This week, we continued the “Two Kings, Two Thrones”
series. In this part, we began seeing Saul’s jealousy toward David emerging.
After the men return from the defeat of Goliath, the people are shouting and
singing about how Saul slays his thousands and David his tens of thousands.
Needless to say, Saul was not happy about this.
Law will always be jealous of grace and what it can do –
particularly what it thinks grace is not qualified to do. It just doesn’t seem
fair to those living by law that some sinner can be used by God. After all,
they’ve done all the works necessary to be deemed qualified. If the work truly
had qualified them, they would be used, but works are not the qualifier – faith
in His grace and a desire to partner with God is the qualifier. It is not about
obedience to the letter of the law, but obedience to the voice of the Spirit.
I don’t know if you have ever thought about HOW Jesus was
able to live life without sinning. Perhaps you just assumed it was because He
was God, but, if Jesus were not capable of falling to temptation, He would not
have been a truly sympathetic high priest. Jesus was God, but He was also man.
So what gave Him the power to overcome sin? It was the Holy Spirit inside of
Him. No one had ever lived on earth
since the Garden with the Holy Spirit inside of them. The Holy Spirit is our
teacher and our tutor. He is our supervisor. He is all the things that the law
tried to be but failed. Also, as in
Matthew 3, the Spirit descended on Jesus as well.
You see, learning all about the grace of God is vitally
important, but unless we learn to be led by the Spirit, we can make grace the
“license to sin” that some make it out to be. In fact, it is interesting to
note that the churches and denominations that are very strong in their
admonishment against the grace message (calling it dangerous and a license to
sin) are also generally the ones that do not believe in the baptism of the Holy
Spirit or that the gifts of the Spirit are for today. Apart from intimate relationship with the
Holy Spirit, grace can indeed become dangerous. If we have NO tutor or
supervisor and are simply left to what the flesh feels like it wants to do, we
will find destruction because of destructive behaviors.
The Holy Spirit is alive in us once we are born again.
When we seek and receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit, then the Spirit is
also ON us – empowering us to follow His leading. Jesus had that Spirit alive in Him from the
very beginning. It was literally in His DNA. The Holy Spirit came upon Mary and
she conceived. In a sense, the Holy Spirit was His “daddy.” We were not born in
such a way. We are born entirely of the flesh – of a man and a woman. We must
become born again to ignite the Spirit in us. The Spirit is then alive in us
and speaking to us – leading us into all truth. The baptism of the Holy Spirit
is what gives us supernatural power to DO what the Spirit is leading us to do.
Many Christians receive that gift of salvation and the
Spirit in them, but without the power of the Spirit in and on them, they return
to being governed by law. The law is a poor tutor because it can only govern
the outside of man. The Spirit desires to work inside of us and change us in a
way that law cannot – at the heart level.
Remember what Paul told us – that the law is no longer written on stone
tablets, but upon the hearts of men. It does not magically appear there, but
the Spirit is doing the writing. As He writes, the heart changes.
We also spent some time looking at how this worked in
Jesus’ ministry on earth. At the end of Matthew 7 as the “sermon on the mount”
draws to a close, the people are amazed at the authority with which Jesus
speaks – an authority that the teachers of the law lacked. The Holy Spirit in
Him gave Him that authority. There is no authority in the law – only hopeless
submission. Grace allows the Holy Spirit to operate with authority through the
believer.
When we think about what Jesus was teaching at the sermon
on the mount, we could say He was teaching us how to slay the giants in our
hearts – much like David had just slayed the giant Goliath and brought the
jealousy of Saul upon him. After Jesus teaches and then demonstrates this
authority through healing and casting out demons (all symptoms of sin and loss
of authority to the enemy), we see that the teachers of the law and the
Pharisees were becoming jealous of Jesus. He was doing what they could not;
what they had no authority to do. He was taking authority over the fruit of
mankind’s sin – sickness, affliction, and disease.
In Matthew 9, a paralytic man is brought to Jesus.
Instead of focusing on the man’s body, He tells him that his sins are forgiven.
This man’s sickness may have been a result of sin. Ultimately all sickness,
disease and lack is a result of the sin of mankind. Jesus was getting to the
root problem. He was also irritating the Pharisees with the authority He was
exercising. Since He was without sin, He had authority to demand its effects to
stop. So, it was the Holy Spirit that
empowered Jesus to not sin. That is the same Holy Spirit you have in you. It is
also the same power made available to us on the day of Pentecost. It is not
just Spirit in us but also on us. Unlike
Jesus, we were not born that way, and we must continually renew our minds to
this new way of thinking that is in line with the Spirit and empowered by the Spirit.
To listen to the entire sermon go to http://ahwatukeechurch.com/media.php. To learn more about Living Word Ahwatukee,
visit http://ahwatukeechurch.com/.
