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Living Rock Church is a friendly, growing Christian church, meeting each week in Stoney Stanton, Atherstone, Market Harborough & Kenya. We’ve discovered that Jesus changes lives, heals bodies, restores families and gives meaning and purpose to us all. We’re convinced that church should be positive, practical, relevant and great fun! This podcast contains audio recordings from our Sunday gatherings.
Welcome to the Living Rock Podcast. It's my pleasure to minister from the word this morning. And this is the last in the series we're calling Extraordinary before our little summer hiatus, but extraordinary. It's a series have been looking at about how we as very ordinary people hands up if you're an ordinary person. Most of us, us are ordinary people. How we can know what it is to live extraordinary lives as we come to know the fullness of life with and through the Holy Spirit of God. And we are going to jump back into that series together this morning.
One of the things that you and I will both know if you've listened to me speak before, is that a morning like this is nothing to do with the skill of the person who is coming to share the word, but it's all to do with the Word and the Holy Spirit is the revealer of truth to us. And so we want to say this morning, holy Spirit, will you come and reveal Jesus to us? And we're asking you to do this knowing it is what you love to do. So what? This morning we see Jesus through the Word, would you come and speak to us? Would you come and sharpen us? Would you provoke us? Would you encourage us? Would you show us what it is to walk in step with you? We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Amen. Okay, I was speaking sometime last month, can't remember when it was, but my title that morning was The Sanctifying Holy Spirit.
Does anyone remember anything to do with that? No. Excellent. Great. Well, that's why I wrote a little summary and then we'll all remember in very short order, okay? Because we'll talk about how one of the jobs, one of the roles of the Holy Spirit is to sanctify. It's a big Bible word, but it means it's to make us more Christ-like it means it. It is to help us on our onward journey with God. But we said there were two aspects to sanctification that we find described in the scriptures. One is the initial washing from sin and being made holy. And for any of us here, if we've repented from our sin and turned to Jesus in faith, we have been sanctified. That is the first part of what it is to be sanctified. But then there is this second part, this progressive ongoing work of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
More people starting to remember me talking about this, okay? One person in this room remembers something about what I said this time last month. That's good, but about how the Holy Spirit's work is progressive and it's ongoing and the Holy Spirit is shaping and refining us to increasingly reflect the character of Jesus and his reign in our lives. And the gospel where he said doesn't stop with the from we've been saved from something we've been saved from death. We've been saved from sin. We've been saved from a future without God, but rather we're saved for something. We're saved for purpose. We're not saved simply so we can go to heaven, but we're saved for something on this earth. We're saved for something in our lifetime. We're saved to demonstrate the coming of the kingdom of God. We're saved to live in a way that says actually God is king. And where God is king, where the king reigns there, the kingdom comes. And I finished last time with a scripture. It's Galatians five 16. It was Paul's encouragement and it is my title for this week. Let the Holy Spirit Guide Your Lives.
Now, last week, Hillary was sharing the word and she was talking about how the Holy Spirit guides us and some examples as to how we can listen to and know the voice of the Holy Spirit. But this morning is all about what it is to let the Holy Spirit that by implication, if Paul is saying You should let the Holy Spirit do this, he must be saying there's a chance he might not let the Holy Spirit do that. But his urging is, oh, come on guys, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. That's our starting point today. So would you turn with me to g Galatians and chapter five, I am going to read verses 16 to 26, and I'm reading this morning as you'll have noticed already from the New Living Translation.
So Paul writes this verse 16. So I say, let's the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won't be doing what your sinful nature craves. Your sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants. And the spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires. These two forces are constantly fighting each other. So you are not free to carry out your good intentions, but when you are directed by the spirit, you are not under obligation to the law of Moses hoses. When you follow the desires of your sinful nature, the results are very clear. Sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarrelling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties and other sins like these. Let me tell you again as I have before that anyone living that sort of life will not inherit the kingdom of God, but the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. There is no law against these things.
Those who belong to Jesus Christ have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there. Since we are living by the spirit, let us follow the spirit's leading in every part of our lives. Let us not become conceited or provoke one another or be jealous of one another. It's the word of God. So Paul is describing there to the two natures, the sinful nature and the Holy Spirit nature, and they are opposed to one another. In the CSB, it says, for the flesh desires what is against the flesh and the spirit desires what is against, sorry. The flesh desires what is against the spirit. And the spirit desires what is against the flesh. These are opposed to each other so that you don't do what you want and therefore this is not a battle between our internal sinful nature and external and aspirational. You must do better list. It's not a battle between what is within us and what is outsiders, but rather a battle between the two natures that are both within us. Because when we're saved, God's holy spirit enters into us and I'm describing what goes on insiders. But if you've been a Christian for any length of time at all, you know exactly what it is. I'm talking about how we're constantly battling the old man sinful nature.
Paul writes verse 16, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won't be doing what your sinful nature craves the word craves. I was reading somebody who understands Greek, not me, but the Greek scholars. This word craves, it's more accurately described as being an over desire, a craving, an over desire. So it is something that you can set the heart on to covet to lust after. And it's not always a desiring of bad things such as wanting to go out and do somebody some harm, but an over desire for good things. An over desire is idolatry. Over desire is where we take a thing or a person or an attitude and we put them ahead of God in our lives. It's putting the thing or the attitude first and relegating God to somewhere down the pecking order.
So work is good, but we can over desire. Career food is good. We can over desire. Food friends are good in an age of social media especially, we can over desire friends and followers over desire for career. That house and over desire to have that man or that woman or that body shape or that comfort or fix that's found in addictive behaviours such as overeating or over-drinking or over exercising. It can become a guard. It can become an idol. And knowing how strongly we can over desire, it's important to see verse 17, that the flesh over desires against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh. And that is to say, Paul wants us, let us know here that whatever strong desire we find we have within us to lean into our old sinful nature, the yearning of the Holy Spirit for us to lean into him instead is as strong, if not stronger. The spirit's desire to have his way in our lives is as strong as any over desire to follow the craving of our sinful nature within us. Can we switch that fan off or you get blown away? It's not helping. My notes are doing this. Alright, and I'm going to preach the end before I get to the beginning if this all keeps happening. So thank you. That's so helpful.
Yeah. The Holy Spirit's role is to bring glory to Jesus. See the Holy Spirit. He wants to glorify and adore and he yearns for the good of the Holy Spirit to be worked out in our lives. He speaks as the beauty and the greatness of Jesus. And he strongly desires, he very strongly desires that you and I reflect the glory, the beauty and the greatness of Jesus to a world around us. And this battling of the two natures insiders will lead to one of two outcomes. There's a battle going on and someone's going to win the battle. And Paul writes the works of the flesh. Well, they're self-evident, sexual emity, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, and so on. And Paul refers to things here that if they are our habitual practise, if it's what we set our heart upon, then people like that will not inherit the kingdom of God. Just want to say here, Paul is not saying that if you find yourself angry in one occasion and repent that you not inherit the kingdom of God. But Paul is saying, come on, if you're going to live in a way that is all about living in the old person, the person you are before Christ redeemed you, then you will not inherit the kingdom of God.
But Paul is trying to encourage us to take seriously what it is to have that Holy Spirit as our helper and as our guide. He's trying to discourage any sense of complacency in the list of works of the flesh. Paul talks about drunkenness and ORs or drunkenness and wild parties. And again, when you come back to the original text, that's kind of all in one. When we talk about orgs these days, we tend to think of sexual orgs, but actually it's just a too much of something. It's a too much of drink, it's too much in our culture, it's too much of drugs, it's too much of self. It's a too much of ego. It's a too much of finding our identity and what we see on social media or do people like us do people like our photographs and getting completely caught up in that. We can so easily fall into an over desire for things that are not helpful to us.
But the fruit of the spirit is love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The fruit of the Holy Spirit. When Raphael was sharing with us couple of weeks back now, he was talking about the fruit of the spirit and saying that it's one fruit. The fruit of the spirit isn't lots of fruits. The fruit of the spirit is one fruit. And when we find one fruit in the natural life, we find it on a tree or on a bush, and it's the tree that gives life to the fruit. You don't find fruit without there being something that's giving it life to start with. There has to be life in the tree in order for the tree to bear fruit. And there's no fruit without the tree. Do you remember Jesus told his followers, he said, look, I'm divine and you are the branches.
My life needs to flow through me and into you in order that you can bear fruit. So here are four characteristics of Holy Spirit fruit growth. Here's the first one, fruit needs to have internal roots. Something happens deep within. If I came this morning with a dead tree and nailed some apples to it, I couldn't say Here is an apple tree could. I mean you can't just nail some fruit to something that's dead and you can call it an apple tree that it has deep internal roots in Colossians two verse six, Paul writes, just as you accepted Jesus as Lord, you must continue to follow him. Let your roots go down deep into him and let your lives be built on him. And then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught and you will overflow with thankfulness. So fruit growth has internal roots.
Here's a second characteristic. Fruits growth is gradual. Sometimes it's only when you look behind you that you can see how far you have come. Last week I was climbing up mountains. I did the National three Peaks Challenge. And so we climbed up Ben Nevis and Scarfo Pike and Snowden and you start off at the bottom of each mountain and you look up and actually you can't even see the top because all these mountains have this tricky false summit. You think, well there's the top and by the time you get there it kind of goes on again and up. But when you get to the top, you can look behind you and you can see how far you've come. Look, that's a long way away. That's where we started.
And so it can be in the growth of the fruit of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We might say things like this. A couple of years ago I'd have struggled with that or my attitude would've been different in that area. I would've struggled to express God's kindness for example. But actually God's been doing a work in me and I'm in a different place now. Look how far I have come. So fruit growth is internal fruit growth is gradual. Here's an encouragement for is fruit. Fruit growth is inevitable. So in the same way as you don't plant an apple tree and when the fruit comes, you wonder what unearth this fruit is and what kind of fruit could it be from my apple tree that I planted, the believer who puts their roots down into Jesus and who allows the life of Jesus to permeate their character are going to bear the fruit of the spirit. That's what they're going to bear because that's what the roots are down in. That's the kind of tree that's growing.
So fruit growth is inevitable. Listen, if you and I have put our faith in Jesus, his Holy Spirit is already doing a work in us whereby he's growing fruit in our lives to help us to express more of the character of Jesus to the world around us. And here's the fourth thing, fruit growth is symmetrical fruit growth is symmetrical, genuine Holy Spirit fruit grows symmetrically. And what I mean by that is the whole fruit develops at the same time. So you've got these characteristics, love and joy and peace and patience and gentleness. They all grow within us at the same time. And why does Holy Spirit fruit look like that? It's because the fruit represents the character of Jesus from whom we receive our life.
And Holy Spirit fruit does have nons, spirit given counterfeits. Let me explain. We all know people don't. We who are not believers, they're not followers of Jesus. They wouldn't say they know anything of the Holy Spirit, yet they're kind of joyful. Some people have bubbly personalities, don't they? And it just looks like joy. There are some people who don't know the Holy Spirit within them who are just kind people. We know kind people. And that's not to knock any of that at all. We are given within our natural frames, the way we're built, tendencies and traits to certain kinds of behaviour, whether we're saved or we're not. But the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives is to develop all of these traits and fruits together.
So we think about love and love is as described in the scriptures, serving a person for their good and their value only, not for what that person brings for you. And the opposite to love is not actually hate, but the opposite to love is fear. Love isn't a selfish attraction being attracted to someone because of how they make you feel about yourself. Joy is described in the scriptures as delighting in God because of who he is. And the counterfeit version of joy is in elation based on our experiences and our circumstances. And it's a temporary things are going well, well hey, and then we lose it all over again when things are not going quite so well. But that's not joy in the Lord. Joy in the Lord of delighting in God because of who he is.
Godly peace, it's confidence and wisdom. So it's confidence and rest in the wisdom of God. It's not indifferent or apathy. Yeah, don't care about that. It doesn't bother me. But peace is knowing who God is, knowing that we can rest in him. Patience facing trouble whilst remaining even tempered, not hitting out kindness, serving others in a way that makes me vulnerable, perhaps giving something up. But it comes from a place of deep inner security and the fake version of kindness is kind of manipulative, good deeds. I'm going to help you so that I get something back from your data down the line, maybe even to earn someone's praise, maybe even to feel slightly snug within ourselves. Okay? That's not kindness. Kindness is serving others to express something of the love of God towards them. Faithfulness being completely true to your word, not simply being a friend in good times, but being both loving and truthful in every situation.
To be gentle, to have a humble, a self-denying a self forgetful attitude and self-control. To not be impulsive, but to maintain the ability to pursue the important stuff over the seemingly urgent stuff of life. The fruit of the Holy Spirit sounds very compelling, doesn't it? And why does it sound compelling? It's because that's the life we saw reflected in our Lord Jesus. When you read about in the scriptures everything that he did and said, it wasn't always easy for him. People spoke out against him, people argued with him. He came up against opposition. There are times when he was stirred to a righteous anger, but all the way through the fruit of the Holy Spirit was born out in everything that he said and everything that he did. If we have a desire to walk in step with the Holy Spirit, then we need to choose Holy Spirit nurturing. We need to keep feeding the nature that we want to grow in, in order that we bear fruit. So we've got these two natures, they're warring inside of us. Which one are we going to feed? We're going to feed our sinful nature, the old man. Are we going to feed the Holy Spirit nature and we need to keep doing it?
Listen, if we want to look after our physical health, it's a well-established fact that we just need to eat sensibly and to exercise. We can't really argue with that. We seem to know that. But listen, it would be an absolute nonsense to claim. But because I once had a salad in 2016 or that on one occasion I had to run for the bus because I was slightly late, that I am looking after my physical health being absolute nonsense because we need to keep walking in what is good and keep walking in what is helpful. We need to keep seeking a filling of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
We need to nurture the Holy Spirit fruit in our lives and avoid nurturing the desires of the sinful nature. So practically, if going to a certain place leads us to over desiring things that take the place of as God as number one in our lives, then let's stop going there. If being with certain people always ends up in a satisfying of our sinful nature, let's stop being with those people. If surfing the internet alone late at night is feeding out old man instincts, then let's stop it and go to bed. And likewise, if certain people encourages in our faith, if being in certain places stimulate our love for Jesus, if reading the word or finding moments of solitude or listening to some helpful teaching or music that causes our hearts to worship the king of kings, we should seek out those moments. We should feed and we should nurture what the Holy Spirit wants to do in our lives.
So this passage finishes, so I'm looking at verse 24 and 25. Those who belong to Christ have nailed the passions and desires of their sinful nature to his cross and crucified them there. And since we are living by the spirit, let us follow the spirit's leading in every part of our lives or in the NIV. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the spirit. I love that. I think that's really helpful. Let us keep in step with the spirit. We have all seen this situation and probably been in it where you get a child in a supermarket who is having a tantrum. And for people who have never had children, they look at this child screaming and shouting in the supermarket and sitting down and refusing to move again. You've never had children. You go, why don't their parents do something about that?
And if you've got grown up children or perhaps you're a grandparent, you look at that situation, go, oh, that poor mother, look what she's dealing. Look what she's dealing with. And if you are that mother, you are thinking, why does my child, why is my child the only child in the world who's ever done this? And why is everybody looking at me right now? But we can get this, don't we? And I was reminded this last night. We were sitting having our tea and we heard this screaming and it was clearly one of the children who lived next door to us. And I thought the noise was coming from next door and it wasn't. It was this child. He was a hundred yards away. He was walking back down through the village and he was screaming and he was doing this literally stamping his foot in temper because he wanted to play with Molly. But it was time to leave.
But we all know what we're talking about. But isn't that the old man within us? Isn't that the old nature within us? But we like doing that. I want to stay here and Holy Spirit go, come on. No, we're going to walk in step together, come with me. And again, we melt down. It's like, no, I don't want to go that way. I like doing this thing. I like being with those people and I like consuming this or that or whatever it is. But the Holy Spirit says, no, no, there's a better way. Come with me. Let's walk in step. That's the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Jesus loves the church.
Yes he does.
Jesus really loves the church. Jesus loves the church so much that he gave his life for each one of us. And today he is cheering on his church as we all learn what it is to live under his kingship, under his authority. What Jesus isn't doing is setting a list of tasks for us to accomplish that we don't really want to do. And sitting over us going, you lot could all do so much better. That's not the gospel. Jesus is cheering his arm. He's saying, come on, I've given you my Holy Spirit. Why don't you walk in step with him? He'll show you how to live a life that honours and worships Jesus in everything that we do.
And therefore this morning, I want us to see Jesus of everything else. I want us to know what it is to come back to the cross this morning. Each of us knows what it is to have the old man nature inside of us. We don't need to explain this. We know what it is. We know the things individually that are the triggers, the flashpoints, the things that we find particularly hard to bring under the Lordship of Christ. But we have Jesus in heaven who's saying to us, keep going back to the cross. I'm not going to abandon you. I'm not going to leave you as orphans. I've poured out my Holy Spirit on you. We have his promise that if you confess your sins, he's faithful, unjust, he'll forgive us our sins. He'll cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
So this morning, what passions and desires do we have that we need to nail to the cross? This morning, Jesus has already dealt with all of the sin that's in our heart and all of the sin that ever will be in our heart. But we have an invitation this morning to take that thing, to take that habit, that illicit relationship, the thing that is a crutch in our lives that we've put into place of God and we take them, bang, bang, we're nailing it to the cross of Jesus. I'm going to walk away from that.
One of the things I'm really conscious of in this scripture is this is the word that Paul is writing and it is addressed to individuals, but it's addressed to the church. It's a letter to the church, letter to the Galatians. And whilst we will have an individual response to bring to this, there is actually a corporate response we can bring in that we can be men and women and boys and girls who know what it is to stand alongside one another in this battle between the flesh and the spirit, to be accountable to one another, to support one another, to find out what's going on in one another's lives and to help and encourage us to keep revealing Jesus to each other. We can do that, can't we?
She says our question, will we trust the Holy Spirit to guide us and to shape our character, to reflect Jesus to ourselves, our friends, our families, to our watching world? The top of this scripture, Paul wrote, let the Holy Spirit, let's be a people whose bring a yes. Yeah. We are going to let the Holy Spirit, we're going to sing together in a minute, but I just want to say this, it would be great if there are aspects of the things that you have been thinking about this morning as I've been sharing from the word that the Holy Spirit has dropped into your mind to say that's the thing of the old man. That's the thing of the flesh. And that needs to go. We'd love to pray with you this morning. We are not going to embarrass anybody. You confess your sins to the Lord and not to me somewhere else. You go if you want to do all of that, but you confess your sins to the Lord. But I'd love to stand alongside you, and it doesn't have to be me as brothers and sisters in Christ. We can pray for one another, can't we?
But why not this morning? Make a choice. That thing. I'm going to nail it to the cross of Christ and I'm going to stand with my brother and I'm going to declare to him what I've done, and he's going to pray God's blessing and the peace that only the Holy Spirit can bring in its place. That together we know what it is to bear fruitful lives. That's honour and worship our king. Amen.
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