So in the last post, I talked about the Gospels-Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; as we read and study and contemplate them-being like a major in "Jesus". The rest of the New Testament, especially the Epistles, are like majoring in "Applied Jesus". To state it more plainly, what Jesus does applies to us. In the case of the baptism of Jesus, Jesus receives both the Holy Spirit and the approval of the Father.
So, if 'what Jesus does applies to us', it will follow that we, in turn, will receive the Holy Spirit.
I am NOT going to tackle the topic of the approval of the Father. To do so feels to me like reading the parts of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, said to written by Moses, where it says that Moses was the humblest man in all the land. I do not feel the moral capacity to presume God's approval in the context of a blog post. God loves me, the Bible tells me so, that's good enough.
In the New Testament, Acts should be attached to the major of "Applied Jesus", because it is there we read of Pentecost, that as Jesus received the Holy Spirit, so did the Church in its first congregation gathered there in Jerusalem.
This we get from the ongoing Gospel story, working on our "Jesus" major. It is in Jesus' life and ministry, His death and resurrection, the plan of God unfolding in the Son for our salvation. We will consider those in the next chapters of Our Story. The baptism of Jesus is foreshadowing (a compositional risk) what is to come for us.
This Sunday, in this chapter of Our Story, Jesus was baptized for us, we begin a sermon series to explore what that means. Presupposing our salvation, our guiding question is "What Does God Want From Us as Christians?", we are proceeding from a particular assumption.
This assumption is that "as Jesus received the Spirit, so too does the Church (us)". We begin in our study of "Applied Jesus", in Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth. Paul takes the 'moment', reception of the Holy Spirit, into our lives and work as people of faith. The word so overworked in sermons is that we 'unpack' what Paul has to tell us.
This is personal for me. Of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the toughest one for me to see purpose in is the Spirit. The creative power that is at the center of our understanding of the Father, the redemptive power that is at the center of our understanding of the Son, those I get and celebrate. I understand, as a concept, the instigative power of the Holy Spirit, something that indwells us to push on the path to be more like Jesus.
But what I invite you to consider with me is that this instigative power is not simply a trickling of the divine into our lives, day by day in every way I am getting more and more like Jesus. There is a long form effect of the Spirit in our lives. But there is something more immediate, far more powerful. Tune into the Spirit and God's power is a wave washing over us, washing out from us to inundate the world around us.
Inundate? What's an "inundate"? A welcome flood. A what now? When we read about or experience floods in our day and age, those are objects of disaster and destruction. But I came to know this term in application to Egypt in times past. Annually, the Nile would run high, overrunning its banks. This was not seen a disastrous flood but a blessed inundation that would water and rejuvenate the fields for a full and bountiful harvest.
That is the Holy Spirit washing over us. Unleashed. Exciting, a little frightening, expectations beyond our reckoning. Inundating. But it is what happened to Jesus when He received the Spirit. And my argument is what Jesus does applies to us.
Peace,
Pastor Peter
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