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INTRODUCTION I want to tell you something: you can't do anything. John 15. Jesus says apart from me you can do nothing. So the reality is that is everything that you've read thus far, is going to accomplish absolutely nothing. I want to make sure that's clear, because John 15 apart from me you can do nothing is sitting right in the middle of chapter fourteen and sixteen. Where Jesus tells us about the Spirit. The Spirit has to do the work. You're not going to illuminate truth, you're not going to reveal truth, you're not even going to convict of truth. The Spirit of God must do that. You can't do anything you've just read and have it accomplish anything good unless the Spirit of God is at work. So I want to make sure we understand what that looks like. Study Luke 3, 4, 5 and do a parallel study of Acts. Say, what is God teaching us about his Spirit? Jesus says before he sends

them out to be his witnesses, "Wait for power. Don't do this without me. Don't do this without my Spirit." If you look how Jesus did it. The very beginning of his ministry he gets baptized and the Holy Spirit ascends on him and he hears the Father say, "This is my beloved Son with whom I'm well pleased." DEFINING THE PROBLEM The first question I have for you is have you heard him tell you that? Has the Spirit, as Paul says in Romans 5, poured the love of the Father into your hearts, as he says in chapter 8, "You can call God Abba, daddy, father." Because if he hasn't most of you will do ministry so that the Father will love you, instead of doing ministry because you know the Father loves you. The problem is you will use people to gain love, instead of serve people to give love. The Father has already given you all that he can in his Son. His Spirit has been poured into your

heart so that you might have a testimony that you belong to God as a beloved child. Do you know that? If you don't know that, don't go further. Randy - a guy I got to disciple, and I still am - I remember he used to pray and he used to say "Lord God, would you please just " and that was his prayer life. And I never heard him call God Father and finally I stopped him one day. I said "Randy do you know the Father and do you know his love for you?" He said, "of course I do, I know God loves me as a Father." "Well I have never heard you call him!dad." I said I just want you to go alone until the Spirit reveals to you. Let's not go any further until that happens. He just asked the Spirit would you show me the love of the Father. He experienced the Spirit pour the love of the Father into his heart. He just melted knowing God's love. I saw a hard cold theologian turn into a soft caring missiological genius and how he loved people and cared for

people. You ve have got to have that first. Jesus needed that before he did ministry. HOW TO TRULY OVERCOME TEMPTATION Second, Jesus goes to be tempted by the evil one in the desert. And you find that in the next chapter, in Luke 4. And he is full of the Spirit and led by the Spirit. Now let me ask you: How many times have you gone through that passage or you have heard someone teach that passage. And they say "How do you overcome temptation?" And over and over again, I hear people say "You just quote scripture." That doesn't make a whole lot of sense because the devil quoted scripture to tempt. The Pharisees were using scripture to stand against Jesus. Scripture alone will not help you overcome sin. It didn't help Jesus overcome sin all by itself. Jesus was full of and lead by the Holy Spirit. So that the word could be appropriately applied to the situation. Even Jesus needed this.

Do not think you are better than him that you can walk around and quote Bible all of the time. Who needs the power? If you do not have the Spirit and the word, you're not going to overcome sin. You need both. I remember years ago when Clay came to faith. We went to a big concert event - Kings of Leon - and he got a little too drunk. Brand new Christian and it was a crazy night. He was walking around being concert Clay. He was just like "Hey where's the doobies man, I want to smoke some." I'm just running around trying to keep up with the guy to make that he doesn't get in trouble. His wife embarrassed, is watching him. We come to the tent later that night, get him in bed. He is a mess. Rand comes up to me and says "Hey what are we going to do about this? We need to confront this sin." I said hey buddy it seems like the Holy Spirit was given to convict of sin. Let's ask the Holy Spirit to do it first. And he said "I don't know if that is going to work."

That is where some of us are at. We're like "No, I've got to be the Holy Spirit!" No you don't. And we prayed and he was full of doubt and a few weeks later we get together. We're having a meal and someone brought some wine. Clay doesn't drink anything. I pull him aside and say "Hey buddy what is up? Normally you like to have a glass of wine with a meal." He says "Yea, Concert Clay is dead. Until I can do this in a way that honors my family and the Lord, I'm not doing it again." Randy is across the room and looks at me and goes "No way." He just can't believe the Spirit will actually fulfill his job description. I wonder if that is us. Like "The Holy Spirit isn't going to convict the sin. I've got to be the convictor." No you don't. He is really good at doing his job; He has been doing it for a long time. HOW TO LIVE TRULY HUMAN You keep reading in Luke and you find out that Jesus opens up the scriptures in Isaiah. He says the Spirit of the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. Every wonder how Jesus spoke with such power and authority?

As he preaches, the people that have known him since he was a little kid go, "Isn't this Joseph's son? What is up with him? Don't miss it." For thirty years he wasn't preaching with power and authority. He got the spirit of God on him and he is preaching with power and authority. Why? Because Jesus is showing us how the human life is to be lived. Jesus showing us how power preaching takes place. Jesus showing us that when the Spirit of God comes on men and women, they proclaim with power the greatness and goodness of our God in such a way that people will go "Who is this?" And we will have to say, it's not me. It's Christ in me by his Spirit proclaiming to you. That is what is going on. I want to offer to you, if you want to be effective in proclaiming the gospel, you must be full of the Spirit. You must be anointed by the Spirit. You don't just go proclaim the gospel with power, without the power. What are you thinking? You need to be filled. You need to be lead. You need to be anointed.

I'm going to tell you that I'm a charismatic and you better be too, because if you don't have the Spirit of God, I don't know what you are doing. Intellect alone will not save people. The Spirit must. Fast forward a little bit in Clay's life. I'll just say that honestly there are days when I get frustrated and was even telling my wife the other day, "Why isn't he reading the Bible? What is going on, it seems like he is drifting." This was right before something took place one morning while I was praying for him. My wife, this is the beauty of my wife. My wife is a Spirit filled woman. She said "Hey remember you were telling everybody that maybe we should just pray for Clay. You know ask the Spirit to do it?" I said "Yeah." "You teach on that all the time don t you?" "Yeah, I do." She said, "Why don't you pray?" So that morning I'm praying for Clay. I'm driving home from a meeting. It's pretty early in the morning. I see fire trucks and ambulances passing by me. I begin to wonder what's going on.

The first thought on my mind is "I wonder if Clay is okay." So I follow them, I noticed that they followed down his street. They are parked right in front of his house. His wife is outside sobbing. I get out of the car quickly and I say, "Christy, what is going on? What is happening?" I said "is it Clay?" And she just falls on my shoulder and starts weeping. I ask, "What is going on?" She said, "Clay." I said, "Did he do something? What is wrong?" She said, "He came out of the house this morning with Emma, our daughter. The woman across the street came out screaming and yelling. The man that she lives with was

hanging from a rope in the garage. And Clay ran in there, and Clay found him." And Clay tells me the story later. Clay found him hanging from a rope and he said his hair was jet black and his face was bright red. He had no life in him. And Clay tried to get him off the rope but he felt like an 800 pound man, even though he was 180 pounds. There was some kind of demonic force going on in that room He couldn't get him up, but he found some scissors. He grabbed them, cut him down, grabbed him. Started pumping his chest doing CPR, doing everything he could to get the guy to be revived. Nothing worked. He said that in that moment he started praying "Jesus, if it's his time just take him home. But if not would you bring life back to him right now." He said a wind blew right into the garage and he felt it go right past him. All of a sudden the man started breathing and he came back to life. Amazing.

This is Clay who isn't great at following Jesus. I just want to make sure that is clear. Not some crazy healer - a normal guy who is just figuring out what it means to follow Jesus, to learn to follow Jesus. He hasn't figured hardly anything out yet. The spirit of God came on him and did a marvelous thing in that moment. You know what, he came to me and said "Man, I have been reading the book of Mark like crazy lately." Thank you Holy Spirit. Later I found out this older man ended up in a hospital. One of our young women works at that hospital and she had heard that story. She ran into him and found out she was actually caring for him. She said "I want to tell you what happened to you. You don't know this, but God saved you so you could hear the gospel." I don't know if she was able to tell him all at that point. She went and found the Chaplin and she said, "It's your job to tell people about Jesus. I work here, I might get in trouble for it, but if you don't do it, I'm doing just so you know. You had better go tell that guy about Jesus."

This 21 year old college girl. I found out later she is getting so filled with Spirit and the power to proclaim the gospel. She is on vacation in Southern California and a bunch of pastors find out she is there. They actually call a meeting and meet with her about three or four hours. Asked "Tell us what you guys are up to in Tacoma, because we want to learn from you." She got to teach pastors for about 3 or 4 hours how to be about the gospel and mission of every-day life. A 21 year old girl is teaching men who have been trying to do this for twenty years. Why? Because of the power of the Spirit that enabled her to what only the spirit of God can do. I want you to know I don't care how old you are, how young you are. Whether you are white or black, or woman or man. A REMARKABLE NORMAL If you have the Spirit of God in you, you can do remarkable, unexplainable things that can only be explained by the Spirit of God working in you and changing you.

That is what the church should have in them. Every one of us should be living in such a way that there is no way to explain our life other than the power of God given to us by the Spirit of God.

Bio: Jeff Vanderstelt is one of the founding leaders of Soma Tacoma, a multi-expression, church-planting church. He serves at Soma Tacoma as an Elder, Missional Community Leader and Teacher, and oversees Leadership Development and Vision. He is also the Apostolic Movement and Visionary Leader of Soma, a family of churches spread throughout North America. Jeff is married to Jayne and together they love and shepherd their three children in gospel, life, and mission. This ebook is a transcript of a talk from the Verge 2013 Conference: www.vergenetwork.org