One Spirit

Today we continue with our worship series. Hey Methodist, why go global? What’s the point of this? Why switch? Why not be independent? There’s pluses and minuses in both areas, but we’ve gone through several things. We’ve talked about how being a part of a nomination we can trust helps us think about beyond ourselves, beyond us, beyond our current condition to see maybe that God is working way beyond us and God is working in places we may have no idea about without knowing God.

And without having connections of people who are going places. I heard from our president pro-Templar yesterday, Jordan McFaul, who said again, he had told me this before, but he told the group that he’s headed to Ethiopia with one other president from Mid-Texas Conference and Bishop Jones because Ethiopia is a part of Bishop Jones Circuit. So that’s why we’ve connected.

That’s why we took the collection. And I’ll just warn you, I asked him to be on the lookout for a church that might be a good fit for One Hope, for a partnership, someone we could mutually be a part of. Like at the Mid-Texas Conference, there was a, one of their president pro-Templars are coming to, came to the Mid-Texas Conference and speaks.

So we don’t know what that’s going to develop in the future, but that’s part of thinking beyond us. Next we talked about, I don’t remember the order. Okay, scriptural holiness.

And I love the combination of scriptural holiness because sometimes we think, I’m going to be holy and sometimes we’re going to be scriptural, but scriptural holiness says, I’m going to take what the scripture says and apply it to my life. Holiness is being sanctified. A huge part of Methodism is sanctification, being set apart for God.

Sanctified is another word for holy, and that is to be more like God, scriptural holiness. And of course we need the scripture to show us to be like God, show us who God is, show us who God’s character is, and show us how important that was in our life. I don’t think I shared with you, but when I was on a trip to Brazil, Brazil, and they spoke Portuguese, one morning or one afternoon as they were preparing for the worship service that we were going to help with in the evening, their tech guy called me over and asked me in English, what does this mean? And he was trying to interpret the song that they sang that they loved, and it was in Portuguese.

And I’m like, dude, I don’t know Portuguese. You know, I’m the kind of guy that I would say, I kind of know Spanish, and we go to the, oh, I went to, we went to the mall in Brazil at the end of the trip, and the lady there helping me said, oh, you’re English, do you want to speak English? And she was going, I can speak Spanish, I can speak French, I can speak Portuguese, or I can speak English, what works the best for you? And, you know, Portuguese is kind of a mixture of French and Spanish, if you didn’t know that. So I said, well, I know a little bit of Spanish, why don’t you speak some Spanish? And she started talking, and I was like, okay, let’s just do English.

So he’s showing me these words, and I’ll never forget it, because it was like a click of the Holy Spirit, because I had, first of all, it was the same words as in Spanish as the Portuguese, so I could see it, and it said, Sanctos y Sanctos, Sanctos y Sanctos. And I was like, oh, what is, oh, yeah, I, Sanctos, sanctification, holy, it’s singing about the holy of holies, and it was just this rush of the Holy Spirit that came over me, and I was like, oh my goodness, nothing better to sing about than being in the holy of holies. And I was able to help with almost no knowledge whatsoever of anything.

So that was kind of cool. So after scriptural holiness, we talked about last week, no, two weeks ago, One Hope, that we have one hope, and of course, that’s the name of our church, and that one hope is Jesus. No more needs to be said there, except wanting to be part of something global means it’s all about Jesus.

We have one hope. We don’t have our hope in any other religious practice, or any other religion, or any other God. We have one hope, and that’s Jesus, and that’s how we live, and that’s how we share with our life.

Last week, we talked about being in a denomination where you had a good balance of autonomy, where we have the freedom to live out our mission as God has called us to live, but we have a sense of accountability, accountability to the scripture, accountability to the doctrine and discipline of the Global Methodist Church, and that you have to believe in, in order for that to fly. This week, we’re going to talk about one that is near and dear to my heart, and my relationship with God, and it’s going to be near and dear, whether you know it or not, to your relationship with God, and that’s talking about how we have one spirit. Now, we tend to forget, and maybe it’s just because I was around so many people that were open to so many different things for so long, that there’s a spiritual world outside of us.

You guys are aware of that, that it’s not all what we can see. There’s not just this material world, that there is a world, and not every spirit in that world is holy. Those were fighting words among some people I used to hang out with.

Not every spirit is holy, and the Holy Spirit has been so key to my walk. When I was a kid, I went to church and Sunday school, but I never read the Bible, but I’d hear about it in those places. I got that third-grade Bible that was pristine until I went to college and finally read the Bible, but I’d have these blips where, in my prayer, the Holy Spirit would come and amazing things would happen, and it would draw me into the presence of God.

Strange things. I don’t think I’d be standing here if, in the fifth grade, there’s a sense of God healing me when I was sick, when I had horrible sinus headaches, and when I would get sick, I would get really sick. And then in high school, at communion, I didn’t share this at Christmas Eve, I don’t think.

Stillwell knows about this, but kneeling at the altar, taking communion on Christmas Eve, all those churchy things, that was the first time the power of the Holy Spirit came down and overwhelmed me. So I will never take away the power of communion and God working through communion or special services like Christmas Eve, where God can do amazing things and work with our hearts in different ways. And then in high school, in college, I got this urgency to start reading the Bible, and then I grew closer to God, and I’d still have high and low points, like those points would hit and then there was nothing, and I’d have high and low points until eventually I just tried to follow God in all circumstances, clear up to the point where I trusted God enough to leave my career and go to seminary, which I’ve shared to you a little about.

And I got to meet a lot of unique people in that situation. In my first year, my first semester, I was taking a class, a practical theology class, and one of the things we had to do, they would have extra speakers come in and group discussions that would go on, and you had to go to one of those and write a one-page paper about it. And let’s just say, I didn’t think about it until it was the last week, and there was only one class left, and it said it was hearts on fire.

So I went to this class, and we were in a great big room with chairs and tables across where you could probably fit a hundred people, and I made the mistake of sitting in the middle. Like I went early enough, I sat in the middle, and the screen came up, hearts on fire. I said, that sounds pretty good.

And then people came in and started sitting all around me, and all of a sudden, the lead speaker for that thing was someone who just went to this conference called Hearts on Fire, and it was the student who was transitioning at that moment. And we all knew because they sent a letter to make sure we were sensitive to that transition, and I was like, I did not leave myself a getaway. I’m surrounded by people on all sides.

And my heart started pounding, and I just stopped, and I prayed. Without prayer, I can’t get through much of anything big. And I said, God, this is all your fault.

You told me to come here. It was clear as day. I didn’t mishear you.

Why am I here? And I said these words, and these are dangerous words, so I don’t expect you to try to say these, but I said, if this, if I need to change my thought process, and I need to adapt this into who I am as a pastor, I will. I’m just trusting in you right now, because you sent me here, so I’m going to trust in you. And that was the first time I could see in that moment that there was a, I could see, I could experience God and the depths of who God is, that there was a different spirit that had come over about 80% of the group in there, and it was not holy.

Now, the interesting side of this that we cannot forget when we’re dealing with God, high on the other side of the camera, is that it wasn’t a sense, I was like, yeah, that is right. That’s what I was thinking, you know, and I’m sitting there going, yeah, they’re wrong. This is bad.

I need to say something. I need to attack. And here’s the sense of God I got, and he longed for them.

He longed for them to come home, just like anyone who had never heard of God, those who had strayed and were following other gods, God loved them and wanted them to come back home. You see that two sides of God, that there is a right and the wrong, but there is also a side that says, now as much as I’ve been through, man, I’m forgetting to do the whole Bible. I’m just going.

The, as much as I’ve been through in my experience, and it seems crazy that I even did that because I didn’t want to in the beginning, and then it, especially in this moment and different things I saw around campus, that there was so much in there that was not of the Holy Spirit, but I just had to trust in God. And, you know, you take some heat and you take some people not liking you, you take some people bawling you out for who you are, but it doesn’t matter. I mean, I praise God I’m here right now, but what I’m saying is, God is love.

You know, that’s a sense of the Holy Spirit I got, and the text we’re going to look at today tells us a lot about the Holy Spirit. As Jesus was at the Last Supper with his disciples, John gives us insight in some of the deeper conversations they had, more than the synoptic Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He gives us insight to what Jesus was saying in the conversations they were having, and Jesus was preparing them for his death.

And they kept not getting it, and not understanding it. And some of the words in here is where Jesus really drives it home, that he’s going to die, but he’s got a great plan in mind for him, where you stand as you are able. John 14, 15 through 21 and 26, if you love me you will keep my commandments, and I will ask the Father and he will give you another helper to be with you forever.

That just struck me, forever, that’s pretty cool. Even the spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him, you know him for he dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you, yet in a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me.

See the difference there? The world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in the Father, and you in me, and I in you.

Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me, and whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. The Word of God, for the people of God, amen.

You may be seated. Jesus said in Matthew 12, he was doing this crazy thing where I was talking about having different worlds, but in Matthew 12, Jesus was driving out demons. And the Pharisees didn’t like that because it wasn’t through the religious leaders that he was doing this.

Now they might have tried to do this, or this would happen at certain places, but they had different leaders, and they said, you’re driving out demons by Beelzebub. And that is, you know, another way of saying Satan, or an evil God, or something, Beelzebub. Actually, did you know that Beelzebub that you see in the New Testament is a play on words, that in the Old Testament, Baal, you know the Baal gods, and they took Baal, Baal was the god of, he could control the earth, and they believed he could control the weather, and all that stuff.

And Jews started calling him Beelzebub, which means the god of the flies. Which means, this is the power of your god. That’s just a side note.

Jesus said to them, and if Satan casts out Satan, is he divided against himself, how then will his kingdom stand? If Satan casts out Satan, in other words, he’s saying, well, if I’m doing this by Beelzebub, then I’m dividing the kingdom of Satan. And that doesn’t make any sense, because what I am doing is driving these demons out, doing the work of the devil. And Jesus is saying, so you can’t do that.

And in the same way, he was saying, you can’t divide the kingdom of God. You cannot divide it. The kingdom cannot say, this is good and true and right.

And the same in the kingdom can say, this is good and true and right. You divide the kingdom, and you break it down, and you make it weak. And you make it not strong, so it is not of God.

You can’t have both sides on everything. There are things that divide the kingdom of God that make it too incredibly difficult to actually do kingdom work. First John 4, I would advise you to go read 1 John 4, 1 through 6. But it says, beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.

For many false prophets have gone out into the world. There was just something that, why did I hang out for so long as a leader in a denomination where I disagreed with so many people, and it was simply because the Holy Spirit called me in, and I wasn’t leaving until the Holy Spirit called me out. And, well, I’ll give you this so it’s not just impractical.

When I saw the new bishops that were elected in the fall of 2022, and they were so excited, and they did it on the first ballot and everything, I was sick to my stomach. Every once in a while that happens to me is that God just punches me in the gut. And in being punched in the gut by the Holy Spirit, I saw that and that the leadership had gone too far, and God gave me a release.

But we have to test spirits. The Global Methodist Church isn’t perfect, and it’s not full of perfect people, so we have to test the spirits of the pastors, of each other. While we’re in our Hope Builders group together, test the spirits.

What’s God saying to us in the midst of that? What’s God convicting us of? 1 Corinthians 1.10 says, And somehow that interprets to, we need to agree to disagree. I heard that so much. But it doesn’t matter if we disagree.

Even on issues that are of the Holy Spirit, it doesn’t matter if we just agree to disagree and we go on down the road. And then you end up with a big hodgepodge mess. I mean, the Bible says, agree.

Paul said that so many times, agree in the Spirit. If you two are quarreling, come together, pray about it until you agree in the Spirit. Maybe there’s some things on both sides you both need to deal with, but agree in the Spirit.

Don’t just say, well, I believe this, you believe this, let’s go on down the road and we are still the kingdom of God. It’s different when you actually read the Bible. It’s just different than what we were told.

Let me just put it to you plainly. The big tent that they started back in the 70s and they said the big tent theology, philosophy of church, the big tent doesn’t work. In fact, it creates a circus.

See the big tent there? And the kingdom of God is not a circus. The kingdom of God is holy. The kingdom of God is righteous.

The kingdom of God directs us to God, not to every other spirit in the world. Okay, this one, it’s biblical, but this is my experience that we have one spirit. If it is the Holy Spirit, it connects.

The Holy Spirit connects. Jesus said, I will not leave you as orphans, in verse 18, I will come to you. And then he says this weird thing, if you obey my commandments, I will manifest myself in you.

Why can’t, what do the commandments have to do with love? It’s all about love. The Holy Spirit connects us to God. The Holy Spirit brings us in the presence of God.

The Holy Spirit connects us to the throne room of God. And then we talked about holy love a few weeks ago, that if it’s love from the Holy Spirit, it’s going to be holy. See, holy, not holy, holy love.

Love that makes us more like God. Love that teaches us to love like God. Love that convicts our hearts to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Everything, everything, and that holy love comes into our whole lives in everything we do. One spirit, the Holy Spirit says it’s God’s way. How do I know half the time if it’s God speaking in my prayers and not me telling me God is telling me what to do? Because God disagrees with me.

It’s God’s way. It’s not my way. It’s God’s way.

It’s not the world. It’s like if you get it in prayer that you need to do something, it feels like you’re paddling upstream against the world, that is more like God. And Jesus said, I will send you the counselor or the helper, the spirit of truth, who directs us to the truth, who counsels us into the truth.

And that truth that the Holy Spirit has pointed me to all my life, so I can preach about nothing different, is that the Holy Spirit points us to Jesus, directs us to Jesus, who is the way, the truth, and the life. He directs us to truth, and he also directs us not to say, well, I don’t really like what that says. The Holy Spirit agrees with the Bible, because the Holy Spirit wrote the Bible through other people.

We believe the Bible is inspired. So he directs us to that truth, and he also directs us to the truth of that God is living and working and moving way beyond us, and if we listen to God, he’ll have us talk to people we may be uncomfortable with, but knowing that if God wants us to, God is working in their hearts and their lives. And God has a purpose on why he puts us in other people’s path.

One spirit convicts, says that also, that the Holy Spirit convicts. It doesn’t corrupt us, and it doesn’t condemn. There’s a difference between conviction and condemnation.

Conviction says, I need to go this way, I need to do this, I need to change this, I need to repent of this. Corruption says, well, yeah, I thought that was bad before, but you know, you can’t really understand what the Bible is, so you just let more stuff in and call it good and holy and bless it. And it doesn’t condemn.

If you’re hearing voice in your head that when you go to pray and when you go to ask for forgiveness, the voice says, how can you be forgiven? You’ve messed up too much. You’re not good enough. You’re a failure.

You’re weak. That’s the accuser, who is another word for Satan. If it’s God, you feel that love of God and that desire God has to bring us all into his presence and draw us in.

That is the difference. And condemnation teaches us to love as God loves, so when we find someone who we disagree with, we don’t believe or try to tell them they’re going to hell for that. That’s not God convicting us.

Our conviction is that we need to love them. We need to be patient with them. We need to share the truth with them, but we don’t give up what we have, except for those feelings of, gosh, it’d be a lot easier if all these people would just, you know… Instead of Jesus coming and taking people away, we’ll have Jesus come and drop them off.

That is not what is of God. You see that difference? There’s a little bit of a tension there between what we as human wants. We want it cut off and to be easy, but God desires for no one to be condemned.

Doesn’t mean there won’t be people who are condemned, but that’s not what he desires. I don’t have it on here, but the Holy Spirit gives us the gifts and the fruit too. Ephesians 4.4, where we get our title from, for there is one body and one spirit, just as you have been called to one glorious hope for the future.

When my mind started opening, which wasn’t too long after it started, to when they first founded the Global Methodist Church, I believe it was in May of 2022, that they wrote the Transitional Doctrines and Disciplines.