More of the Holy Spirit - N.T. Wright Archives

I have the great privilege and honor of introducing uh tonight's teacher and um we're going to open up the word and hear from Professor int Wright um Tom Wright [Applause] is Tom Wright is living out the most active retirement that I have ever beheld a profound lack of golf and a profound amount of still teaching and writing um he uh he and I were chatting earlier today uh calculating the amount of books that he has written together and the number is falling somewhere between 80 and 90 but can he preach only time will tell With

all sincerity there's um I don't think there is any person who has ever graced the Earth who has shaped my biblical imagination as much as you have Professor Wright and I am so so grateful for the words that you have labored after to put on paper and an office on the other side of the world because they have shaped the way that I interact with the Living Word on this side of the world and the way that I teach the Living Word and I am one of so many people who could say something like that

so thank you for choosing to become less that God might become greater through you um and that is bearing a multiplying effect so I think it's very important that we do two things I think it's very important that we and I want to ask you not to respond for a second I think it's very important that we honor Professor Wright and I think it's very very important that we only worship Jesus okay can we do both of those things so we want to say thank you so much for who you are and the way that

you have given your life let's honor Professor Wright and Jesus is our only King and our only hope and he is the one that we've come to praise here so so as Professor Right comes to open the word let's pray together Lord we open not only your word but our our hearts right now we invite you to come in we invite you to have your way every room of our inner lives is open to you there is no door that is locked No Place Within me that I'm cutting you off from access to would you

surprise me with the way that you meet me tonight in Jesus name let's stand together for the reading of the word I'm going to be reading tonight from John chap 20 you're welcome to open your Bibles there if you have one I'm going to begin in verse 19 John 20 beginning in verse 19 on the evening of that first day of the week when the disciples were together with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders Jesus came and stood among them and said peace be with you after he had said this he showed

them his hands and his side the disciples were Overjoyed when they saw the Lord again Jesus said peace be with you as the father has sent me I am sending you and with that he breathed on them and said receive the Holy Spirit if you forgive anyone's sins they are forgiven if you do not forgive them they are not forgiven this is the word of the the Lord than to thank you good evening and thank you for your welcome and uh for the extraordinary privilege of being with so many of you tonight and uh I

I want you all to know that on my body clock it's about 4 in the morning or something like that and so um if I appear a little bit dreamy then forgive me but there is much to dream about in that passage which we will get to but in order to get to that passage in John chapter 20 I want to begin where many many people begin when they think about the Holy Spirit which is the scene of the day of Pentecost in Acts chapter 2 now when people think about the Holy Spirit uh who

people who haven't studied the subject particularly often they just know enough to know that on the day of Pentecost that's when the spirit came and people wonder what exactly that meant when Luke writes the story in Acts chapter 2 what does he have in mind how does he interpret what's going on there and many people in my tradition the Anglican Church when they think of uh the Holy Spirit they ask the question today is the holy spirit coming to give us a Second Blessing if I was converted some years ago do I now need to

have a new level of spiritual experience and people ask me somebody asked me earlier today in order to be sure that I'm filled with the Holy Spirit do I have to receive particular gifts on the day of Pentecost they received the gift of tongues so they were able to communicate with a crowd about this size probably or if anything even larger but all in their own languages the mind boggles and people have come to the text with those questions about my spiritual experience and I want to say though these things are not unimportant they're not

the main thing that Luke is wanting to tell us about and the main thing is what I want to try to explain a bit of tonight because in Acts chapter 2 when Luke says the day of Pentecost was fully come he describes that fully again and again and again fully come the day of Pentecost had fully come the disciples were all together and there was a rushing Mighty Wind and it filled the house where they were sitting and the disciples were themselves filled with the Holy Spirit as though Luke can't stop using the word filled

or fulfilled he he's got it on his on his heart what is going on here and the answer is that acts chapter 2 is the new testament's equivalent of two extraordinarily important passages in the Old Testament we know uh people have often said this in studying Acts 2 that but it's the reverse of the Tower of Babel in the Tower of Babel human arrogance wanted to build a tower to get up to God uh let's not have God U bothering us we want to to take over we want to be the people and God comes

down to see this stupid little Tower they've made and God confuses their languages so that they can't understand one another and they are dissipated and that great Act of human Rebellion which is as it were the ultimate shaking of the fist in the face of God the the conclusion of the story which began with Genesis 3 in the garden well not the conclusion but where all that led to God comes and deals with that by producing a new sort of chaos a Babel and throughout the rest of the Old Testament the answer is quite clear

if you won't have the promises of God you will have Babel and Babel is babyon on and the people of God refused to have the promises of God and so they got Babel that's how one strand of the Old Testament story works now many who've studied Acts chapter 2 know that that story of Babel is in the background and that Luke is saying that now something quite new has happened and as a result even though there are many languages the message can be heard by everyone in their own languages Thea the chaos and confusion is

brought into order but a fresh differentiated order by the spirit just as the spirit of God moved over the Waters of Chaos in Genesis chapter 1 to bring about order so now and the order was the wonderful world we live in where it isn't that we're all in exactly the same box we're all different and all God's creatures are different and that's wonderful that's the way God wanted it this is God's differentiated order so now in the church on the day of Pentecost the community that have followed Jesus thus far and those who are then

converted to follow Jesus on the day of Pentecost and all those subsequently are drawn by the spirit into this wonderful differentiated Unity Unity but with everybody fully honored not all squashed into the same shape as they were at the Tower of Babel but what else is going on the passages in the Old Testament I'm thinking of particularly are Exodus chter 40 and First Kings chapter 8 now some of you know these passages very well others of you may not be so familiar with them in Exodus chapter 40 Moses has built the Tabernacle or rather Moses

has got some special god-gifted workmen to build the Tabernacle in the wilderness and then finally in Exodus 40 God's glory the living glorious presence of God himself comes and dwells in and fills the Tabernacle is this my microphone that's doing it or is it the glory of God reaching down or or could it be both I don't know yeah is that better okay my beard must be getting excited so the point of Exodus 40 is often lost on people because as I remember when I was a very young Christian and wanting to read through the

Bible I started off with Genesis as you do full of excitement and Genesis is full of one great big story after another and great big characters one after another that's fantastic but then you go on to the Exodus and The Exodus is one fantastic story about the people of God being led out of Egypt and through the Red Sea and so on and then unlike this microphone which is misbehaving maybe we need a new Pentecost Miracle to make the uh make the confusion uh into peace after the after the uh Exodus from Egypt they arrive

at Mount sini and on Mount sini they're given the law and then to a young person reading through the Bible wanting to get on you suddenly hit some passages in the 20s of the book of Exodus where it seems to be one strange old law after another and you're not keeping any of these laws cuz it's like not boiling a kid in its mother's milk and stuff like that what I I thought I was reading a great story of the people of God and what we miss is that the reason God gives his people the

law is so that they can be the Tabernacle bearing people ever since Genesis 1 God has wanted to come and dwell in the midst of his people God makes a world that is other than himself in order to fill it with his glory so that it is both gloriously itself and gloriously the vehicle the receptor for his own personal presence humans were given the task of looking after God's creation on his behalf working it so that it would be what he wanted it to become and then God was going to come and dwell there so

when it all went horribly wrong because humans rebelled and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator what was God going to do was he going to scrap that plan when humans went wrong was he going to say well I'm not going to work through humans anymore they're a dead loss well they continued to be in all sorts of ways of dead loss but God isn't going to undo that original Covenant with the human race so he chooses Abraham and Isaac and Jacob who are a very very mixed and dysfunctional family and Jacob's sons

are worse again and how on Earth is this going to be rescued and then the story of Genesis ends with Joseph forgiving his brothers It's a Wonderful gospel moment at the end of the book of Genesis but the story ain't done yet because God's plan is to get new creation launched in the midst of the old creation how are you going to do that God wants to come and dwell in the midst of his people and so on Mount sin he doesn't just give Moses the Ten Commandments and a bunch of other laws he gives

Moses the instructions for building the Tabernacle the shrine where he will come and dwell in the midst of his people this is an act of sheer Grace the people are ungrateful they're grumbling they want to go back to Egypt some of the time um they don't know what's going on they're getting it wrong Moses and Aaron get it wrong too sometimes but God in his grace comes and dwells in the Tabernacle and there's a line that runs from Genesis 1 and2 all the way across to Exodus 40 and even the giving of the Torah itself

the the 10 words or the Ten Commandments is a way of preparing the people to be the people in whose midst God comes to dwell in some ancient Jewish Traditions the Feast of Pentecost is the feast of giving the law and the Feast of Pentecost in the New Testament is the time when God comes to fulfill his will by coming in person in the person of the Holy Spirit to dwell in the midst of his people and not just in the midst of his people but in their hearts in their lives this is the Tabernacle

moment but it is also the Royal moment because David in in in second Samuel David wants to build a house in Jerusalem for God and God sends word to him by the prophet Nathan and says uh no you've got too much blood on your hands you're not going to build me a house but it wasn't such a stupid idea because actually the Lord will build you a house what on Earth does he mean David's already got quite a nice house and he's been feeling AIT bad about that which is why he wants to build God

a house as well but God says no I mean there's a pun between two different senses of house God says when you sleep with your ancestors I will raise up your seed after you who will sit on your throne I will be his father he will be my son and he will build a house for me now the multiple resonances there are that David wants there to be a place on this Earth where God will come and dwell in perpetuity and God basically says nice idea but I want to go one much much better I

want to come and live not ultimately in a house made with hands and building of bricks and mortar I'm going to come and live in and as a human being great David's greater son I will raise up your seed after you he will build me a house we'll come to that I will be his father and he will be my son and so what happens on the day of Pentecost happens because finally there was a son of David called Jesus and God raised him up and declared what had been implicit throughout jesus' public career he

really is my son and he is the one who will build me my temple but it won't be a building of bricks and mortar it'll be a family an ever increasing family in whose hearts and lives God will come to dwell and as a a sign and pointer towards that David's son Solomon builds the temple and the scene in First Kings 8 when Solomon commissions and dedicates the temple matches the scene in Exodus chapter 40 when the SP where the shikina the glory of God comes to dwell in the wilderness Tabernacle there's something ambiguous about

solom 's Temple because it looks as though God actually prefers to be on the move he doesn't want to be tied down nailed down as though he could be the possession of those who happened to live in Jerusalem God wants to be out there making stuff happen but at the moment the temple in Jerusalem serves as the promise like the Tabernacle did of New Creation the people who studied the detail of the Tabernacle and the temple both how the decoration works and the sequences in which it was built have come back to say from that

detailed research that both of these are designed to be small working models of New Creation instead of the chaos which could have resulted from the human rebellion in Genesis 3 God nevertheless is going to bring his Genesis one and two purposes to their appointed end so that the Tabernacle is a forward-looking signpost there will come a time when this microscopic New Creation which is the Tabernacle this beautiful extraordinary Exquisite structure there out in the sini desert for goodness sake what a contrast this will turn out to be the pointer to the eventual whole new creation

when as the later prophets say will come back to this when the whole earth will be full of the glory and the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea so Tabernacle and Temple are Pointers towards God's evental purpose which is to fill the whole Creation with his presence and his love and His glory and on the day of Pentecost we have the New Testament equivalent of the building of the Tabernacle or the building of the temple which is why incidentally throughout the Book of Acts all the great controversy and clashes are about

temples think of Ephesus think of Athens think of back in Jerusalem the point about temples in the ancient world was that they were supposed to be access points not just access points for humans maybe to reach out to some God but dangerous access points where God would come and dwell with and deal with people and in the ancient Hebrew uh Temple there is of course no image in the temple because it's pointing for towards to the time when there will be the true image of God as Paul says he Jesus is the image of God

the firstborn of all creation and so that the the new Temple now is the temple built by Jesus himself the temple which is a family which starts there on the day of Pentecost of people who are themselves filled flooded saturated with the Holy Spirit that's who we're meant to be but not for ourselves eles but exactly as in the Tabernacle or the temple in the Old Testament the church is to be the small working model of New Creation in so far as we are indwelt by the spirit that's what we're all about not just a

signpost either but an active model New Creation in ourselves causes of New Creation in the world right now poin us to the ultimate New Creation which will come come when God finishes the work that he began so those are the way that's the way that the uh the scene in Acts 2 picks those um Old Testament themes up and this then continues in those wonderful Old Testament promises I alluded to just now in Isaiah 11 you have that same idea of the Messiah the Son of David they will come out a Shute from the stock

of Jesse that's the davidic family A branch will grow out of his roots and the spirit of the Lord will rest upon him the spirit of counsel and might Spirit of knowledge and wisdom and the fear of the Lord and in his Reign the reign of this coming King the wolf will dwell with the lamb and The Leopard with the kid and the cow and the bear shall feed and a little child shall lead them they will not hurt or destroy in all my Holy Mountain because the Earth will be full of the knowledge of

Yahweh as the waters cover the sea the the Messianic Kingdom will produce the ultimate new Temple which will be the whole new creation filled as on the day of Pentecost the house was filled with the living glorious active presence of the living glorious active God my friends we you and I we who are celebrating as we were doing with this extraordinary music just now we are celebrating the fact that already we have have that inauguration of the Kingdom we have it in our bodies we have it in our hearts and Minds we have it in

our lives in our fellowships we see it in healings in all sorts of ways as we've been hearing and this is the pointer towards that isaianic promise and we'll come back to that because Paul picks that up when he's talking about how the church is to live but it's not just in Isaiah 11 there's an extraordinary passage in Numbers Chapter 14 in numbers 14 um Moses has sent the spies into the land of Canaan to spy out the land the people are still in the wilderness they're in the desert they're really fed up with this

because they they remember how they had good stuff to eat in Egypt and now all they've got is Mana well they should be so lucky but that's another story so Moses sends 12 Spies into the land to see how how things are going to be and they come back and 10 out of the 12 say say there's no way we can go in there we've seen they've got Giants there we were just like grasshoppers in front of them and there are there are strong people and they got fortified cities how could we possibly dream of

ever going and taking over this land two of the spies Joshua and Caleb said no the Lord is with us this is doable we should go up and do it but the people rebel and they want to go back to Egypt and they want to have a different leader other than Moses and God is fu Furious so Furious that as one or two other occasions he threatens actually that's it game over and Moses has to plead and say uh no no no please because actually it's your reputation that's on the line the Egyptians will hear

it if you don't let us go on into the land and and then it's it's your honor that's at stake and God says yeah you're right but I will forgive people but as the whole Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord none of those who rebelled will come into the land now what what's the point of that saying as the whole Earth shall be full of of of um my presence and my knowledge the whole point is listen Moses it was my purpose in the beginning to fill the whole of Creation with

my power and my love and my joy and my fruitfulness do you think it's a big deal for me to bring you and your rabble into this Holy Land which I've promised them of course it's not a big deal so let's just do it and so they have to wait they have to wait for 40 years but then of course they do but the point is this and this is actually enormously important right now geopolitically God's purpose always was that the people coming to dwell in the Holy Land itself would be the foraste of and

the pointer towards God's claim on on the whole creation the straight line from there to Romans 8 where the whole earth is now God's holy land and the church by being filled with the spirit in the present are the people in whom God's future purposes for the whole creation are to be modeled the small working model of New Creation so that just as Paul speaks about the Holy Spirit in our own personal lives as the guarantee the spirit is the guarantee of our inheritance now we tend to take that in terms of us ourselves as

individuals and that's not wrong but it's just not complete that the fact that I have the Holy Spirit dwelling in me so I believe and experience is the sign that even though I am an old man now and and bits are dropping off and fading and failing um and and one day I won't be any longer uh breathing and living among you um nevertheless I have the Holy Spirit who assures me that one day I will be raised from the dead if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you then

he who raised the Messiah Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also that's Romans 8 9 9 101 and that's the that's the holy spirit is but listen that's the Holy Spirit as the individual guarantee but the holy spirit in the whole church is the guarantee of the whole new creation that's part of the point it's the same thing we've tended to over individualize um which is no bad thing because the individual every single individual matters but don't forget then that this is a sign to the larger reality the spirit is

the guarantee and in Acts we have then the new Temple and from acts I want to move to the letter to the Ephesians Ephesians is an extraord ordinary text full of glory and Splendor I've said this um in one or two places so but I don't mind repeating it some years ago my colleague Michael bird and I were uh out in the Middle East where we were doing some recordings in connection with the book we co-wrote called the New Testament in its world if you Google that you'll find that not only is there a book

there's a website and there's all this stuff and we were we were making some films where um Mike was asking me questions or I was asking him questions and we were talking about the meaning of the Bible in its original historical context we were in Jerusalem we were in Galilee we then flew over to Greece which was kind of interesting because that was exactly when the Greek currency was going down the pan and uh people were saying in the airport should we be buying cigarettes because that may be the only currency that's left in Greece

now fortunately we were all right and then we went on to Rome and filmed there but when we were standing at the foot of the Hill the areopagus where Paul debated with the Athenian philosophers we were discussing what we had agreed in advance we would discuss and suddenly with the cameras still rolling Mike Bird turned to me and said he's an Australian I can't guarantee that I get the accent right but he said so Tom what's your favorite Pauline letter and why I had not been expecting that question standing there at the foot of the

areopagus I said a quick prayer and I said well Mike my home this is when I lived in uh Eastern Scotland at near St Andrews for in my home there are many rooms there's one room which is very busy where everything happens where the family congregates and it's a bit chaotic but it's where stuff happens it's the kitchen and as far as I'm concerned in terms of Paul's letters that's Galatians but then you cross the corridor and there's a more formal dining room which is laid out where we can sit and actually have a proper

served meal and that's Romans now down the corridor one way there's a living room down the corridor the other way there are bedrooms that's basically the Corinthian correspondence and a few other things as well but then I said but then I said at the back of the house there's a room which faces South out over the fth of fourth and at certain times of certain days you can see the the sun rising up out of the sea and at certain times of certain days you can see the moon setting over the mountains in the other

direction I said that's Ephesians Ephesians is visionary it's one of the reason why some new testament Scholars over the last couple hundred years said it probably wasn't by Paul it doesn't feel like the kitchen or the dining room well of course it doesn't because it's giving this enormous and how does this Vision work this Vision Works because it's all about the church as the temple the small working model of New Creation Ephesians chapter 1 verse 10 says that God's purpose from the beginning was to sum up in the Messiah all things in heaven and on

Earth do you know if Ephesians 1 had been taken as the watchword of the church in the 16th century the whole history of Western Europe and North America would have been different all sorts of reasons I could spell that out because so often the the Western world has thought that the purpose of Christianity was to leave Earth and go to heaven and here in Ephesians 1 it says no the whole point was that heaven and earth were to come together they have already come together in the Messiah and one day they will be completely joined

in the new heavens and new earth that's the Christian hope because the Christian hope is not the platonic hope that my soul will find its way up some torturous journey and end up in in a place called Heaven the biblical hope is that the Living God always intended to come and dwell with his people he did it in the Tabernacle he did it in the temple he's done it in Jesus the word became flesh and pitched his tent Among Us that's what the word means Jesus is the true Temple and then in the book of

Acts and in Ephesians Jesus sends the spirit so that the church can be the advanced sign of this heaven Earth reality that God has planned so from Ephesians 1:10 and we could read through Ephesians at Great length but obviously there isn't time to do all that tonight but um Ephesians chapter 2 sets out the Plan of Salvation chapter 2 veres 1 to 10 we were Sinners Jew and Gentile alike we were all Sinners and we are saved by grace through faith and many Christians in my tradition stop reading at verse 10 because then the rest

of the chap chapter doesn't seem to be so relevant to us as so some people would say because it's all about how Jew and Gentile now come together in a single family excuse me that's about the most relevant thing you can imagine the reason why the the the the reason why Pauline scholarship has been bothered about that is we've been so fixated on how I as a sinner get saved which is hugely important but we've forgotten that in Paul's argument the reason for saying that is that then the these Gentiles who were Sinners outside the

Covenant if salvation is by grace through faith they can now be fellow members in corporate in the one body this is the truth which the western church forgot for hundreds of years so concerned with being saved and going to heaven as individuals that we were content to allow different ethnic churches different language groups to go their own way and do their own thing without remembering that for Paul for Jes Jesus for God there is neither Jew nor Greek slave nor free no male and female because all are one in Messiah Jesus and so and so

in Ephesians chapter 2 towards the end of Ephesians chapter 2 we have exactly this word uh where where Paul says so the Messiah came and gave the good news peace had come because through uh through the Messiah we both have access to the father in The One Spirit the holy the holy spirit is the guarantee that all of us from whatever moral background cultural background social background we come we're all part of the one family and he says therefore you are no longer foreigners or strangers you are members of God's household and here's the temple

language this is the point built on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets with Messiah Jesus himself as the Cornerstone in him the whole building is fitted together and grows into a holy Temple in the Lord you two are being built up together in him into a place where God will live by the spirit that's the promise that is the Assurance that's where that whole argument is going but it doesn't stop there because in chapter three Paul says this is why I've been an apostle going around doing all the things I've done Landing up in

prison and all the rest of it but he says that the point of it all chapter 3:1 is that God's plan was in God's wisdom in all its Rich variety was to be made known to the rulers and authorities in the Heavenly places through the church in other words the very existence of this Spirit-filled Community a community composed of all sorts of people young and old Jew and Gentile black and white male and female whatever the very existence of this community filled by the spirit calls the powers to account the Earthly Powers it tells Caesar

Herod every modern equivalent of Caesar and Herod that they are not God and that God is God that they are not Lord and that Jesus is Lord that they are not powerful and God's spirit is powerful the very existence of the church is meant to do that which is why it's so tragic when the church fails to recognize this and live accordingly because then the principalities and Powers smile sardonically to themselves and say well that's all right we're not going to get any trouble from that Source when the church is acting as the church as

a small working model of New Creation New Creation calls time on the power Brokers of the old creation and my friends it's time it was doing that once again we really need it right now which is why then at the end of chapter 3 Paul Paul seems to to to so to relish this that he he can't say it often enough he's praying before the father um that he will lay out all the riches of Glory to give you strength and power through his spirit in your inner being that the Messiah may make his home

in your hearts this is this is the gospel truth of God coming to dwell with us so that you may be strong enough with all God's holy ones to grasp the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the messiah's love though actually it's so deep that nobody can really know it so he says so may God fill you with all his fullness that's Acts 2 again that's Tabernacle plus Temple plus Jesus and now here we are tremblingly that's our calling so to the one who is capable of doing far more that we

can ask or imagine to him be glory in the church and in Messiah Jesus to all generations that's that's Paul's prayer at the end of the first half of Ephesians and then immediately he launches into a description of the church in which Jesus is now exalted so that he may fill all things and part of his plan eventually to fill the whole Creation with himself and his presence is that the church is given Multiplicity of different tasks and Ministries not in order to divide the church but in order to strengthen and unite the church so

that the differentiated Unity which was God's will for creation in the beginning is to be modeled in the church in order that the church May then hold up that model and work for it in the world which is why the ethics of of Ephesians four and five are so important if you're New Creation if you're indwelt by the spirit then this is going to look different people are going to say we didn't know you could live like that no and you couldn't without God's spirit uh in your in your heart and your lungs and your

body but now with God's spirit we are to be genuine humans each Christian human being is herself or himself called to be that very small but working model of New Creation that's tough It's demanding it's challenging but that's our vocation which is why in Ephesians chapter 6 we are told so much about spiritual warfare so the challenge of the coming of the spirit is to struggle as a church towards unity in diversity here we are a large diverse crowd but United in the common Faith which we've been celebrating in our worship but it's very very

difficult it's I sigh because I've lived this for years when I was working full-time as a bishop in the Church of England struggling constantly for Unity and for Holiness and for appropriate diversity now Unity is easy if you don't care about Holiness you just have to say okay who cares how we behave we all get together um Holiness is easy if you don't care about Unity you just say well I know how we're to behave and anyone who thinks differently they can go off and do their own thing somewhere else the real problem which which

Ephesians holds together it's unity plus Holiness together and it's so easy to to fool ourselves that unity and diversity are going to be easy oh yeah well you do your thing I'll do mine but the church has so often then gone its own way and we live in a world where identitarian political thought or social thought has been so Rife in the last 20 or 30 years that there's several people charging off in different directions as we speak and different cultural agendas personal agendas Etc how is the church going to hold that together read Ephesians

and find out but I want to cut quickly now because I see my watches going faster than I thought it was um uh a passage which is so often forgotten a passage in Romans chapter 15 um I said to some folk this morning I I have lectured on Romans several times in the universities and so on and when you lecture on Romans as many of you will know or preach sermon series on Romans the Temptation is so to Major on Romans 1 to8 that you don't leave time to give the second half of the letter

it's proper due and even if you then do take time to look at 9 to 11 because we all kind of know they're important too well chapters 12 to 16 they're all about the so what and we sort of know where the so what ought to go well actually we probably don't because Romans 14 and 15 is all about the differentiated Unity of the Church of God and Paul is a clever writer and and clever writers save their strong point for the end of the main argument and the end of the main argument of Romans

is in the middle of chapter 15 and we shouldn't ignore it we should celebrate it because Paul is addressing a church in Rome where people were very suspicious of one another and yes maybe they do have the spirit in that church over there but they do things differently to us they don't we don't have the same diet as one another or or or they drink wine and and and we are tea totals or they keep Sabbath days and of course we don't need to do that or vice versa and so there are different house churches

in Rome that don't get on and Paul coming to Rome is saying to them welcome one another therefore yes there are red lines they come elsewhere in Romans and in one Corinthians and Ephesians there are things which if people do them then they cannot possibly be part of the Fellowship of the Messi that's a whole other conversation but when it comes to those issues of ethnic separation and the symbols which Mark out ethnic separation particularly Jew from Gentile but many others as well then we must learn that because of the Gospel itself This is Gospel

truth there's I know a scholar who said faced with this way of reading Paul oh this is just about table manners this is quite trivial it really really isn't it's about does the gospel work for Gentiles as well as for Jews because if it does then Gentiles are sinners no more and they are welcome at the table because God in Christ has dealt with their sin these things go together so he says in Romans 15:7 welcome one another as the Messiah welcomed you to the glory of God and so he goes on quoting um several

different Biblical verses and unusually for Paul though it's a rinic trick of underlining something he quotes from the law and the writings and the prophets which is a way of saying every segment of the Old Testament is making the same point that the nations are to glorify God With His People Israel and to cut to the chase in verse 12 he quotes that wonderful passage from Isaiah 11 the passage immediately after the line which says that the Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea he quotes from

uh Isaiah uh 11 verse verse 11 there shall be the root of Jesse the one who Rises up to rule the Nations the Nations shall hope in him the nations are welcomed into the family of the Messiah and so his closing blessing at the end of this um uh the real argument of Romans is Romans 15:3 May the god of Hope fill you listen to the words fill you with all joy and peace in believing so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit he hasn't mentioned the Holy Spirit up

until this point but the Holy Spirit has been under the argument all along and it comes out now with a great Clash of symbols like the end of a great Symphony the god of Hope fill you with all joy and peace in believer in other words you are to be the Pentecost people the people who are now filled flooded drenched with God's spirit and as a result you may overflow with hope because your present filling with the spirit is the sign to what God is going to do both for you and for the whole Creation

in the end when Paul quotes one line from the Old Testament again and again he has the whole passage in mind what's the whole passage of Isaiah 11 all about as I said it's about the rule of the Messiah in which the wolf and the lamb will lie down together and so on and already there was some Jewish writers who are interpreting that in terms of these animals being like Nations coming together in the Messianic family yes says Paul and that coming together of God's people across traditional boundary lines of ethnicity or social class or

or moral background or whatever it is that is the sign that the new creation is underway and that one day the whole Earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord and as you now are filled with the holy spirit so may you overflow with that hope your present filling is the sign of the Hope which is set before you so I'm nearly done but there are two themes which arise out of all of this and I think they belong closely and tightly together in Paul and in our practical theology today and the first

which we find in Romans 8 though people often skip over it is the theme of lament Paul says the whole creation is groaning in travel and is up to this day and my friends did you watch the television news this last week did you look at the newspapers this last week is the world or is the world not groaning in travel it's probably worse than at any time in my life what's going on in many many different parts of the world of which Ukraine and Gaza there are simply two examples but many others where should

the church be in the middle of all this sitting on the sidelines saying well at least we've got our act together and we're too bad about the rest no no no no no Paul says we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirit grown inwardly as we await for the New Creation in other words the church is called to be the people who lament at the heart of of the pain of the world and that is part of our spirit-given calling which is why he immediately goes on to say that in in our hearts

the holy spirit is groaning within us with in articulate groanings there is a time when even the third person of the Trinity has no words to say how bad stuff is right now and if we believe as various people say that the spirit already fills the whole world then let me tell you what the spirit is doing at least half the time is groaning is lamenting we are called to share in the prayer of lament that rises from thousands millions of hearts and lips in the places of great pain in the world and in places

of great pain in our own lives and hearts because we all have places of such pain but when that is going on then Paul says I haven't got time to explain this in all the detail but then Paul says that when the spirit is groaning in our hearts and God the father is listening we are carrying forward God's Redemptive work in prayer in the wordless prayer of lament where we don't even know what to pray for but the spirit is praying within us we are being part of God's new creational purposes and I've worked that

out in various books and writings and places but then when we are doing that we are all also back to where we began with John 20 we are also to be the people of jesus' ongoing mission in the world Jesus on the evening of the first day of the week Jesus representing New Creation he has come out of the Tomb as already the beginning of God's New Creation Jes the the the human body of Jesus is the start the launch of that New Creation The Immortal physicality which will one day be the whole creation and

Jesus comes into the room where the disciples are hiding for fear of the judeans and he says peace be with you peace as with the wolf and the lamb and so on peace and then he says as the father sent me so I send you hang on as the word became flesh and tabernacled in our midst that's the father sending Jesus now the word has become spirit and Tabernacle in our hearts so that we can be for the world what Jesus was for Israel that's how the logic of Mission Works we can look at everything

about the life of Jesus including by the way him Weeping at the tomb of his friend including by the way his tears over Jerusalem in Luke chapter 19 we can lament and we can celebrate and we can be God's witnesses as the father sent me so I send you you how does that work because echoing Genesis 1:2 echoing Genesis 2:7 he breathed on them and said receive the Holy Spirit receive the Holy Spirit you are to be the tabernacling people the small working model of New Creation which is why in your very life you are

to hold the principalities and powers to account whosoever sins you forgive their for given he says whosoever sins you retain they retained what on Earth is that about I read this in terms of Genesis 1 and two that in the garden there is the Tree of Life well we know we know from elsewhere in John 20 that the promise of life is what Jesus now gives through his church to the world but now we have the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil humans had grasped at that thinking to control God's way of being

in the world or for the world no no now through the spirit God gives his people a sense of the way things should really be God's justice God's Beauty filling the world flooding the whole creation as a result the church in its very existence is to hold the world to account as Jesus already said in John chapter 16 I go back to Ephesians chap 3:10 that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might be made known to the principalities and powers in The Heavenly places the New Testament Witnesses converge then on the church filled

with the spirit as the small working model of New Creation not just as an example of what God might do which people might look on and say isn't that interesting but as the active participants in God's new creational plan God is already filling us with his Spirit in order that we may be Spirit people towards the the eventual goal in which the Earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea thank you very much my friends for bearing with me through my jet lag may God be glorified we

are now Tyler is going to leave us in prayer thank you let's stand and respond together