Scripture: Psalm 143:10-11; Galatians 5:22; Galatians 5:19-21; Acts 7 Series: 2022
A New Year’s Day sermon in a series on the Apostles’ Creed, focused on the line ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit.’ Pruitt untangles the word ‘spirit’ from cultural associations (school spirit, ghosts, New Year’s spirits) to affirm the Spirit as fully God, the third person of the Trinity, present and at work in unseen ways. Drawing on Psalm 143 and Wesley’s covenant prayer, he argues the Spirit is not a benign affirmer of our desires but a wild, revolutionary presence who transforms hearts, discernible by the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5) tested in community. Stephen’s martyrdom models a faith so Spirit-formed it seeks God even to the point of death, and the sermon closes with the congregation praying Wesley’s covenant prayer.
Illustrations: school-spirit-am-consolidated, spirit-halloween-ghosts, translucent-ghosts-tv-movies, big-sky-daddy, divine-megaphone-binitarianism, lover-beloved-love-between, wesley-covenant-prayer, martyrdom-of-stephen, refiners-fire, mary-magdalene-empty-tomb
January 1
Credo
I believe in the Holy Spirit
Teach me to do what pleases you, because you are my God. Guide me by your good spirit into good land. Make me live again, Lord, for your name’s sake. Bring me out of distress because of your righteousness. - Psalm 143:10-11
Spirit is a funny word. I remember at my high school, A&M Consolidated in College Station, how we had spirit days on Fridays and always played ‘the eye of the tiger’ by Guns N Roses in between classes. That was a different spirit than the Holy Spirit. School spirit is about possessing a general positivity towards your school, cheering on the relevant team. Spirit Halloween pops up every year with costumes of all kinds. Spirits often refer to ghosts or dead souls.
Last night was New Year’s Eve, a date known for its spirits. The Holy Spirit is the the third person of the Trinity. What does this spirit have to do with any of the others?
Series Intro
My friends, we are continuing our series on the apostles creed, that historic doctrinal statement of the faith. We are going to look at how the creed encapsulate scripture and offers it to us in a way that shows us what has been revealed from God about who God is, how the world is, why we are in need, how Jesus saves us, and what we should do about it.
Today, I believe in the Holy Spirit.
New Years is a fitting day to talk about the Holy Spirit. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, loved to say a special prayer on this day called the covenant prayer. It was for people to covenant with God for the next Year.
It starts with these words
“I am no longer my own, but yours.”
These are not the words of the new-you or me-time or self-care or a lot of other New Year’s resolutions. Something different is going on with the covenant prayer. And something different is going on in Psalm 143.
The scripture from Psalm 143 could be a fitting New Year’s resolution for any Christian.
Teach me to do what pleases you, because you are my God. Guide me by your good spirit into good land. Make me live again, Lord, for your name’s sake. Bring me out of distress because of your righteousness.
I am going to come back to Psalm 143, but we need to start with this word spirit, because if we don’t understand what the creed means by Spirit, we limit ourselves in understanding how God acts through and by the Holy Spirit.
The King James Bible often translates the Greek, ieros pneuma, as Holy Ghost. Ghost or spirit refer to non material objects or substances. Ghost is a term that only recently has become connected to dead people, but it became that way because of the idea of a soul, which is non material, neither entering heaven or going to hell. A lost soul of sorts. With television and movies, in order represent these souls, white or semi-translucent people were designed. But in books and other media, ghosts are invisible.
Spirits at Halloween or ghosts are described in such a way because they do not follow the basic physical laws of other material things. They are invisible yet present.
God is present and working in unseen ways. The God who works in unseen ways is fully God. This is the power of the Trinity and the uniqueness of the Christian faith. God is not just a big sky daddy controlling us, ordering us around, punishing us when we are naughty or nice. God is for us, here.
Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the word made flesh, is fully God and fully human. We are still celebrating the birth of Jesus and the amazing reality that God has come down to us. Some early Christians were Binitarians who believed Jesus was God but the Spirit was just a mode in which God acted, like a divine megaphone of sorts.
The Spirit is not simply a mode of God but fully God and this is amazing! God created everything from nothing. God created humans in the image of God, in the likeness of the Son of God, Jesus Christ. All of humanity is a reflection of the life of Christ which became fleshly and material at Christmas.
And God’s presence with us didn’t lesson or weaken with the ascension of Jesus Christ. God is with us fully in the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter, the instructor. My favorite analogy of the Trinity is love. God the Father is the Lover. God the Son is Beloved. And God the Holy Spirit is the love between the Lover and the Beloved. That Love is present with us in the Holy Spirit. And the only way to see or understand the Holy Spirit is by faith.
God is with us fully. God is not with us metaphorically or in any way secondary to who God is. God is with us fully.
But God isn’t just with us to affirm whatever we want anyway. The Spirit moves in us to transform us and change us in ways that may be uncomfortable. The Spirit is mischievous and wild. I think one of the more challenging aspects of being a Christian is saving space for the Holy Spirit. That is, not planning or dictating everything about worship or the life of the church.
Some denominations talk a lot about being Spirit-filled. Pentecostal churches especially claim a special connection to the Holy Spirit and practices like speaking in tongues. Extemporaneousness is a virtue. Authenticity is found in being “Spirit-led.” And yet all these denominations or non-denominations are tranditioned. Even if they are quote-unquote not traditional. They are. There is nothing Christian that is not traditional or else it wouldn’t be Christian. Tradition means what is worth passing down. If you believe Jesus Christ is the only Son of God who died for your sins and rose again to give you life, you are following a tradition of the Good News that has been passed down since Mary Magdeline and the other Mary first noticed the empty tomb. They shared the word and it passed on to the Peter and John and they passed it on and others passed it on, generation after generation until we come to today.
The Good News of Jesus Christ is a tradition that has been passed down. But not everything that has been passed down in each generation is inherently good. That is, something is not valid because it is old but because it is valid. Something is not good because it is traditional but only if it is good. But how do we know whether something is good or old? We have the Bible, not as a dead book but the living word of God. We have the Creeds as the summation of Christian doctrine. We have our capacity to think and discern as people made in the image of God. And we have our experience of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The important word here is “our”. Christians can’t figure anything out alone. And the amazing thing is that God didn’t leave us alone. God is with us in the Spirit, which not only helps us individually, but gathers us together as the Church.
And we are not finished. Neither as individuals nor as a church. Some of you have been a part of churches in simpler times, but that didn’t mean the Holy Spirit was finished transforming people. We see the direction of transformation with the fruit of the spirit.
The fruits of the Spirit from Galatians are not static. They are dynamic. To have them is to be constantly changed by them.
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,” Galatians 5:22 CEB
We know when the Spirit is present when these things take place. Likewise, we know when the Spirit is not present when the fruits of selfishness take place, from earlier in Galatians.
“The actions that are produced by selfish motives are obvious, since they include sexual immorality, moral corruption, doing whatever feels good, idolatry, drug use and casting spells, hate, fighting, obsession, losing your temper, competitive opposition, conflict, selfishness, group rivalry, jealousy, drunkenness, partying, and other things like that. I warn you as I have already warned you, that those who do these kinds of things won’t inherit God’s kingdom.” Galatians 5:19-21 CEB
A good tree bears good fruit. We hold to the presence of the Spirit through the fruit. In order to tell the fruit, we need other people. I can’t tell if I am loving by myself. I can’t really tell if I am patient.
The challenge is to not turn the Holy Spirit into an alter-ego of ourselves. That is, to not use the invocation of the Spirit to justify whatever we wanted to do anyway. It takes faith to discern the difference between our will and God’s will. I may be causing conflict but I tell myself I am being obedient. I may be competitive but I tell myself I am seeking faithfulness. Only God knows my heart and I must seek God with others so God can speak through them to let me know if I bear fruit of the spirit or selfishness.
Also, it takes faith because God’s will may look like something radically different from anything else you see in the world.
God’s will for you may not look traditional. One of the earliest traditions of Christianity was martyrdom. Witnessing to Jesus to the point of death. Stephen, one of the first deacons, was arrested for blaspheming in Acts 7. He took the opportunity to joyfully share the story of Jesus as revealed through the Old Testament while he was waiting to be stoned to death. Even at the point of death, he prayed for his executioners.
Do you have a faith like Stephen’s? Or more importantly, would you ever want a faith like Stephen’s? Would you ever desire a life that ends like that? It is a total waste of a life according to the world. It is a total waste if God doesn’t exist or if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. But if Jesus is Lord, then Stephen is not only an example but a goal to strive towards. And the Holy Spirit is a part of this. The same Spirit which taught Stephen about Jesus and comforted him at his trial, that Spirit is with us today. As we read Psalm 143 again in light of Stephen’s death, we may have a new respect for what please God.
Teach me to do what pleases you, because you are my God. Guide me by your good spirit into good land. Make me live again, Lord, for your name’s sake. Bring me out of distress because of your righteousness.
To say I believe in the Holy Spirit is to have faith that God can transform our hearts and desires through God’s real and true presence with us. Converting our desire from one that fears sickness, fears poverty, fears death, into a heart that seeks God to the point of sickness, to the point of poverty, to the point of death.
The Holy Spirit is not a benign advocate but a revolutionary who causes the world to turn on a different axis, the axis of Jesus Christ. To believe in the Holy Spirit is to be open to revolutionary change within yourself that may lead to the loss of everything you used to love because all those things are seen as loss next to the light of Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit will illuminate our lives to point out what is not love in us, that is, what in us needs to be burned away by the refiner’s fire of God’s love.
May you be willing to receive this fire that created the world, this fire that created the church at Pentecost, the fire that still spreads this day. May you be willing to pray the words of the covenant prayer together
“I am no longer my own, but yours. Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will. Put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be employed by you or laid aside for you, exalted for you, brought low for you. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, You are mine, and I am yours. So be it. And the covenant which I have made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.”