Wangaratta Wesleyan Methodist Church Sunday 15 th November 2015 Minor Prophets Joel part 2: Going Deeper

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1 1 Wangaratta Wesleyan Methodist Church Sunday 15 th November 2015 Minor Prophets Joel part 2: Going Deeper Bible Passages: Joel 2:23-32; Acts 2:14-17; Hosea 10:12; 1 Thessalonians 4:3, 7-8 Intro: Deeper is better Show slides of foundations or tap roots that hold a building or tree steady. Deeper roots are achieved through adversity. The dryer the conditions the deeper the root goes to find water therefore the stronger the foundation becomes. Pray: That the Holy Spirit would be able to do a deep, deep work in us. We have been looking at Joel Joel falls into two parts The first part that we looked at last Sunday majored on God sending a locust plague to bring about a deep repentance in the people. They wept and mourned and prayed for God s mercy and deliverance. Joel was confident that God who is gracious and compassionate would relent and not send the calamity he suggested. We leave that section with the priests weeping between the temple porch and the alter pleading that it won t be said of God s people, Where is their God? The second part of Joel is partly Messianic. It looks way forward to the Messiah coming and the blessing that was poured out at the beginning of the last days. For Judah they could look forward to physical and spiritual blessing if they repented. The question, Where is their God? is answered by God himself and he shows just how much and how powerfully he was to answer that question in the last days. 1. The message of Joel is that Nothing really changes in God s economy a. Repentance is the key And still is the key. Biblical history shows that people struggle with repentance Yet God is continually calling us to repent. It was part of every prophet s job description. John the Baptist, the last prophet before Jesus, was also commissioned to call people to repent. It is still needed today. Every pastor s job description involves encouraging people to repent. Of course we have the added presence of the Holy Spirit to convict people of sin and draw them to repentance. Why is this so important? Because in God s economy b. Blessing follows repentance For the Jewish people land was a symbol of God s blessing. 2:18 The Lord will be jealous for his land and take pity on his people. He would bless them. Enough to satisfy them fully 2:19 2:21-13 Threefold call to be joyful: note land, wild animals and people

2 2 Blessing would come in rain. Verse 23 The blessing would also be the produce of the land, the product of their labour. V. 24 The blessing will be retrospectively given. V.25 repay you for the years the locusts have eaten. As a result you will praise God and know God. This is always God s aim in blessing us Prophesy has always got a now and not yet component to it. In fact, often prophesy has many layers to it. There was blessing now if they obeyed God and blessing to come. The blessing to come was going to be so incredible that words simply couldn t do justice to it. You see c. God has so much to give us! The not yet component of Joel s prophesy was partly fulfilled in the coming of Jesus who brought healing, restoration and forgiveness into people s lives. Now Joel does looks further into the future when he quotes God as saying, And afterwards Peter says, In the last days in Acts 2 Read 2:28-32 On the Day of Pentecost when this prophesy was fulfilled I would love to have been in heaven to see Joel s face. 'You re kidding, Wow! Talk about Peter s speech For the Jewish hearers that day this would have been a realisation of hundreds of years waiting for the Spirit to be poured out. Expand. Jesus spoke often of the Holy Spirit who would come after he returned to heaven and the impact he would have. We are still in the last days and the same Holy Spirit who made such an impact at Pentecost is being poured out with the same force on every generation and people group across our world. Transition: I want to focus now on the impact of this passage for us today and the opportunity that God has through his Holy Spirit to go deeper into our lives and produce lasting holiness. It is my prayer that God would challenge and convict us this morning Firstly what has 2. Prophesy, Dreams and Visions (got to do with it) Do you love dreams? Expand I often think that our imagination is our greatest ally It is no mistake that we as God s created people made in his image have the capacity to speak into the future, to dream and visualise what can happen. Our God-given creativity is a powerful thing and God wants to use that in the church today. There is always an outcome to God s purposes, including our dreams and visions, and that will be to bring glory back to God and bless others by building his kingdom.

3 3 A warning: Always run your dreams by someone who is spiritually mature before acting on them. Sometimes our imagination can be confused with what God desires. a. We all need to dream! I ve always been a dreamer. Many of the things that I ve initiated in ministry have begun as a dream. It is my source of motivation. It is God s way of grabbing my attention and speaking to me. My greatest dreams and visions come either in my waking hours or while I m jogging or walking in the mountains. What is annoying about that is I don t have a pen and paper at those times to record my dreams. Taking notes the other day on the bike track! If I ever stop dreaming I know there is something wrong. Recently I noticed I had stopped dreaming. Expand Events of the past few months. Losing my job for a time The anointing had gone The second vote did not change things as I had hoped. I still felt grieved When Alan and others laid hands on Rhonda and I we began to sense God s healing and restoration. The very next morning as I jogged I began to dream again! Expand Two things: There is an intimate connection between walking with God s Spirit and the anointing on our lives and ministry. There is also an intimate connection between the spiritual authority of a leader and the blessing of the people they serve. If we want to get the best out of our leaders then pray for them and bless them in the name of the Lord. Jesus told the people that when the Spirit comes He will lead them into all truth. He would be a counsellor to them and would soon live in them. God would send the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus to teach them all things and remind them of what Jesus had already taught. The Holy Spirit has an important work to do in you and me 3. Letting the Holy Spirit do his work One of the main ministries of the Spirit is to bring about a deep a. Humility & repentance (in us) I really don t think we can achieve anything for God without these two aspects at work in us. Jesus demonstrated humility throughout his earthly ministry and asked us to do the same. I still find it hard to fathom how the creator of the universe who is all knowing, all powerful and everywhere could humble himself to become a vulnerable and defenceless baby and spend 33 years amongst a poor, sinful and oppressed people. He then displayed the ultimate in humility by subjecting himself to a cruel and shameful death on a cross.

4 4 Despite who he is and what he has done as the Son of God he choose the pathway of humility to bring about the greatest of his feats: Paying the ransom for our sin, bringing victory over death and defeating God s enemy and our enemy Satan. As genuine followers of Jesus have we any other choice but to follow this pathway of humility? Coming to God in prayer and submitting ourselves to him brings about humility. As we then allow the Spirit to work on us He convicts us of sin and draws us into repentance. Prayer therefore is the beginning of great things. Comment on the 24 hours of non-stop prayer Pastor that I bumped into through the week. Through the prayer night the Lord revealed something that was not right in my life. It was like his Holy Spirit zeroed in on an area that I had wanted to remain untouched. I had developed a resistance or hardness of heart. I cannot tell you what a release it was as God broke through that night. We all need to give God permission to b. Breaking up the hard ground One of the most important implements on the farm was a deep ripper. The soil was subject to compaction from stock and machinery To break up the hard pan Deep ripping allowed the water to get down and the plants to come up Imagine if the hard pan remained and nothing could get in and nothing could get out. Do we have a hard pan stopping God s Spirit getting in and suppressing the potential we have getting out? Expand Hosea 10:12 says, Sow righteousness for yourselves, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unploughed ground; for it is time to seek the Lord, until he comes and showers his righteousness on you. Expand When I read this passage the other day I felt like the Lord was challenging me to break up the unploughed ground in my life. Is this passage a challenge for you also? Maybe God is saying to you leave no ground unploughed leave no stone unturned for it is time to seek the Lord. Don t let pride or the unwillingness to confess or repent stop you. Every one of us needs our unploughed ground broken up before we can be effective for God. In our prayer day I noticed that a number of people pleaded with God to shake us and break us. Why did this become an outcome of our prayer together?

5 5 King David understood this when he wrote, My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise. (Psalm 51:17) I think it is possible for us to have a wilful resistance to the things of God. c. (Is there any resistance?) Recently I had a blocked bath pipe which was slowly getting worse and I feared it would block altogether. My gentle efforts to unblock the pipe were not working. Finally I decide to declare war on this blockage. I got a big plunger, put hot water in the bath and pumped vigorously until the blockage was so stirred up that it finally cleared. Is there resistance in us that is blocking the flow of the Holy Spirit? Zechariah looked forward to a time when God s Spirit would flow freely. On that day a fountain will be opened to the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, to cleanse them from sin and impurity. (Zachariah 13:1) I started with some pictures showing the value of 4. Going Deeper I hope you prayed that prayer with me earlier in my message; is it your desire to allow the Spirit to go deep within you? I m reminded of a child learning to swim. Look mum, I m swimming, as the child wades in the shallow pool. Look mum, I m swimming, as she bounces along on her tummy on the bottom of the baby pool. You will need to go into the deeper water to really swim, mum calls out. Wow mum, my feet are off the ground and I m really swimming, the child cries out excitedly. Unless we go deeper we will never experience God true blessing. The aim of going deeper is to bring about holiness. a. (Our aim is holiness) Holiness is being set apart for God. It is living a life that God intended for us rather than living to please ourselves with its sinful tendencies. Our passage from Thessalonians says, For God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Sanctification which basically means made holy is also used in the bible to describe our lifestyle of being set apart for God and not engaging in sin or sinful practices. When we first come to Jesus and have our sins forgiven our spiritual position is that we are declared holy by God because of what Jesus has done for us. Theologically this is referred to as positional sanctification.

6 6 Now if we left it there we would remain a spiritual baby and not have victory over ingrained sinful habits. Our goal is to continually seek holiness of character and lifestyle. The term we use for this is progressive sanctification. The point I want to make is this; the desire to be holy and live like Christ is a lifetime pursuit and the degree to which we obtain this is the degree to which we allow the Holy Spirit access to every area of our being. We cannot afford to have blockages or hard areas where the Spirit cannot have access. May we recognise the need for holiness and ask for the complete infilling and empowering of the Holy Spirit. Read story: In 1935 Blasio Kigosi, a schoolteacher in Rwanda, Central Africa, was deeply discouraged by the lack of life in the church and the powerlessness of his own experience. He followed the example of the first Christians and closed himself for a week of prayer and fasting in his little cottage. He emerged a changed man. He confessed his sins to those whom he had wronged, including his wife and children. He proclaimed the gospel in the school where he taught, and revival broke out there, resulting in students and teachers being transformed. They were called abaka, meaning people on fire. Shortly after that, Blasio was invited to Uganda, to share with the leaders of the Anglican Church there. As he called leaders to repentance, the fire of the Spirit descended again on the place, with similar results as in Rwanda. Several days later, Blasio died of fever. His ministry lasted only a few weeks, but the revival fires sparked through his ministry swept throughout East Africa and continue to the present. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been transformed over the decades through this mighty East African revival. It all began with a discouraged Christian setting himself apart to seek the fullness of God s Spirit. 1 Message by Pastor David Lloyd 1 Ajith Fernando, The Acts NIV Application Commentary, (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1998), 118.