Now like me, in this time and season perhaps, you may be preparing for Christmas drama presentations. Perhaps you and your children or your grandchildren are preparing for some kind of performance. Perhaps you remember those times. Weeks of practice, rehearsals, going over lines, going over songs, all culminating in a bunch of cute kids on a stage in cute costumes in hopefully not too chaotic of a skit, right? My oldest daughter, she's practicing her songs for the CIBC Christmas Cantata, which is next Sunday. And her songs have been on repeat, non-stop, for a month. My youngest daughter is preparing for her preschool performance. Now last year, she was a sheep. This year, she gets to be Mary. That's a big jump. So we're preparing. And of course, as all of the camels, the sheep, the donkeys, the shepherds, the wise men, Mary and Joseph themselves, all gather on stage, it all turns to the manger. The focus rightly turns to the baby there who was born. Rightly so, we want to focus on the advent of the Christ, the Messiah, in this Christmas season. This is, after all, the Son of God come in the flesh, the one who had been prophesied and revealed now as a baby, and all of the redemptive plan ahead of him to incarnate and to die for us. But one thing I wish to demonstrate and to encourage you all with is that the whole Godhead, works together in the incarnation, in our salvation. It wasn't simply the Son on a rogue mission, if you'll pardon the pun, a Hail Mary plan. No, the Father and the Son and the Spirit were working together in this great drama of Christmas. And so just like all the parents and the teachers and the organizers are there actively shepherding along the Christmas program, so too the Father and the Spirit. My focus today is actually on the Spirit. There's a series, a short series on the doxology that I'm doing at CIBC. You know the doxology, that song. We sing, praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise him all creatures here below, praise him above ye heavenly hosts, praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And so we know God is three persons in one God, and there are many ways in scripture where we see the Father and the Son united, the Father, Spirit, and Son united, and yet at the same time distinguished in their persons all over scripture. I direct your attention to just one example, one very familiar Advent passage in Luke. Luke chapter one, verse 35. And the angel answered, Mary, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be called Holy, the Son of God. We see the three even here. The Holy Spirit, of course, is clearly laid out for us, for he will come and overshadow Mary. And then, of course, Jesus is the one who was conceived and to be born, the Son of God. And when you think about it, it's fitting for the Son to go. It wasn't the Spirit who came. It was not the Father who came, but the Son who came and incarnated to be the one to take on flesh, to dwell in a womb, and to be pushed through a birth canal, to be born as a Son, as a Son of Man. it's fitting for Him to come. And so even as we see the Spirit of the Son, we also see the Father, because it mentions the Most High. And for there to be a Son, there must be a Father. And so the Father also is highlighted here in His power coming. Here, as in many places in Scripture, we see the three persons acting together, acting inseparably in the one action of God, And so, I want to encourage you that the incarnation is an act of the entire Godhead. Now, even as we look at that, it is fitting for the Son to be the one to incarnate. It is also fitting for the Spirit to be the one to hover, to overshadow this act of creation. Because, and this is my theme, the Spirit is the giver of life. As the Nicene Creed says, and it has a section, we believe in God, the Father, and a section, we believe in Jesus Christ, and we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life. The Nicene Creed says, we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, which is something that the church has held to for millennia. And even as we sang, we see that he is the one who gives life to all that God has made. That's my theme this morning, the Lord, the giver of life. And so point number one, if you're taking notes, is that the spirit creates life. The spirit creates life. Because just at the incarnation, as it says, the spirit will hover, overshadow you, so he did in the beginning at creation. Turn with me to Genesis chapter one. Genesis chapter one. beginning in verse one. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. When God created all things in the beginning, the Spirit was there as part of this creative act. And this is not to take away from God the Father or God the Son. We know that the Father is credited as the source of all things, the fountain from whom all blessings flow, if you go to James. That blessing, that fountainhead, includes creation, which is, it's a good thing that we were created, that all of what we see was created. And so it flows from God the Father. And also, Jesus Christ is credited with creation. If you go to Colossians 1.16, for by him, which is Jesus, by Jesus all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities. All things were created through him and for him. So scripture affirms, God the Father made all things through Jesus the Son. And actually it says that Jesus upholds, continues to uphold the existence of all things through his power. If he were to sneeze and lose his power for a second, we would all blink into nonexistence. He upholds us through his power. And yet also, the Spirit was there as well. the light was created, heavens and earth, the waters and the land were separated, the living creatures came into being, all spoken into existence by what? By the powerful word of God. It says, right, God said, let there be, and it was. But think, what carries a voice? What carries a word or sound in space? Is it not the air? Is it not the breath that proceeds from the mouth carrying those vibrant, those vibrating sound waves that move out, that change the state of existence. There was vacuum or just air sitting there and then the sound waves proceed through it to produce an effect that we call sound. There's an enervating effect that the spirit carries forth from God. He carries the power of the spoken word of God into creation, into effects. And so it is the spirit who animates, who vitalizes in creation. In Genesis 2.7, we see this particularly. This is what it says of man, 2.7. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground. and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. Right before that, Adam was a pile of dust. But then the Spirit breathed into him and he became a living creature. And this breath, this wind, is the same word as spirit. And it was a life-creating spirit that God breathed into him. different from everything else that had come before, right? You have the birds and the bugs, you have the dogs and the dolphins, and yet this is something different, something more, because we are uniquely created in God's image. In part, our unique, what sets us apart is our rationality, right? We are created to have reason, to be able to think logically, to be able to ponder science, mathematics, logic and philosophy and biology, all of those things, even spiritual things, to reason from scriptures, to ponder the mystery of a God who is three in one. So let me encourage you. I mean, some of you are all in finals. Some of you are laboring in studies. Well, that is exercising this God-given ability and life in you. It may feel like you're digging in the thorns and in the dirt, but you are exercising this part of God that has, this part of life in you that is above and beyond what he has given to the animals. So labor on, persevere in your studies. And in another part of our uniqueness is our moral ability, knowing good and evil and being able to choose between them. We are more than the creatures in the world because we have received this breath of life from God. Adam became a living creature. And the interesting thing is that every human being thereafter has also received this gift of life, right? The text as it goes on does not explicitly say that Eve received the same CPR maneuver, right? It just says that God made the woman. And yet we see that she has the same moral ability as Adam, the same moral agency. There is this life to her in the same way as him. And so we see that she also has this breath of life from God, the Spirit. And it's amazing to see. We delight to see it. In the birth of every baby, it's a wonder. Would you consider where that baby's soul comes from? Does it come from the Father? Does it come from the Mother? Neither. In a mysterious way, it comes from the Lord. To have a spiritual soul and a conscience, given life by the power of the Spirit, they are their own person. And that is, of course, why we fight so hard for the right to life, right? This respect of life for every human being to live and to flourish and not to be killed. Whether that be in the womb or in the streets of Oakland or in the nursing home. Whether that life is dressed well and smells nice and looks like us or not. Whether that life has mental or physical issues. It matters not because life, all of life is sacred because it comes from God. that soul having been imparted by the Holy Spirit. And so we see in one sense that even as God the Father and God the Son are working in creation, God the Spirit finishes or caps off this amazing work of creation by imbuing life into it. Basil of Caesarea, one of the Cappadocian fathers, Basil calls the father the initiating cause, and he calls the sun the operating cause, so God made through the sun, and then he calls the spirit the perfecting cause, capping it off. As I was thinking of illustrations, it popped into my head, it's kind of like, kind of, and now speaking analogously, how a wife makes a house into a home, right? Young, single men may have houses that aren't homes. There's a bed, There's a table that's a cupboard full of instant ramen. Okay? And that's enough for a time. But when a wife comes into the picture and adds all the touches, oh, she turns it into a home. You know, you've got the framed photos, the throw pillows, whatever those are, scented candles, home-cooked meals, all the magic that a woman brings to make it into a home. And far above and beyond those things. It's really the presence, right, of the woman in the home that makes it home for us. I'm sure all the men would add their amens that having you there makes it into a home so that we, husbands and our children, feel that we belong there. In that same sense, perhaps, the spirit. to be the one who applies that finishing touch, giving life to all that God has made. And, as we see in the case of mankind, even a special kind of life made in the image of God. And so, the Holy Spirit is rightly, as the Nicene Creed affirms, He is Lord. He is Lord God. He is not lesser to the Father or to the Son, but also God in creation, and that ex nihilo as well. He is the giver of life, making life out of nothing. But then, sadly, as we know as history unfolds, shortly thereafter, mankind does not live forever. In Genesis 3, mankind sins and falls into death. The man and the woman disobey God. They sin, they choose evil instead of life. They took the fruit, the forbidden fruit that God had commanded them not to eat, and they ate of it, disobeying God. Out of all of the fruit that God had set aside for them to take, they went and disobeyed and took from the one tree they were not to eat of. They sinned and cast all of mankind into the shadowy depths of death. No longer a living being. Yes, still breathing, but spiritually corrupted and twisted and no longer good. Our hearts are bound in sin to choose evil and that continually. We love our sin. We coddle it and protect it and we let it run our hearts and this Sadly, as the state of all mankind, we simply have to look around to see it. This is our state, you and I, and the world out there, and by ourselves, we have no hope. By ourselves, we're just as hopeless as Adam was, lying there as a pile of dust on the ground. Perhaps in the shape of a man, but without any living breath to us, not a living being. And Paul picks up on this. This is why in Ephesians 2.1 he calls us dead in our trespasses and sins. Right? Dead. Dead in heart to God's voice. Whether God is stridently warning us or tenderly, mercifully entreating us, we just don't heed him. We act like nothing's wrong, even as we're devouring ourselves and one another in our sin. How many of our co-workers push aside our Christianity, our offers of hope and life, simply because they say it's not for them? By ourselves, we can't even see that there's a problem and that that problem is ourselves. Right, we're in the Silicon Valley, Rule number one in Silicon Valley is solve the right problem. And we can't even figure out what the problem is so that we can't apply the right solution. And so here again, in our deadness of sin, we need God the Spirit. The Spirit is Lord and the giver of life and so He too is sovereign in our salvation. So point number two is that the Lord, the Spirit, recreates life in us. which is what we need. We need to be recreated spiritually to be regenerated. Look with me at Titus chapter three. Titus chapter three verse five. He, that is God, God saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ, our Savior. By the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, we are saved. And as it says, this comes from the Holy Spirit. He is the one to wash us and to cleanse us and to renew us, to make us alive again, to turn our dead hearts into living, beating, feeling hearts, so that we then turn to God, so that we hear His voice, His loving voice calling to us and turning away from our sins, repenting and seeking Him for our salvation. We don't save ourselves. This passage says that He saves us. We're not flipping a switch in our own hearts, changing ourselves and deciding to one day call on God. God the Spirit saves us through regeneration, which then leads to faith. And I hope you also see here how this work is, once again, inseparable from the other persons. From before the foundations of the world, God the Father elects us. He calls us. It says, He saved us. He poured out on us through Jesus Christ. God the Father, out of His mercy, out of His sovereign will, chooses to save us. And then in the fullness of time, which we celebrate at Christmas and we celebrate in Easter. The fullness of time, God the Son accomplishes salvation for us. God the Son is the one who incarnated, became flesh out of love for us. And God the Son then died in that flesh for us, taking our place on that cross. and then rising again to new life, ascending into heaven. And this is the work of the Son. It's not the work of the Father or the Spirit to incarnate and die for us, but the Son did that low under two millennia ago, at that point in time. And then the spirit is the person of the Godhead who applies salvation to us. That accomplished salvation is applied to us in the sovereign will of God and in the sovereign timing of God. I was struck by something in my devotionals this week. I was reading Galatians chapter one, verse 15 and 16. And Paul is declaring, talking about his own conversion, and he says, when he, God, who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his son to me, in order that I might preach him among the Gentiles. He had set me apart before I was born, and then at a point in time he was pleased to reveal his son to me. And so just this that I want to point out. Saul was elect before his birth, before he was even born, saved according to and in the definite plan and for knowledge of God. And yet he was still born a Jew in Tarsus, raised by Jewish parents, trained as a Jew and in the strictest sect of them, and under the greatest teachers. He was in the synagogues as a representative, persecuting the Christians, the Church of God, hating them, chasing them all over, jailing them, following them all the way out to Damascus, right? Until that point in time, when God chose to reveal Christ to him, and in such a dramatic way. And then Saul became Paul. And all of that was in the plan of God, but all of that still happened. And what was the difference at that point in time? Because Jesus had already died and resurrected. Salvation accomplished. And yet it took that moment in time. for God to apply it into his heart, for him to be converted by the Spirit to regenerate him and apply that salvation to his heart. Each of us in this room, if we are in Christ, has had that moment, has had that power of the application of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. Because before our salvation, we were dead and cold towards God, wandering in our own ways. even if you grew up in the church, even if you had parents and teachers lovingly telling you every week the stories and the doctrines and the gospel, those true facts about God and about Jesus. And in the midst of all of that, we were still serving and worshiping the idols of our hearts, until something changed, until one day, and maybe that was all at once, maybe it was gradual, You started listening. You started taking an interest in what God had to say about yourself and about himself. And then you believed it and accepted it as what you needed. And you placed your faith. Hallelujah, you placed your faith and trust in Jesus Christ and salvation came into your heart. In that moment, and not a moment before, did you stand forgiven in Christ. Because even as God's eternal plan stands forever, even as Christ came in time and space, this plan to save you was also enacted in time and place. Perhaps you remember where that was. Perhaps you remember when that was. And that is a special place and time that you treasure. Because God came to you. God the Spirit came to this very particular and unique you in your background and in your personality, known to God from before you were born, came to you and made you alive. You became a living being through the power of the Spirit on your life. He gives us life, recreating what was spiritually dead. I just want to touch on this part briefly because the spirit does not awaken just knowledge of God in a mental factual sense. He awakens love to God so that we love to belong to his family. Romans 8 15 says, For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, Abba, Father. Such a tender cry for us to have through the spirit of adoption, because a spirit of adoption is necessary in this. It's one thing for the paperwork to be all filled out, signed, and completed. But we need a spirit of belonging. As I've read about and as I've seen in adoptive families, this is the hardest part. It's harder than the paperwork. A sense in the child of knowing that they have been included into a new reality, a new familial experience and situation that reshaped their entire identity. And not just awareness of it, but acceptance of it, embracing it. coming to a point of treasuring these new relationships with the adoptive father and mother and siblings, of coming to love the values and the traditions and the rhythms of life that were different, so different perhaps from what were before, but eventually claiming them as your own. Because how stilted it would be to simply be legally adopted but to never have a love for your new family. That's not life or family. And so the Spirit comes to be our spirit of adoption in us, living in us, shaping us, communing God's love to us so that we come to instinctually love God's love for us, to trust Him, to run to Him, as our Heavenly Father, and to love the people of God around us. Because as the Spirit leads us and makes us, we then become truly part of the family of God. This is what it means to be born again, born of and through the Spirit. Born of the Spirit, that's familiar to us. That's what Jesus was trying to teach Nicodemus all along in their secret nighttime meeting, right? John, chapter three. And verse five. Jesus answered Nicodemus, truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, you must be born again. The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the spirit." Jesus says we must be born again. And we know that Nicodemus was confused. He didn't understand. He's picturing a grown man entering a mother's womb again and coming back out. But Jesus, we see, speaks of a new birth, a spiritual rebirth by the Spirit, washed as water symbolizes washing and cleansing that the Spirit gives to our heart, and the regeneration that He gives, as we saw in Titus chapter 3. We must have this spiritual rebirth in order to be saved, to be part of the kingdom. And what we see here is that we don't know where it comes from. It's a breath, a wind that comes and goes. We may see, we hear it sounds, we look around, we see all the blown over power poles. I don't know if you guys were affected by the power outage, we were. We see its effects, in other words, of the wind. but it's invisible to us and we can't control it. We can't turn it to our own devices. It is a mysterious and sovereign work that we long to see. We long to see it, especially in others, in our loved ones, in our friends and in our coworkers. We long to see it happening in far off countries that are torn by war and corruption and catastrophe and we want the peace of the spirit to come upon them. though much as we want it and we desire to make it happen however we could, we cannot. We can simply pray and wait on it from the Lord, the Spirit, who is the one who is the giver of life. Perhaps you here today have not yet placed your faith in Christ and not yet received the forgiveness and peace in him. You may have salvation, you may have it, If you want it, perhaps the Spirit is open in your heart. I mean, you are, after all, here when perhaps you have made and found excuses not to be here before, and yet you are here today. And if you recognize that you are a sinner, that you have sins that you don't even know how to stop sinning in them, If you recognize this in your heart, then take the next step. Call on God. Ask for God to forgive you because Jesus died on a cross, a painful death on your behalf in order to take away your sins, to pay for them, to pay for the guilt of them and wash away all of your shame. He was perfect and yet he died a sinner's death in our place so that you might have forgiveness. Whatever your sin is, Christ is enough for it. His death will have paid for it. So follow, follow the Holy Spirit's leading in your heart and ask God to forgive you. And he will answer you. He promises it. Let today be the day of your salvation. Let today be that day that salvation is applied in your heart. And if you do, we will rejoice at what God has made and remade in you. Because that is what salvation brings. It always leads to praise. The doxology, that just means praise to God. And as we know the doxology as that particular verse that we sing, It actually comes from a trio of hymns written by Thomas Ken in the 1600s. He had one called the Morning Hymn, the Evening Hymn, and the Midnight Hymn. And the verse that we know is the concluding verse of each of those three hymns. And he intended the morning hymn to be something that we would sing to awaken our hearts, prepare our lives, and to prepare for the coming day. And then the evening hymn would be a time of reflection on God's mercies in the day. And I'm not sure about this, but I think that the midnight hymn would be the hymn that you would wake up for your midnight hour of prayer to sing. So perhaps if you find yourself still awake in the midnight hour, trying to fall asleep, perhaps this will help. I would like to read to you the concluding three verses of the Midnight Hymn. Shine on me, Lord, new life impart, fresh ardors kindle in my heart. One ray of thy all-quickening light dispels the sloth and clouds of night. Lord, lest the tempter me surprise, watch over thine own sacrifice. All loose, all idle thoughts cast out, and make my very dreams devout. Praise God, from whom all blessings flow. Praise Him, all creatures here below. Praise Him above, ye heavenly hosts. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. As we sing over and over again, and remember, Preachers on earth and in heaven, up and down the cosmos, are amazed at who God is and what He has done. He is the fountain of all our blessings. And the response from us, from us who have the privilege of experiencing these blessings, particularly the blessing of salvation, the response from us is likewise to pour out our lives in abundant praise of our great God. Let's come to him in prayer. O Holy Spirit, we praise you, the Lord, the giver of life. Rightly are you, Lord and God, for we know only God creates and gives life. And so we praise you for creation, for the beauty of what we see around us. We praise you also for recreation, that each of us In personal ways, you came to work in our own hearts. And we ask for any here who, in whom you are working right now, that they would call out to you and receive salvation in the Son, Jesus Christ, in the power and in the will of God, the Father. We ask this. And we ask, O Spirit, for you to work yet more in our hearts, shaping and sanctifying us so that we conform more and more to the image of Christ, perfecting and bringing to completion what you began, this salvation. And Father, we ask that you work in our world. speak through us, so that more and more would be made alive to God, that we would carry the word of the gospel into their hearts, that you would carry it into their hearts, plant it and water it and vitalize it. We long for their salvation, but we know that it is only you who grant it. And so we pour out to you in prayer and in praise to you when you answer. So give us expectant hearts and give us bold hearts, Lord. We adore Thee, O God, Father, Son, and Spirit. Three in one, and one in three. And so it is that we pray to the only Father, through the Son, in the power of the Spirit, we pray all these things. In Christ's name, amen.