Jesus is Lord

Good morning, my name is Dana Gouge and I’m a deacon here at One Hope Church. I’d ask that you prepare your hearts for prayer. Oh yeah, be seated, yeah thanks.

I appreciate that. So let’s pray. Almighty and merciful God, Lord we thank you for the freedom you’ve given us and for the price that was paid by Christ so that we could truly live free.

It is a great sacrifice Jesus made for our freedom, freedom from sin and death. And we remember this now, the great cost of it all. We know that your love is unending.

We also remember Jesus’s words, blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. So we lift to you those who are here with us today. You see tomorrow’s Memorial Day celebration, not as a joyous event but a painful reminder of sorrow and loss.

Give strength to those who’ve lost family members and miss them dearly. We know freedom is a gift, it’s a treasure. This truth is often easy to take for granted.

We thank you for the men and women who have fought and continue to fight so bravely for our nation. We ask for your blessing over them and their families. We pray for comfort for those whose loved ones died while serving our country.

And we pray that you will surround them with your peace, and that peace that surpasses all understanding. Lord be with all of us in the Global Methodist Church as we meet this week for the Heartland Annual Conference. May the Holy Spirit be in control of all that happens there.

We know there’s power in your word, Lord. Help us be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. We pray for those in the One Hope Church family who are sick, recovering from injury, suffering emotionally, financially, or spiritually.

Allow all of us to shield ourselves from those flaming arrows of the evil one with the shield of faith in you. Lord, you know our needs and what is on our hearts for each of us. I’m going to conclude with that perfect prayer that Jesus taught us to pray.

And if you would join me, saying, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

Thank you. Mrs. Sherrill is going to take the children back here if they are ready to roll for Children’s Church, unless you’d rather hear a sermon prepared for adults.

So, my oldest son, Christopher, has been trying to talk me into letting him take boxing lessons.

And so, school’s out, so we finally found a place, and we went, and they give a first free lesson. So, I was like, I’m going to be a good dad, and I’m going to take the class with him. Maybe I’ll show him a thing or two.

So, we went to this boxing class, and, of course, it’s a 45-minute workout, and your feet are moving the whole time, and you’re punching this big bag in front of you, and they wrapped our hands and put the gloves on. And before the class, they showed us the swings, the jabs, and the crosses, and the upper cuts, and they all have numbers. And, of course, when you’re going through the class, and they’re playing, the music calls out the numbers, and you’ve got to be ready.

Four, oh, no, wait, four, cross. And so, we get behind, and we’re going, and we’re going about 30 minutes into it, and he goes, he keeps saying, just one more, and I’m going, yes, we’re done. And then he goes, okay, just one more, and we kept going.

And at the very end, he’s calling out and saying, okay, it’s freestyle. I want to hear you pop that bag, and, you know, my arms are going, and I can barely get to the bag. And he’s calling that out, and we finally get done punching the bag, and he says, okay, now let’s do push-ups.

Let’s do set-ups. Let’s do crunches. And what was the other thing we did, where you drop down and kick your feet back? Burpees.

And burpees. And some of them didn’t even do the push-ups with the burpees, and I did. And I woke up the next day, and you discover muscles you forgot you had.

And Christopher comes down and goes, I am so sore. And he goes, it hurts right here. And I was like, yeah, it hurts me too.

And I was feeling that pain, and I woke up today, and I went, I’m still sore. The discovery of that. Now, what can happen with that is you can keep working it and strengthen those, so you can continue longer during the classes or during a bout or whatever.

Or you can stop, and that pain will go away too. If you continue, you’ll build up the strength, and the pain will go away. You can stop, and it’ll go away.

I think Christopher’s going to continue, and I’m going to stop. It kind of reminds me of the early church. Last week was Pentecost.

Remember we talked about the Holy Spirit coming down with the flame and the tongues of fire and landed on each one’s head? Who was there? And it was a new thing. In the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit would come down on individual prophets or maybe on David or Saul or somebody for a specific ministry. But now the Holy Spirit poured out on the whole church.

And our next series, which is kind of going to linger on throughout the summer, we’re going to look at 1 Corinthians 12 and 13 and maybe a little into 14. Paul is addressing the church in Corinth, the first century church, who are kind of sewing, figuring things out. Figuring out, sewing what they have in the Holy Spirit and how that works.

Last week we talked about the Holy Spirit is the core. I mean, when the Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost, that was the birth of the church. The Holy Spirit breathed life in the church.

We talked about ruach in the Old Testament, the Hebrew, which means to breathe breath or wind or spirit. The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. When God breathed life into creation, the Holy Spirit was right there to breathe life into it.

When Jesus was conceived, the Holy Spirit was right there to breathe life into Mary’s womb. And Jesus was born. And, of course, when Jesus’ ministry began, the Holy Spirit breathed life into that at Jesus’ baptism when it came down like a dove.

See, the first century church was having some difficulty, in Corinth especially. There were people who had powerful spiritual gifts. And even though it was the Holy Spirit, they were feeling kind of superior.

Like they had this spiritual prowess over other people. Others were feeling inferior, so they might not have participated as much. You see, like when you work muscles on your body, when you receive the Holy Spirit, you have a choice of shying away from it and letting that power of the Holy Spirit go away, or living into it and letting that power increase in you.

But Paul talks to the church, and that’s what we’re going to talk about throughout the summer, is how the church works together. How the church works together through the Holy Spirit to be who God has called us to be. And there’s some pretty cool verses.

I think the verses we’re going to talk about you’re familiar with. But integrating them into the life of the church is different. We see the same thing in the 21st century.

Some people think they’re more spiritually powerful. Others think they’re not spiritually powerful. I remember doing a Bible study on the Holy Spirit and seeing this sweet older man say, you know, in his 70s, go, I don’t have any spiritual gifts.

And throughout the whole Bible study, he’s quoting scripture that he learned when he was a child. And we’re going, that’s it. You’re blessing us because you have the word on your heart.

Peter says it also, we all have a spiritual gift. As we begin the study, the sermon series is called We Are the Body. As we begin this, we’re just going to look at the first three chapters, because they cut the first three verses, because they kind of give us an introduction to how spiritual gifts work in the church and how the Spirit will work in the church through us.

We stand as you are able, 1 Corinthians 12, verses one through three. Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed. You know that when you were pagans, you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led.

Therefore, I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says, Jesus is accursed. And no one can say Jesus is Lord except in the Holy Spirit. The Word of God, inspired by God for the people of God.

Thanks be to God. Amen. You may be seated.

Now in here, Paul, in his address, he starts with now concerning spiritual gifts. But if you go to the Greek, it’s just the word pneumatic, pneumaticus. Pneumaticus is, well, the Greek, like the rock, the Greek is pneuma for spirit.

So really, it doesn’t have the word gifts in there, but it goes into a discussion of gifts. So usually in English, we interpret it as gifts. So you can look at it in a few different ways.

And throughout this series, we’re going to look at all these different ways. One could be that now concerning spiritual gifts, or you could say it like this, now concerning things of the Spirit, or you could say now concerning the spiritual ones, looking at people who thought they were spiritual, people who thought they weren’t spiritual, looking at the general life of the church and how the Holy Spirit was working in the church. The word in Greek means belonging to the divine Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, one who is filled with and governed by the Spirit of God, pertaining to the wind or breath, windy.

Now, some people are kind of windy, but they’re not necessarily full of the Holy Spirit. They’re just full of liking to hear their own voice. Exposed to the wind.

Why is everybody looking at me now? Exposed to the wind, blowing. Now, concerning spiritual things, I do not want you to be uninformed. So it’s important to talk about spiritual things.

Sometimes we just get caught up in talking about the business of the church or in behavior without thinking of the guidance of the Holy Spirit and how the Holy Spirit works through it with us. Now, again, some people are extremes on this. And to the point of talking about spirituality, that is unbiblical.

You got to have a balance of that. And so this is one of the reasons we’re going over that. And when that balance comes together, the church finds its rhythm, its power, its momentum, its way to move and to live and to act and to let God work through the church and through our hands and our feet and our voices.

This next slide, Agnoeo. Agnoeo sounds kind of like ignorant. Paul says, I do not want you to be uninformed, to be ignorant, to not know, to not understand, known to err or sin through mistake, to be wrong.

Interestingly, even in the first century church, some people thought all they had to do, you know, some people think they got to feel the Holy Spirit. Some people think they need to display gifts of the Holy Spirit that put them above other people. And Paul wants to talk about it, to teach about it.

So we’re going to teach about it because we don’t want to be uninformed. We don’t want the Holy Spirit to seem like this thing over here that’s kind of hidden and kind of hard to understand because it’s spiritual. I mean, it’s easier to understand Jesus of Nazareth because Jesus came and he walked the earth.

He taught, he hung out with his buddies and he gave his life for us. It’s easier to understand the Father, to think of God who created the heavens and the earth. But where is the Holy Spirit in all this? How are we, as members of the body of Christ, part of the Holy Spirit? The next thing Paul says is he said, now when you were pagans, and he’s teaching the church in Corinth, which is in the Roman Empire, outside of Jerusalem, outside of Judea.

So a lot of the people in the Corinth church were not Jews and now they’re into this new thing. Can you imagine if you were in these pagan cultures where you went through all these rituals to try to get these ecstatic experiences and all of a sudden in the early church, it’s like Pentecost every Sunday. The Holy Spirit pouring down, all of a sudden me who felt drained and empty and hurt and lost, the Holy Spirit is working through and manifesting powerfully.

But Paul said, when you were pagans, you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. However, whatever did it, you were. You were led to idols.

Now it reminds me of when Moses was up on the mountain in Exodus 32. He was getting the Ten Commandments and we have an actual photograph of a depiction of the golden calf. The people with Aaron, Moses’ brother down there, all of a sudden were like, Moses has taken too long.

God’s probably killed him. Let’s just make our own God. And they made this golden calf and they were led astray.

They had these voices in the crowd that kept saying, well, God’s not gonna do this. Let’s do this. And so they made this golden calf.

They worshipped it. Moses came down and he was so mad. He was the first one to break the Ten Commandments, literally, because he broke the tablets.

And the people were worshipping the idol. Moses destroyed the golden calf and it was a horrific scene. It’s easy for things in our lives to become idols.

Sports figures. I mean, I’m getting excited about the Royals every day now. Eight wins in a row.

How awesome is that? But it can’t become my idol. It can’t become our idol. It can’t become the most important thing in our lives.

Paul is also saying with spirituality or spiritual gifts, that can become an idol as well. If we’re not just seeking God, we’re not seeking God’s word and understanding God and growing in Jesus. And we’re just going from that moment to moment or we seek that power and then we wanna use that power to show off or to brag or to look like we’re better or more spiritual or more religious than other people.

Paul is saying, you know how easy it is to fall into idolatry. Don’t do it with the church. I mean, we can have rituals or things that pastors like to call sacred cows that we think are, they elevate themselves and they come, they can even become a barrier in between us and Jesus and knowing God’s grace.

And the power of the Holy Spirit is not meant for us. That’s why the series is called We Are the Body. Every time Paul brings up the spiritual gifts in Ephesians 4, in Romans 12, in 1 Corinthians 12, it’s all about how the gifts are used for the body.

The gifts are used for one another that each one of us have gifts and we come together. It’s when we take those gifts and certain churches say a certain gift is a sign of who you are as a Christian and then it separates who we are as with our own unique gifts. Kathy was telling a story about how when she was growing up, she was a rebellious teen who drank, who partied, and was caught in a vicious cycle of bulimia.

Now, she was at a summer job and she couldn’t escape the witness of a co-worker named Cindy. Cindy would talk to her and Cindy would, every once in a while, slip in something about Jesus. And it was pretty annoying to her for a while.

But she grew to respect Cindy because Cindy didn’t really care what other people thought of her. It was like she really only cared about what her Heavenly Father thought of her. And she said, I just made fun of her when she’d bring up Jesus.

It became a joke, but I did admire her. And there was a part of me that began to suspect something about what she was saying must be right and I was on the wrong path with all I was suffering with. Finally, one day, Cindy said to me, you know, Kath, Jesus is Lord whether you accept him or not.

I went home thinking about that. If Jesus was real, I had to check him out. I plowed through the Gospel of John and when I got to the end, I knew I had to make a decision.

Everything would have to change. 16 years ago, it did. Now, I don’t know if you know this person, but Kath was Kathy Tricoli.

She became a Christian singer. One of her best known songs is Carry Your Candle, Go Light Your World. She has several others.

She had some secular songs that she won awards for too. But it’s because she had a friend. A friend who told her about Jesus.

I think we’re all called to be that friend as a part of the church and we have to think from that perspective. Whether you believe it or not, whether you actually realize it, Jesus is Lord. That’s how we live as a church.

When you talk to someone and they don’t believe in Jesus, they don’t believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, they don’t believe that God is alive today, then we don’t get down and we don’t get discouraged because Jesus is Lord. Even if our words fall short, even if our actions fall short, even if we fall short and we still need Jesus’ grace every day, Jesus is Lord. When it comes to the spiritual and it comes to spiritual gifts, the number one thing we have to remember is Paul is saying it’s only by the Spirit of God that somebody will say Jesus is Lord.

And it’s never by the Spirit of God that someone will say or act like or put in a position where they say, Jesus be cursed. The Holy Spirit, number one, points us to Jesus. If the Spirit is not pointing us to Jesus, then it’s not the Holy Spirit.

And that’s something churches can get confused on and people can get confused on, even if we consider ourselves the body of Christ. Now, when Jesus was at the Last Supper with the disciples, giving them his final teachings, he told them about the Holy Spirit. He said, I’m going to go away, but you can celebrate because I’m going to my Father.

My Father is more powerful than me. I will send one who will be like me. And he said in John 15, 26, but when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.

Doesn’t say he’s going to bear witness about you. Doesn’t say he’s going to say, man, you are almost on God’s status. The Holy Spirit points you to Jesus.

The Holy Spirit reminds you of Jesus’ words. The Holy Spirit guides you in the direction of Jesus and helps you become like Jesus. And in 14, 26, he says, but the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to remembrance all that I have said to you.

Again, the Holy Spirit points to Jesus, to Jesus’ words. Romans 10, 9, I think ties well to what we are looking at in 1 Corinthians. It says, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

What I’m saying with that is, if you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord, and then you connect that to 1 Corinthians 12, Paul is saying that as long as Jesus is your Savior and you confess him as Lord, then you are spiritual. Then you have the power of the Holy Spirit to unlock within you. Then you have gifts that contribute to the body of Christ.

Then you have a spirituality that is important and needed and necessary for us as fellow believers in Jesus. It’s not that one person is more spiritual than the other. It’s that all of us in Christ are of the Holy Spirit.

In Philippians 2, Paul also explains it, the humility of Jesus. And he says, become like Jesus in this way. He said, therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee will bow.

And in heaven and earth and under the earth and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Number one of what we do as a church, as the body of Christ, is acknowledge that Jesus is Lord. When the Holy Spirit came down at Pentecost and people heard all the disciples speaking in their own languages, that wasn’t the main importance.

It was that the Holy Spirit was praising God. The Holy Spirit was talking about Jesus. The Holy Spirit encouraged everyone there to say, Jesus is Lord.

Why don’t we, before we close, let’s just get it out of our system. You know you want to say it. You know you can’t help yourself.

Let’s just say it together. Jesus is Lord. Let me hear you like you’re five years old and you’re excited school’s out.

Jesus is Lord. Amen.