Well, this morning we're week four in looking at the fruit of the spirit and how that plays out in our lives, what that might look like in our lives. Last week we looked at a passage in Galatians, chapter five that talked about the deeds of the flesh, and the deeds of the flesh being those things that we do that seem like just that human nature side of us, that part of us that just likes to chase after everything that our eyes sees, everything that our heart desires. And so we look at that and we say, well, this looks fun. This sounds fun. You know, I enjoy consuming this, so I'm just going to be about that.

I enjoy the things that my money can buy, so I'm going to try to make more money so that I can get more of those things. Does anybody ever find that their house seems to be shrinking because there's more and more stuff filling it? That was a conversation like yesterday in our household, you know, and it tends to be mostly things for our precious little girl. It's interesting. When you have one child, you tend to want to give them a lot of things.

Like it's, I think my brother and sister and me had less stuff combined than my one child does now. But we tend to find the space getting filled up and we say, they didn't build these houses with enough storage in them. These houses that they built like 40 or 50 years ago, they didn't really have the materialism of today in mind when they built them. I don't even know where they stored Christmas trees in these houses to be. Oh, wait, they cut them down and then when they were done, they put them away.

Now we have all these artificial trees and how many of you have just one tree that goes up in your home at Christmastime? Bless you guys. I, I, I know some of you guys, your home is a lot smaller than mine. You go and only put one up. But I'm just saying, like, like, my goodness, you know, like, I, I miss those days.

And I'm not complaining. You know, I'm getting mean mugged by my wife back there. But we, I used to, I used to kind of mock my youth leader's wife back in the day because she had, I think seven trees in the house. Not all full sized ones, you know, but in one room she had like tall, medium and small. Like, or if you're a Starbucks kind of person, you know, tall, grande and venti trees.

But anyway, that's how they measure their coffee cups. Anyway, we, you know, we have like all this stuff, this clutter in our Homes, all this stuff filling it. And it's because we kind of keep wanting more, we keep chasing after more. And not that any of those things maybe are necessarily bad, but our eye takes in something. We used to get catalogs.

Now that's online. Amazon, Tamu, Wish, whatever it is that you shop on, you know, Target, Walmart, all that stuff, it's just an endless supply of stuff. And as soon as you look one thing up or even talk about it, somehow those little spies inside your phone hear it. That's the biggest business in our country right now, is selling your data. All those free apps that you downloaded, turns out they weren't free.

There was just a clause in there, buried in that legal contract that you just said. Sure, sounds good. Except there's a clause in there where they can take stuff on your phone that you put on there willingly, and then they take it and they sell it to somebody who's going to use it to market to you. Brilliant plan on their part. And we just kind of go along with it and say, yeah, sounds good, you know, no problem.

And then we wonder why I was just talking about this earlier. Now I got ads on my phone for this. That's why. So we keep filling up our lives with these things. Not just shopping, not just retail stuff, not just like the.

As Charlie Brown said on the Christmas special all those years ago, you know, all this commercialism around Christmas. It's not just that, but it's not just the commercialism in our world. It's the fact that our eye sees something, our heart begins to desire it. And then we chase after that thing. The scripture that we looked at last week talked about these deeds of the flesh, these things that are our fleshly self, our earthly self, our body, our mind, our spirit, these things that we see that we desire and we chase after them.

Some of those things might be okay, like we need food, we need shelter. Those are things worth obtaining. And yet at the same time, there are times where we can say, well, but I need more of that. I need a bigger one of those. I need a better tasting and a higher portion of that.

And so we chase after those things. In those cases, those are what we might consider these, as we called it last week, illicit pleasures. It's a pleasure in the moment, but that pleasure quickly fades away as you find yourself wanting more and more of it. You think that as you obtain this thing that you were desiring, that you will have pleasure by it. But you find out that that pleasure quickly dissipates.

Many of the foods that we consume are that way we eat these foods and then we find ourselves within just a few minutes or an hour or two, hungry again for another meal. I found myself doing this on Thursday. I took, took Thursday mostly off because I was planning on doing that Tuesday and it didn't happen. So Thursday was the day. And Thursday I'm at home and I ate something and then like an hour later I'm just.

I got up and I found myself doing that thing. You've all done it. You walk up and you open the refrigerator. It's the same thing that's in there from before. And you know what?

I'm going to eat something else. And I didn't know what I wanted. I didn't have an actual need for calories or nutrition. My body just felt empty and I wanted more food. They put things in our food to make you desire more of it, but they're empty calories.

It's empty food. It's not just only unnutritious or lack of nutrition, but it's also food that tends to leave you craving more. We wonder why our diets don't work, why counting calories doesn't seem to matter because you can eat lower calorie food, but it's still empty food, empty nutrition. In the same way we find these pleasures in life illicit, leaving us empty very quickly, we find out that those things that we sought did not really fill us, that they were only temporary joy, temporary filling, temporary pleasures. So as we do those things, we figure out as we read the scriptures and we kind of lay the word of God over top of our life's experiences, we look at it and we say, oh my goodness.

It's almost as if the guy writing this knew me. Like, these desires that I have, it's like he was talking about them. Oh, maybe I don't have every single one of those desires in my life. But I bet if we went as a survey throughout the room, and we'd have to do it, a blind survey, because most of you wouldn't like admit it freely, but you would say, well, I don't deal with that one, you know, like, okay, but be honest. Maybe you do a little bit, you know.

And so we look at those things and we place it over our lives and we say, oh, I've chased after these things and I've still found myself never quite satisfied. Now make sure that just to understand in our heads that when we talk about hungering and thirsting after the righteousness of God, that's something that's continual as well, because as soon as you seek the righteousness of God and you get to a certain level in there, you realize that there's still more fleshly desires in your life. So you end up desiring the righteousness of God even more. The more you desire God, the more you'll continue desiring Him. It's not that he leaves you empty, but he shows you just how empty your life already was.

It's not that being filled with God and filled with the Spirit of God and the spiritual things of God leaves you empty. It said, it reveals the emptiness that already existed. And so you desire more and more of God. So as you yield your life to him and your lives to him, then you begin getting filled more and more with the Spirit of God. So these deeds of the flesh that we talked about, on your own, you cannot put them to death.

You can't deal with them. You can't get rid of them on your own. You can't take these illicit pleasures and on your own just be done with them. You're not able to do that. If you were, we wouldn't need Jesus.

We wouldn't have needed Christ to come into this world if we were able to deal with it on our own. But because of that, because of that sinful nature that we can't deal with, Jesus Christ came into this world and he came here so that he could give us a way out of that. We call this living life by the Spirit. You see, it's that list we looked at was an impartial list. But it's things that we ought to quit doing.

And we know what's wrong and right. Like there's things that we try to rationalize and say, okay, I could do this, because for me it's okay. And, you know, it doesn't really matter. But deep down inside, the more you have to spend time rationalizing it, the more we should realize that God is saying, don't live that way. Don't do that thing.

Don't have that lifestyle, that behavior. And yet at the same time, we find ourselves continuing on in it and on and on. And then wondering, why is it that my life isn't working out how I want it to be? Why is it that I keep having these problems, these broken relationships, these friendships that end in disaster, these bills that keep mounting or the debts that keep coming in, and all these things. And we look at all of it and we say, it can't be.

The thing that I know is wrong, that I've told myself is okay. It can't be that can it. But we don't know how to get rid of that on our own. And so God has provided a way. We call this living according to the Spirit of God.

So I want to look today in a scripture in Galatians 5. We've been in Galatians 5 a little bit, but I want to read that to you. And then we're going to flip over to a scripture in Romans for a second. In Galatians chapter 5, it's just three verses. It's verses 16 through 18.

If you want to use a Bible, in the rack in front of you is page 1315, you can use one on your phone as well. I don't care if I see you pull out a phone again. Like I said earlier, if you want to go up and sign up for one of those Thanksgiving dinner things or the women's tea, I'll just take it as like, okay, I was really boring and I need to move on. So if I see you on a phone, I'm not going to be mad about that. I'll just assume you were probably posting, hey, he said something really cool and putting that on Instagram or something.

For those of you who don't know what Instagram is, find somebody half your age and ask them.

I'll have to find a kid and ask him what Tik Tok is. I'm just kidding.

Galatians chapter 5, verses 16 through 18. This is the I here it says, but I say, that's Paul, the guy that wrote this, the Apostle Paul. He says, but I say, live by the Spirit and you will not carry out the desires of the flesh. For the flesh has desires that are opposed to the Spirit. And the Spirit has desires that are opposed to the flesh.

For these are in opposition to each other. So that you cannot do what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. Then I want to flip over to Romans chapter 8, Romans chapter 8. You know, the interesting thing is the first sermon I ever preached as a young 20 something year old in college, I went to a couple friends of mine, worked in this ministry.

They called it the Saints ministry. And there was these towers at Triveca Nazarene University in Nashville. It was like, I don't know, 14 or 17, 20 stories, something like that high. And it was retirement towers. And they would have a service at 4 o'clock every Sunday and college ministry students would come in there and preach.

And so I got on the schedule every so often to preach. And I cannot believe that these folks that probably most of them spent their lives attending churches, probably had great pastors that they would actually sit every week and listen to people like me preaching. It was so terrible back then. Oh, my goodness. And Romans, chapter 8.

I picked this chapter, which many preachers will tell you is one of the most difficult to understand and to work through. And I somehow pick that to be like my opening sermon in my, you know, preaching history. My goodness. And I could still probably kind of go through it point by point, what I had said. And I'm not going to do that to you.

I just. I can't believe these people sat through that. Thanks for still listening to me now. So, Romans 8, verses 12 through 14. Again, Paul speaking.

Same guy, different audience. He says, so then, brothers and sisters, we are under no obligation not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

You see, he talks there that he says, you know, you're not under an obligation to a law or a legal code. You don't have to obey that or to live by that. But these deeds of the flesh, not that there's a law that very. I mean, there is a law that clearly defines those things, if you read through the Scriptures. But he's saying, I'm not putting that in front of you, saying, you've got to be legalistic and following this law.

What he's saying is those things that you know are wrong, those deeds of the flesh, I'm going to tell you that those need to be put to death by the spirit of God. Those are the things that you have to learn to tune your ear to listen to him. We can tune our ears to a lot of things. I'm a kind of guy that I'm always listening if something's breaking, because it always seems like something's breaking around me that I'm going to have to fix. I was in the gym, and I heard a sound that I knew wasn't right.

The air conditioner kicked on, but it just didn't kick on forcefully enough. And I said, oh, a month ago, I meant to go up there and tighten the belt on that thing. And that means also the filters needed to be replaced. Forgot about that, too, you know, so it's like, okay, so yesterday I went up there with some tools, took a couple panels off, replaced the filters, tightened the belt. You know, 30, 40 minutes later, I'm done.

No problem. No big deal. But at the same time, it's like, I'm listening to that. Elaine was playing the piano earlier this morning, just, you know, when we had first gotten here. And I said, do you have nails or something?

Or, you know, what's going on? I just wanted to make. Because I kept hearing this little clicking sound. Well, she's got this little ring that had, like, a pearl or something on it, I think. And it was spun around, and it was clicking a key every so often.

When she hit, like, one of the black keys or something, it would bump into one of those. I said, oh, no. She said, I can take it off. I said, no, no, no. I was just making sure that the piano wasn't breaking.

You know, like, I wanted to make sure one of the keys wasn't getting stuck. And we had to figure out how to do maintenance on a piano now, too. See, my ear is impossibly tuned towards certain things. Yesterday, about the time I was going up and down from the attic, bringing my tools up to take the air conditioner apart, I stepped outside and I heard. I mean, I heard some serious stuff.

Like, people were getting murdered, I promise you. Like, I heard all these guns going off. I was like, oh, my goodness. Like, do I need to get in this? You know, behind a big stone wall somewhere?

What do I need to do? And then I remembered seeing signs around town, the World War II reenactment that was going on. I was like, oh, thank goodness. You know, Like, I was sure that there was, like, some gang activity like, that came up, you know, from somewhere real bad. You know, like, they brought the whole army, and people are fighting it out.

I don't know what's going on, but I'm like, this is bad. And, like, oh, World War II reenactment. That makes a lot more sense and probably a lot more likely you know, with our military history museum that we've got and all that stuff. Like, good job, guys. I'm glad they had put the signs out, because I seriously would have.

The police probably had quite a few phone calls about it yesterday, and they were probably ready. Like, it's a war reenactment. Don't worry about it. You know, but it was. You know, I walked outside, though, and I heard that, and my ear immediately picked up on it.

What would it be like in our lives? It should be this way, that when we're walking around and we see something, maybe as somebody that we can serve them and help them, we can minister to somebody's needs. Or maybe as some one of those fleshly desires that you're doing that needs to be put to death. What if you were walking and you heard the spirit of God speaking to you? It's not just a what if he does do this?

But what would it be like if you tuned your ear to hear those things instead of, the biggest thing for me is listening to the thing that might be broken. And what do I have to fix next? It's what is the spirit of God leading me to do next? What is he telling me doesn't belong in my life and that thing needs to. Needs to be gone.

That thing needs to be put to death in my life. And, you know, the thing is, he'll do it. Just like, I don't want to compare him to when you get nagged to do something. However, sometimes for me to do a task like fix something around the house or fix something that needs to be done, sometimes I need to be asked a few times. Now, I found this great joke on the Internet that I told my wife.

I said, you know, it's like, hey, listen, if I tell you I'm going to finish a project, I don't need to be nagged every six months to do it. You know, like, I will get it done. And so that seems to be true. Like, you know, like every six months be like, hey, are you going to take care of that or not? You know, and eventually, after a couple of years, I'll get it done.

But the Holy Spirit, he doesn't nag us, but he keeps saying, didn't I tell you to stop that? I told you to quit that. Right? Sometimes that's the best way that he can help us. He can put these sinful fleshly desires to death in our lives, is just by constantly saying, you agreed to do what I said, right?

Yeah, I submitted to you. I yielded my life to your leading, to your guidance. He says, I'm telling you not to do that. I'm telling you to stop that. I'm telling you that that thing needs to go out of your life.

And as we continue to obey him, each time we hear his voice more and more. But then on the other side of it, when he tells you, don't do that. And you're like, no, it's okay. I'm going to do it. It's not hurting me.

It's not bad for me. Everyone else is doing it. I see others doing it, and I don't see anything bad happening in their lives. And we just kind of judge what we should do. Based on what we see in the world, rather than listening to the spirit of God, we start to tune our ears out.

It's like we have a volume knob on our ear or like, on our soundboard back there. We can. There's a. There's a device next to it. There's a graphic equalizer.

And we can move little ones to tune out different sounds or raise different levels, different parts of the sound spectrum. Like, if there's a little bit of a hiss or a buzz in the system, I can find which one it is and just kind of turn it down on that one and say, I don't know what was causing that, but I don't need to hear it anymore. We can do the same thing with the Holy Spirit and say, well, I don't know what all this noise was. I was hearing about these things in my life that need to go away, but I don't need to hear that. I don't need to hear somebody telling me not to do these things.

You see, when you are living your life that way, question whether you have even understood who Christ is and what Christ is doing. For you. See, Galatians, the book we've been looking at, is truly a discipleship book. Discipleship is taking us from who we were and creating us into people who look like Jesus Christ, who live like Jesus Christ. In Galatians 3:26,27, Paul begins telling them a bit about what baptism does.

He says that you are baptized into Christ. You see, he's saying that when you get baptized, it's not just a simple sign or symbol. You're actually. That's your initiation into Christ. You're baptized into the life of Jesus Christ.

And he says that that is when Christ is begun to be formed in you. He begins to be formed in you. We see this echoed in Galatians 4, verses 4 through 6. He talks about Christ formed in you. He talks about you being adopted as sons and daughters of God.

So I want to give you some practical advice over the next few minutes. Just a few minutes is stuff that scripture tells us at different stages in our life of discipleship. Like if you're a disciple, if you are following Christ in any way, or at any level along the way, there's something to be said to you from his word. Now you might say, well, I'm not living for Christ, or I haven't decided to give my life to him. Well, maybe not yet.

Now, my prayer, and literally, as I prayed earlier before the message, I prayed for our nation's leaders. I pray for People that we would yield our lives to God. One of the most, I don't know, mind boggling things that I saw on the Internet this week, and I saw a lot. I mean, I woke up Wednesday morning about 1:00 and I said, well, let's. Or about 1:30, I said, let's see where we're at on this election, you know, And I look at my phone and I'm looking at stuff, I'm like, oh, wow.

And I'm like, oh, my. And then people are already melting down that the end of the world's coming and all this. So I'm seeing all this stuff going on and I'm taking it all in. And then we get to the funny stuff where people are making memes and jokes and laughing at some of that and going through all this stuff. And then there's this clip that pops up.

One of the, probably the most popular podcaster, if you know what that is on the Internet, is a guy named Joe Rogan. He's got multiple avenues of professional things that he does. He was MMA competitor, he does commentary for them. He was an actor on tv. He's done all kinds of stuff.

He's a hunter. He's had TV show stuff that he's done. Fear Factor was a big show. He led just all this stuff. And now he has this podcast that, you know, tens of millions of people listen to on average every episode.

And he has this guy on there named Kid Rock, a singer that's been around for a long time. Kid Rock spent some of his time living In Michigan, about 30 minutes from where I grew up, and then also has a place in Nashville where I believe he spends most of his time now. And I lived there for 11 years and Amy's from there. And so Kid Rock, every time before he moved there, every time he would come to Nashville, it seemed like he would go to a bar, get drunk, which is not abnormal for him, it seems like, and then get in a fight and get arrested. Now, that was a thing where it's like, oh my goodness.

And one day I did some work. I worked for a company that cut down trees and did stuff like that. And we did some work at a publicist's home. And he was the guy that did the media control for Kid Rock among some other people. And I said, oh, my goodness.

Like, I bet you cringe every time he shows up in Tennessee because it seems like he can't come here without getting drunk and getting in a fight and getting arrested. He's like, yeah, he's a lot of fun, you know, for my line of work. But Kid Rock is sitting on this podcast with Joe Rogan. I haven't caught the whole episode, just this clip for a couple minutes. And Joe Rogan asks him, what?

What? You know, if you could time travel, go to any spot, what would it be? And he just thinks for a second. He says, jesus Christ. He says, what?

Yeah, I want to go somewhere where Jesus Christ is. And Joe says, well, what if you got there and there was no one there? He says, oh, that'd be great. It'd just be me and him. He's like, no, what if you got there and Jesus wasn't real and you found out that he wasn't?

He says, well, he is. And I'm thinking, like, this was not what I expected out of Kid Rock, you know, I'm. I'm not saying that he couldn't be like, I just. I hadn't heard this side of him come out, you know, and so I'm not expecting what happens next. And he says, well, yeah, he's real.

And they get talk around it a little bit. And Joe says, well, you know, how are you so sure of this? Like, how do you believe? How do you know this to be true? And he says, it's my faith.

And Joe just. You could tell he's processing that. Like, at first it looked like he wanted to say, that's not a real reason. And then he actually said, that's about the best reason I could get out of you. That's the thing that makes the most sense.

You didn't try to prove it to me. You just said, I just know it. And so then he has this moment there, and Kid Rock says, do you want to meet Jesus? And it's like, what's going to happen? And then he says, I'm just not there.

I don't know that he's real. And he said, I love the idea of Jesus being real. I'm not quite there. And then they talked. It went from there.

But this moment where here's Kid Rock, this guy that gets into all kinds of trouble. Some of the lyrical content of his songs, most of us would say, wait a second. Really? I don't know. And he's the guy asking one of the biggest, you know, audience.

You know, the guy that has the biggest audience online. And he talks to him, and he says, you want to meet Jesus? And I literally said out loud to Amy when we're watching this. She showed it to me, and I said, is it that easy? I mean, I know, it's that easy.

Like, you can do that with your friends and your family. But, I mean, talking to a guy like Joe Rogan on his podcast, sitting in his studio, and you say on knowing that millions of people are going to see this, you don't really care if he says no. And you say, would you like to meet Jesus? Now? I said all that story.

I told you that whole thing. I could have played the clip and it would have taken less time, but I didn't feel like getting into all that. I said all that to say this. We look at our lives, we look at the people around us, and we think, like, it gets so complicated. And really it's just like, start by meeting Jesus.

If you don't know Jesus yet, my prayer is that you will. My prayer is that you would get to know him. And not only that, but if you don't know Jesus because you have other objections about it. Listen, if Kid Rock can believe and have faith like that, I think any of us can as well. And so when we talk about discipleship, what we're saying is you might start down here and say, well, I can't be holy.

I can't be perfect. That's not true. Apparently, Kid Rock can't either. But he has a faith that doesn't seem to waver in the face of potential adversity. And he says, so we start out there, wherever it is, and we say, I'm willing to believe in Jesus.

Not just Joe Rogan's answer, that says, like, I'm willing to. Like the idea that Jesus might be real. That's that step of faith that says, I'm ready to believe that Jesus existed, that Jesus was the son of God, and that he has something to say for my life. And as we start there, the process of discipleship begins. The process of becoming more and more like Christ begins.

So then there's another group of us that you might have believed in Jesus as your Lord and savior. At some point. You might have recited a creed, recited a prayer, made some kind of public profession, been baptized, and you said, well, Jesus is my Savior. I'm going to heaven. I can't wait.

But in the meantime, you were given a list of rules, a list of traditions. I know I've got a lot of folks in here that spent time in what we might consider more Catholic, like Roman Catholic, or churches that had a lot of rules, or perhaps in the old school Nazarene Church that also had a lot of rules. And I know that so much of what you were told and Taught was based upon. Here's the way of living. Now do these things, here's the catechism, here's the classes.

Do these things and you're set. I want to tell you that Jesus has so much more for you than a list of rules. In fact, as we read this discipleship manual, this book of Galatians, we realize that what Paul is trying to tell these people is that if they kind of go back to rule living, rule following life, then you'll never get to truly understanding who Jesus Christ is. What he's trying to tell them is that if you just believe that, okay, if you just believe that this relationship is only about a list of rules, then you'll never really have a relationship with Jesus and you're truly not understanding his life for you. So if you've believed and yet you've found these traditions and rules and been told you have to follow them, I want to help you be freed from that.

Because the word of God speaks about Christ being formed in us, not us being conformed to rules, but Christ being formed inside of you. You see, we talked last week about, or maybe it was in our Bible study. It all blends together. But some of us talked about there was two prophets, two traditions of writers in the Old Testament. And both of them, even though they had different, different, we might call it denominations or different viewpoints, they came together with the same understanding that the problem was their heart.

That their heart had become like a stone and it was immovable and they needed somebody to replace that. They needed a heart transplant and they needed the very heart of somebody that could save them, namely Jesus Christ. But then there's another group of us. Perhaps you understand that you allow Christ to live in you. You invite him in.

You want to have a personal relationship with Him. Maybe you do you devotions, maybe you read the Scriptures and have prayer time every day. Perhaps you say, well, Pastor Nick, I appreciate your messages, but I want to hear somebody you know, that digs into the Word in a different or better way. And I want more of that. And so you're watching them on TV or on the Internet or listening to it on your phone, that's great, but yet you find yourself not tuning your ear to the Holy Spirit.

You find yourself open to the Scriptures and the Word of God, but not to hearing the Spirit of God speak through those Scriptures to you. If you are not listening and obeying the Holy Spirit, you're missing out on everything that God not just has for you in this life, but everything. He created you to Be. You see, God didn't just create us to be walking this earth on our own. In fact, the first people, he created them, he placed them in the Garden of Eden.

And every day he walked with them. Every day he spent time with them. God wasn't just doing that just to make sure that they hadn't broken the rules. He was doing that because he loves them and he cares about them and he wants to be with them. They were the ones that hid from God.

They were the ones that decided to go their own way and recognize that that caused separation from God. And they decided that they wanted to live that way rather than in close communion and fellowship with Him. Now, since God doesn't just walk in the garden with us or walk on this earth with us, he has given us His Holy Spirit to be with us, to dwell with us each and every day. And because of that, he gives us this whole way of living. He gives us not only the things to do and the things to avoid, but he speaks to us, he ministers to us, he comforts us, he guides us, and he cares for us.

And so what we must do is we start to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit. But not only just listen, we have to obey. When he tells us something to do or to not do, we must be obedient. For me, many times it's that person that he tells me to stop and to help or to speak to. And those are the times that I tend to fail the most.

And I worry that the more times that I rationalize not acting in a good way towards them, the more that I rationalize not doing those things, the more that I am in danger of my heart becoming calloused. As much as my hands might be, I worry that my ears get out of tune. To use the piano again as an example, every so often you need to have somebody come and make sure that it's in tune. Because temperature changes, humidity, all those things can affect it. And if it's out of tune, we don't know what notes to sing.

Because the ones that are played aren't right. They're not in tune. Our lives can be so out of tune with the Spirit of God that when he speaks, we can't even hear him. Because we're not attuned to listening for that. We're not.

We don't have our ears set to hear the things that he's saying to us because we've said, I don't want to hear you. I don't want to listen to what you're saying. I don't want to obey what you're saying. And the Holy Spirit will never go where he's not wanted. Now, for sure, we believe in this thing called prevenient grace.

This is the idea of the grace of God that's going ahead of us, that's going to meet us at a place where we weren't looking for him, where we weren't ready for Him. Prevenient grace is this idea that God is preventing or at least doing everything he can to prevent us from going over that cliff in our lives that leads to a bad place and a damnation in hell for eternity. That God is working to reach us even when we weren't looking for Him. The Bible tells us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. In other words, before you ever knew that you needed God, he was already reaching out to you.

He was already giving Himself to you, giving everything he had to you. And as such, we know that the Holy Spirit is already working on our lives. And yet we can still reject that and say, no, thanks, I don't need this. I don't need this Christianity. I don't need this walk with Christ.

But the Holy Spirit. Once you're a believer, once you're a Christian, once you are somebody who has given your life to Christ and received his salvation, the Holy Spirit will not push his way in where you do not want Him. If you decide that you don't want to listen or obey, he won't push in there. He'll keep knocking, he'll keep being there. But the more you tune him out, the less he'll ever come by.

He's not going to be anywhere he doesn't want to be. I believe that holds true for churches as well. You see, churches, whole congregations can say, well, we've got this on our own. Like, we've got a comfortable number of people. We've got things going on.

We're okay. We don't really need the power of the Spirit of God in our midst. I've seen this in churches, big and small churches with lots of programs, with hardly any programs. They get too comfortable where they're at and say, we don't need the Spirit of God. We have good people here.

We have a good minister, we have a good worship leader. We're all set. I've seen churches that had such a great program with their music, with their instruments, with their singers, with their stage lighting with smoke. It's like a rock and roll show. It's a great concert.

Some of the hearts of the people might be worshiping God, and yet we wouldn't ever know if the Spirit of God showed up because we've gotten so good at imitating what he might feel like in our midst that we don't know if he's there or not. Because it might have just been the amplifiers and the light show, or it might have been the Spirit of God. Did you know when you read in the book of Revelation and the apostle John is taken to heaven in a vision and he's in the throne room of God, it sounds a lot like that the way you read it. There was thunder and lightning, light shows booming. There was.

There was. There was smoke that appeared. There was worship. There was singers, There was an angelic choir. Like, all this stuff is just like.

We're just. It seems like we're trying to mimic that. And yet. And I'm not trying to, like, dog those churches or say they're doing it wrong. I'm just saying we've figured out how to.

How to make, like, unnecessary for the Spirit of God to show up. I'm not saying that's true. It's just like, it feels like that's what we're doing is saying, we don't really need you because we figured out how to do this artificially. Just like so many times scientists think, like, their job is, what they're trying to do is actually disprove God rather than prove the things that God has made for us and how they work, what they're trying to do is say, well, see, we were able to morph this one life form into this other life form. And so therefore, God must not be necessary for this equation of life to exist.

We don't realize that everything, everything that we are, stems from the creating word of God that put us in place. And so they're working to disprove God in the same way that many churches are working to prove that we don't need him in our services. Now, they wouldn't go out and say that that's what they're doing, but effectively that's what's happening. That can happen in our personal life or in the corporate church life, either one. So for those of us who find ourselves as believers and accepted Christ's salvation, and yet we're not listening to the Holy Spirit speaking to us.

The call today would be that you would listen and obey both immediately when he speaks and continually as he content as he continues to speak to you. The last stage or aspect that we need to talk about here today is that the Holy Spirit wants to Fill you with his presence. And as he does that, he will give you gifts. Who doesn't like gifts? Who doesn't like getting a present, like a good one, anyway?

I mean, we've all gotten a few duds, you know, where it's like, why? Why did you give me this? Or what made you think that that's something that I wanted? Like, sometimes I just wish sometimes that Christmas would go away because I've spent days. Not so much anymore.

But when I was younger, I spent days walking through malls and big box stores looking for this list of people I was going to buy stuff for and saying, yeah, they probably would like that. They don't want it at all. And it never gets used. And I just feel like I'm propping up this whole, like, Christmas commercial thing, going back to the Charlie Brown stuff again. But at the same time, it's like when you give somebody a gift where you look at that person in your mind and you say, okay, I know them.

I understand them. This is something that they would really enjoy. This is something that would really go well in their life, that would really compliment what they're doing. That makes sense. Amy gave me a set of fuzzy dice that hangs on a car mirror.

I love it. I had a set of those back in the day, and they've been gone for a long time, and I think it's time to bring that back. You know, like, people are putting all this other stuff on their cars, but fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror was one of the coolest things ever back in the day. And I want to bring it back, you know, and so we. We get these gifts where it's like, it shows us that that person gets us.

We don't all get the same gift that way. My grandmother was always wanting to be perfectly fair with everyone. And so at Christmas time, all of the boy cousins got the same exact thing, and all the girl cousins got the same exact thing. Which was weird when my cousin that was about 12 years old got a windshield scraper for the car that he wouldn't have for a few years, but she was fair. Except that gift really didn't make much sense for him, did it?

I guess he could go help his parents out on their windshield. It didn't make much sense for my cousin that lived in Florida either. So, you know, I'm not sure what was going on there, But Grandma was nice and fair. I don't actually know that she gave the windshield scraper to everyone, but I do remember windshield scrapers as one of the gifts they had like, this, like, glove thing that went over your hand like a cuff so it would keep your hand warm. I thought it was funny because it's such a female thing to give to a guy.

We don't care. You know, it's like, oh, so it's cold for what, 12 seconds? No big deal. I'll be fine. You know, that's.

Guys, that's what we think about. But I love my grandmother. And you know, the thing is, the Holy Spirit doesn't give each of us the same gift. He gives you a gift that is just for you, and he gives you a gift that is just for you to use in ways that he wants you to use it. That glorifies God, that makes this world a better place, that brings the kingdom of heaven here on earth, that brings the presence of God in our midst.

You see, if there's anything this world needs right now, it's the presence of the Spirit of God everywhere. Amen. And so if you're a believer and you've gone through all these things, you've accepted Christ, you've believed in him, you've allowed the Spirit of God to form the heart and mind of Christ in you. But if you haven't sought the filling of the Holy Spirit and the gifts that he brings that are up to him to choose, then you're missing out on everything that God created you for. You're missing out on everything that he has for you.

And so we can talk more about this in class later, if you'd like, we can discuss that further. We can look at some of these sections in Galatians that talk about some of this stuff. And next week we'll talk about what the fruit of having the Spirit in your life looks like. This, the culmination of five weeks of preaching through this is the Spirit of God. Once you've invited him in and allowed him to fill you, and you've listened to him and led and obeyed him, there will be fruit that bears in your life.

From that, there will be these things growing out of you that are just popping out. That is like, this is what it looks like to be living that Spirit filled life. So we're going to look at those things next week. But remember, the Holy Spirit won't go where he's not wanted. If you enjoy living by the flesh more than you enjoy yielding your life to the Spirit of God, you'll never experience the Spirit of God filling you if you're not willing for that to happen.

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