Turn to Ephesians and chapter one. Ephesians and chapter one is where we're gonna be. All right, let's read a passage and then we'll pray. And I'm gonna start at verse 15 read down to the end of the chapter Ephesians chapter 1 says wherefore I also after I heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and love unto all the saints cease not to give thanks for you making mention of you in my prayers that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened, that you may know what is the hope of his calling and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints. and what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us word who believe according to the working of his mighty power which he wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places far above all principality and power and might and dominion and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come, and hath put all things under his feet and gave him to be the head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him that filleth all in all. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this day and the privilege to be here tonight. I pray and ask you might help us As we come to your word, would you give clarity of thought and speech as we continue in our study, thinking, Father, about what you've told us about the Spirit and how vital that is that we might live a life for your glory through the Spirit's power and presence. And I pray you'd help us with that tonight. Would you pray for the teens and the stalees, just be with them in that setting, and help them, I pray, work in the lives of our youth, Lord we think of the upcoming youth conference and the many teens that will be here as well as Sponsors and youth pastors and wives and and father we want to be a great encouragement in all those that are our guests, but certainly our really our primary focus is that the life of the youth of our church would be strengthened and Encouraged they might be for their challenge to go forward in their life for you and would you help with all those things we think of brother Clement as he's preparing to come and they've just been struggling with some just some mundane kind of things leaks in the roof and how how the devil can just get into details and sort of Affect our spirits and our I pray you just help them with those things father. Please we pray for brother Mormon who's in the hospital tonight. We ask you to put your hand upon him and just give him strength. Be with Barb, give her the strength that she needs to be a help to her husband. I pray you give wisdom to the doctors and nurses and those who will be attending and giving him care. Would you guide and direct in those details. Would you pray for my brother Dan as he heads to Mayo Clinic again for another round of tests. And I pray you might work in his life physically and spiritually. Would you guide and direct their father, please? Lord, we do pray for Annika and Little America as they have to travel back now. And with the situation and the hearings and all those details that can be quite wearing and draining, I pray you just give her the strength she needs. Help her in all of those details. May you work through all of this for your good for your glory and for for their good Father guide and direct please we pray Lord, no doubt there are other needs amongst our church family, some that, Father, we don't know, but you know, and some perhaps that we've just grown used to them being there, but whatever that case, you know what our needs are and we ask you might help us. We think of the work in St. James and how exciting it is that they have a young man coming to be the pastor and just would you help in all of those details now what needs to be done is they make a transition from there in Kentucky to to st. James just helping all those details and Bless that work. We pray Help us now tonight. I pray in Jesus name Amen, I Initially I confess, I thought, I think I'm just gonna do Wednesday night what I preached Sunday morning in St. James, and then, of course, Brother Hoover's here, so I'm so glad the Lord directed me to sort of adjust that a little bit so it's not just a repeat. That can be a little boring. I will bring some of that out, because it does have to do with our study, as we've been studying the Holy Spirit, and how important it is that we might know the Holy Spirit. And we might sense his presence and his power working through us to help us. That's vitally important. Look at verse 20. It says, which he brought in Christ when he raised him from the dead and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places. And over there in Romans chapter eight, we find out just exactly what that is. Okay. Romans eight and If I can get to the right place. There we go, I'm in the wrong chapter. It says, but if the spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his spirit that dwelleth in you. And previously in verse 10, and if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. Verse nine, but ye are not in the flesh, but in the spirit, if so be the spirit of God dwell in you. Now, if any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his. I know we kind of went in the wrong order there, but it's important that we recognize he's talking about the Holy Spirit. That's how Jesus rose from the dead. It's by the Holy Spirit. And that's the spirit that we have. That's the spirit he's placed in us, his spirit. That's the spirit that raised Jesus from the dead. And if you don't have that spirit, you're not saved. It's just that simple, okay? And so we're not trying to belittle or necessarily detract from the importance of the Holy Spirit, His gifts and enablings, etc. But I would hope you would take issue with our charismatic friends. You do not have to speak in tongues to validate your salvation experience. You don't have to get the second blessing, as the old Methodists would say. No, you get all the Holy Spirit when you got saved. And if you didn't, then you didn't get saved, okay? That's very important that we recognize that. Well, we are working through that about knowing the Holy Spirit. And of course, we were in Acts 1 and verse 8 a while back, you know, about the Holy Spirit coming upon us, and ye shall be witnesses, okay? Ye shall receive power. After that, the Holy Ghost has come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me, both in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth. And we studied some subsequent passages in the book of Acts, how the Holy Spirit manifested Himself in a very special, significant way, and folks got saved. Phenomenal, I mean Peter going to Cornelius's house and a bunch of Gentiles got saved and that was a big shockeroo to all the Jews that were there But God was working in them. Okay, and we looked at several of those events So tonight as I'm thinking about the power of the Holy Spirit I was reading a little more in Finney's little book, and he gives an interesting incident, a testimony of an incident that takes place. He was at, he didn't mention the name of the town where he was, but he was preaching there, and on Monday he decided he'd go down to the mill, you know, where they weave cloth, and just kind of like get a tour, and just visit this manufacturing plant, And as he goes into the room where all the looms are, they have Mike and Donna back, okay. It was pretty loud, you know, and mostly everyone at the loom was a young lady. And so he's just kind of glancing around. And several of them start looking at each other and kind of snickering. And I forget now that he used a particular term to describe their behavior. It was not a term we would use today, but I took from that. They were kind of snickering and being a little kind of mocking and so forth of this silly preacher and things like that. Except Finney says, I wasn't speaking to them. It was too loud. Nobody would have even heard what I said, but I could tell they were looking at each other and snickering. And he just stopped and looked at them. He just gave them the look. Whatever that was. And this one gal at the loom got all embarrassed and nervous and then the string broke on her loom and she was trying to fix it but she was so jittery and nervous and then she got under conviction. And next thing you know, the gal next to her got under conviction and this one and this. In just a few moments, every woman at the loom in that big area of that factory, they were all on their knees crying out to God for mercy and praying. The owner of the mill walks in, who, according to Finney, was a an openly very unsaved man, antagonistic to the gospel, with the superintendent, like the foreman. The foreman was a Christian, the other guy, the owner was not. They walk in, and it was just, the owner got overwhelmed and said to his foreman, shut down the mill, we need some preaching. It's more important that the souls of these women be saved than that we weave cloth. That was an unsaved man, said that. So they cleaned out the, he called it the mule barn. Doesn't sound like a very desirable place to have a preaching service. But anyways, he shut his whole mill down, gathered all his employees, and Finney preached. And within a day or two, the testimony was, everybody that worked at that factory got saved. The whole factory got saved. Wow, that's kind of amazing, isn't it? Wouldn't that be something if that happened to us? Years ago, I'll be discretionary since we're streaming, it was a place locally, and I had contacted them because we had an evangelist coming, and I thought, hey, let's try something like that. Let's just see if we could have a voluntary lunchtime prayer gathering of the employees of this place. And I was under the impression that the owners were Christians, but no, they couldn't do that. They couldn't do that. But I thought, that'd be amazing to have that happen, wouldn't it? It'd be phenomenal to have something like that happen. R.G. Letourneau, who was a Texas industrialist, multimillionaire, kind of a genius kind of a guy, but a very committed Christian, he would shut down his factories for chapel. I mean, he didn't require the employees to get saved. But he was paying their time. I'm paying you to be in this room. I'm your boss. If you want to get paid, come down to this room. And a lot of people got saved, you know. I want you to notice here in our text first. Because we're thinking about the power of the Holy Spirit, okay? And this last Sunday, as I was preaching there in St. James, I talked about the local church's God's Hoover Dam. And some of you may have heard me speak about this before. The Hoover Dam's kind of amazing. Each of those water turbines concentrates the weight of the water as it flows through, and collectively together, all those turbines essentially power the southwestern portion of America. The power from the Hoover Dam goes all the way to California and down to Arizona, New Mexico. It's not just Colorado and Nevada and so on. It transformed the southwestern quadrant of our nation during the Depression. It was a phenomenal project. made of 3.2 million cubic yards of concrete. That is a lot of concrete. To this day, it is the largest solid concrete dam in the Western Hemisphere. And until like 1985 or 89 or something like that, it was the largest solid concrete dam in the world. And it was made in the Depression time. Amazing. Produces as much power as two nuclear power generators. It's a phenomenal place. Now I mention that because That power is the same in all those penstocks that go down to those turbines. It's the same water pressure, etc. And yet collectively together it multiplies that power and spreads it. Okay, and that's what we're supposed to do. The power that is in you and the power that's in me is identical. It is the Holy Spirit. He's not more in you or more in me, he's the same Holy Spirit. The same Holy Spirit. Notice verse 19. Okay as we think about the intensity of His power it says and what is the exceeding? greatness of his power That's that power is like the word where we get dynamite. Okay, so it has a dynamic to it. It's it's Explosive it is phenomenal. Okay to us word. It's to us word who believe according to the Working. That's where we get the word energy in English. That was a big issue. How many times did you hear energy independence in the last 10 months in all of the election stuff? Energy, energy, how important it is to have energy, the ability to perform work. the ability to make a change. According to the working of His mighty, His mighty, it's the word for strength in Mark 12, 30. It talks about loving the Lord with all your strength, all your effort. This is God's effort. his mighty power. There's power once again except this, this is you might say raw power. And so it's mighty because that raw power has been directed and focused for a purpose. How much power does it take to make the world? I read somewhere, some physicist somewhere, he went through all the nuclear physics calculations to determine how much energy would be released if somehow you could extract the energy that's necessary to hold one molecule of water together. A molecule of water doesn't sound like very much. It's not very big, but if you could somehow take all the electrons, neutrons, protons, gluons, and all the rest of the quarks and warks and whatever the rest of the tiny little subatomic particles are, and if you could just bust them all apart, all that, what holds them together, physicists call that binding energy. and we used to have to figure that out, nuclear power school in the Navy, we'd have to figure out how much energy would be released in the nuclear reactor per a single fission event from one atom of uranium, fissionable uranium, busts apart into two fission products, strontium and yttrium, and then they release a bunch of neutrons and blah, blah, blah, all this other kind of stuff. And we'd have to calculate all that and figure out, OK, if you get one fission in the nuclear reactor, how much temperature differences are going to be in the steam to the steam turbine in the engine room? It's like, oh boy, I couldn't do that today. It's been way too long since I've done that kind of stuff. But you see the fission of uranium, that's an unstable atom. It's ready to fall apart. You just got to give it a swift kick and pshh. But a molecule of water isn't unstable. It's excessively stable. So the amount of binding energy holding all those particles together is actually more than the energy in a molecule of uranium. And they say, if you could release the binding energy in a molecule of water, that's enough power to blow the whole earth apart, to blow it up. I can't quite comprehend that. It's kind of outside of my comprehension ability. But that's a lot of energy. And to think the Lord made how many molecules of water are there? There's a whole bunch of them. Not to mention all the moisture in the dirt and all the moisture in the air and all the moisture in our bodies. If he just vaporized all of us, I mean, talk about global warming, man, that'd be pretty amazing, okay? That's just one thing God did. That's just one thing that he did. That's why it's the exceeding greatness. The exceeding greatness of his power. That's quite a phrase, exceeding greatness. It really has the idea of hitting a home run. Except it's not just a home run. It doesn't just go out of the park. Since I don't know the name of any other stadium except Tiger Stadium. So I can't even name you a single player on the team but he hits a home run. It doesn't just go out of the park. It goes around the world. That'd be pretty phenomenal. That's like a Superman home run. That's God's power. It's beyond comprehension. And that's the power that's working in us. Or may I say that's the power he wants to work in us. Exceeding. It says in chapter 3 and verse 20, Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us. That's the Holy Spirit. That's the power, the working of His mighty power. That's what's working, that Holy Spirit, that's in you. So whatever you may be facing, whatever that may be, it really doesn't matter what it is. I mean, as I shared this with the folks in St. James, You know, it's a, I'd say the auditorium is about half this size. From here to the, not even under the balcony. Holds about 100 people, roughly. And it was like, hmm, can you imagine this place being full? Full. because there was, how many were there? Nine people, counting Bridget nine, Brother Hoover, so take the three of us out. There were six people, half a dozen people. It'd be pretty hard to imagine 100 people when you're only six, and not a single child. And I think my wife was the youngest person present. I think, I don't know, Diana, I don't know how old she is, the pianist. It's hard to imagine that the church would be full, but there's a town of over 4,000. A hundred's not even that far out of the reach, actually. But God says, I don't want to just fill you up. I want to do exceedingly abundantly above. We'd be happy if we had 10% of Laurel's population Sunday morning. Actually, we wouldn't be happy. We would be distressed. Because we couldn't fit 600 people in this auditorium. Since I've been here, we've never had 600 people in this auditorium. I think at Tricia B.' 's funeral there was three. something about that, and they were like everywhere. Everywhere. We're like, wow, that'd be amazing. And God says, that's nothing compared to what I want to do, or what I can do. So if you think about God's power, we have to think about the intensity of His power. He's revealing it. Paul's praying that God would help them have a greater understanding of what the Holy Spirit wants to do through them. There's an intensity. and that intensity of power, that's resurrection power. Verse 20, which he brought in Christ, if the power is the Holy Spirit, and we just read all those verses in Romans chapter eight, the power of the resurrection is the Holy Spirit. That power is in you. That's in us. So when we think about the power of God doing amazing things, and it's always we read about it somewhere else, through someone else, at a different time, at a different place. We are no different. We are not exempt from the possibility of God doing great and mighty things. It would be awesome if Friday night, after the banquet when the kids gather in here and brother Clement preaches if the entire assembly was so overcome with the presence of the Holy Spirit and their need whether for salvation or to get right with God or their parents and they all fell on their face and cried out to God to help them and be merciful. Wouldn't that be amazing? Wouldn't that be amazing if that happened? Sunday morning? Sunday night? Tonight? That's the power. It's resurrection power. You know, sometimes revivalists will talk about revival power. That's just resurrection power. That's all it is. It's the Holy Spirit. I'm not saying, oh, that's all it is. It's nothing. I'm just saying, let's not make it more complicated than it needs to be. It's the Holy Spirit. He's the power. He's the power, okay? Next, I want you to notice the interaction of his power. And now I want you to, I want you to go to the Gospel of Luke and verse 24, or chapter 24, not verse 24, sorry, chapter 24. Because Jesus talks about this, and he uses a very interesting word, okay? In Luke 24, in verse 49, okay? It reads differently in the other gospels, and even in Acts, but we're going here on purpose. Luke 24, 49. Jesus is about to ascend, okay? So he's kind of given some final words. And it says, or he says, and behold, I send the promise of my father upon you. What is that? Or the Holy Spirit, it's actually I should say, who is that? Because Jesus told him in Acts, wait for the promise of the Father. Okay, and this is what he's talking about. I send the promise of my Father unto you. And John, he says, behold, I send the Comforter, right? Who's gonna convict the world of sin, righteousness, and judgment. That's the Holy Spirit. He's gonna guide us into all truth. He's gonna enable us, instruct us. He says, but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem until ye be, what's the next word? Endued. That's not a word I use in everyday speech. Endued. With power from on high. Endued. What does that mean? Endued. That's not a normal kind of word. To be endued. At the root it means to put on. That's what it means. It means to put on in some fashion. It could be like in Ephesians where it talks about, put on the whole armor of God. And in that case, the context is, you in-do yourself. Meaning, you put it on. You put it on. The first point under the interaction of his power is it's the presence of the Holy Spirit. Now we've already talked about that and I'm highlighting again. I don't have to pray for a new Pentecost to happen. I already have the Holy Spirit. His presence is already within me. I don't have to go looking for it. I don't have to pray it down, work it up, There's not a magic, you know, handshake or nothing. He's already there. The problem is I don't access Him. He's there, but I'm not in doing. Now, the Father's done the endowment He's going to do, and that is He's given His Spirit. The next step of endowment is me putting him on. I've given this illustration before. There we are in Riyadh. Okay, we land under Scud missile attack threat. Okay, so that's a real thing. Everybody's got their chem gear. And in the middle of the night, I mean, they put us up in these Kobar Towers, I think is what they called them. These big, great, big, high rise apartment buildings they built for the Bedouins. Who wouldn't use them? Okay, well that was pretty classy lodgings for us, except now we're sleeping on a marble floor. That's not really very comfortable, it's pretty hard. And a Scud missile alert comes in, and the guy comes, one of the fellas in my squad comes and says, Sarge, I don't have my chem gear. Well, where's your chem gear? Well, I gave it to this girl in the other, I said, Stings to be you, buddy. I'm not giving you mine. That was pretty dumb. He made a choice to not have his gear. And that's what we do. We make a choice not to put on the gear. The helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness, feet shod with the preparation of the gospel, a shield of faith, etc. We make the choice not to put the gear on. And if we make the choice not to put the gear on, then the gear's not functional for us, is it? No. If I don't pick up my sword and keep it sharp, which basically means I'm reading it, I know what it says, if I'm not keeping it sharp, it's not going to help me. It's just a nice, pretty book on a shelf. we spoke thy words have I hid in mine heart that I might not sin against thee wherewithal shall the young man cleanse his way by taking heed thereto according to thy word I gotta know what's in there because if I know what's in there that's gonna help me stay right it's gonna help me be enabled when the battle comes okay that's that's important so there's the presence of The interaction is his presence is there, but the propriety is that I have to put him on. He's there, but I have to access it. That's important. Ephesians. Back to Ephesians. Go to chapter 4. And let's, I'm just gonna work through, I have just a sampling of scriptures that kind of highlight this idea. Ephesians chapter four, verse 24. Now, he's talking to Christians, right? He's talking to the saints at Ephesus. These are saved people. And he says in verse 24, and that ye put on, there it is, and do, okay, that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. Chapter six and verse 11. Okay, six and verse 11. Put on, There it is, and do put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. Would you say the devil's pretty slick? Does he play fair? No, he don't play fair. He cheats, okay, on purpose, unashamedly. That means the father of lies. Verse 14, stand therefore having your loins gird about with truth and having on, there it's translated just on, on the breastplate of righteousness. Colossians chapter three and verse 10, And it says, and have put on, there it is again, the new man which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created. Where do you get the knowledge of God? From the Bible. Okay, so we gotta access it. Verse 12, put on, there it is again, therefore as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercy. Now he's not talking about armor here, he's talking about Attitude, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering, and it continues on. First Thessalonians, ooh, my tongue got tied up there. And chapter five, I have a new Bible and the pages are all sticking. You know what that's like, that's frustrating. 5 and verse 8. But let us, who are of the day, be sober putting on. Notice the phrase, but let us. The idea is we have to make a choice. We make a choice. So the Holy Spirit is present. The power of the Holy Spirit to do amazing phenomenal things is present with me always. Always. But I have to make the choice whether or not I'll access His ability. I'll submit to him. It's my choice to choose that. It's his ability then that gives me enabling to do right and to be effective for him. Lastly, the intention. What is the intention of his power? As I was reading, Finney gives another illustration. He's preaching in this town, and he says, there was a man in the church, okay, so he's preaching away, and there's a man in the church, let's say it's Mike. And he comes up to him afterwards, and he says, oh, Brother Finney, would you please come to my village and preach? We've never had any religious service in my town ever. So Finney says, yes, I'll go. So after preaching all day Sunday and everything, And then Monday comes, and he has to walk to this village, it's like five miles away. And so he's walking there, and it's hot, and he gets tired, and he's discouraged, and he finally gets to the town. He walks through the town. And they're just wicked. In his testimony he says, I was overcome by their blasphemous speech everywhere I went. It was terrible. But at five o'clock in the afternoon he goes to the schoolhouse and it's full. The whole town's come out. And they start to sing. You'll appreciate this, Rick. And he says, the singing was such a horrible discord. He says, I sat down with my elbows on my knees and covered my ears. It was so bad. That's pretty bad. And then he starts to preach. And he's preaching about a lot. And his text is about where the Lord tells Lot to get up out of this city because he's gonna destroy it. That's his text, you know. So then he, first he talks about Lot, kind of gives some background. And he can tell the people in the congregation are getting mad. They're just, he thinks the guys are gonna get up and just beat his brains out right there, you know. And then he gets done giving kind of the Bible background. And then he kind of points his finger at them about their terrible, blasphemous speech. And it wasn't but a few moments later, and everybody in that congregation was on their face, crying out to God for mercy. Except the guy who came and asked them to come. He apparently was already a saved man. So he was under conviction until Finney says, can't you pray? And so the guy starts praying. And next thing you know, he deals with this young boy and then this person and that person. Almost everybody in the town got saved. That's pretty amazing, isn't it? Wow. But I mention that because our problem is we're looking for the miraculous thing. Meaning, man, wouldn't it be something, as I said, if everybody fell on their face and started crying out to God? Well, that would be something, and necessary in a town where nobody's saved. But I would hope Sunday morning when we all come to church, at least this crowd's already saved. Okay, so I'm not expecting you to fall on your face and get saved again, right? Now, maybe we have things in our life that need to get right. But my point is, the intention is not that we have an event. As if we're looking for a tangible, quantifiable, miraculous thing. Because God may or may not do that again. But, the power of the Spirit is necessary for my walk with Him. Galatians 5 16 Paul says walk in the spirit and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh Hmm Okay, that sounds really nice, but what does that mean actually? well here in Galatians He says That's verse 16 Verse 17 he starts to tell us what that means for the flesh lusteth against the spirit and The spirit against the flesh so my old nature is contrary to God So if there are things within me that are bent that way I know that's not of the Lord. If somebody gets saved and they were a drunk, do you think that's a godly thing to be a drunkard? No. Do you think it's a godly thing to be a dope addict? No, no. Is it a godly thing to be, you know, addicted to gambling? No. And we could name a whole bunch of other kind of stuff, couldn't we? Sure. So my flesh, if I find, is it a godly thing to be bitter? No. To be angry? Without reason? Let me qualify it. No. To be unkind? No. To have inappropriate speech? No. Inappropriate behavior between men and women, etc.? Is that okay? Is immorality not a big thing? No. So whatever it is that I may be struggling with, If it tends toward those kinds of things, I know that's not of the Lord and it's not right. And I know that that part of my old man is fighting against the presence of the new man and the Spirit of God within me. I need God to help me. Verse 19, now the works of the flesh are manifest. Which are these, adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness. All of those in one fashion or another have to do with immoral or wicked behavioral things. Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies. Those are all correlated with each other actually. envyings, murders, drunkenness, revelings, and such. This is not even an exhausted list, is it? There's a whole bunch of other stuff that we could be doing. Say, oh, well, my pet peeve's not on that list, so I'm good to go. No, you're right there in and such like. Okay, that's where it shows up. And to contrast that, we have the fruit of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance against such. That's also not an exhaustive list. So walking in the Spirit means I'm filled with love, joy, and peace. I'm long-suffering toward others. I'm gentle with others, even those who maybe rub me the wrong way. I am filled with goodness, kindness, gentleness, et cetera, toward others. I'm confident in the Lord, I have faith. That's what's exemplified in my life. Now I'm saying this because the intention of the power of the Holy Spirit for a Christian is that you would walk as Christ, meaning you'd live a Christ-like life, and that's what it looks like. I don't know about you, but I read that list, it doesn't have to be exhaustive because I have trouble right off the bat. Do you have trouble with your old man? Or old woman, whatever the case may be. Our old nature is contrary to those things, isn't it? And the only way I'm gonna be victorious over the old nature is through the power of the Holy Spirit. Walk in the Spirit and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. As soon as I find myself drifting into those other things, the nasty list, that means I'm not walking with the Spirit anymore. So the intention of the power of the Holy Spirit in my life should be evident in my walk. and in my witness. And we're not neglecting or negating the witness. Obviously, Acts 1A, and ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost come upon you. Well, that was the, we are saved, are we not? Now, there's probably an implication there about fullness and baptism and so on, and we're gonna get to that eventually, but go to Romans chapter one, and I'm gonna close here, I promise. Two scriptures. Romans 1 verse 4. Paul says, and declared to be this, he's talking about Jesus, and declared to be the son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness. It's pretty tough to be a witness for God declaring who Christ is in truth without the enabling of the Holy Spirit. Okay, chapter 15. verse 19 and we close with this verse and Paul says through mighty signs and wonders by the power of the Spirit of God so that from Jerusalem and round about unto it look Elycrium I have fully preached the Gospel The point is there's a connection between the power of the Holy Spirit and the spreading of the Gospels. Whether that's me and my personal witness with individuals I interact with, or that's what we do collectively as a church outreach, okay, in one fashion or another. Today at the cleaners to pick up the tablecloths, the lady says to me, Do you have like a Christmas bazaar at your church? I said, well, no, we don't have a bazaar. That's probably maybe the Catholics or the Methodists might have a bazaar. We don't have a bazaar. I said, but we do have a Christmas cantata. Oh, that sounds wonderful. So I gave her a track from the church. It happened to be the one that is the kind of sportsman's oriented one. It has the picture of me when I shot my one and only deer. And she says, oh, you're a hunter. I thought, I'll let that go. I shot one. Yeah, I'm a hunter like Brother Hoover's a fisherman. He's got his one fish story. I said, yeah, we have a sportsman's banquet. She said, oh, that sounds great. Yeah, so our witness, whether that's a corporate witness, if you will, or that's a personal witness, I need the Holy Spirit to help me. And so do you, and so do we. We need the power of the Spirit. We need Him. Father, would you help us, I pray, give us safety as we go our separate ways, bring us back again Sunday. Lord, I pray you might help us, give us boldness and courage and the opportunities that we have. Lord, again, we think about the upcoming youth conference, Friday and Saturday, and all the guests that will be coming, we pray for their safety, we pray that their hearts might be tender, and those teens that come who maybe are not saved, they would see their need to trust Christ and be saved. Those that, Father, You want to work in their life, they need to surrender, to whatever it is you may want them to do and be. This might be a turning point for them. Would you help us please? Bless now, I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.