Last week was Pentecost, where we celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples, which constituted the beginning of the organism we know as the Church.  In the shadow of Pentecost, therefore, today I am starting a series on the Life in the Spirit.  The Life in the Spirit usually stands in stark contrast to normal, everyday life apart from God.  We will see a series of contrasts over the next six weeks or so as we look at different aspects of the life of the Spirit.  Today, we are looking at Love through the Spirit. 

 As many of you already know, I’ve had a wild couple of weeks.  Between the backhoes in my front yard, houseguests, houseguests showing up when there was no running water after camping and having to shower elsewhere, two trips to Pennsylvania, a plumber three times at my house and once at the church, drama here and there, and then the normal pastoral stuff, it has not been, to paraphrase “A Prairie Home Companion,” a quiet week in Lake Woebegon. 

While a lot of the drama and chaos that regularly makes up a part of my life is, to one extent or another, self-imposed, one does begin to ask, during those times, where God is in the middle of it all.  The crazy week syndrome doesn’t really fit the Biblical definition of suffering, as much as we often would like it to.  It would make us feel ever so much more holy.  But neither is Biblical suffering only relegated to extreme tragedies.  You don’t have to lose a limb or have a shooting pain radiating from your third lumbar vertebra to be considered someone who suffers under the Biblical definition. 

In other words, Biblical suffering is the endurance of some level of unpleasantness for the sake of achieving, accomplishing or persisting in what God has for us.  And I think we all, who do not usually endure backhoes or medical trauma day-in-and day-out, can relate to that kind of suffering. 

When we look at Romans 5:1 - 5, we see one of those Biblical passages where one thing builds on another.  This is what we would call a “wisdom passage” and it is intended to be repetitive so that it may be memorable and teach us something.  It gives us the impression we are learning from someone wise - a sort of Biblical Gandalf, minus the white beard, pointy hat and glowing staff. 

We see in this passage a stark contrast between the normal way of life we often see in our lives and the lives of those around us.  The Life of the Spirit makes a neat progression from suffering to hope, while our lives apart from the Spirit often do not reflect such a simple process.  I mean, think about it: how often, when faced with a challenge, or multiple challenges, does our suffering produce endurance or perseverance?  More often than not, when faced with too many things to keep track of, we just throw up our hands and bail out - or we begin to lash out angrily when we see someone just piling one more thing on. 

This would be normal life apart from the Spirit.  Sure, sometimes we are able to manage it all, but, really, we give up more often than we’d like to admit.  The promise of God is, by contrast, that we can boast in what we are going through because, since God is, in fact, involved, our suffering will produce endurance and perseverance. 

But the Spirit must be involved in the whole process.  How many of us have met people who have been through a lot and come out the other side with a good deal of endurance and persistence and perseverance, but whose persistence is a burden, rather than a benefit?  Without the Spirit, the perseverance that we gain from suffering often makes us jerks.  It’s the kind of thing when you say to yourself, “I’ve fought my way to get here, and I’ve been through a lot to get here, and darn it if I’m going to let them spoil it for me.”  In politics, we talk about the tyrrany of the persistent - that if a small minority talks loudly enough for long enough it wears everyone down and they get their way. 

By contrast, in the Life of the Spirit, suffering produces endurance and endurance produces character.  Yes, perhaps I’ve been speaking of bad character here.  But character in the Spirit is a lifestyle that lives according to God’s ways while in the midst of everything else.  When we choose to let suffering and endurance build our character apart from the Spirit, we can often end up jaded, cynical or fearful.  Just watch the news, right?  Who’s griping about what because of what who did to whom. 

By contrast, the Life in the Spirit brings hope.  Hope, according to a common Christian definition, is the joyful expectation of good.  Hope is the joyful expectation of good. 

You see, when we suffer apart from the Spirit, we get a mixed bag.  Sometimes we grow from the experience, other times we are broken by the experience.  Many times we are deeply hurt by the experience.  And apart from the Spirit, we really take pot luck - the good, the bad, and the green bean casserole all together. 

By contrast, with the Spirit’s deep involvement in us, we have the promise that we will progress from suffering to hope - the hope of the Glory of God.  The hope of the Glory of God is, of course, the joyful expectation of being able to share in God’s life and lifestyle and quality of life as we experience the life we call eternal day-to-day starting now and in its fullness at the end of all things.  And this hope will not disappoint us, because God has acted to bring his love into our lives. 

You see, that’s the big difference between the mixed bag that we normally have to settle for and the Life of the Spirit.  When God pours his love into us, it makes all the difference in the world.  We don’t know which end is up until we know who we are as we relate to him.  We could work that all into an entire sermon on its own, of course. 

Our lives will never be fully backhoe-free.  It is the love of God, as we allow it to fill us up, that will transform our experience of daily life into a life filled with the Spirit of God.  You see, like we said last week, we really don’t have any clue how much God actually likes us.  We are fearful and cynical of his overtures of love - we don’t understand what he is about.  But coming from the God who wants us to call him “Dad,” like we saw last week, his love for us makes even our craziest weeks something that can draw us into him.  Even in the worst stuff of daily life we can see the Spirit of God at work, because he loves us.

Amen.

God has been at work in major ways throughout the month of May with the People of God known as First Baptist Church.  I know that this has been a constant refrain over the last few months in these newsletters - but no less true by its regularity.  God continues to work in ways that we never could have anticipated.  Here are some highlights:

• As announced previously, our discipleship groups took a break during the month of May to see what God was up to outside of our group times.  One of the direct results of that is that we now have a group of musicians learning to lead us in worship as they add newer music to our well-rounded traditional repertoire. 
• During worship on the first Sunday of May, Robert Lane was healed of significant back pain as members of the congregation gathered around him to pray for him.  As I came back to see what was going on, one of the people praying said to me, “we beat you to it - he’s already feeling better!”  Praise God that the gift of healing is being poured out on our congregation!
• While at the Relay for Life, First Baptist was represented well: several of our youth passed out fliers for our church and preschool at various times during the event; Tim Sankey’s balloon animals were quite a hit - with kids lined up for half a block in either direction at times; our worship band got to play for the whole relay for about 20 minutes - which got us quite a bit of free advertizing; and so much more!  Perhaps we’ll try to attend some of the other summer festivals downtown this summer and keep the ball rolling!
• We have a new discipleship group that started in May leading a small group of folks toward baptism.  Praise God!

There’s so much more that could be said, no doubt - but it is clear that God is at work.  As I’ve said before, God would not be doing this kind of stuff with us unless 1) he genuinely likes us, and just enjoys doing nice things for us, and 2) he was up to something really big and planning to do something so beyond our experience that he has to warm us up to it. 

So what is coming up next?  I think we continue to be in a time where we all need to, as much as possible, pray and invite God to do what he wants to do, and seek to do what we believe he is doing.  Beyond that, we have a few things coming up that I think lend themselves to showing what God is up to:

• Emily Rock volunteered to head up VBS this summer, June 11 - 15.  Please contact her if you can help in any way.
• I will be a church camp director-in-training at a High-School-age camp near Columbus run by ABC/Ohio along with Rev. Jim Goodrich of FBC Hubbard.  We have been invited to take our available band musicians along.  The camp runs June 17 - 22: if you are interested in attending, contact me ASAP.  Those going to Koinonia are still encouraged to go there. 
• Starting in July, we will resume the Sunday Discipleship Group.  The subject will be a seven-week study on worship - what it is about, and why we do what we do.  It is called “The Glory of the Life of God.”  Stay tuned for specifics.  This group will wrap up in August. 

There is, of course, much more going on - but this is the Highlights, is it not?

Let us look forward in hope to God’s continued work to bring about his good in our lives!

Grace and Peace -

::Pastor Matt