural and the spiritual go together very commonly you will see that whatever the Lord has created in you when the Holy Spirit comes upon you it gets accelerated there is an increased degree of faith there is an increased degree of anointing and power and one of the best ways to find out where is God calling me what is he equipping me for is to say what is the passion that God has placed in my heart what drives me what longing has God placed there longings that in some cases go back to when you were a child dreams that you often put on hold because it's impossible for them to be realized humanly speaking and yet God by the Holy Spirit can do whatever he wants to do and that's the anointing so he decides he gives them his gifts just very quickly the purpose of spiritual gifts obviously is to further God's kingdom again 1 Corinthians 12 7 to each one the manifestation of the spirit is given for the common good Peter says exactly the same thing he says each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others faithfully administering God's grace in its various forms there you have that emphasis again it's going to vary across the body in the way that God chooses to administer it if anyone speaks he should do it is one speaking the very words of God if anyone serves he should do it with the strength God provides so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ the purpose of spiritual gifts is never to make you feel significant or to enable you to do a one-upmanship over somebody else Paul writing to the Corinthians says to them at one point what do you have that you have not received and what are you bragging about because the Corinthians had a particular problem they were intensely and immensely anointed by God's Holy Spirit for the job that God was calling them to but they were a bunch of spiritual babies they were always comparing and contrasting and they were saying yeah yeah yeah I got more than what you got that's not how it works when you get tempted to get carried away because you're so incredibly gifted just remember this in the Old Testament God was able to speak through Balaam's donkey and if he could speak through a donkey well we'll leave that one hang there okay winding up with this number four in my experience our experience of the uniting of God's Holy Spirit is a function of our surrender to the Lordship of Jesus Christ Paul starts that passage or verse 3 of what Corinthians 12 I tell you no one who is speaking by the Spirit of God says Jesus be cursed and no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit in John's Gospel Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit and the function of the Holy Spirit is always to exalt Jesus one of the very practical questions whenever you talk or teach about this kind of subject that all of us have is how do I experience more of the anointing of God's Holy Spirit and there are many different theologies about what this baptism of the Holy Spirit looks like and those theologies are generally based partly on what scripture says and they're generally based on what people have experienced in their own lives because everybody's experience to some degree is the same but to some degree is very different so here's what you need to remember everything you need spirit within and spirit upon which is the distinction that Brad Long used to make among us many years ago and we had numerous conferences is available to you in Christ and if by faith you have surrendered your life to Jesus then there's a big room in heaven if you will that has everything you need to fulfill the calling that God has on your life whether that's in church whether that is outside of the church whether that's in Christian organizations whether that is in your household whether that is running in your business whatever you need to accomplish God's calling is there how much of that I believe with all my heart flows in your daily life is determined to no small degree by the degree to which you have yielded to the lordship of Jesus because God doesn't waste his anointing and he doesn't want to see his anointing used just to advance your own kingdom he wants to see it used to advance his kingdom so if you want more and experience more of who God is and what God wants to do in you and through you then here's what you do number one have I surrendered my life to Jesus if I have it's not spiritual pride to say God has anointed me he has an anointing on my life number two is there anything in my life that stands in the way of what God wants to do in me and through me and sometimes you will find no there is nothing that stands in the way sometimes there will be unforgiveness or places of anger or places where you refuse to bow the knee before Jesus and you need to come to that place and you need to say Lord breathe on me help me to come to that place of surrender and then I would say by faith you claim the anointing of the Holy Spirit the Bible says be filled with the Spirit it's a command and so by faith we can say Lord fill me with your spirit and as you fill me with your spirit I will do everything that I can to step into it so that my life can count for you now next week Lord willing when we come back to this we're going to look at what happens when you do that because again experiences will vary but God is true to his word and his power is there to do the work of the kingdom so here's what we're going to do I want to ask you to stand as we spend a few moments in prayer just like we did last week again if you will and if you're comfortable hold out your hands like this and we're just going to pray for the Lord to seal this word and to fill us afresh so that with gladness and with joy we can run the race all the way to the end with perseverance so Lord Jesus we're here and we are your people and we thank you that you are a God who has a long term memory and that you remember the covenant made with Abraham and the covenant made with David and how Jesus is the heir to all those promises made all the way along the line and how by faith in Jesus each one of us here now we are eligible for that same anointing we we don't have to clean up our lives before you can do that we don't have to rise to the super heights of spirituality we're just your people and you love us and you have gifts of grace for us Lord sometimes we can't believe that we don't think we're worthy we feel that we've messed up we feel inadequate Lord help us to know that especially to the weaker members you give the greater honor and I take that to mean the greater anointing and the greater public awareness of your presence and your power so Lord help us to be open to what it is that you pour out in our lives help us to be open to what it is that you pour out to the lives of others help us to give space to each other to grow and to learn but Lord may this place be so filled with your life and with your vitality the blind see the deaf hear the dumb hear and speak and and the poor have the good news of Jesus proclaim many years ago this church went on record as saying that we want you to lead us and that we will follow you as you lead and give us grace that's not been an easy journey and there are many of us that still in deep places of our hearts we smart at the price that some of us have had to pay but Jesus overcame and he promised the presence of his Holy Spirit so come Lord Jesus breathe on us now breath of God fill us with life in you that I may love what thou [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:41:09.660; remove through 00:41:16.000] dost love and do what thou wouldst do we pray this in Jesus name amen. 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