I Believe in the Holy Spirit

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Well, good morning! Happy New Year! It's good to have you here. It's good to be here. And one word of advice for you this year, get the flu shot. I did not, okay? Boy, did I pay for it this week. But we're back. We're feeling a lot better. It's good to be here. And I think we better begin with prayer, shall we? Oh Lord God, we are amazed that you want to have your home with us, to abide with us, to be with us, and to gift us with the Holy Spirit. And so, Holy Spirit, we're asking you to enter in. Open our ears, our hearts, our minds, our thoughts. You know, just come in such a way to get beyond our defense mechanisms or anything that would be a blind spot that would get in the way of what you want to teach today, what you want to be about today. Lord, be so foundational in our lives that you are the air we breathe, and the ground we walk on, and the food we eat, and the light we see. All this we pray, Lord Jesus, in your name. Amen. It's good to be here, okay? It really is, let me tell you. And it's good to be able to get back into this foundations series, the building block of our lives. And we're going to be looking in John chapter 14, verses 15 to 26, as our text today. And this we're into now, I believe in the Holy Spirit. So we've kind of gone through, we took a break for three weeks for the Christmas season, and now we're back. And for the next four weeks, we're going to do this series, I believe, again, foundations and starting with the Holy Spirit. Next week, the Holy Christian or Catholic, that means universal church, the communion of saints, and then the forgiveness of sins, and then the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Okay? But we're going to start out with I believe in the Holy Spirit, and we're looking in John chapter 14, 15 to 26. So you can follow along, I think, in the Bible app is the U version of that, the notes are there. And if not, we've got some Bibles outside, or you'll see it on the screen. You can take notes today, if you'd like. Here we go, where Jesus is speaking to his disciples the night he's being betrayed, the night before he, in a sense, leaves. That's what he's talking about. Okay? He says, if you love me, he will keep my commandments, and I will ask the Father, and he will give you another helper to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world will see me no more, but you will see me, because I live, you will also live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him, and manifest myself to him. Judas, not Iscariot, said to him, Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world? Jesus answered him, if anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and he will, we will come to him, and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words, and the word that you hear is not mine, but the Father's who sent me. These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you, but the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. So we've said nearly all Christians over the last two millennia have actually confessed in one form or another, or professed, or said this is what we believe, and have used in one form or another, the words called the Apostles Creed. It was started way back when, and continues to the day, a kind of summary of the foundational teachings of our lives. And when we've done that, we've done basically two different things when we, or a church, speaks or confesses the words of this Creed. We first of all say this is the story, this is our identity, this is our destiny, this is our direction, our purpose, this is where we get a sense of who we are, what we are about, where we're headed, what life is really about. Our sense of reality comes from this story. Everything comes from that our God has chosen to bind himself to us, to promise himself to us, to be with us as Father, and Son, and Holy Spirit. And boy does that make a difference for everything. So at first we say this is who we are and what we confess, but we also have said over this time, when we confess this Creed, we're also rejecting all the narratives, all the stories, all, as we would put it, the myths that this world has to offer of what life is all about, what the purpose is all about, what direction you should live, etc. And those myths, we have said, are different isms, you know. Each ism is bas...