My name is Sam Bleeby and this is study number 11 in the 2013 New Creation Teaching Ministry Summer School. And my topic is the Indwelling of the Spirit of God. Last year I had the great privilege of being able to speak at a theological conference. I'm not sure why I was asked. The person who organized the conference knew me personally and I think it was probably through that. And what I was doing was I was responding or critiquing a theological paper. It was a paper of probably the foremost youth ministry theologian. I bet you didn't even know there were such a thing, but in Australia. And I discovered through that experience that it was one thing to sit in my study and critique a theological paper, and it was quite another thing to be standing in front of people at a conference and with the author of the theological paper sitting in the front row looking at me intently. And I can tell you that experience as I was standing there, it suddenly became immensely important to me that I had understood him properly and was representing him fairly and actually honoring him in the things that I said. I said a little bit earlier that I'm speaking on a topic, but I'm not really. I'm speaking about a person, and he's present. Well, God is God and I am not God. As we've been hearing over the summer school, that's not the sentence we start with, is it? We actually start with the absurdity. We start with the vile and muck-filled horror of I am God and God is not God. We start with self-idolatry. We start as the God pretenders, as Derek's been telling and unfolding to us this morning. I am God, and you are not God, and God is not God. We never actually say it that boldly, would we? But we're quite happy to live it boldly. To live the self-centric life where my needs and wants, my comfort and convenience are paramount, where I am the master and commander of all that I am, In our society, we're actually applauded when we live that out. It's what our kids are taught in our schools. It's what leadership and self-actualization seminars across the country tell us. It's what our consumer culture and economy is based on. It's based on idolatry of self. If you ever wondered why we in the West lack external idols, to use the words that Wayne used yesterday, why don't we have great big statues set up in our shopping centers? Why don't we have great temples and place impressive gods in them? I wonder whether idolatry of other things is actually just a cover for idolatry of self. If the first sin was motivated by being like God, and being our own God able to choose what is right and what is wrong, then is all non-worship of God a grasping after self-worship? Do we make idols in our own image so that we can worship ourselves? If that's the case, and there's a lot more to be said, there's a whole role of the spiritual realm that's opposed to God in all this as well, but if that's the case, do we lack obvious idols in the West? Because we've simply given up the facade. We've become bold and shameless and indeed proud of our sin and so we unabashedly give ourselves over to self-worship. Perhaps we lack physical idols, not because we're not idolaters, but because we're bolder idolaters. The God pretenders. And the thing about idolatry is that it enslaves you, it gets its claws into you, it taints you, it reaches into your heart, into the very depths of who you are, and it deposits its filth. So that what proceeds from my heart, what comes out of it is the darkness of my self-worship, the muck of my pride, my selfishness, my lovelessness that necessarily comes from believing that I am God and God is not. And so our hearts and our minds and our mouths become full with a filth and a grime that no amount of scrubbing is going to clean. A mark that's not just skin deep, but it is heart deep. And that is why we need the Holy Spirit. That's why anything that happens out there externally to me will fail to cleanse me. My good actions will fail to cleanse me. My good words will fail to cleanse me. Even my good thoughts will fail to clean me because they're all tainted by my sin. It's like taking a dirty rag and trying to rub myself clean with it. And even worse than that, you just can't get deep enough, you can't get into the heart. Anything that happens out there externally to me cannot cleanse me. Even the death and resurrection of Jesus on the cross cannot clean me. if it remains external to me, something that is out there. We need the Holy Spirit, the Spirit that comes into us and dwells in the deepest part of our hearts. Ezekiel 36 verse 25, God says, I will sprinkle clean water upon you and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses and from all your idols I will cleanse you. It takes God's power to clean us from the muck and the filth of our idolatry. And how does He do that? Verse 26, a new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within you and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. It takes God's Holy Spirit and the action of God's Spirit is so deep and complete in our hearts that He doesn't just wash our hearts, He gives us a new heart. What are we describing here? We're describing an experience that if you're in Christ, you have had. We're describing the action of God the Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit on your heart as you came to Christ. And that's a ministry that's only applied through the work of the Holy Spirit, reaching into the very depths of who we are and bringing to bear the cleansing that comes from Christ's cross. That's why the gift of the Holy Spirit can actually be seen as the greatest blessing of the gospel. Because without him, the cross is ineffectual to me. Omo Ultimate may well be the very best laundry powder the world has ever seen. But if it doesn't get into my washing machine, it's not going to do my clothes any good. The cross is the glorious work of God, the power of God for salvation, sufficient to cleanse the whole world of sin. But if the Holy Spirit is not poured into my heart, applying the power of the cross to my heart, taking out my heart of stone and giving me a heart of flesh, then it will not clean me. It will leave me and myself idolatry in the filth of I am God and God is not God. What a glorious grace then that God would give us his Spirit. Sometimes I wonder if we underestimate, I'm sure we do actually, the wonder and the blessing of having the presence of God himself dwelling within us. John 16, Jesus tells his disciples that he's about to leave them. And he wants to impress upon them something that they're going to find hard to believe. That's why he begins with, I tell you the truth. And what does he say to them? He says, and not just to them, he said, what does he say to us? He says, I tell you the truth. It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the counselor will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. Imagine the Lord Jesus was standing here before us this morning, up on the platform. Not in his returned glory, not to catch us all into the end of things and catch us up into the great and terrible day of the Lord, as one day he will, but simply here with us. Can you imagine the rapture and the joy of our worship? As we bowed before him, fell at his feet, as we bathed in the wonder of his presence and were filled with the fear of the Lord, could you imagine it? Can you imagine the zeal with which we would actually go out and tell the world of this glorious Lord who we've seen with our very own eyes? Can you imagine what it would be like? What a wonderful experience it would be to have the Lord here bodily among us. And yet Jesus says, truly I tell you, it is better that I go away because then Then I can give you my spirit and you can have the spirit dwell inside you. Having me among you is good, but even better, I will send you my spirit. And what does the spirit do? What are the glorious benefits of the spirit that Jesus himself would depart from us to give? Well, firstly, he convicts us of sin. We continue in John 16, Jesus says, I will send the Holy Spirit to you, and verse 8, when he comes he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment. And so the first glorious benefit of the Spirit is that he convicts us of sin. It doesn't really sound like a glorious benefit, does it? It sounds negative and unpleasant. no doubt cutting a tumor out is negative and unpleasant and yet gives us the glorious benefit of being able to continue to live. Well the Spirit comes and he cuts and he brings us into a conviction of guilt. Verse 9, in regard to sin because men do not believe in me. People don't believe in me. That is, people don't believe that he is the Lord and the Savior. What's one of the reasons, what's one of the main reasons people don't believe in God? Well if we go back to Genesis again and the original sin in which Adam and Eve failed to believe the Word of God, the heart of their unbelief was their desire to be as God. And that actually continues to be the flavor of our sin and our unbelief. Original sin is never original for us. That is, the Spirit comes and He convicts the world of guilt because we failed to treat God as God and took the Godhead to ourselves. The Spirit is the Spirit of truth, John 16, 13, and so He will tell us the confronting and awful truth of ourselves and expose the terrible lie at the heart of who we are and tell us the glorious truth that God is God and we are not. Well the first of the glorious benefits of the Spirit is that he comes and convicts. But of course he doesn't just leave us there. So far He's simply shown us the grime and the mark of our guilt and brought into our hearts the pain of the knowledge that we were not created for this, that in reaching for more than we are, we settled for less than we are. He's shown us the abject filth of what we have heaped upon ourselves. But the Holy Spirit doesn't do it to just leave us there. He comes and He washes and He cleanses. How does He do that? The cleansing comes as the Holy Spirit brings to us and applies the power of the cross of Jesus Christ and His ascended Lordship. I'm going to give you a series of words. They're way too small. They're way too small for the glorious things that they cover and the immense power of the cross that they express. Repentance, a gift of God which he inspires through his spirit, where we confess the truth of our rebellion against the one true God and turn to new life in him. Faith, not a work of my mind, but a spiritual gift. The gift that allows us to abandon all reliance on my own powers, I am not God, and enables us to live in full and joyful trust and to delight in Him. God is God. Forgiveness. The unbounded grace of God in pardoning sinners. justification, where Christ's righteousness is reckoned as mine, I am acquitted of all my sin, and that too is actually ministered by the Holy Spirit. Romans 8 verse 1, there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, for the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. And all these things work together to be the cleansing of your heart. Cleansing from our idols, the granting of a new heart that was spoken of in Ezekiel. And so we can look back today on the filth and the muck of our self-idolatry and say by the grace of God and the working of His Spirit, that is what I once was. And echoing the words of 1 Corinthians 6, we can say we were washed. We were sanctified. We were justified. in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our God. Now I'll skip to reasonably quickly over some of the great works of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Because I want to spend the rest of our time on a subject I'm reasonably sure is much neglected in our churches. I know at least it has been in mine. I want to talk about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Not the spectacular giftings, the speaking in tongues and the prophecy and the words of knowledge. We certainly think on those things and they're glorious gifts of the Spirit. But I want to talk about the daily, moment by moment, indwelling of God that calls us to a holiness of life. Ezekiel 33, 27, I will put my spirit within you. and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. The Lord by His Spirit doesn't just give us a new heart. He takes up residence in our hearts and enables us to live the renewed life. Do you know that right now You have the Holy Spirit within you. You have the presence of God Almighty himself within you if you are in Christ. Do you know that? Do you know what a fearful and wonderful thing that is? The presence of God is never something to be taken lightly. The presence of God is something to be desired and in which to delight, it's something to long for. So, Psalm 16 verse 11, we hear that in your presence there is fullness of joy and in your right hands are pleasures for evermore. If you want joy, and not just a little bit of joy, if you want and not just passing pleasure, but forever pleasure, then you will long for, you will desire, you will seek out the presence of God. That's completely opposite to what the world thinks, isn't it? Christianity is a killjoy, you can't do anything. I think there's a picture of God, he's sitting up in the clouds and he's looking down and he's saying that Sam's about to have fun. And he says, not on my watch, No. We talk about people having the war on terror. I think people think God has a war on joy. That's not the God we worship. In His presence is fullness of joy and pleasures for evermore. And so we want His presence, we long for His presence, but the presence of a holy God is a fearful and weighty thing. and something that's more than a little problematic for us. Ever since the fall when Adam and Eve were driven from the Lord's presence, God's presence has been dangerous to us. The people of Israel knew this at the foot of Mount Zion. Moses comes down and they say to Moses, you go up and talk to God because if we go, it'll kill us. Such a holy God. The holy presence of God is an awesome and terrible thing for sinful people. The prophet Nahum speaks of God coming in judgment. He says, the Lord is slow to anchor, but great in power. The Lord will not leave the guilty unpunished. His way is in the whirlwind and the storm and the clouds are the dust of his feet. The mountains quake before him and the hills melt away. The earth trembles at his presence. The word and all world and all who live in it. We can be so careless in our approach to God. So blasé in our approach to God. so thoughtlessly turned to him and we can so lightly consider him. And yet the earth, dust and rock though it was, had the sense to tremble before him. God's covenant people of old knew that God's presence was something weighty and awesome. The tabernacle and the temple were an elaborate reflection of the difficulty we have in approaching God. a holy God. The tabernacle and temple were the place of God's presence with his people. He very graciously came to dwell amongst his people, but his presence was something the people could only approach through the sacrificial shedding of blood. And even then, they couldn't go fully into his presence, into the holy of holies. The high priest could once a year, but I think there was actually more to emphasize the separation than to bridge it. It was God's presence there that made the temple holy and his presence that made the people holy. To overcome that final separation, to be able to enter into the holy of holies, to be in his presence, we would need to have our sin decisively dealt with. And so when Jesus died upon the cross, as God's holy anger against our sin was poured out on him and our sin was dealt with once for all upon the cross, the curtain was torn in two and we could come into his presence. And gloriously, as that curtain was torn in two, a way was made for his presence to come into us in a new way. for God's Holy Spirit to make His dwelling place within us. Do you know if you are Christ then the Holy Spirit is dwelling in you now? 1 Corinthians 6 verse 19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? So the temple was that grace-filled provision of God by which the blessing of his presence came among his people, a place where sins were expunged, the public place that was known among the whole nations as the worship place of the Lord God Almighty and you are his temple now. how little I think about this, but how much it would actually transform my thinking and my living if I was more mindful of it. You may say, well that's amazing, but I don't really feel like he's in me. I don't really see him. In the first temple, the most sacred part of the temple, that for which all the rest existed and on which all depended was the Holy of Holies. And even though a priest who was working there day in and day out might never go into the Holy of Holies, might never see the glorious presence of his God, everything that he did, all his conduct was regulated by that truth. that he was present. And all his faith was animated by the thought of the unseen presence there. Their whole life was controlled and inspired by the faith of the unseen indwelling glory within the veil. It's no different for you and me in some ways. You may never see the fullness of God's glorious and holy presence burning in your heart, but as we know his presence is there, that becomes the reality that regulates our conduct, animates our faith, and inspires a new life. These days we often mistake the temple for the body. the temple for the God. We pump iron and we admire ourselves in the mirror and worship the fact that I am God, worshipping our own image and impressing ourselves with our Godness, that I am God, or at least a God. I don't know about you, but the other night when Andrew Clinesmith invited us to appreciate his body and his dress sense, the word Adonis came into my mind. That might've just been me, I don't know. But not as marvelous as God has made our bodies, I am not God. And just as it was God's presence that made the temple in Jerusalem the temple and not the decorations and the glorious building itself, it's God's presence that makes the body the temple. The indwelling Holy Spirit sanctifies us and so we are both to live a holy life and we are able to live a holy life. And so we're back at Ezekiel 36, 27. I will put my spirit within you and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. What's the concrete expression of I am not God? It's obedience. It's the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that enables us to follow God's commandments. That is, to live a life that acknowledges God's lordship, not our own, and our own dependent creatureliness. Something of an irony, isn't it? That it actually takes God within us to realize that we're not God. In some ways it makes perfect sense, doesn't it? I might think that I'm quite good at tennis until Novak Djokovic drops around and gives me a set. I might think that the sonnets that I write are extraordinary in all the world until they're brought into the presence of a sonnet by Shakespeare. And then I realize that if they're extraordinary at all, they're extraordinarily bad. When God draws near in His holy and powerful presence, our self-delusions flee. And we're left only to fall down before our Lord and acknowledge our sin. And our Lord is so lovingly, so graciously, He lifts us up and He empowers us by His presence to live anew and afresh in Him. But we should be clear that the Holy Spirit doesn't give us some kind of automated holiness. It's not like a coke machine. You pop the money in and out pops a coke. You don't just pop the Holy Spirit in and out pops holy and righteous actions. It's not an automated thing. If only it was that easy. Let go and let God, they say. And yet the indwelling of the Spirit is nothing so passive. He comes within us and He calls us to war. It's a call to fight with God against the powers of unrighteousness. The Holy Spirit stirs our hearts to oppose with all the vigor that He inspires the hidden evils of our hearts that join with the hidden evils of our world. Jeff Bingham wrote that we are to be obedient and to be filled, to be aglow, to receive the Spirit in continuing relationship, to receive His supply, to work according to His gifts, to be led, to follow Him, to be empowered. This is an attitude of the mind. I will, that is I decide, I will be filled or I will not. We will live in the Spirit or we will not. Will you be filled with the Spirit? It comes as a complete gift of God, the indwelling of the Spirit's already there, but will you live in the Spirit? Too often I will not. I wonder if you've observed the work of the Holy Spirit in your heart long enough to recognize this. this situation. You're on the edge of a sin. You've joined in battle a hundred times. The Holy Spirit has even taken the taste of this sin from your mouth. You don't even want to do it. He's orchestrated circumstances such that there are clear ways out of it. The Holy Spirit is so fought that the battle simply requires one decisive blow and time slows down and all the eyes of that unseen battle turn to you. Will you be filled with the Spirit? Will you live in the Spirit? It's such a difficult path to tread. We have to be careful here because we can avoid the bog on the one side and we can end up in the mire on the other. Because as soon as I mention our will, the moralists among us will raise our heads and gleefully charge into the fray and leave the Holy Spirit behind. We can't put to death a single evil deed. if the Holy Spirit does not animate, aid and empower us. If we don't start with the glorious truth that the victory has already been won in the Lord Jesus Christ and on His cross, that His grace has already covered everything. Too often we're moralists, we're not Christians. If we try to do it in our own will, we end up in will worship, and that's a very subtle form of I am God. And we will fight, and we will fight to exhaustion, and we will fail, and we'll be tired of the fight. Is that you? Are you tired of the fight? Find a place today, a quiet place. Read about the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, maybe read one of the accounts of his crucifixion. Sit down and repent of your sins, bring them to the Lord Jesus Christ and speak to the Holy Spirit and say to him, I am tired. I am tired of fighting alone. Come fight for me." And ask Him to empower you anew, to fill you anew, and to lead you into a great holiness of life. Do it today. Because it's so easy to be a moralist and not a Christian. To refuse to do evil and legalistically try and keep the law, the indwelling of the Spirit is warmer and it's deeper than that. He does work in your life to negate evil and He does infuse you with the joy of true obedience. But more than that, His call to the holy life is actually a call to the participation in the very purposes of God. And so the obedience that the Holy Spirit gives, it's not episodic, it's not punctilia, that probably doesn't help you, does it? It's not going from one little point of moral decision to the next. You don't go through life and then you suddenly come to a moral decision and then you call on the Holy Spirit and say, help me to go this way. It's not like that. It's not little discreet actions like that. No, we walk by the Spirit constantly. It's a constant walking. The obedience inspired by the Holy Spirit has direction, it pushes towards a telos, an end. And that telos is not me, I am not God, but the glorious fulfillment of the Father's rule in the Lord Jesus Christ. We've been talking about the ongoing work of sanctification. F.F. Bruce in his study on Romans said that sanctification is glory begun. Glory is sanctification completed. The transformation of life the Holy Spirit works within us actually catches us up into the eschatological purposes of God. and draws us towards the glory that he has prepared for us. Too often we end up just looking inside and trying to fight there, but if we would raise our eyes to the glory of what God has prepared for us and the direction in which the Spirit in the life is leading us, that's a completely different battle. As we look towards that glorious day when all our striving with self and sin is done, and we are cleansed and we are holy and we are perfect, when we stand before the throne of Jesus Christ who is all in all, with all our hearts we cry out, you are God. how I look forward to that day when I stand with you, by the grace of God, and say those words.