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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

The Holy Spirit

David Shin

Filled by the Spirit

Our Father in Heaven, we thank you so much for this Sabbath and this opportunity that we have to come apart from the cares of this life, from our work and school, to be able to reflect on your goodness towards us.

We pray for the Holy Spirit to guide our thoughts tonight.

Bless each heart and each mind, and may you apply the truth specifically to each individual here tonight.

For we ask these things in the precious name of Jesus Christ.

Well, this weekend we're going to be focusing on the Holy Spirit.

And my understanding is that a few months ago, you had someone come and share about the personhood of the Holy Spirit and the theology of the Holy Spirit.

And this evening and tomorrow and tomorrow afternoon, we'll be focusing on the practical aspects of the Holy Spirit that applies to our day-to-day lives.

And I pray that this is a blessing to you and your own Christian experience.

And I wanna begin by a quotation from a Reformed theologian, Imel Bruner.

He wrote that the Holy Ghost has always more or less been the stepchild of theology.

And I think that his concept or reflection on the Holy Spirit is true in this aspect because we talk a lot about Jesus, and we should.

Of course, we talk about the Father, and we should as well.

But the Holy Spirit is this mysterious entity, And we don't talk a lot about the Holy Spirit in respect to the other individuals in the Godhead.

In many circles, this seems to be the case.

But let's look at Jesus' own words in John chapter 16 and verse 7.

He says, Nevertheless, I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go, the helper will not come to you, but if I depart, I will send him to you.

Jesus says, it's to your advantage that I leave.

Now to the disciples this may seem strange because they probably thought I see no advantage in Jesus leaving.

We don't have his presence with us anymore, but Jesus says, look, it's to your advantage, it's to your benefit that I leave and that the Holy Spirit come.

Now the book Desire of Ages indicates the reason why it was advantageous for Jesus to leave and for the Holy Spirit to come.

The Holy Spirit is Christ's representative, but divested of the personality of humanity and independent thereof.

Cumbered with humanity, Christ could not be in every place personally.

Therefore, it was for their interest that he should go to the Father and send the Spirit to be his successor on earth.

No 1 could then have any advantage because of his location or his personal contact with Christ.

By the Spirit, the Savior would be accessible to all.

In this sense, he would be nearer to them than if he had not ascended on high.

Jesus, when he came as a babe and walked on earth, he divested himself of 1 key attribute of what it meant to be God, and that was omnipresence, the ability to be everywhere at once.

He didn't walk in Alaska or even Loma Linda.

That was a limitation that he chose to take.

So when Jesus went to heaven, he sent the Spirit.

And at the same time, the Spirit is in Alaska, in South America, in Africa.

So this was a key advantage, that no matter where you were on planet Earth, God would be with you.

When you look at Acts of the Apostles, page 53, Ellen White indicates that the Spirit is given as a what?

As a regenerating agency to make effectual the salvation wrought by the death of our Savior.

In other words, the Spirit is the medium through which the benefits of the sacrifice of Christ is applied to each individual.

It is through the Holy Spirit, and I love this quotation from the book Desire of Ages 672, this promised blessing, the Holy Spirit, claimed by faith, brings all other blessings in its train.

Now think about the implications of that.

If you have the Holy Spirit, all other blessings come in its train.

Another thing that Jesus said about the Holy Spirit in John chapter 14, verse 16 and 17, and I will ask the Father and He will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever.

The Spirit of truth, the world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him, but if you know him, for he lives, " and what does the Bible say?

Notice that Jesus says to his disciples, he currently lives with you.

Now the word Holy Spirit in the Greek is paraklete.

Alongside, okay, and this is the indication that Jesus gives here, for he lives with you.

And notice the tense of what Jesus says in the next part of this verse, will be, that means future, where?

In other words, the Holy Spirit takes from a position of with, alongside, to the position of where?

From the position of with to the position of in.

In 1st John chapter 3 verse 24, And by this we know that He, Jesus, abides where?

In us by the Spirit whom He has given us.

The Holy Spirit will bring the presence of Jesus into us.

And we've heard the in Christ motif throughout the epistles of Paul, Christ in you, the hope of glory.

Now here's a practical question, how does Christ abide in us?

When we invite the Holy Spirit to fill us, the Spirit brings with Him the presence of Jesus.

Can you see how essential the Holy Spirit is?

This is not some peripheral tangent of a concept, of an idea, of a person.

The Holy Spirit brings with him Jesus, the presence of Jesus.

So when you invite the Holy Spirit to fill your heart, you are having Jesus fill your heart.

And even though Jesus is in heaven ministering in the most holy place of the heavenly sanctuary, through the Holy Spirit, All of us have the capacity to be filled with the Spirit of God.

This is why the Holy Spirit is so essential.

Tozer makes this remarkable statement when he says, if the Holy Ghost were taken away from our church today, 95% of what we do would continue and no 1 would notice the difference.

If the Holy Ghost had withdrawn from the early church, then 95% of what they were doing would have stopped and everyone would have noticed the difference.

I believe that for much of our church today, we have become so institutionalized and so dependent upon humanity that the Holy Spirit were to be withdrawn tomorrow.

In many circles, church would just continue on, Sabbath school would just continue on, our worship service would continue on, and most people would not even know.

But in the book of Acts, you remove the Holy Spirit and everything comes to a screeching halt.

This is from Michael Green in the book 30 Years That Changed the World.

He says, 3 crucial decades in world history.

In the years between AD 33 and 64, a new movement was born.

In those 30 years, it got sufficient growth and credibility to become the largest religion the world has ever seen and to change the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

It has spread to every corner of the globe and has more than 2 billion putative adherents.

It has left an indelible impact on civilization, on culture, on education, on medicine.

On freedom and of course the lives of countless people worldwide.

And the seedbed for all this, the time when it took decisive root was in these 3 decades.

It all began with a dozen men and a handful of women and then the Spirit came.

Transformed By the Spirit

Father in heaven, we thank you for this beautiful Sabbath and this opportunity that we have to come apart from the cares of this life and to worship you in spirit and in truth.

My feet are made of clay and I ask for the Holy Spirit to apply the truths from Scripture specifically to every heart, to every need.

May our hearts be touched with the love of Christ and may we be uplifted by your spirit for we ask these things in the precious name of Jesus, amen, amen.

This morning I invite you to open your Bibles to 2 Corinthians 3 12-18.

Paul here is reflecting on Moses' experience after he came down from Mount Sinai.

2 Corinthians 3, verse 12 through 18, therefore, since we have such hope, we use great boldness of speech, unlike Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the end of what was passing away, but their minds were blinded, for until this day the same veil remains unlifted in the reading of the Old Testament because the veil is taken away in Christ.

But even to this day, when Moses is read, the veil lies on their heart.

Nevertheless, when 1 turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.

Now the Lord is spirit, and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror, the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord." Paul is using this analogy of Moses after he came down from the mountain.

Remember his face was shining with the glory of God and the children of Israel said, look we can't look at your face, it's too bright.

So they asked him to put a veil over his face and Paul uses this experience, this analogy, in applying a very important principle in the Christian experience.

And I wanna pick it apart with you a little bit.

In verse 18, the Bible says, But we all with unveiled face, contrasting the children of Israel, they had to put a veil on the face of Moses, but Paul says now we don't have to have a veil, but we all with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror.

Now this word beholding literally means to contemplate or to think about, to thoughtfully look at a long time.

Synonyms are to take in, to reflect upon, to meditate, and to ponder.

So this beholding is not just a visual beholding, it is a beholding in the mind to contemplate and to think about what are we beholding the glory of the Lord.

Let's go to the Old Testament to the experience on Mount Sinai.

Go to Exodus chapter 33 verse 18 through 21.

Moses is having a conversation with God, and he asked this question in Exodus chapter 33, verse 18, And he said, please show me your glory.

And God said, I will make my goodness pass before you.

I'll proclaim the name of the Lord before you.

I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious.

I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion, but you cannot see my face, for no 1 shall see me and live.

And the Lord said, here is the place by me, and you shall stand on the rock, and so it shall be, while my glory passes by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock, and will cover you with my hand while I pass by.

Then I shall take away my hand and you shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen." Moses asked to see the glory of God and he says, look you can't see my face, but you can see my back.

So Moses goes into the cleft of the rock.

There's a song, he hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock.

Moses goes in the cleft of the rock, and God places his hand over the cleft of the rock.

He passes by, and in a brief moment, he removes his hand, and Moses, I imagine, is peering out the cleft of the rock and he sees the back of God.

And that experience was so transformative that the children of Israel said you have to place a veil over your face because we can't look at your face.

Notice what God says when Moses asked to see the glory of God.

He says I will let my goodness pass before you.

I'll be gracious to whom I'll be gracious.

I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.

The glory of God we think of as this physical presence, this physical brightness, but I believe that the brightness of God, the illumination of God, really comes from the essence of who He is, His character.

And because He is so beautiful in character, there is a physical radiance that emanates from that inner beauty.

The glory of God is not only the physical illumination, but it is the character of who God is.

And we go back to 2 Corinthians 3, verse 18, But we all with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, the character of God, are being transformed.

Now this is from the NASB, the New American Standard Bible, and I believe that it gets the tense of the original language the best.

In other words, this is not a one-time experience.

It is a continual transformation that we experience.

It's not as though we are transformed once, but we are in a continual process of transformation, of becoming like Jesus daily, into the same image from glory to glory, from 1 character to another character.

This is a continual process of transformation, our being transformed.

So this process of continually contemplating and meditating upon who God is has a transformative process upon our own character.

We are being transformed from 1 character to another character.

And the beauty of the Christian experience is I came to Jesus just the way that I was.

I praise the Lord for that steps of Christ quote, that we can only come to Christ just the way that we are.

And he wraps his arms around us, and we begin this process of transformation.

I've kept this journal from the inception of my Christian experience till now, and I look back on my early entries, and I just shake my head.

You know, I'm just, And I praise God that even though I have a long way to go, there has been growth in my Christian experience.

And many times this growth is unconscious to us.

The last part of this verse it says, by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit makes this transformation possible.

And as we reflected on the Holy Spirit Last night, we brought out the idea that Christ, through his spirit, abides in us.

The Holy Spirit fills each individual that is open to his transformative process.

This is from the book Great Controversy, page 555.

It is a law of both intellectual and the spiritual nature that by beholding, we become changed.

The mind gradually adapts itself to the subjects upon which is allowed to dwell.

It becomes assimilated to that which it is accustomed to love and to reverence.

He used to be the North American Division President.

And when I was a freshman in the theology program of the school I went to, there was a class that we were required to take and it was homiletics and it was a terrifying experience.

Public speaking, we had to get up in front of the whole school and give a 10-minute talk and I was absolutely terrified.

Furthermore, the class would critique your entire 10 minute talk with these little sheets and you would get a collection of all the sheets after class and they would bring up your name and openly have an open dialogue on your sermon, very painful, and then the professor would sit down with you and watch your sermon.

And I remember in preparing for this sermon, for about 6 months, I listened to a tape.

My dad had an old tape of Charles Bradford.

And I would listen to it over and over and over again for 6 months.

Charles Bradford, I mean, it was an incredible sermon that I loved and I appreciated.

I listened to this, I meditated on this sermon day and night.

I got up for my homiletic sermon, and I preached, and I thought it went wonderful.

And then 1 of my African American friends came to me and said, David, you preach like a brother.

And I was like, what do you mean you preach like a brother?

Now, just as a side note here, there is nothing like African American preaching.

I believe it is at the height of homiletic ability.

I think to myself, oh, if I could only capture that type of wording, you know, It's just the language of angels.

And I sat down and watched later that afternoon with the professor my sermon.

And as soon as he hit play on that old VHS tape, which I hope they burned, by the way, they pressed play, and it was a surreal experience because I was watching an Asian man preach like a black man.

The pronunciation and the repetition and the homiletic, you know, climbing of the mountain.

I said, that is a Korean that's trying to, I don't know, it was just this weird out of body experience And I said, what happened to me?

By meditating and contemplating And visualizing and experiencing the beautiful stern by Charles Bradford for a duration of 6 months, day and night, over and over, unconsciously, I had become the Korean version of Charles Bradford.

Praying For the Spirit

Father in heaven, we thank you so much for this opportunity that we have this afternoon to reflect on the Holy Spirit and prayer and revival.

We pray that you would bless us as we look at your leadings in the past, and we thank you that we have nothing to fear for the future, except we shall forget how you have worked in the past.

So bless us, we pray, in the precious name of Jesus.

On the screen, I have a drawing of 1 of the reformers.

This is John Wesley, and I have a quotation from Ravi Zacharias on John Wesley.

He preached 40, 000 sermons during his lifetime.

He traveled 250, 000 miles on horseback preaching.

And at the age of 83, he was angry with his doctor because he wouldn't let him preach more than 14 times a week.

At the age of 86, written in his journal are these words, laziness is slowly creeping in.

There's an increasing desire or tendency to stay in bed after 5.30 in the morning.

John Wesley was a driven individual and the Lord used him in a powerful and profound way to transform England and turn it back to God.

It's entitled England Before and After Wesley.

It's out of print and the thesis of the book is in the title.

It shows England before Wesley and then England after Wesley.

England had collapsed to a degree that had never been before known to any Christian nation.

And John Wesley and a group of his friends gathered together and prayed for England, prayed for the Holy Spirit, prayed for revival.

And it began a series of events that transformed England on every level.

Christian ethics were reinserted into society.

It seems that there wasn't a segment of society that was not touched by the influence of John Wesley.

And this afternoon I'd like to talk about the relationship between prayer and revival.

And when you look throughout history, you will note that with every significant spiritual awakening There is always someone that has a radical prayer life.

And you look at Jesus in Mark 1, verse 35, the Bible says, now in the morning, having risen a long while before daylight, He went out and departed to a solitary place, and there he prayed." You can see that Jesus is spending significant time in private prayer, and in Luke 5, verse 16, the Bible says, But Jesus would often slip away to the wilderness and pray.

There are several instances in Scripture where Jesus would spend the entire night in prayer as well.

And the impact of Jesus was documented by the historian H.G.

He says, in his five-volume work on history, historian and religious skeptic H.G.

Wells found himself devoting the most space to Jesus Christ.

He wrote, a historian like myself cannot portray the progress of humanity honestly without giving Jesus of Nazareth the foremost place.

Jesus was an individual that spent significant time in prayer.

And I want to go very quickly to different revivals in history.

Every spiritual revival can be traced to a person of prayer.

We just celebrated last year the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation.

Incidentally, there was a fascinating article in the Catholic Herald where Pope Francis indicated that the Reformation was essentially over.

And it's quite ironic that in a time of celebration for the 500th anniversary that the Counter-Reformation has been overall largely successful in bringing Protestantism back.

The book Great Controversy, page 210, says, from the secret place of prayer came the power that shook the world in the Great Reformation.

Luther did not fail to devote 3 hours each day to prayer, and these were taken from that portion of day most favorable to study." Here he is, an obscure monk in Wittenberg, and he prays for the Holy Spirit and revival, and the greatest revolution in the modern era took place, the Protestant Reformation, and it came from a praying individual.

You have Elijah on Mount Carmel, and then James 5, verse 17 says, Elijah was a human being even as we are, and he prayed earnestly for the revival that took place in Israel.

You have the upper room experience where they were gathered in a prayer meeting.

The whole book of Acts in the Christian church started in a prayer meeting.

Bound says this, "'God shapes the world by prayer.

"'Prayer is God's singular condition "'to move ahead in his son's kingdom.

Therefore, the believer who is the most highly skilled in prayer will do the most for God, and the secret of success in Christ's kingdom is the ability to pray.

I've often wondered this, why should I pray if God already knows?

Isn't God a God of love and all power, which means not only does he have the ability, but he has the desire.

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Series

The Holy Spirit

Transformed By the Spirit

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Attachments

Becoming Like Jesus

Becoming Like Jesus - Part 2

35m

Becoming Like Jesus

Becoming Like Jesus - Part 1

34m

The Science of Overcoming Sin

The Science of Overcoming Sin - Part 6

33m

Consider My Meditation

Consider My Meditation- Part 1

37m

Reflections on the Seventh-day Sabbath

Reflections on the Seventh-day Sabbath - Part 2

28m

The Close of Probation

The Close of Probation- Part 2

31m

The Intensity of Your Mission

25m

Not by Might... Nor Technique

44m

Devotions For Decisions

5. By Every Word

1h 3m

Plenary

How to Gain the Victory Over Your Thoughts?

35m

Sound Doctrine