The Ministry Of The Spirit

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John chapter 16, looking at the ministry of the
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Holy Spirit, and we had told you.
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I told you. All I had to do was open my mouth and whoosh. There just wasn't any reason for me to even try to get started.
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The official taker of the notes wasn't here. Nothing. And now things are right.
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Now we're more balanced. All is well. We were looking at the ministry of the
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Holy Spirit in John chapter 16. There were three areas in verse 8.
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When the Spirit comes, we'll convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment. I remember doing the first two.
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I don't remember doing the third. Maybe I just briefly mentioned judgment in regards to the finished work of Christ, the rule of this world has been judged.
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Yes, and I also mentioned the possibility of that. Never mind. Okay, so then I remember now.
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Jesus says, I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. But when he, the
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Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. Again, referring specifically to the disciples first and foremost, there's always the question of exactly where we make application beyond the disciples.
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I would say that if there was something specific about the founding of the church that's different than our experience today, that might enter into our thinking in those areas.
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But I would point your attention to the description as the pneumatis aletheios, the spirit of truth.
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I think we're used to hearing that. We're used to using Christianese without necessarily hearing what that means and considering what that means.
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We're not just talking about a truthful spirit. When he, the spirit of truth, comes, there's again an exclusivity that I think we need to recognize.
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He is not a spirit of a truth. He's not just a truthy spirit.
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But there is something to where the spirit and truth are intimately related to one another.
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To know truth requires the spirit of God. I mean, that's not so much bound up in this particular description, but obviously when we look at everything that the
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Word says about the nature of man, what John says, for example, in John chapter 8 about being slaves of sin and so on and so forth, it's the spirit that is necessary for really even a true consistent desire for truth requires a spiritual element to it.
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And so he's described as the spirit of truth. That means he's not deceptive.
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That's why, for example, John can tell us in his epistle that we are to test the spirits because there are going to be many spirits that are going to be untruthful, deceptive spirits.
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I read an entire book yesterday. It's been a while since I've been sort of in the forefront of dealing with Mormonism.
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There's been a lot of developments. Mormonism is changing a lot. I think leadership has lost its way.
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It doesn't know which ends up. Al Mohler was asked to address the entire staff of BYU a few weeks ago.
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Mormonism is changing. I think there may well be a major split coming in the not too distant future.
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But I read a book called Unveiling Grace about a pretty high up family in Mormonism.
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She was a tenured professor at BYU. He was a high priest. And it's their exodus out of Mormonism as an entire family.
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And it started with their youngest son on his mission. And he ran into a
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Baptist preacher that let him have it. It was a very, very interesting story.
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It really was. But one of the things that was discussed was the many, many spiritual experiences that Mormons are encouraged to have.
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Encounters with dead relatives and things like that. And this woman's coming to understand that there needs to be an objective standard by which you can judge these experiences.
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And it just reminded me of this particular text. But when the spirit of truth comes, and it's not that the spirit of truth had,
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I think it's important here, we need to recognize, and I think we discussed this years and years and years ago when we looked at John 7.
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It's not like the spirit of God has not been actively involved in the world. I mean, from Genesis 1, the spirit of God hovers over the waters, etc.,
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etc. But there is a, clearly what's in view here is a specific administration that right now,
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Jesus is the one who is with the disciples. And there is going to be a transition to where Jesus is no longer present with the disciples.
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But the spirit of God is going to be present with all of the disciples. Jesus can only be present with so many in a physical body, whereas he and the
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Father, by the presence of the spirit, can be with all of the disciples as the church expands across the earth.
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So, when it says the spirit of truth comes, we shouldn't have in our idea, well, he's visiting for the first time or something like that.
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That's not what is in view here. It is, I'm going back to the Father, the
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Father and I are going to send the spirit. And he will guide you into all the truth.
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Now again, yes, I think there is a good and proper application in general to the spirit.
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Since he is truthful, he will only bear witness to that which is truthful. And that every generation of believers has that promise.
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But I think there is also an appropriate recognition that there is something special about the apostles and their apostolic ministry.
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And that part and parcel of the spirit's activity is not, the important part is not focused upon miracles or any of the apostolic sign gifts or anything like that.
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It is instead an emphasis upon promising to these apostles that they are not going to have to be guessing.
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Certainly, once they start realizing, well, you know, man, if we're the ones that are being charged with the responsibility of proclaiming this message and doing all the things that Jesus would have us to do, you know, right now we have questions, we go to Jesus.
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What are we going to do when he is no longer with us? And so the first and foremost promise is that he will guide you into all the truth.
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Now again, for many people this is just not enough. They look down through the history of the church.
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They see all sorts of heresies and schisms.
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Certainly one of the things that I recognize that a lot of, for example, students in theological education, seminary, university education, whatever it might be, what they often encounter is such a plethora of competing ideas and opinions and viewpoints held by very intelligent men.
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This past week I read a couple of books by liberal scholars.
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It's part of my job. It's not necessarily enjoyable, but it's what I do. And these are intelligent men.
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These are very highly trained men and their books are filled with footnotes and bibliographies and great erudition of learning.
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They are out in the sticks as far as truth is concerned, but they're very, very brilliant men.
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I've mentioned many times that one of the nicest heretics I've ever met was John Dominic Crossan, a brilliant man.
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But, you know, he doesn't really believe in a personal God, thinks Jesus was crucified, taken down, buried in a shallow grave, dug up by dogs and eaten.
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I mean, you can be incredibly intelligent and incredibly out in the woods as far as the truth is concerned.
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And so I understand that for many people today one of the biggest challenges is to walk the tight line because on the one side you have the, well, nobody knows what the truth is.
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You can find a scholar that believes anything in religion and that's true. I mean, you can find somebody with degrees after their name that will say anything, well, in any field, really, just about, but especially in religion.
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You know, did you all hear about this Atwill guy a few weeks ago? You probably didn't because it was more in London.
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But I think it was right before I went to South Africa, people started sending me all these links to this thing.
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It was going to be happening in October in London. And basically this group was claiming that they had discovered a, it made it sound like they had discovered a document where the
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Romans were admitting or claiming that they had invented
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Christianity. The Romans invented Christianity. And so, you know,
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I start reading this thing and I start reading through some of this stuff. And I'm just rolling my eyes because you have to pay money to get in to see this thing and all this stuff.
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And I just told folks, I said, look, this is going to be, I can guarantee you, this will give you some harebrained liberal interpretation of some historical document someplace.
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And it's going to be like the proverbial flash in the pan. And a year from now, no one's even going to remember this.
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But that's what, you know, always happens sometime before Christmas and sometime before Easter.
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Well, I sort of forgot about it. And a friend of mine,
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Chris Rosebrough, did an interview with this guy. He took the time to read the guy's book and watch the guy's movie in the
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Hawaiian Arts. And I just really enjoyed listening to Chris just take this guy apart on his radio program.
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It was hilarious because this guy's not even a biblical scholar. Chris would ask him, well, if you know anything about the
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New Testament field today, if you want to be in the forefront, you want to know who's who, you've got to read
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N .T. Wright, James D .G. Dunn, and then Larry Hurtado, much more conservative than those two, and books like Jesus and the
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Eyewitnesses and stuff like that. You've just got to be up on this. So he asked him if he had read
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Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, and he'd never even heard of it. I mean, I wrote the review of that book in 2007 for the
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CRI Journal, and Richard Balcom is the author. Sorry about that. And never even heard of it.
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I mean, the guy's just clueless. But what he's done is he's discovered that there are parallels between Josephus and the life of Jesus.
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There you go. I mean, in Josephus, there's a mention of someone who was sacrificed during the
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Jewish wars like a Passover lamb, and the very next section, Josephus mentions three of his friends who were crucified.
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And he went to the governor and asked they be brought down, and the three were taken off the crosses, but one survived.
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There it is. Jesus is a fake. It was all based on Josephus. Really? Wow.
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And you made a movie about this. I hope you only used one camera. I mean, I hope it didn't cost you much, you know, because, wow.
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But, you know, so there it was. And there's just so much of this stuff out there that a lot of folks just look at and go,
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The only way to say you know the truth is to become one of these narrow -minded fundamentalists who say,
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I'm not even going to listen to any of that stuff. I'm not going to study any of that stuff. I don't care about any of that stuff.
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I've just got my way, and that's it. And I know it's the truth.
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So there's the precipice that people find themselves standing upon.
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Either you fall off into the abyss of nobody has a clue what the truth is, or you fall off into the abyss of I'm a closed -minded fundamentalist, and I cannot interact with the world.
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I cannot address the world. I'm going to live in my own little cloistered monastery cell type thing or amongst my own little people and not even think about all these things.
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And they feel the only options that they really have are between those two.
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And so when it says he will guide you into all the truth, that really, I think, causes us to have to ask ourselves the question, do we believe that the
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Spirit of God, A, did that historically, and B, is that truth still available to us today?
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And I wasn't planning on a sermon this morning, but it certainly strikes me as something that's rather important in our day, because it seems to me that all of the degradation, what was the term that was used in Spurgeon's day, the downgrade controversy?
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Spurgeon would be amazed at the downgrade that we are experiencing today, even amongst allegedly conservative churches.
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But what is allowing people who 20 years ago would have said, oh,
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God's revelation on human sexuality and marriage is very clear, there's no question about it, there's no...
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What is allowing people who 20 years ago would have said that, to today, saying, you know, we need to get over this.
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You know, as the new Pope said, sometimes we tend to obsess about these things.
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Really? Okay. What has allowed that kind of rapid change to take place, to where there's a lot of voices saying, unless you want to get completely left behind, completely marginalized, left out in the boonies of society, then there are certain things that you need to start getting on board with, and one of them is that our society has decided that marriage is just simply a temporary contractual relationship between fill in the blanks, and it can be as many blanks as you want, and you don't even have to necessarily make it humans, and that's just all it is, and you just need to get with it, and otherwise you're hateful.
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What allows... Is it something that's changed in 20 years? Or if we look back, would we see that there is a fundamental problem even 20 years ago, and 30 years ago, and 50 years ago, and I say it comes back to both of the questions
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I just asked, he will guide you in all the truth. Did he, the historical question, and is he, the present tense ministry question?
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In many, many seminaries, what you are taught, well, in many, many Bible colleges, what you are taught is really to question whether the historical issue can be answered.
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In other words, I think the vast majority of people graduate from Bible college and seminary with a master's degree in confusion, and I saw that.
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I saw that years ago when I graduated from Fuller. I saw people who came in, and they pretty much knew what they believed, and once they graduated, they had no idea what they believed anymore.
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Now, was that Fuller's fault? Partly. Sure. Was that their fault in having gone in without a firm foundation, and maybe the churches that did or did not send them?
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Yeah. Definitely. If you don't have a firm conviction and foundation in understanding of what truth is, then when you get exposed to all sorts of different views and all sorts of different perspectives, that can have a broadening of your scope.
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I mean, I'm not saying that it's good, that Christians should,
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I'm not saying that Christians should be in their little enclaves and, you know, I was basically, look,
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I was, a lot of us were raised this way. If someone is different from us, they must not be going to heaven, because God's grace isn't big enough to say people are different from us.
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So, you know, these, like, on the playground, so where do you go to church? I go to a Lutheran church. I can see the flames around you now, you know.
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You know, or I'm a Presbyterian. What's that? You know, it's such a long word, you know.
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I'm not saying that's a good thing. And the problem is, once we start learning that, wow,
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I've got some great Presbyterian brothers and sisters in the Lord, the tendency, once you realize that, is to start going, so everybody's in.
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There are no dividing lines. There are no distinctives. And that's where the problem is. That's where the emergent church has come from.
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Almost everybody in the emergent church is an old -time fundamentalist. And they start realizing that old -time fundamentalism was not big enough to actually contain all of God's truth.
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And it's like, whoosh, now everything's fair game. You know, they just throw it all out and, oh, let's just grab hold of everything.
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If any of you ever listened to the dialogue I did with Brian McLaren a couple of years ago on that very subject, you know, he and I had a very similar upbringing.
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You know, he talks about his spit -shine black shoes and his white shirt and his clip -on tie, you know, in kindergarten.
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And that was me. I've got pictures of me. You know, this is natural for me. I've got pictures of me in kindergarten with a beautiful bow tie on.
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It was great. You know, it was 1967, 68, something like that, you know.
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And I've got this, you know, silly grin and missing a few teeth, and here's my bow tie, you know.
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So I'm just going back to my childhood. That's all. But that's what I was raised with too.
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So here we are. He's a little bit older than I am, but, you know, we're four decades down the road, and I still believe, and he doesn't.
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Why? Where is the difference? Well, obviously, we would say the Spirit of God is the difference. But the point is that there is a fundamental conviction that God has spoken.
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And even when you discover that, you know, for example, I remember very clearly sitting up in the balcony at a very large
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Baptist church a number of years ago, hearing the pastor saying, now the Greek here says, and the thought crossed my mind, and I was raised in a good
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Christian home, but I hadn't put two and two together yet. Why do we care about Greek?
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You know, I mean, my Bible's in my language, and the idea that, well, it didn't just float down from heaven on a fluffy cloud with leather binding and gold pages and thumb indexing.
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Once we discover that there is a process whereby the Scriptures were given to us, and then there was a process whereby the canon came to be recognized by the church over time, when we realize all these things, sometimes it can be very unsettling to people.
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And unless there is that groundedness, very frequently people just start throwing off everything and wandering off into na -na land.
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And so if you don't have a conviction that Jesus is speaking the truth here, and of course, sadly,
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I would say 80 % of theological education, minimally, in the United States would tell you,
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Jesus never even said these words anyways. I mean, I'd say 80 % of the people graduating from Bible colleges and seminaries would have a fundamental distrust in the nature of these words, well, because John's so different from Matthew, Mark, and Luke, you know.
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If you don't have that foundation, then there's going to be all sorts of bad stuff that's going to result from that.
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And then, of course, even if you have that, even if you go, well, okay, I guess I can see how
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God could have guided the apostles into all truth, but it's been a long time.
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And they may have known what the truth was, but there's just so many opinions since then.
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Well, there you have the question, is that same Holy Spirit active today or not? That really becomes the question, and it's pretty easy.
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I'm not sure if any of you have heard the debate Thursday night between Michael Brown and Sam Waldron that I moderated, but it's certainly understandable why, in light of the abuse of the
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Spirit today, and the absurdities that are attributed to the
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Spirit in so much of what we see around us, why someone would go, well, can we really believe that He will guide you into all the truth?
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Is that still a present tense ministry of the Spirit of God, and how would
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He do that, and why then are there all these differences, and so on and so forth? So, something to be thinking about, something certainly to consider, especially as we teach our young people, and they go into an ever more aggressively oppositional world.
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No two ways about it. He will guide you into all the truth, but He will not speak on His own initiative.
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Whatever He hears, He will speak, and He will disclose to you what is to come. Now, once again, some people have looked at this and said, well, obviously here the
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Spirit, therefore, is not really personal, even though personal pronouns are being used, so on and so forth, because how could
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God not speak on His own initiative? How can the Spirit be deity if the
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Spirit does not speak on His own initiative? But you'll notice that it says, for He will not speak afeal to, from Himself.
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This is exact parallel to what you had in John chapter 5, because remember, in John chapter 5, when the
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Jews recognize that Jesus is claiming deity,
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He is, in essence, saying, my Father is working until now, and I am working.
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Claiming the divine prerogative to work on the Sabbath day, which only
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God had. Jesus' response was not to deny His deity, but to deny that He was some separate
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God out in competition with the Father. And He says, I can do nothing, interestingly enough, afeal to, of Myself, in isolation, separate from.
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There is a perfect unity between the Father and the Son. Well, now you've got the exact same thing here. Why is it that we can trust that He will guide you into all the truth?
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Because He will not speak on His own initiative. He's not off by Himself. He doesn't have His own agenda.
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There is a unity in the Godhead. But instead, just as Jesus spoke the words that were given to Him by the
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Father, in the same way, the Spirit, whatever He hears, He will speak and He will disclose to you what is to come. So, this is not some willy -nilly promise that Christians are going to run around going, well,
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I've got a word for you, brother. This week you're going to have a flat tire while riding your bike.
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You know, this kind of thing, which happens all the time. In fact, it did happen to me this week, which is probably why
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I said that, because it was still fresh on my mind, because I couldn't get it fixed, because the other tube that I was carrying with me turned out to be bad.
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So, that was fun. But that happens, you know, and there are people running around, and they're having words of knowledge and prophecy and all the rest of that kind of stuff.
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The point is that there is a perfect unity between the
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Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And so, you're not going to be getting different truths. There's no competition.
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There is perfect unity and consistency. I remember very clearly a college professor
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I had once at Phoenix College that said, you cannot talk about truth without talking about consistency.
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Right, Brother Callahan? Yeah, that was Brother Callahan. I remember where I was sitting when he said that.
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That's scary, because I sit in front of my computer all the time now and wonder why I just opened that browser window, because I can't remember anything for 10 seconds long.
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It's terrible. You sit there going, okay, I was going to do something. How many of you have done that? You sit there going,
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I was about to do something. I clicked on the browser. What was I going to do? It's terrible.
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But I remember where I was sitting when Brother Callahan talked about the fact you can't talk about truth without talking about consistency in a logic class at Phoenix College.
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Now, why is that? I don't know. The human mind is an odd, strange thing. But I do recall that very, very clearly.
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So, there is consistency between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. That is something we should be extremely thankful for.
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One of the things that I was reminded of in listening to that, or reading that book yesterday, was the fact that when
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I first met with those first two Mormon missionaries, one of the last things, the first time
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I had been really studying Mormonism, I mean, this was shortly after Kelly and I got married, so we're talking 31 years ago, and I remember one of the last things
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I said to them before they left, Elders Reed and Reese, was, someday you're going to need to know a
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God that does not change. Your God has changed and is still changing. Someday when you need to know the God that does not change,
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I hope you'll look me up. And that pretty much remains the message that I've had for Mormons all along.
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And reading that book yesterday reminded me of what it's like to be in a faith where God changes, and God has evolved and progressed to the position where He is now.
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What an amazing thing to believe about God. There is consistency, and hence the leadership of the
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Spirit of the Apostles is one that can be trusted. He will glorify me, for He will take of mine and will disclose it to you.
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It's very important that you understand that each of the
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Divine Persons in the Trinity has taken the position they've taken in the economy of salvation voluntarily.
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The Spirit has taken a position that does not put
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Him in the front. The Spirit has taken a position that primarily causes
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Him to be one who speaks of and witnesses to another. And so if you ever encounter a form of Christianity where the
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Spirit becomes the focus, you're not dealing with biblical Christianity. Because the
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Spirit will glorify me. He will glorify me, for He will take of mine and will disclose it to you.
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Now that does not make the Spirit lesser than the Son, it makes the Spirit different than the
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Son. And you need to understand that. They have not taken the same roles in redemption.
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And one of the primary ways in which people argue against the Trinity is to demonstrate that each of the
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Divine Persons is different than the other. We believe that. We believe we can recognize who the
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Father is, who the Son is, who the Spirit is. One of the reasons is what's called the opera ad intra, the interrelationships of the
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Divine Persons. So, for example, the Son is related to the Father. There's the begettal idea, not in time, but eternity.
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And then the Father and Son send the Spirit procession. These are relationships within the
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Trinity itself. But then in the economy of salvation, they've taken different roles. And, for example, the
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Father has never been incarnate. Only the Son has been incarnate. It is the
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Spirit who now indwells the people of God. There are different roles they've taken.
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And one of the roles of the Spirit is that He will glorify me, Jesus. Now, does that mean that the
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Spirit does not glorify the Father? Well, no.
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But the primary way in which the Father is glorified is through the work of the Son. So, the
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Spirit points us to the Son, and the Son's work points us to the Father. And it's the Father who sends both the
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Son and the Spirit. So, you have these relationships, which is why
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Calvin quotes from, I believe, I think it's Gregory of Nyssa, who rightly said,
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Whenever my mind focuses upon the three, it is brought back to the unity of the one.
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And when I contemplate the glory of the one, I cannot help but understand the relationship of the three.
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Which is a paraphrase of the quote that I start my chapter on the Trinity on in the book that I'm doing with Shabir Ali.
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But it's true. And I would submit to anyone, it's just simply impossible to interpret this
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New Testament as it exists today, and certainly the Gospel of John, outside of a
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Trinitarian context. When the Spirit comes, He will glorify me. That's Jesus speaking.
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This is one of the reasons liberals go, Well, we know Jesus wasn't like that, so we can't believe
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He ever said these words. A little bit of a circular thing going on there.
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But the idea being that this had to have developed much later, because Jesus would never have said the
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Holy Spirit is going to glorify me. But when you think about it, if these words are
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Scripture, and many of the groups that deny the deity of Christ do believe that they are Scripture, how do you make sense of this?
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Certainly, these words could never have been spoken from the Islamic perspective, because there would be no possible way for a mere prophet to say,
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The Spirit of God, when He comes, who, by the way, I will send, which is a function of deity, He will glorify me.
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That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. But again, the danger is we read these words, we know the background, we know who
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Christ is, and as a result, we sort of pass by some of the greatest evidences of the deity of Christ, which are right there in front of our noses, but we don't see them, because we let the opponents define the ground of battle, rather than us doing that.
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That's something that needs to be kept in mind. He will glorify me, for He will take of mine, and will disclose it to you.
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Mine. He will take of mine. It's literally, because of my own.
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Ectu emu. Well, what's that? I would suggest that probably it is the truth about Christ, the whole truth about Christ, the whole understanding of the
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Gospel, the whole understanding of the Incarnation, the Sacrifice, the union of the people of God with Christ, all these things.
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There is going to be a growth in the understanding of what
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God has done in Christ. It's going to take some time. We would like to think that as soon as the
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Resurrection took place, that God is going to send down a nice westernized printer manual style thing, saying the result of these actions are
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Section 1A, Redemption, and then put that in Section 1C.
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That's not how Revelation has ever been. There is a ministry of the
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Spirit over time to the disciples, and we see them growing in their understanding.
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We see Jesus meeting with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, and has to open their minds and discuss with them what the
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Scripture had testified, and all of these things. And this is done by the
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Holy Spirit. All things that the Father has are mine, therefore I said that he takes of mine and will disclose it to you.
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So, again, you've got to see the beauty of the consistency here.
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All things the Father has are mine. Again, impossible to read those words.
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If Jesus is a mere apostle, a mere human, it doesn't make any sense whatsoever that a creature could say these words, a mere creature.
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All things the Father has are mine. So, there's this inner penetration, the Father and the Son. He is in me,
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I am in him. Again, that comes out again in the next chapter, in chapter 17. Therefore, I said that he takes of mine.
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He takes of divine truth, which is the possession of the Father and the
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Son, and will disclose it to you. In other words, we have a promise that whatever is necessary, as Peter would say, we have been given everything that is necessary for life and godliness.
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Not everything that would be fun to have. I think one of the problems that many people have had over the years is wrestling with the reality that God has the right to limit what he reveals.
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That we do not have an exhaustive revelation of everything there is to know about God and everything there is to know about what
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God has done in this world. I mean, the Bible is only yay big in print.
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You can download it real fast on your iPad or your phone now. It is not an exhaustive manual of everything
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God has ever done. No human writing could even begin to comprehend everything that God has done and is doing.
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But what he has done is he has given us a sufficient revelation. It is sufficient in its extent.
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It is sufficient in its revelation. But what it requires of each generation is that with the
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Spirit's presence and guidance, we plumb the depths of that revelation and make application to our own lives.
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And when we get the idea that preceding generations have figured it all out and we can just simply sign on the dotted line, that is where it becomes a problem.
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Christianity is not a genetic religion. It is not passed down through the genotype. And I think, unfortunately, there are certain
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Reformed people who got that idea and you see the result in Europe today. Where you still have state churches, but they have been dead for so long, the corpse does not even stink anymore.
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There comes a time when corpses stop stinking because there is not left to put off the smell. And that is certainly the case, sadly, in historically
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Reformed nations in Northern Europe, which tend to be, today, the most liberal and the most abrasive.
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They embrace the culture of death. Belgium, for example. Oh, my goodness.
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There are now people in Belgium. Belgium has become the euthanasia capital of Europe. A pair of twin brothers,
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I think in their mid -forties, just had themselves killed because they did not want to live life.
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And now they have people in Belgium who are actually promoting the extension of the right to euthanasia to children.
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To children. So, if you are an eight -year -old and you decide life is not worth living, well, you should have the right to end it all right then and there.
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You are just like, what happened? I am not blaming Reformed folks for that. What I am blaming is, when the light goes out, it gets real dark.
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And when there has been a lot of light, and the light goes out, it gets real dark. And it is really dark in Europe.
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It really, really is. So, anyway, we are out of time.
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So, we need to close our time with a Word of Prayer. Father, we thank you for your
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Word, the ministry of the Holy Spirit, the beauty of the balance of your Word, and the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit.
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We are just truly excited to see what your Word says in these matters.
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And it gives us confidence to pray that you would be with us now by your Spirit as we go into worship, that you would lift up our hearts and our minds, that you would be honored and glorified in everything we pray in Christ's name.