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The Nicene Creed: Holy Spirit (ADVENT)

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Listen to this week’s sermon, The Nicene Creed: Holy Spirit (Advent) preached by Rev. Benjamin Kandt from Galatians 4:4-7

Rev. Benjamin Kandt:

Hello everyone. This is Pastor Benjamin. You're listening to Sermon Audio from New City Orlando. At New City, we long to see our Father answer the Lord's Prayer. For more resources, visit our website at Newcity Orlando.com.

Gina Fickett:

Today's scripture reading is from Galatians 4. But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. This is God's word. Thanks be to God. Please be seated.

Rev. Benjamin Kandt:

As a young man, Winston Churchill was thrilled when he was accepted into Sandhurst Military College. This was a prestigious school, but it it wasn't quite as prestigious as his father's alma mater, which was called the 60th Rifles. And so Churchill was anxiously anticipating to hear how his father would think about the fact that he is going to the school. And eventually he received this letter from his dad. It says this quote The first extremely discreditable failure of your performance was missing out on getting into the infantry. For in that failure is demonstrated beyond refutation your slovenly, happy-go-lucky style of work, for which you have distinguished yourself at school. Never have I received a really good report of your conduct and your work from any master. Always you are behind, never advancing in your class, incessant complaints of your total lack of application. Do not think that I'm going to take the trouble of writing you long letters after every failure and folly that you commit and undergo, because I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything that you say. Make this position indelibly impressed on your mind that if your conduct and action is similar to what it has been up till now, then my responsibility to you is over and I shall leave you to depend on yourself. I am certain that if you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle, useless, unprofitable life that you have had during your school days and recent months, you will become a social waste and you will degenerate into a shabby, unhappy, and futile existence. And if this is so, you will have to bear all the blame of this misfortune yourself. Signed, your affectionate father, Randolph Churchill. Wow. In his reply, Winston wrote that he was very sorry indeed that you were displeased with me, and that he would try to modify your opinion of me by my work at Sandhurst. So, this letter scarred Winston. It haunted him the rest of his life. Someone said of Churchill that he worshipped at the altar of his unknown father. Churchill wrote a two-volume biography of his father. And even late into his life, in his 70s, Churchill painted portraits of his dad. If you've seen the movie The Darkest Hour, Churchill says in that movie, My father was like God, busy elsewhere. Now, some of you this morning would describe your experience of God as busy elsewhere. And Christianity is meant to be marked by the freedom and the joy of being the children of God, having God as our Father, and yet often we live like slaves and orphans, not sons and daughters. And so as we continue in our series of Advent through the Nicene Creed, we talked about what it is that we believe. Then we talked about the Father, the Son. Today is about the Holy Spirit, and next week will be about what it means to be one church. And as we look at Galatians chapter 4, I really want to see that the good news of Christmas is that first the Father sent his son to set us free, and second, the Father sends his spirit to bring us home. The Father sent his son to set us free, and he sends his spirit to bring us home. If you have a Bible or a device or the worship guide, go ahead and get Galatians chapter 4, verse 4 in front of you, and we're going to walk through this together verse by verse. Galatians 4, 4 says this. The fullness of time. It's almost like if time was a bucket, it was just being filled up, filled up, filled up to the brim, and then it poured over into a baby in a manger. That's what the metaphor here of the fullness of time. Verse 4, the fullness of time, it actually signals a very important doctrine for Christians, which is what we call providence. The idea that the Christians do not believe history is random or arbitrary, nor is it cyclical or destined by fate. Instead, our view of history is we believe that the events of the world are under the providential oversight and governance of a good father who directs and prepares all things for his purposes. That's our understanding of history. Now, I studied at history at UCF, Go Knights, and I learned about the Egyptians and the Phoenicians and the Greeks and the Romans, but you know what I didn't learn? That the fullness of time is the birth of Jesus Christ. Missed that for some reason. Wasn't in the curriculum. But Western culture historically understood this. We have structured our understanding of history around BC and AD. Everything leading up till this moment in time, the fullness of time at the birth of Christ, and then anodomine, everything that's in the year of our Lord after that. That's how we've understood history for almost 2,000 years. Until in the late 20th century, it fell out of being in favor and being in vogue. And so we replaced BC and AD with before common era and common era, B C E and C E. The ironic part of that is it still marks the same events in history. We're still structuring our history around the coming of the birth of Jesus Christ, and yet we just don't want to be honest about it. We've actually used the same event, the birth of Christ, but we've just whitewashed Jesus from history. One pastor named John Tyson says secularism is performing a reverse exorcism. You see, because an exorcism says to the devil, get out in Jesus' name. Secularism says to Jesus, get out in our name. And in light of this, I refuse to write B C E or C E in any of my papers. Why would I? The fullness of time is the birth of Jesus Christ. We all know it. And I want to acknowledge it publicly. I want to have a sense that scripture is clear about this reality. The fullness of time is about Jesus. So what happened? Look at the text with me. Galatians 4.4 says this God sent forth his son born of woman. Now, if you're familiar with the scriptures, you might know that the gospel, the good news, starts a long time ago in Genesis 3.15. There was a promise there. Theologians called it the proto-Uangelion. This first gospel that's there, and it says this I will put enmity between, this is the serpent and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. He, now that word there is a singular, masculine pronoun. One man, he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. You see, the fullness of time is about Jesus coming, this one man, the seed of the woman, as the snake crusher. The one who will come into history when he needs to come into history and undo all the effects of the fall. We have a song in Christmas time, we sing it says, As far as the curse is found, that's what he's coming to undo. Jesus was born of woman, and in Luke 1, the angel is speaking to Mary and says, This the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. In Matthew 1.18, our call to worship, it said this Mary was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. If you look with me at the worship of God, we've got the Nicene Creed printed there. Look at the section, the fourth paragraph down. It says, We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life. You see, all life comes from the Holy Spirit. All life. Not just the incarnation of Jesus, all life. This is the way Psalm 104 says it. When you take away their breath, this is talking about animals, by the way. When you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created and you renew the face of the ground. This is the way Job talks about his own life. In Job 33, he says, The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life. I belabor this point because I do this thing with my kids called Science Saturday, where every Saturday they get to choose a topic that they want to study, and I catechize them. So I'll say, Augie, why do we do Science Saturday? And he'll say, Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them. Psalm 111, 2. And I'm teaching my son that creation, the cosmos, is for our observation and delight, and we study it, but we study it in light of a certain worldview. And so when we started watching a documentary called Life on Our Planet, which was produced by Steven Spielberg, narrated by Morgan Freeman, who makes everything sound amazing, it traces the quote four billion year evolutionary history of life on Earth. And so right at the beginning, they talk about Luca. I didn't know this, but some of y'all are gonna be like, yeah, so you probably shouldn't talk about this. Okay. Luca, the last universal common ancestor, is the hypothetical, it's important, single-celled organism from which all life on earth descends. Right out the gate. That's what we're talking about. And I'm watching this with my six-year-old. And um, since it started stupid, I like to talk to my kids when that happens, uh, lest they should become stupid. Okay? This is parenting 101, right here. And so I just turned to August and said, hey, where did life come from? His answer was not Luca. Spoiler alert. You see, because childlike wisdom often outpaces the brilliance of fools. And in this moment, you realize that Romans 1 is clear that these brilliant genius scientists are just humans who suppress the truth and unrighteousness. Because here's the thing if there is a Lord and giver of life, it means that I am not my own. My life belongs to another. And that other is not named Luca. The other is named the Holy Spirit of God, the Lord and giver of life. And so, what is the right response to the Lord and giver of life? Well, we see it actually in a teenage girl named Mary in the ancient Near East, and she says it like this in Luke 18 1.38. Behold, I am the servant of the Lord, let it be to me according to your word. You see, the glad consent of Mary is a paradigm of what it means to have the right response to reality. That's what we want to be like. And so verse 4 goes on. It says, God sent forth his son, born of woman, born under the law. Now I said God sent his son to set us free, free from what? In in our text, if you read just one verse above and one verse below, sandwiched here, it says this. After our text, verse 8 says this formerly when you did not know God, you were enslaved to those who are by nature not gods. So one of the things I don't have time to unpack what he's doing here with this idea of elemental principles. What he's doing is he's saying, whether you are submitted to a religious law that you can't keep or irreligious autonomy, whether moralism or relativism, the current condition, the current human condition is one of slavery. And so that might mean that you live under some standards that you've self-appointed or that have been put on you that you're desperately desperately trying to keep and to live up to. It might mean that. Or it might be that you are caught up in some addiction, which is usually looks like an ever-increasing craving for an ever-diminishing pleasure. The scriptures are just really simple and plain about slavery. 2 Peter 2, 1, uh, verse 19 says it like this for whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. So to my question earlier, enslaved to what? Set free from what? Well, let me just ask you: have you been overcome by anything? Is there anything in your life under which you can't get free? You're a slave, according to the Bible's definition of slavery. And and so the most some of us might think, well, slave to under he was born under the law, this must be religious in nature, and and it is kind of. But the reality is that the most damaging law that you can live under is the obedience to your own desires. It's like a fish desiring liberty by leaving water to live on a dock. You see, freedom, according to scripture, is to live aligned with one's design. God designed you to live in light of his character, of who he is, of how he made the world to work. So the law is good, but sin is not. And so we have we have come under the law of God in a way that is, it becomes oppressive to us, not because the law is problematic, but because we are problematic. And so Jesus Christ comes born of a woman, born under the law, it says here. And and really, he's born under the law because we all have standards that we fail to live up to, and then we live under their condemnation. And God's law just happens to be the perfect standard. And so many of us in that religious mode, we reply to God, we say, like Churchill, I'm very sorry indeed that you are displeased with me. I will try to modify your opinion of me by my work. And that's how we relate to him. But the father replies, he says, I sent my son to redeem those who were under the law so that you might receive adoption as sons. We're constantly tempted to go back to relating to him through our own record or our moral merits. And the father has given us a gift, and we're trying to we're trying to give it back to the giver so that we can strive to earn it. And he's saying, That's not the way this works. I sent my son to set you free. And because there's so much internal for God to overcome in our lives, not only does he send the son to set us free, he sends his spirit to bring us home. Look with me at verse 6. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father. You see, according to Scripture, our objective freedom was won by Jesus Christ, but it becomes subjectively experienced by the Holy Spirit. Said differently, all of God does, all that God does. That is true. And it's also true that the Father appointed our salvation, the Son accomplishes our salvation, and the Spirit applies our salvation. And so the persons of the Trinity are all at work, leveraging everything they've got to bring you back home. And when we see that this scripture here, it says that the Father has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, we're being caught up into ultimate reality here. Um, let me look at the text of the Nicene Creed. It says, We believe in the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified. You see, the Holy Spirit pours out the love of God into our hearts. That's what Romans 5, 5 says. And as the Holy Spirit is poured out into our hearts, it is the very love of God being poured out into our hearts. And and Augustine of Hippo makes this plain by saying a good way to understand the Trinity is that you have a lover, the beloved, and love. God the Father is the ultimate lover. God the Son is the beloved of the Father. And the what binds them together is so this potent love of one for another that's so mutual and self-giving that it actually is a third person named the Holy Spirit. And so ultimate reality is the love of a Father for His beloved Son in the love of the Spirit. And we're being caught up into that when he sends the Spirit into our hearts. There's this drawing up outside of ourselves. One theologian says that the Spirit's abiding interest is to bind us to the Father through the Son. That's the Spirit's abiding interest. If you could call up the Holy Spirit on the phone and be like, hey, what are you up to this week? He'd be like, My abiding interest is to bind people to the Father through the Son. You know that. Hasn't changed for eternity past. This is the Spirit's work. This is what the Spirit delights in. And so the text here says that when the when the Father sends the Spirit of His Son, right, the Spirit of Jesus, into our hearts, the response of us, like a newborn baby with its first cry, the response of us is to cry out, Abba, Father. Such a simple yet dense word. This is an Aramaic word for Papa. This is a simple, profound word that has a density to it that we can't even fathom, and yet it's the word of a child. In other words, when God wants to give us ultimate reality, he doesn't give us a theological jargon. He doesn't give us some sort of a title like Lord, although those are important. He gives us the word of a simple child, Abba. Now there's linguists who believe that the most basic words, so in our vocabulary, we've got kind of fundamental words that are the basics of reality, that that then all the other words that we learn build on top of those basics. So the most basic words, though, you can tell because they're usually only one or two syllables and they're very small, like up, down, hot, cold, in, out. Super simple, very basic. One of the most basic words that any child learns, often the first word that any child learns is ABBA. Whatever language that might look like. And so this profoundly primitive speech. Is both the most basic and the most exalted thing that could ever come from the lips of a human being. To look at God and to, with deep sincerity, authentically say, Abba, Father, it's the whole purpose of history. It's the culmination of the fullness of time. You see, this word Abba is only recorded three times in Scripture. Once here in Galatians 4, another time in Romans 8, and one time in the Gospels in Mark 14. But if you if you understand Abba to be Jesus' term of endearment for his father, you realize that the first thing that Jesus said was, I should be about my Abba's business in the temple when he was a 12-year-old boy. And then when we see the prodigal son, his maybe most iconic parable, the first word of the prodigal son is father. You see, the first word of the Lord's prayer is our Father. The first word of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane is Abba Father. One of the last words Jesus prays is on the cross, he says, Father, forgive them. And maybe the very last he praises, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. You see, this mystery, this brilliance of this word, Abba, it's the very core of and the culmination of Christmas. This is what God's after, is that you can authentically say from the heart, Abba. That's what it means to have the Spirit of His Son indwelling you. One writer puts it like this: the Holy Spirit's supreme task as Christ's spy in our heart. I love that. The Holy Spirit is Christ's spy in our heart. His supreme task is to bring us to say, Abba Father, not my will but yours be done, not my control, but yours. All of history, all of redemption, all of Christmas is for this purpose, that you and I can authentically cry, Abba Father. And if you're anything like me in this moment, you're going, Yeah, but how do I know? Yeah, um, how can we be sure that the Spirit is in us? What does that look like? What does that feel like? How do I experience that? How do we know that I have acceptance in the Father through his son by the Spirit? How is all this brought home? Well, look at the Nicene Creed again. It says this we believe in the Holy Spirit who spoke by the prophets. There's this wild moment in 2 Peter chapter 1. I'm just going to summarize it. Peter, uh, who is an eyewitness to kind of all the things, right? He's there from basically the beginning. And he remembers the moment when he when he was on the Mount of Transfiguration and God the Father, whom he calls the majestic glory, what a cool title for God. The majestic glory speaks over Jesus and says, This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased. And Peter's like, I was there, it was dope. And then he says, Um, these are his actual words, we ourselves heard this very voice born from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain, aka, it was dope. That's what he's saying. That's what he's saying. And then he goes on and he says something like, but all the rest of y'all losers, you weren't there, you really missed out. Sorry. Wish you could be me. It's not what he says. He goes on and says something staggering, though. This is what he says in in 2 Peter 1.20. He says, the great experiences that we were eyewitnesses to that were amazing were simply all the more reason to believe your Bible. 2 Peter 1.20. No prophecy of scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. Some of you are like, make it plain, preacher. What are you what are you getting at here? Okay. We all long for an experiential, affective knowledge and confidence that God loves us, that he's for us, that we're his children, and he's our father. Don't give up on that. Press in. I can't help but read Ephesians 3 and think that is on offer to all who belong to Jesus. Press in. But here's the danger. When we feel anything less than the height and the depth and the width and the breadth of the love of God in Christ, anything less than that, we often get discouraged. And here's the fatal flaw, the move that we make that actually ruins the whole thing, is we start searching inwardly to find it. And what Peter's saying is don't even look outwardly to some miraculous thing like God writing in the sky, like, Ben, I love you. Like that's not gonna work. In fact, the goal, the point Peter's making here is look to the scriptures. If you want to know if God loves you, if he's your father, if the Spirit's in you, if Jesus is before you, look to the book. That's what Peter's saying. And that seems provocative, but this is how he says it. You will do well to pay attention to the scriptures as to the lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. You see, we have a more sure word than whatever might happen in our internal life, in our hearts. I'm super helped by this that 1 John 3, verse 20 says this Whenever our hearts condemn us, subtext, your heart's gonna condemn you a good bit. That's a normal part of the Christian life. Walking with God and your heart condemns you. So if you look to your heart to figure out if there's no condemnation for you, you're gonna be in trouble. So we look to the Bible, and when 1 John 3 20 says, Whenever our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything. If that's true, we take him at the word, we tell him, we say, God, you know everything. My heart condemns me. I need from you a word of no condemnation, to which I think God would reply, I wrote it for you. Romans 8, verse 1. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Take him at his word. And if you don't feel that no condemnation, instead you feel shrouded with the guilt and the shame that the evil one loves to accuse you with. If that's what you feel, you take that to him and say, God, I'm just, I feel the accusations. I feel the distance. And you read Luke 15, maybe, and you find out there God would much rather hug a dirty child than a distant child. Come home to the Father. You go, Okay, Father, I'm coming home to you. I want to come back, I want to know what it's like for you to throw the robe over my shoulders and kiss my neck and put a ring on my fingers. He says, I want you to know that. You see, because it's not what you do to get yourself back in, like Churchill thought with his dad. Instead, you go to the Bible again. John 1.12 says this to all who did receive Jesus, who believed in his name, he gave the right to be called children of God. And you take that word, you say, I've received Jesus, I believe in his name, I trust him. And then you just start living like a child of God from slavery into freedom. That's what verse 7 says. It says, So you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. So a question I'd be curious to know is when are you most in danger of living like a slave rather than a son? Now, if you're bugged out by the whole son versus daughter thing, son simply had all of the status and all of the inheritance in the ancient Near East. And so that's why son is used here over and over and over, not child or daughter. It's not gendered in that way. It's saying the son is the one who has all the status, the son has the inheritance, and it's all yours because you're in the son, capital S. Plus, dudes have to get used to being the bride of Christ. So it works both ways. But it says in verse 7, you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God. We hear the voice of Randolph. If your conduct and action is similar to what it has been up till now, then my responsibility to you is over, and I shall leave you to depend on yourself. And our father looks at us and says, You are an heir. All that is mine is yours. And so because God has nothing greater to give you than Him, than His own self, God gives us nothing less than His own self. I know of people who will start giving their inheritance to their children and grandchildren when they're still alive because they want to watch and experience as their children and grandchildren experience it. In some ways, the Father has done that for us. He's given us the Holy Spirit to dwell in our hearts as the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it. Ephesians 1.14. Now, our inheritance, it should be really simple. Our inheritance, when it says that we are heirs through God, our inheritance is God Himself. Nothing less. It's more than that in the sense that we get the kingdom, we get the cosmos, we get a new creation, we get God Himself. If we had time to trace the theory, the theology of inheritance and what it means to be an heir throughout the story of Scripture, we realize there's something breathtaking that happens, which is not only is God our inheritance, we are God's inheritance. What he wants more than anything else is us. Not our stuff, not our obedience, not our goodwill, not our whatever. Holy and without reservation. And so if this is true, that we're going to receive all of this as heirs through God, then what's the proper response? I can remember when my oldest was younger, and he would wake up from his nap and he'd come looking searching the house to find me. And one time he walked into the room I was in and and he saw me and he saw my backpack and he went over to my backpack and he he just un kind of unloaded everything in it. He'd come up to me and bring me a pen. And I'd say, Augie, I don't I don't want the pen, I want you. And then he'd go get a book and he'd bring me a book and say, Augie, I don't want the book, I want you. And then he'd bring me uh uh, you know, my key car keys or whatever. And and and I kept saying over and over and over again, Augie, I don't want this, I want you. And many of us relate to God like this. We just keep bringing whatever might commend us, whatever might change his opinion of us, as Churchill said. And what he's saying to you, always, and in the fullness of time, I don't want your stuff, I want you. You see, the the point of Christmas is that God gives us the great gift of himself, and he's asking in response that we would give him the gift of ourselves. You see, because the Father sent his son to set us free, and the father's sending his spirit even now in order to bring us back home. Let's pray. Father, this is almost too good to be true. We can't comprehend it. It's why we need you, Holy Spirit, to give us the strength to comprehend with all the saints the matchless love that you have for us and your Son Jesus Christ. We receive it now as you come to us in the swaddling cloths of the Old and New Testaments, Jesus. We receive it now as you come to us in the table with bread and with wine. And we want to respond with giving you our whole selves. You're worthy of nothing less. Spirit of God, would you search our hearts? Would you find the ways in us that hinder us from receiving all that God has for us and responding with the heart cry of Abba, Father? We pray this in the Son's name. Amen.