So our teaching scripture this morning is very short.
It is only one verse from Romans chapter 5, verse 5.
It says God's love has been poured into our hearts through
the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
This is the word of the Lord. Good morning.
How are you guys doing? All right.
It's great to be here with you this morning.
There are people who are taller than me, and that's better.
OK, That's too much. It's good to be here with you
this morning. If you are new with us, my name
is Jared. I'm one of the pastors here.
And we'd love to have an opportunity to meet, to meet
you. And you know, I'll.
I'll look for you. We're a small enough community
that if you're new, I, I, I can tell and I'd love to meet you.
So, and it's OK, you can bowl out immediately and you don't
have to meet me. That's totally fine as well.
It's really, I love child dedication Sunday.
You know, all of all of our kids were dedicated at a church.
Three of them were dedicated at this church.
And, you know, my kids are in college now and there's
something really beautiful about a community of people and even
just the way that that we all experience this.
I mean, you can, you can always count on a couple kids going a
little crazy during child dedication, right?
Laying on the floor and grabbing for things.
And it's like this prophetic sort of witness of a community
to be able to witness the realities of parenting.
Like it's just messy. And you know, those of you who
are parents know that. Those of you who have parents,
you know that parenting is just really messy.
And it's really beautiful to have a community of people
around you to bear witness to the mess and to help.
And I just got to say that this church has been a place where we
have felt so supported in raising our kids.
And so I'm really grateful for so long ago, you know,
dedicating kids, you know, 20 some years ago.
So anyway, hello beautiful. This is the the title of a novel
that my friend Tyler sent to me a couple of months ago.
Because it's a story inspired by contemporary family that is
inspired a little bit by Louise May Elcot's book A Little Woman.
How many of you have read? How many of you wish you have
read Little Women because you keep hearing about it.
And as a family with four girls, one of whom is named Josephine
after one of the main characters in the story, let's just say
that we have a thing or two to say about Little Women.
And Hello Beautiful is primarily about about love.
It's about love. And because I think this is a
book that you should probably just go ahead and read, I'm
going to give you the no spoilers version of the book.
It's a story that follows a boy named William Waters.
He's a young man who grows up in a home devoid of love because of
a family tragedy. And so basketball becomes his
lifeline, giving him structure and a sense of purpose.
And when he gets to college, he meets Julia Potavano.
And she is an ambitious and fiercely devoted young woman
with dreams of building a future of purpose and family.
And Julia has three sisters, Sylvie and Cecilia and Emmeline.
And the Potavano household is is vibrant and chaotic and full of
affection, which is the complete opposite of William's
upbringing. You guys ever like recognize
that like there are families that lived differently than your
family did. That can be a bit awkward.
But as William becomes entwined with the Potavano sisters, long
buried emotional wounds begin to surface.
Things get a little messy and chaotic and uncertain as some of
William's mental health struggles begin to surface.
And over time we get a story of what it looks like for someone
who was nearly empty of love become surrounded by people who
learn how to love him. Here we go.
Wrong button. I don't know, surrounding him
and learning how to love him and filling him up so that he too
eventually has some love to give away.
And listen, life still happens. Of course the story is not a
rose colored like, you know, ROM com.
It's just not that. But what it is, is a story about
what it looks like for people to surround one person and who is
in the midst of chaos and emptiness and uncertainty of
life and learning how to love that person and that person
learning how to receive love. So read the book.
I'll come back to it. OK.
Our teaching text this morning is a really short 1.
Romans chapter 5, verse 5 says God's love has been poured out
into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
And I'm going to lead with this primary image that the apostle
Paul has given us in this letter to the church at Rome.
And the image that God gives us, and I want you to sort of
imagine this in your mind, is the image of the person of the
Holy Spirit pouring out the love of God into our hearts.
This is where we're going to begin and then we're going to
move around a little bit and briefly meet the person of the
Holy Spirit in a couple of different contexts because it's
really hard to know a person from just one place or context.
Like I have this friend who's probably one of the smartest
people I've ever met in my life, you know, undergrad at Harvard,
PhD at MIT, and he's sort of just pretty buttoned up and, and
like, speaks incredibly eloquently and just super
successful guy in the world. And, and so my, my image of this
person has basically been shaped by sort of knowing that about
him and interacting with him in different ways.
And then we were all in New York City together and somebody had
the idea that we should go to a Korean karaoke bar.
And this guy became an entirely different person.
Like, I don't know what you're like at a karaoke establishment,
but you get me around karaoke. And I literally just sort of
like, do the Bart Simpson, you know, I, I, I don't want
anything to do with karaoke. I, I, I might be able to do one
song and everyone will be embarrassed on my behalf, but
this guy, man, he was incredible.
And for hours and hours and hours, he's like, let's go,
let's go, let's go. So you know, you, you got to see
your people in multiple contexts in order to get a full picture
of them. And the same is true with the
Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a person.
And the scriptures give us these pictures and metaphors of the
kind of activity that the Holy Spirit is doing in the world.
And the three things that we're going to look at today are
pouring, hovering and sealing. So first up is going to be
pouring. We're in a series, a brief
series right now on the Holy Spirit.
And our friend Joel Seymour a few weeks ago opened it up by
reminding us that the Holy Spirit is a person, not just
like this inanimate power or force.
It's not Star Wars, OK? The Holy Spirit is a person that
Jesus left behind in order to be with us so that we can
experience the fullness of the presence of God at all times.
And then last week, Tori talked with us about the work that was
set apart and empowered by the Spirit for Craftsman and artists
to bring all of their skill and their knowledge for the carving
of wood and the weaving of fabrics in order to make the
place of worship for the people of Israel who were roaming
through the desert and, and they needed a place to worship in a
Tabernacle. And so the Holy Spirit gave them
gifts and empowered those gifts and put their hands to work,
enabling something to be built so that these people had a place
to worship. And the challenge that she gave
us last week was to not forget that all the work that we're
engaged in, the emails and the conversations and the lesson
plans and the project planning and the painting and whatever it
is that you do, all of it has the capacity to be something
that we partner with the Holy Spirit in as we use our gifts,
empowered by the Spirit, to partner with God in the world.
It's really good. There's a sense in which,
friends, we have to receive the gift that God has given us to
move out into the world with energy in life.
And so we began thinking and talking about the person of the
Spirit empowering us for the work out there in the world.
And Parker is going to lead us along that same theme again next
week. What is it like for the Spirit
to empower the work out in the world?
That there are contours of our life and context that we have
work to do and we need a little bit of help in order to do that.
But this morning I want to focus in on what the Holy Spirit is
doing in you and around you and for you.
So the first image is this image of the Holy Spirit pouring the
love of God into our hearts. God's love has been poured into
our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us,
says Paul in Romans, his letter to the Romans.
So let me just like ask you a little question.
If we had the capacity to to sort of open up your heart like
the top of a tin can, like what do you think it is that we would
see right now? Like if you just had the name,
sort of the particular flavor of the mix of things going on in
your heart right now, how would you like, how would you name
that this season or maybe this week or maybe just today?
Like what would you call it? And I'm not asking, I'm not
asking this in any way that is meant to kind of throw shade at
whatever it is that's going on inside of you or even put you
back on your heels. Like I can imagine that there's
a vast array of things that we might have sort of blended up in
in a blender, like a smoothie going on inside of our heart.
Does that make sense? I had a smoothie yesterday when
I was writing some of this. So that's there you go.
That's what it is. There's probably some fear and
anxiety and hope and excitement, maybe even some grief and
sadness. It's all mixed up in there,
isn't it? You know, more than 50% of
people prior to COVID indicated that there is a fair bit of
loneliness at work in the everyday of their lives that
just sort of sits there. And on the other side of COVID,
that number has actually skyrocketed such that, you know,
even medically they're calling loneliness like an epidemic.
Like we are living society societally through an epidemic
of loneliness. Guys, people are lonely.
And so if you have some loneliness in your smoothie mix
inside of your heart, like it's OK, you're not alone.
There is something happening, broadly speaking, in Western
culture, in American culture that has us feeling all kinds of
things. And so if you're most people,
you have probably a little bit of a challenge naming the
specific cocktail of emotion that makes up what is going on
in your human heart at any given moment.
We have one of these pillows sitting on our couch that helps
us out a little bit. You guys are like, that's
brilliant. You can get it for 1299 at
Amazon. Not right now.
You can. You can wait like till after
church. But seriously, like this could
be on your couch tomorrow morning if you're an Amazon
Prime member. And I want you to look if you
can see it. I tried to get a big enough
picture. Do you see the centre of that
pillow and notice what is absent at the centre of that pillow?
Love. Love is absent at the center of
that pillow. This is sort of a tool that is
to help us get in touch with and name what it is that is at work
inside of us. And love is at is completely
absent there. Never in a million years did I
imagine that I would have a theological squabble with a
pillow. But as I look at is what is at
the center in the core, these six primary emotions of fear,
anger, disgust, sadness, happiness, and surprise.
And I set this up next to the Apostle Paul's description of
what it is that the person of the Holy Spirit is doing and has
done. And this fact of God's love as
being one of the primary theological points that the
apostle Paul is making in his letter to the church at Rome.
I can't help but see a picture that feels a bit confusing to
me. The only mention of love is
sitting somewhere down near the bottom of the outside of the
circle just before 6:00 PM. Second picture loving.
Now this particular pillow is pulling from a psychological
model of emotion developed by psychologists like Paul Ekman
and Robert Pluchik, whose work has identified what they call
the primary emotions. The six that sit at the center
of this pillow are Paul Ekman's description and his
psychological work. Robert Pluchik would add joy and
anticipation to these six to make it 8.
But what they both agree upon is that these emotions are
considered universal across cultures.
They're they're biologically hardwired and they they're
expressed similarly in facial expressions and physiological
responses across different cultures.
It's not that other emotions don't exist.
I mean, clearly from the look of that pillow, I mean, some of you
are like, there's that many feelings.
Really. There is actually, and this this
pillow is actually really helpful.
So it's not that there are are other emotions that don't exist.
It's just that these six are like the primary colours of our
emotional wheel. They're basic emotions that
nearly everyone in the world can feel and express.
And the reason that love doesn't sit at the centre of this pillow
is because love is considered a complex emotion, particularly
because it involves multiple emotional components, relational
context, and different layers of meaning.
Does this make sense? Do you guys feel complexity
around love a little bit? So primary emotions like fear or
anger tend to arise suddenly. Like, like if you ever noticed
that, like you can get angry real quick or you can become
afraid real quick. You're out in the garden, you're
like minding your own business. You're pulling the weeds, you're
planting some zinnias and this little garden snake comes across
your path. And it's just like right now
listen, it's not snakes for me. It's definitely dogs for me.
Like I am terrified of dogs. And you're like, don't you have
a dog? And I'm like, yes, I do have a
dog. It's pretty complex
relationship, but I have a lot of like dog trauma and so it's
been like a whole thing for me to try to actually like have a
dog and like we're becoming buddies a little bit.
I don't know, it's complex. So these emotions can come
quickly and they sort of function universally.
They're hardwired into the human psyche almost like a biological
response. That's why when most people see
a snake, there's this immediate sort of biological response
because these kinds of of, of, of core emotions, they sit at
the center and, and that the colors that we primarily paint
with. But love, love develops over
time. I mean, even if you believe in
love at first sight, it's actually not love that you're
feeling. It's all kinds of other things,
but but love takes quite a bit of time.
It is something else entirely. Love deepens over time through
experience and intention and relationship.
And so psychologically, love is typically seen as as as a
composite emotion involving joy and trust and attachment and
desire. And it's deeply, deeply
relational. Here's the thing about love
that's going to sound obvious. You cannot love alone.
It's impossible to love by yourself.
And love is also shaped by context and history and
commitment. And there's actually a lot of
complexity that goes into it. So like what we refer to when
we're trying to use the word love.
So when I ask you to pop open the top of your heart and peer
into it and try to figure out what is it that is going on
inside of you. You probably had a greater
degree of access to the primary emotions of anger and grief and
sadness and maybe some anticipation or hope.
Because biologically these things sit at the surface and
and they're things that can pop up really quickly.
Whereas love is multi dimensional, one that varies
across time and relationships. And so like, you know, the way
that I, the way that I love John or, or the way that I love Katie
is, is quite different than the way that I love Sadie because
she's my daughter. Or the way that I love my wife
Jamie now 1/4 century into our relationship is really different
than the way that I loved her in year 3.
This makes sense. Do you see how complex this is,
friends? Love is complex because love is
relational, and so while love does not sit at the center of
the psychological model of what it is that's probably going on
inside of our heart, it is at the very center of the
theological model of what is going on in our entire lives.
The only thing that sits at the center of your life with God is
whether or not you are receiving the love of God and experiencing
it. And that's a complex
relationship, isn't it? How many of you know that that's
a complex relationship? But this is a really important
thing for us to know that God's love has been poured out into
our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
So the very complex thing that love is and the thing that the
in the world that we most long for and the thing that is often
most difficult for us to name at the center of our heart.
Love is the thing that is being poured out into our hearts in an
infinite measure, cascading like a waterfall.
Isn't that just so beautiful that the thing that is like most
complex is the thing that the Holy Spirit has been given a job
to to make sure that? We are getting dose after dose
after dose of that. So how can we have love be the
primary emotion or affection that sort of fills up our heart?
How do we how do we become a little bit more attuned to it?
Well, the only way to do that is relationship.
This one verse that we're looking at so far comes in the
middle of a beautiful articulation by Paul to the
churches in Rome where Paul is trying to tell the story of the
human condition with all its complexities in this love
relationship with God. There's there's this reality
that the Apostle Paul was trying to bring these people into that
puts at the center of the human experience, the human desire to
be filled up with something. So Saint Augustine named this as
a kind of restlessness that is at work inside of our hearts.
You guys ever had a season where it just, you just feel like
unbearably restless and anybody like, OK, like, just like this
restlessness in your heart, like I'm just trying to fill my life
and my heart with something. Because our hearts are made to
be filled. And we look for that filling and
excitement or satisfaction of of sort of getting things right or
being well regarded by others or that sense of security that
comes with having accumulated enough stuff.
And it's like, OK, like I, I have filled my bank account and
now my heart feels at rest. And Paul spends a few chapters
in Romans, actually, the few chapters right before this verse
describing some of the ways that the humans have historically
tried to fill up our hearts with things like, you know, the basic
three are money, sex and power. And all of those are relational
kinds of things, aren't they? We're we're trying to get our
hearts filled up with these kinds of things because this
whole project and love affair with God is relationship is
relational. And because of that, His love is
not coercive. Hang with me here.
God is pouring out infinite love all the time.
All the time. But God is not coercive.
And so God is not going to force God's own love upon you.
Which is why humans end up in quite a bit of a predicament.
The first few chapters of Paul's letter to the Romans, he is
setting out the whole history of God's relationship with the
human. He's talking about God's
affection for his people in the various contexts where God was
trying to to love and the promises that he was making to
the people and the people breaking all of those promises.
And he begins to highlight some of the people in the the the
story of the Scriptures who begin to understand and get the
fact that this relationship and the thing that we're looking for
to fill up in our heart, the thing that we're longing for, is
built on trust and attachment and security and commitment, all
of which the ingredients of love.
The whole story, says Paul, is this giant cosmic act of God
pouring out his love into the world.
And the whole of that story is that the the story of this whole
cosmic reality is a relational story, and God is doing
everything God can do. I'm highlighting, I'm
underscoreting, I'm repeating myself right now.
God is doing absolutely everything he can do to get your
attention, to help you understand that you are loved,
that God loves you, infinite, infinite love.
That's the story. And that that story has been
handed to the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit is pouring every
ounce of infinite love into our hearts through that story and
the unfolding story that is your life.
And in the very next verse, Paul writes that the demonstration of
that love towards us is that even while we have rejected the
relationship that God has put on offer time and time again, God
gave up his very own life by pulling it out into the world.
He says that why we will, why we were still weak at the right
time. Christ died for the ungodly.
So what he's saying is that when we were still without strength
to sort out our hearts and to stop seeking to fill our hearts
with all of these other stories, when we just absolutely had no
capacity to reciprocate love back to God or even receive
God's love, God poured his life into the world.
This is how the apostle Paul describes this in another
letter. He says that God emptied
himself, emptied himself out into the world.
It's this picture of this giant pitcher of water being poured
out. The Holy Spirit is pouring out
the love of God into your hearts.
Last night I was drinking my smoothie and finishing up a
little bit of this teaching when I got interrupted by a bit of
the news that the United States military struck 3 targeted areas
in Iran. Now, friends, I don't have much
to say about any of that other than to under score what it
feels like right now. I don't know what it feels like
for you, but it feels a bit chaotic to me in the world right
now. I don't have any thoughts at the
moment about the geopolitics or about what this means for you or
I or the people that we love or our future.
But pastorally, I, I just felt like I have to say something,
right? And I actually don't know what
to say other than it. If it feels a little chaotic,
that's probably pretty normal to be feeling that right now.
Part of what is likely at work in you is a fair bit of chaos.
And what I know about the the geopolitical situation right now
is that is that there are humans involved making decisions, and
humans are really good at chaos. And in the opening lines of the
Scriptures, we read this in the beginning, God created the
heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and desolate,
and darkness was over the surface of the deep.
And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the
waters. So in the ancient world in which
this was written, the most terrifying thing that existed
was the ocean. So like most scholars conclude
that the text of Genesis was written, you know, in the second
millennial BC, and the seafaring capabilities during that time
were quite limited. You're like rowing in a boat,
you know, in like 2000 BC. And so you'd have maybe some
seasonal ability to sort of navigate the open waters, but
you would never really go too much far outside of what you can
see land. And so in their imagination, the
most terrifying thing that existed in the world was the
ocean, particularly at night time.
It's the experience of the unknown and the outer edge of
the waters of the sea. They come pretty quick.
They, they, they, they come pretty close to summing up what
it was like to fear, to feel some chaos and some feel some
fear. And so if you're, if you're
writing a poem, which is what the beginning of Genesis is, and
you're trying to tell a story about the God of love bringing
life into creation, you're going to set that story against the
backdrop of the chaos of the surface of the sea.
Does that make sense? Like, I don't know how we would
do that if we were trying to tell a similar story.
We would probably start talking about like nuclear war and all
that kind of stuff. In the beginning, God created
the heavens and the earth, and the earth was formless and
desolate and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the
Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.
And this brings us to the work of the Spirit as hovering.
The picture that this story is painting is the image of the
Spirit of God, the the force of God's presence, the wind of
God's breath, who we later meet throughout the Scriptures as the
presence of God, who we eventually come to know as the
Holy Spirit poured out on the disciples at Pentecost.
The Spirit at the very beginning of creation, the poem says, is
moving over the chaos of the desolate and dark places that
hold all of the fears. This is how the story begins.
Later translations of of this Genesis text, particularly in
Aramaic, would show up in the ancient world.
They, they give us this image, this picture of the, the
hovering spirit like a, like a bird flying over water or, or
brooding over her nest. The Spirit of God is hovering
over the waters like a bird flying just above the surface of
the darkness and of the chaos. And if the Spirit of God is
hovering over all of the chaos of the world from the very
beginning, how much more is he hovering over whatever chaos you
are presently facing? Just imagine like, like take a
moment with your imagination and think about some of the chaos
that you might be feeling right now, whether that is just like
happening inside of you or inside of your home, inside the
story of your life, or whether it's related to geopolitical
events. There is so much chaos and what
the Scripture tells us is that the Holy Spirit is brooding
right next to you, waiting for new life to emerge in the midst
of all of that chaos. So we have pouring, we have
hovering. And last I'm going to close with
sealing. Sealing.
The same Paul who wrote the letter to the church in Rome
writes this in his letter to the churches in the ancient city of
Ephesus. He says this.
He says in Him, you also, when you had heard the word of truth,
the gospel of your salvation and had believed in him, were marked
with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit.
So friends, there is far more that I would want to say about
this than I have time to say, but I wanted to give you one
last image to describe the work of the Holy Spirit.
And it's this image of the kind of seal that would be placed on
the outside of a letter like a wax seal with an imprint on top
of it. And in the ancient world, the
seal functioned as a, as a powerful symbol of identity and
authority and security. It it was the way that the
sender of the letter communicated to the receiver of
the letter that the stuff that I have written on the inside, it
is from me. It is addressed to you.
And as long as this seal isn't broken, you can trust that
nothing on the inside has been has been tampered with.
Does that make sense? It really functioned as like a
like a security measure. It authenticates the sender and
the recipient could trust that the message kind of made it from
the origin to them. And so Paul is using this
metaphor and he says to be sealed with the promised Holy
Spirit means that you now bear God's imprint, and the infinite
love of God being poured out into your heart along with the
hovering presence of the Spirit around you is now protected and
sealed. The Holy Spirit is the one that
authenticates the letter that God is writing inside of you.
Does this make sense? You do not need to be afraid
that the thing that God is doing inside of you is going to get
tampered with or snatched away. Whatever message that God is
trying to sort of send to you and, and seal up in you the work
that God is doing in you is secure.
You can trust it. It's been sealed by the Spirit.
This is the work of the Spirit, friends.
It's the work of of pouring out the love of God in your heart,
hovering over the chaos within you and around you, ready to
sing new creation into existence with whatever chaos is happening
inside of you and sealing in you what is real.
Authenticating all of the things that He is doing in you and in
me and sort of protecting all of it happening.
Like what a good job the Holy Spirit has, right?
Isn't that an incredible job description?
And here's the thing, like that's like the tip of the
iceberg. But here's some primary
metaphors that I want you to pray into over the course of the
couple of weeks that are ahead of you.
Like, what is the way in which the Spirit of God is pouring out
the love of God into your heart? And you know, you know, I don't
know about you, but like, I just want to say like spirit, like
hover everywhere. Can you just like hover, like
just this image of, of a mother bird?
It's, it's actually helpful for me sometimes.
You know, in a lot of the tradition, the Holy Spirit is
sort of this feminine mothering presence in the life of the
believer. And so if you need that, that
image, you know, Jesus talks about, oh, how I wish I could
have been like a mother hen and, and gathered you up underneath
me. It's that image of of the Spirit
of God sort of protecting and hovering and waiting to speak
new life and and man seal up everything you're doing inside
of me, Lord. So back to hello beautiful,
which I really want you to read. If you can't afford to buy a
book right now. I mean, there's the library.
I will buy this book for you if you want to read it.
I've been trying to think about why I loved reading this book so
much. And I think it's it's simply a
story about an empty heart that is filled with chaos and
insecurity, filled with love, where chaos is pushed aside and
new life is created. And you get the sense in the end
of the story that everything that unfolds, that whatever it
is that has happened because of what they have lived through and
built together is going to be untouchable.
And I, as I reflect on the story, it's a story that is
filled with love. New life is created and it's
full of security. And I'm like, this is a familiar
story. Won't you stand with me?
The kids are going to be coming back in shortly.
The worship team is going to come back up and begin to lead
us into some worship. And as we do that, I just want
to maybe offer a couple of suggestions.
Those of you that are part of our prayer team, can you begin
to make your way up to pray? What do you need today?
It's a question I want to ask you.
Do you need, do you need filled up with the Holy Spirit?
You guys know that that can happen both slowly, but it can
also happen where we invite the Spirit and the Spirit with power
can come and fill you up with His love, with the love and the
presence of God. Are you feeling a little chaos
in your life? We can pray that the Spirit
would would do something in your life to help you feel that that
chaos could birth new creation. And then the last thing is that,
yeah, I got a sense this morning early that there are some of you
that just even question your own place in God's family.
Like it's not, it doesn't feel like a sealed letter.
It feels like a like a letter that somebody's been open and
you're just like, I wonder if this is actually going to get to
the final destination. And I just want to invite you to
come and receive prayer that you would know that you are sealed
by the Spirit, that there is nothing that you need to be
afraid of. So there's all kinds of ways
that we could pray for you this morning.
And then one last thing. I just have a sense that there's
there's some folks here that there's one person here that has
like a hip problem, get a lot of pain in your hip over the past
couple of weeks. And I would love to pray for
healing for that. So let's worship together.
Please come forward for prayer, Tom.
One more thing, even this ties into some of what Jared was
saying, but I just have a sense that someone or maybe a few
people are having the sense of like you want to receive the
love of God. You want to see it in your life,
but there's this curtain that's around you and it's like not
letting you it come to you. And I think God just wants to
pray to ripped that curtain from top to bottom.