This morning is our final Sunday in our series talking about the person and work of the Holy Spirit, and we are going to talk about the Holy Spirit as the Sending Spirit; the one who sends us out. Just as Jesus was sent out by the Father, The Spirit Himself is sent out by the Father and the Son. So it’s no surprise that when the Holy Spirit comes into our hearts, He doesn’t lead Christians away from their world but sends them out into it. What exactly does the Spirit send His people out to do? Christians often focus on the power of the Spirit. We want His power to heal, to see miracles, the power to change, power in prayer. It is interesting, though, what the main thing that Scripture says the Spirit gives power for. The immediate result of the coming of the Spirit in Acts 2 was that the apostles began to proclaim Christ. The Sending Spirit sends us out to be witnesses to the world.

As we continue looking at the person and work of the Holy Spirit this morning, the Bible says that God not only gives us the extraordinary gift of our salvation, the gift of Jesus and the gift of the Holy Spirit Himself, but through the Holy Spirit gives us what the Bible calls spiritual gifts or gifts from the Spirit. Spiritual gifts can be easily misunderstood. It’s why Paul starts our passage this morning by saying, “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed.” One of the biggest misunderstandings about spiritual gifts are who they are for. A lot of spiritual gift inventories or tests out there seem to lead us to believe that Spiritual gifts are for our own fulfillment. But 1 Corinthians 12:7 says, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” The gifts the Spirit gives us are meant to both bless us, but mostly to be given away to bless the local body of Christ where he has put us. Our Scripture this morning comes from 1 Corinthians 12. Let’s read it together.

As we continue looking at the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life, we see that one of the main things that the Holy Spirit has done is give us freedom from our enslavement to sin. That freedom was purchased for us by our new master, Jesus Christ, and personally delivered to us by the Spirit. And yet sin calls out to us daily to return to it. The war that we now fight with our former master is the process the Bible calls our sanctification. And it is now the main work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Christian. Let’s read our text this morning, beginning in Romans 6.

WhitSunday, more commonly recognized as Pentecost Sunday, was celebrated as the second-most important Christian holiday from around medieval times all the way until 1972. Christmas was celebrated as the birthday of Jesus; Pentecost Sunday was celebrated as the birthday of the church. What has happened to all of the joy and festivity surrounding this second most joyful day of the year in the Christian life? Since WhitSunday was a moveable holiday, you didn’t know when it would come each year. By 1972, people had grown tired of the uncertainty and unpredictability of when their day of rest would come each year. So in 1972, after 600 years of celebration, WhitSunday was renamed the Spring Bank Holiday and placed on the last Monday of May. And to this day it has been largely forgotten. Ironically, no one forgets the birthday of Jesus. But no one remembers the birthday of the church. No one forgets the resurrection of Jesus. But no one remembers the resurrection of each and every follower of Jesus into new life that the Holy Spirit brings. As we are in a series on the ministry of the Holy Spirit, we come to Pentecost, the day the Holy Spirit was poured out in a new way on a small band of disciples, huddled upstairs in a home 50 days after Jesus rose from the grave. What happened on that first WhitSunday, the first Pentecost? Join us this morning in Acts 2.

We are in a series looking at the person and work of the Holy Spirit throughout Scripture. This morning, we will be looking at John 14-16 where Jesus describes how He and His Father want to dwell again with humanity. And we will also come to know how we come to receive all the benefits that the Son has come to offer us: through the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit.

These days in our modern world we are able to constantly know what’s going on all over our city, all over the world, at all times. It can be frightening and exhausting. It can seem like our world is just an endless cycle of people and things getting worse. People are more and more divided that ever before; war seems to be building everywhere. More and more ethical and moral compromise are demanded of Americans every day. The Bible says that all of this was put in motion the moment that the first man Adam responded to the invitation “You can be just like God.” But what if we could have a do-over, a second chance to go back to the garden and win this time? The Bible says we can. We are in a series looking at the person and work of the Holy Spirit throughout the Bible. Last week we looked at the unique coming of the Holy Spirit to Jesus at His baptism, and this week we will look at the Spirit leading Jesus into the wilderness to make a new way for humanity.

There is something shocking and seemingly unjust in the universe when the gift that the birthday kid gives is greater than the gifts that the party goers are able to bring to the party. But that is exactly what happened at Jesus’ first birthday party. I know it’s shocking to talk about the first two chapters of the Gospels outside of the month of December, but at His birth Jesus was given gifts by kings, but the real reason that He came was to give us a gift. He stepped into our darkness and our exhaustion and our hopelessness to bring us the greatest gift beyond anything our frail humanity had experienced up to that point. And Jesus’ gift to us that was set in motion long before He was born that December night would make the gold, frankincense and myrrh He received look like trinkets in a goody bag. That gift is the gift of Himself, given to us in the person of the Holy Spirit. How did it come to be that He could pour out the gift of the personal presence of the Holy Spirit so freely to us? That is what we will look at this morning as we continue our exciting journey looking at the goal of our salvation—the coming of the Holy Spirit.

Think about all the ways you have changed as a person, sometimes for the good and sometimes not. What about if I see you again after thousands of years, would you have changed? That is how we think of the work of the Holy Spirit sometimes. When we think about the Holy Spirit, it can seem like He was silent or different all throughout the Old Testament, and then suddenly shows up with personality and power only after Pentecost. But, if we look at the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, we see clearly that He was doing much of the same work as He is in the New. Like a room that was dark but is illuminated, where suddenly you can see all that it contains, the coming of Jesus simply brought into clearer view what was already true about the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. This morning I want to share some amazing and encouraging things about the Spirit’s person and work in the Old Testament. Not just for information, but to get to know the Holy Spirit as a friend; to know Him personally enough to begin to ask for, look for and to expect His work in prayer and in your life. So let’s start at the first place we see the Holy Spirit’s work in our Bible: at creation.

We have this machine, this system of living, that we call the Christian Life. We have church, we have our Bible reading, we have our praying; and those things are good. But our Christian life, which was meant to be a life-giving relationship with the Divine, often feels dry and powerless, devoid of both refreshment and power. We have substituted the machine itself as the source of life and power. We have tried to get Jesus from things outside of us, when the offer of Jesus is this: “Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.”You see, without the coming of the Holy Spirit to bring us that living water within us, to unite us to the source of that living water, Jesus, our Christian life becomes dry, powerless and distant. It remains only something that happened to us in the past rather than an ongoing river of new life and new strength for today.