Billy Hellmark – Opening and Prayer
1. I welcome you warmly. You are welcome to stand or sit down if you would like. We’ll read a Psalm together. So, why not stand when we read from the Word of God. We’ll be reading from Psalm 139:7-12, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day,
for darkness is as light to you.”
2. So, even darkness is as light to God. Imagine that. He is light and there is no darkness in Him, and whatever darkness you may find yourself in, remember that even darkness is as light to Him. And He is our light. So, let’s thank Him for who He is and praise Him for who He is and invite Hos light into our lives.
3. Lord God, we turn our eyes to You, we know we cannot hide from You. We also know that we don’t have to search endlessly for You, because You came and searched for us. You waited for us; You invited us’ You called us. Help us today to live in that knowledge, and we pray as we gather here today to praise You, to worship You, to lift up Your name, that You will be in our midst, and that You will be glorified. So, bless this hour or two hours that we have together here today. In Your Name we pray, Amen.
4. So, we are invited to worship God together; what a privilege.
Eva-Lena Hellmark
1. We are just saying that the Lord is good all the time. But there is another characteristic that is also the same. He is faithful all the time. And the worship we’re going to have now, it’s going to focus a lot on that – God’s faithfulness to us. And even though we’re here together, we worship together, it’s also an opportunity for us to look to God as individuals. He’s not just faithful to us as a church or as His people, but He’s faithful to me; He’s faithful to you. He keeps His promises to me, and He keeps His promises to you. So, as we sing together, let’s just focus on God, as what does this really mean to me that I’m just singing? The first song we will sing is, ‘Christ is the rock on which I stand.’ It may be a new song to some of you, but it has some really lovely words that I want you to focus on.
2. Lord, I thank You that You are faithful to us, even in those times when we are not faithful to You. You never change that; You are always there, even when we fail You. Thank You Lord. Lord, we know that without that strength that You have, that You’ll stay faithful; we would be lost without that, oh Lord, because we are weak, but You are strong, and You can be our strength. Lord, we just love You.
Billy Hellmark – Main Message
1. Thank You Father that You are always faithful, and we sang, Your goodness Your love is running after us. Even if we are running away from You, Your goodness is running after us. And help us to never run away from You, but always running into Your arms. Thank You that Your arms are always open wide.
2. So, I’m really privileged to stand here. Not so much that I’m going to speak, but that I can look at all of you and see your beautiful smiling faces. And even when we’re not smiling it’s still beautiful. God lives in all of you, and He’s making something beautiful with all of our lives. So, I’m blessed to see it like this.
3. We have been teaching about the Holy Spirit for 2 weeks; this is the third week, I think. We talked about that He is a Helper, He’s a Friend, and today, we’re going to focus more on that He is God. Much of the theology of the Trinity, has its origin or spring, in the Gospel of John, I would say, and in the apostle of John, his writings. John seemed to be a bit different from the other apostles. He saw what was going on; he saw what Jesus did but it seems like he was also thinking deeper, one step deeper. And much of the thinking of the Trinity, starts with John.
4. There is a very famous start to the Gospel of John, I think I may even know it in Greek, but I’m not going to try. He says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1) He’s making a strong case about that Jesus was God. But in the last half of the Gospel of John, he talks a lot about the Spirit as well.
5. And now we will do what we used to do in the old days in Sunday school. You will keep on repeating things. So, we are actually look at the same Scriptures that we have done before from John. John 14:16-17, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to help you and be with you forever— the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.”
6. And we go on to John 15:26, “When the Counselor comes, whom I will send to you from the Father —the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father—he will testify about me.”
7. And we jump ahead to John 16:7, “But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.”
8. And one more, still in John 16:12-13, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come.”
9. Already in the first chapter of John, he has presented Jesus as the Word, or “the Logos”, and when we hear the Word, as we say in Swedish, it doesn’t mean that much. For you Greeks, I think you have a much deeper understanding of what this really means, the Word. He presents Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And if we have eyes to see, we see something when John says like this, and he is speaking about Jesus, he says, “I would not have known Him, except that the One who sent me to baptize with water’, (John 1:33-34) and who do you think sent John? God the Father. So, it’s the Father who tells John, “The man who you see the Spirit come down upon and remain on, it is He who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.” So, the Father sent John the Baptist, and He said to him, ‘When you see the Spirit come upon this man, you will understand who He is.’
10. So, we see the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit at work. The Word and the Lamb of God, came down from heaven, as a dove remaining on Him. And among the first Christians there were a lot of discussions of ‘Who was Jesus really?’ And the understanding grew, ‘Yes, He was the Son of God, He was God.’ And another big discussion took place, ‘Who is the Holy Spirit?’ And the understanding grew that, ‘the Holy Spirit is also God, the One.’
11. It’s easy for us to not think in a personal way, about the Spirit. We think about power, action, things that happen. We’re told that the Spirit is like a wind. But the truth is, that the Spirit is a person in the Godhead. Sometimes we almost think that the Spirit doesn’t appear until the Day of Pentecost.
12. But He has always been there. In the very first verse of the Bible, He is mentioned. It says that the earth was formless and empty, and it was dark, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. So, He was there from the very beginning. And if we flip over to the very last page of the Bible, you will find the Spirit there. “The Spirit says, Come, whoever is thirsty let him come. And whoever wishes let him take the free gift of the water of life.”
13. So, the Holy Spirit is not just a force, and an impersonal outworking of God’s activities. No, He is God. And this has implications for us. How we interact; how we respond. The Spirit is moving, He’s speaking, He’s leading us and giving us direction. And we cannot take that lightly, because that’s God speaking to us. That’s God Leading, and we should follow. He deserves praise and adoration together with the Father and the Son.
14. I think for many of us, we read about God in the Old Testament, and we get an idea about what God is like. And then we read about Jesus in the Gospels, and maybe we get a slightly different picture. And about the Spirit, many times we don’t know what to think. What is He like? But the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are one. The character of the Father is shown, in what Jesus is like. And also, when it comes to the Spirit, if we see the character of Jesus, how He interacts with people, Jesus is in the same way. The Spirit doesn’t come and do His own thing. They work together; they are One. They love each other. Love has its origin in them, in their love for each other.
15. So, if you have questions, ‘Is God really a good God?’ Jesus has shown us very much, in a way that we can understand what God is like. Whatever is true about Jesus, is true about the Father and the Holy Spirit.
16. In John 3:5-8, there is a man called Nicodemus, that looks up Jesus, and having a conversation with Jesus, and Jesus talks about, that we need to be, “born again by water and the Spirit”, and He also says that, “The wind blows wherever it wants. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it’s going. So it is, with everyone born of the Spirit.” And I think that we, as humans, often want to understand how things work.
17. It would be very nice if we just had a manual that tells us how everything, how we should live and how we should act. And of course, we have the Scriptures that help us and guide us. But the Spirit blows wherever it wants; we cannot find a formula that we just copy. This is a living Person, that has all the power, has all the knowledge, and we think we can understand Him? Figure Him out?
18. I have known my wife for 45 years, and I know her pretty well. I don’t know about you, some of you that have been married for maybe a long time, and I think it is the same with the Spirit. Who knows the mind of God, I don’t. He will sometimes surprise us. But it is still in line with His loving character. These are the things that have been revealed to us by the Holy Spirit.
19. And here it goes on and says, “No one knows the thoughts of God, except the Spirit of God.” We can know a lot of things about God. But we don’t know everything; It’s probably only the tip of the iceberg, and we need some humility in this.
20. So, some things that we talked about, I think we can move forward with the slides. If the Spirit is God, what will that mean for us? Some of the things He does, is that He will give us power. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit come upon you.” And He goes on to say, “and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8). And Paul says, “This is the same power that raised Jesus from the dead.” (Romans 8:11). The Spirit is God; He has all power and He makes that power available for us; not in its fullness. I think we could not exist with that. But that power is at work in us.
21. Another thing, is love (There is a part missing from the video at this point)
22. The Spirit affects us and brings changes in us. And then we have Gifts. Gifts, maybe don’t take as long a time as the fruit. They are not a proof of becoming mature in character. You know, you can give a nice gift to a child, or even to a grown up, and you can misuse the gift. You can use it in bad ways. Even if it is a good gift, it can be used in not so good ways.
23. But God is the giver of good gifts. And the gifts of the Spirit are good, they’re all good, and we grow into using them in the best way. There are a few lists in the New Testament of different Spiritual gifts. So, I will mention a few. That’s from 1 Corinthians 12, “Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, Healings, Miracles, Prophecy, Discernment of Spirits, Speaking in Tongues and Interpretation of Tongues. These are gifts from God. The Spirit gives as He wills.
24. But Paul also says that we can easily desire to have Gifts. It’s not wrong, to really want to have Gifts. But they are not to puff me up. Well, look at what a great Gifts I have. Thay are to help and support and build others up. So, God, the Holy Spirit gives gifts. And if we ask for a Gift, do you think that He will give something bad? No, He will give good Gifts. He’s a good God.
25. And one more. It includes just about everything. Zoe, Life; God is Life. Everything comes from Him. If the Spirit gives Life, because the Spirit is God, He is Life-giving. Everything that exists, everything you can see and even everything that you cannot see, has its origin in God.
26. If you remember, even when the earth was empty and void, the Spirit was there hovering over the waters. The So, the Spirit is a giver of life, day-by-day. He gives power, He gives eternal life, life that comes from God.
27. In John we also read, Jesus was, I think it was the feast of Tabernacles, Jesus stood among the people and said in a loud voice, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. Because whoever believes in Me,” and I don’t think He was talking only to those people who were there on that day, I think He is speaking to us, “as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” (John 7:37-38). And then it is explained, “By this He meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were later to receive.” (John 7:39a). And when it says later here, I think we belong in those ‘Later days.’ So, He’s speaking about us.
28. So, the people were to receive the Spirit. Rivers of living Water will flow from within them. I don’t know how you feel every day, that there is a river of living water flowing out of you. I wish that I would feel like that. But it is also a promise of Jesus. It may not mean that I feel that way every day, when I wake up. But the truth is that the Spirit is there, within us, and the Spirit gives us the things that we need. He gives us power, He gives us love, fruit, patience, gifts and life, river of life. And you know what? That river never runs dry.
29. Here in Greece, you see in the summer months, many rivers – there’s nothing in them, and some of them haven’t had water in a very long time. But the river of the Spirit that flows from us, it’s never going to run dry. Why? Because God is the ultimate source – there’s always more. So, the Spirit has been given. He is God. He’s calling us, and saying, Jesus may be saying with a loud voice to us, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink.”
30. In Jude 20, it says that we should be filled with the Spirit, and in its grammatical form, it’s written that we should be continually filled with the Spirit, every day. We cannot live the Christian life without the Holy Spirit.
31. So, I just want to end this in a very simple way. There’s no magic in this. But I will ask the prayer team, to come, and I hope we have a few, and you can go to them, and they have no magic in their hands, not that I know of anyway. We are called to pray for one another. And we need the Holy Spirit; maybe you need power in your daily life; maybe you need to feel this love. You know that God loves you, or at least you hope. Maybe you need wisdom; maybe you need comfort; maybe you need healing. God can take care of all. And maybe you’re just thirsty. We have water, but if you are thirsty for living water, and would like someone to pray with you, this is the invitation to you. And again, there’s no magic, but if we come with an honest asking and longing, He will not disappoint us. And there’s always more.
32. So, this is your invitation, and maybe we can sing a song, while we pray. But feel free to come to the front and our prayer team will pray. And if you just feel that I need to be refreshed in this, you are welcome to come. I think we all need it. So, don’t be ashamed. If you don’t need more of the Holy Spirit, maybe there’s something wrong – no there’s nothing wrong with you. But come, come. “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink.”