Breath of Heaven

We've been going through some principles that give us breath. Some of you are probably in a season of the doldrums. We often go through those seasons where it feels dry. Where's God? I don't feel God.

I don't feel like going to church. I don't feel like being spiritual, but I know I want that. Well, God gives us things in Scripture to help us breathe again. We need to breathe again. We need to re-energize starting this year.

Get some of that dead air out of us and get the good air in us. And that's what we've been talking about, what God has available for us. And the theme verse is Deuteronomy 30, 19. This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you, and I have set for you life and death, blessings and curses. I love the last part of this.

Now choose life. So God's laid it out for us. He says here's life, here's death, here's blessings, here's curses. I've got it all laid out for you. Choose life, please.

Choose life. Let's choose life. And that's what we've been really hitting at in this series as in week one we dealt with falling in love with Jesus again. We need to have a relationship with Jesus again. Fall in love with Him.

Get Him back in your life. Make Him number one in your life. The second week we talked about choosing a Christ-like attitude. We need attitudes that change rooms and change environments. To live Christ-like is important.

And I needed that yesterday when I went to Duck Donuts. And it was 30 minutes before they closed and they told me there was only two donuts left. And I'm like, what are you talking about? You're a donut shop and it's 30 minutes before you close. Go back there and fix me some donuts.

I didn't do that. I walked out and didn't get mad. I was really craving a duck donut yesterday though. I'm telling you. I'm telling you.

I had to practice a Christ-like attitude. And then last week we talked about slowing down. Slow it down and make things priority in your life. It will give you a breath of fresh air if you put the right things in place. The priorities that are needed.

The God priorities in your life. Taking a Sabbath and resting and looking at all the busyness of your schedule. That was a great message. I mean, I needed that. I was preaching to myself that day.

So today I want to talk about the most important piece. And this is like going a little deeper, okay? This is going somewhere where a lot of people don't want to go. And that's this person of the Holy Spirit. The breath you really need before any of this other stuff is the person of the Holy Spirit.

The breath of God. The Holy Spirit. Before you can really fall in love with Jesus, you need the Holy Spirit. To choose a Christ-like attitude, you need the help of the Spirit. In order to slow down and make priorities in your life right, you need the Holy Spirit.

We have available to us a power. We have a power available to us to help us and guide us and walk us through life. And so we're going to talk about that today. And most people don't understand the Holy Spirit. Don't try to catch this prize.

We can't wait until they grandiose at this 52 mark and look at it. Over to me. Bye. I-be my friend bet. I don't know what background you're from.

We've got a lot of different denominations in here. We've got people from different places. And you may have heard about the Holy Spirit a little bit. Maybe you heard about the Holy Spirit too much, like He was the only person in the Godhead. Or you just don't know.

You didn't even know that He existed in the Godhead. Nobody talked about it because it's one of these touchy subjects. How do I deal with the Holy Spirit? Because most people understand the Father, you know. The Father is easy to understand in the Trinity.

The Father, oh yeah, we've all got earthly fathers whether we like our earthly father or not. We understand what Father means and there's something there for us to look at as a heavenly Father. And we understand Jesus because the Bible is all about Jesus. There's something there with Jesus. We actually have, they're not accurate depictions of Jesus, but we do have pictures of Jesus.

We have white Jesuses and all kinds of different Jesuses. So we have something to look at. So we can kind of put something in place about Jesus and who He is. But the Holy Spirit, what is the Holy Spirit? How do we even look at the Holy Spirit?

How can we even connect the Holy Spirit to anything? It's a hard subject to deal with because it's hard to see Him. It's hard to know how He moves. So today I want to talk about the word Spirit. Let's start out by the word Spirit.

The English version of this word is Spirit. That's how we know it. If you're a King James person, it's Ghost. Yeah, Holy Ghost, you know. The old timers would say Holy Ghost.

You know, down south, Holy Ghost. We talked a lot like that. And Ghost and Spirit, that's kind of an interesting word. That's why, you know, a ghost? What is this?

I remember being in a New Testament studies course in a secular institution at an undergrad. And I was taking it as an elective at the time. This was before I was called to ministry or even knew I was going to go to seminary or anything like that. I just took it because I wanted to take it. And I mentioned the Holy Ghost in class, not realizing that people had never heard Holy Ghost.

They'd only heard Holy Spirit because a lot of them were biblically illiterate anyway. And they were like, I'll start laughing in class. Ghosts, ghosts, what's a ghost? I mean, people don't know this, you know. Like a Holy Ghost, it just sounds strange to people who are perhaps unchurched or don't know anything about the Spirit of God.

But in the Old Testament, the word Spirit is the word ruach. Ruach, not ruach. Ruach. You have to say it like that because it's in Hebrew. Thank you, my Hebrew teachers from seminary for teaching me how to pronounce Hebrew words, which I still don't remember half of them.

And it means a wind, breath, a violent exhalation, a blast of breath. And it's found in the second scripture of the Bible. We see it there. And the very... In the very beginning, in verse 2, it says, Now the earth was formless and empty.

Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the breath of God was hovering over the water. The breath of God was hovering over the water, and the breath of God spoke. God's very voice spoke, and the world leapt into existence. Everything comes from God's mouth. His breath, His power, that's a powerful statement there, that He brought life by His very breath.

The breath of God, the breath, the Spirit, the wind of the Spirit. In the New Testament, we see the word pneuma. Pneuma, which means a current of air, a blast of breath, a strong breeze, a strong breeze. So we see this in scriptures like John 6, 63. The Spirit or the breath of God gives life.

Breath gives life. The flesh counts for nothing, but the words I have spoken to you are breath. They're life-giving. They give life. They are life.

They are life to us. So every time you see the word Spirit, every time you see the word Spirit, it really means breath. Breath. It means breath. And that's what the Holy Spirit came to do.

It came to give us breath in our religious experience, to make our experience life-giving. Without the Spirit, it's just rules, laws, regulations, trying to get through life. But when we have the Spirit of God breathing in us, it brings out everything. It gives us life. There's something powerful about having the Holy Spirit, an intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit.

So why all the mystery? Why is it so hard to relate to the Holy Spirit? How do we explain something? Let's just think about this for a minute. How do we explain something we can't feel or, I mean, can't see or can't touch?

We can feel it, but we can't see. Think about wind for a minute. How do you explain to somebody who's never experienced wind what wind is like? I, you know, you can't touch it. Well, it, well, you know, you think about it, but there's no way to really put it into like some thing that you, some tangible touching thing, you know, like Jesus and the Father.

You can kind of put it there, but you can't do that with the Spirit. So today I want to help us understand it a bit better. Even I, you know, it's hard for me to understand all the things of the Holy Spirit, how he works, how he moves, what he decides to do, what he doesn't decide to do, different ages and times of history when he moves in certain ways and doesn't move in certain ways. It's hard for me to even do this, but my job is to take something and make it very simple for us to understand about the Spirit of God. So like, like the wind or the breath, the Holy Spirit is, or wind is unseen.

The Holy Spirit is unseen. That's the first point. The Spirit... Breath of Heaven is unseen. Wind you can see.

You can't see, sorry. You can't see. You know it's there, right? You feel it when you walk outside. You feel it blowing.

There's something comfortable about wind, right? Especially after a hot day, you know, going outside and a storm comes over. I remember working construction back when I was 16 years old. And I would come home just in heat of southeast North Carolina. It gets hot down there, right?

Human, human, human. And you would just stand out in the field and the wind would come through and blow on me and I would just stand there. I just, yeah, I could just stay there for hours, you know, as a storm was coming across in the evening and blowing right on me. It just felt good. It was comfortable, but I didn't see it.

I didn't see it. But perhaps God doesn't want us to see it. He wants us to experience His presence. Because one second in the presence of God changes everything. One second in the presence of God will change your life.

And perhaps that's what He wants you to do to experience Him. Not just see Him, but experience Him in a new way. Okay. I remember somebody coming out one week looking at me and talking about, you know, the service and stuff and says, I don't know what's going on in there, but something's in there. Something's in there.

You know, it's like, that's the Holy Spirit. That's the Holy Spirit working. Wow, I'll tell you what, it's some good stuff, right? And when we experience the Holy Spirit, it makes us want to come back for more. We want to stay in it.

So many reject the Holy Spirit because they want to see Him. Think about doubting Thomas. We've got a lot of doubting Thomases, you know, in the world. If I don't see it, I won't believe it. And I think of Jesus as Thomas was doubting and Jesus shows up, the resurrected Jesus.

And there Thomas is and he sees him and he says, see Thomas, touch my hand, touch my side. And Thomas immediately says, my Lord, my God, falls to His feet. And this was a lesson for the people that were there, the disciples that were there. He said then, He said this, then Jesus told them, because you have seen me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

Blessed are you that have seen, but you believe. So it requires faith. It requires faith to believe that the Holy Spirit is there and working. Even though you can't see Him, He is there. That's a part of this relationship.

I included this scripture just this morning. I don't have it in your notes, but John 14, 16 says it like this, and I will ask the Father and He will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever, right? The Holy Spirit is our advocate. He's here to help us. Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to be with us, the Spirit of truth, the breath of truth, right?

The world cannot accept Him. Why? Because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. The Lord cannot accept Him for us. The Spirit of truth is that He has crossed and written not inhanded, but 4 before he took us, yeah.

But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. He lives with you. I can't see him, but I believe in him because he's with me and he's working through me. He's with me, he's working through me. I know who he is.

So wind can't be seen. The second point is wind is unpredictable. Wind is unpredictable. Y'all know that if you're a surfer in here. You can go out, there's glassy waves for a second.

You know, you run, especially on the East Coast. We hardly ever have waves. So when we have waves, we're running out there as quick as we possibly can to catch that little section of glassy waves. And instantly it turns, you know, like within an hour. So you better hit it hard or you're going to have a mess.

You just never know. You cannot predict the wind. The wind always shifts. Sailors know this. People who play golf.

If you're a golfer, you know that. You hit a golf ball and the wind changes that day. And you're like, I can't, you know, I'm slicing it and doing everything else because of the wind. You've got to adjust, right? You cannot predict the wind.

It's constantly changing. And the Holy Spirit is the same way. He moves in different ways. We cannot predict what he, if we try to put him in a paradigm, if we try to put him in a tight system, we fail every time. John 3, 8 says it like this.

Jesus answered, the wind blows wherever it pleases. And he's talking to Nicodemus here, by the way, about being born again. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit. Everyone that is born of the Spirit, it just, we don't, we can't really explain it.

When I received Jesus as my Savior and my whole life changed and the Spirit came into my life, it's hard for me to put that into words. I can't tell you, I know your life's going to be different if you give your life to Jesus. Your experience is going to be amazing. But I can't explain it to you. You can only experience it.

We can only experience the power of Christ. But we like to standardize things. That's the problem with human nature. It's just our human nature. We like things in systems.

We like things in order. We like rules and we like laws. And we don't like rules and laws, but yet we need rules and laws. And so we automatically come back to that. And if you like order, God's going to mess you up, okay?

I'll just say it like that. If you think you got God figured out, it ain't going to, he's going to do something to really throw you off. We cannot predict God. Jesus, in fact, Jesus never healed the same way. Think about it.

Jesus sometimes would just say, be healed. The blind saw. Sometimes he would spit on dirt and make mud. And he was proving a point there that it's not my hand. It's the Holy Spirit.

It's the Holy Spirit working through me. I could do it any way I need to. But ultimately, it's God, the Holy Spirit, that's working through me to bring healing to these people. And if he's going, if he's going to. If you're going to be in a relationship with the Holy Spirit, which we need a relationship with the Holy Spirit, you have to get comfortable with the unexpected.

If you want to know the Holy Spirit, you've got to be comfortable with the unexpected. The third thing, the third point I want to make is wind is powerful. Wind is powerful. It has power. The Holy Spirit has power.

It's available to us. Some power is available. Wind can generate electricity. Think about that for a second. It can sell massive ships.

It can destroy entire cities. Storms and tornadoes. If you're from the Midwest, you're very familiar with that. We see it all over the news. Hurricanes coming in.

It can take out entire populations. And at the heart of it, the Holy Spirit is about power. It is about power. It's about the supernatural. We have a powerful God.

A God who is full of power. We forget how powerful our God is because we like to limit Him to human standards. But we have, and you know, honestly, I don't want a God that's not powerful. I believe in a God that's powerful. And our God of yesterday, He is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

And I believe that my God is just as powerful today as He was in the Old Testament when He was taking out the prophets of Baal. He's still as powerful today as He's ever been. And the Holy Spirit brings power. He has power available to us. And that's available.

And intellectualism often, and there's nothing wrong with intellectualism, okay? I love to read about theology. I love to dig deep in Scripture and learn more. And that's why I enjoy doing what I do. But intellectualism, the enlightenment and thinking and rationalization has demanded empirical evidence for things such as this.

This is why the Holy Spirit is really hard for us in this generation. And for many denominations, they've just kind of threw it out to the side, you know? Like, okay, I don't want to talk about the Holy Spirit because I don't know how to rationalize it. But my evidence is absolutely, when I had an experience with the Holy Spirit, I couldn't explain it. It's hard to explain.

Sometimes we have to get past ourselves. Are you familiar with Charles Finney, the great evangelist during the Great Awakening? He is actually, historians say he was responsible of leading over 500,000 people to Christ. Amazing, amazing revivalist. And what most people don't know about him is that he was baptized in the Holy Spirit.

He was baptized in the Holy Spirit. Here's what he said about it as he was sitting in his seat in his home. He was kind of articulating how the Holy Spirit had just endowed him and endued him with power. He said this, But as I turned and was about to take a seat by the fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Spirit. Here.

Here. Here. � The Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body, and soul. I could feel the impression like a wave of electricity going through and through me. Indeed, it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love, for I could not express it in any other way.

It seemed like, get this, it seemed like the very, the very breath of God. Are y'all familiar with Dwight L. Moody? I got a really cool story, Dwight L. Moody and his experience with the Holy Spirit.

He said, I remember two holy ladies, holy women. We got some holy women in here? Ready to pray for the pastor? Okay. I remember two holy, holy women who used to come to my meetings.

It was delightful to see them in the congregation. And when I began to preach, I could tell by expressions on their face that they were praying for me. At the close of the Sunday evening service, they would say to me, we have been praying for you. And I said, why? Don't you pray for the people?

They answered, you need power. He said, I need power. I said to myself, well, I thought I had power. I had a large Sunday school, the largest congregation in Chicago is what the conversations were saying. And I was, in a sense, satisfied.

But right along, these two godly women kept praying for me. And their earnest talk about being anointed for special service set me thinking. I asked them to come and talk with me. And we got down on our knees. They poured out their hearts that I might receive an anointing of the Holy Spirit.

And there came a great hunger in my soul. See, it starts with hunger. It starts with hunger. I did not know what it was. I began to pray as I never did before.

Well, one day in the city of New York, oh, what a day. I cannot describe it. I seldom refer to it. It is almost too sacred an experience to name. I can only say that God revealed himself to me.

And I had such an experience of his love that I asked him to stay his hand. I didn't want him to go away. Don't leave me. And I went to preaching again. The sermons were not different.

I did not present any new truths. And yet hundreds were converted. Hundreds were converted. And I would not now be placed back where I was before that blessed experience if you gave me all of Glasgow. It would be as a small dust of the balance.

Can you explain that? He couldn't even explain it. He says it was an experience that he couldn't. It was too sacred of an experience to even explain. And at an intellectual level, you ask, how do we put this at an intellectual level?

Well, here's what Jesus said. Here's what Jesus said. Here's what Jesus said. In Acts 1, 5 through 8, right before he was going away, he says, For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. So when they met together, they asked him, Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom of Israel?

So at this time, is this it, God? I'm trying to figure this out, okay? We've got to put this in a system. Is this the time? Is this the day?

You're getting ready to go to heaven? God, Jesus, I'm not getting it. I know you're raised from the dead. Man, are you going to be king now? Like, is this the time to do it?

Let's take the world. And how does he respond? And he said to them, It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you. That's the one thing you need to know. We need the Holy Spirit.

An intellectual gospel, danger of an intellectual gospel only, that just puts things in a framework of human understanding. And this is why the Holy Spirit is so hard to comprehend for people, because it limits God to being a man. It limits God's big, you know, powerful brain, whatever we want to call it, his knowledge, his almighty ability to know everything. It pulls it down to us, to making him like us, that we limit his brain to our brains. There's a danger in that.

And we miss out on all that God has for us, all that God wants to do for us, because we need the Holy Spirit. We need more than just human effort to do the things that God has called us to do. We need Holy Spirit to anoint us and give us an unction and give us a power throughout the Bible. We see it. We need the breath of God that God would blow on us to accomplish the things that God wants us to do.

Amen, church? We need the breath of God to give us what we need, to equip us with what we need, so that we can reach this city, so we can reach this nation. Man, if the power of God set on every person in here and filled them up and gave them everything we need, there's nothing we can't do through the power of the Holy Spirit. And we need to be open, pulling aside our intellectual thinking once in a while and think about God and how big He is and what He's able to do in our ministry and our lives. Romans 8, 11 says it like this, The Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead, the breath of God who raised Jesus from the dead, lives in you.

He lives in you. And just as God raised Jesus from the dead, He will give life to your mortal bodies by the same Spirit living within you. The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is the same Spirit that lives in you. And He wants to fill you with His Spirit. He wants to infill you with your Spirit.

He wants to fill you with your Spirit. He wants to give you everything that you need to pursue the calling that He's put on your life. So, let me give you a few things here. First of all, you've got to let go of fears and misperceptions. Fears and misperceptions.

We've got to let go of those things, okay? What do I mean by that? Well, we have some bias. Some of you perhaps have some bias based on the denominational background, one or the other. On the right or on the left.

Maybe you come from a charismatic Pentecostal background. Maybe you come from a Baptist Presbyterian background. Whatever that looks like. The scale is a broad scale, right? And we both need to look at each side of where we are.

What do we believe about the Holy Spirit and what is the Holy Spirit capable of doing? And I've sat under leaders on both sides. I love both sides. I grew up in Pentecostalism. I'm ordained in a Pentecostal network, a Pentecostal denomination.

At the same time, I've worked in Baptist churches. I've worked around other types of denominations. So, I'm very, very interdenominational. I'm a very interdenominational person. So, on one side, we can be so worried and so skeptical about getting it wrong with the Holy Spirit that we just throw out the baby with the bathwater, right?

Because, for me, growing up Pentecostal, I saw a lot of things that I don't know if they were the Holy Spirit or not, you know? There was a lot of crowd suggestions. You see those guys in white suits on stage on TVN making the whole crowds fall down into spirit. And you're like, no, I don't know about that, right? And it makes you question.

And you see some of the psychology of that. So, it makes you, and I had a tendency there in the beginning of my ministry to start throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Well, I, you know, and I was so cynical of everything that was happening in Pentecostal charismatic circles because I had been jaded by some of that that was happening. On the other end, some of you have been jaded or maybe have never been taught about the Holy Spirit. I had somebody tell me right here in this church one time, Leon, I never even heard about the Holy Spirit.

I knew the Holy Spirit was in the Bible, but it was never taught in my church growing up. It was never taught. So, we need to throw out all these misconceptions about the Holy Spirit. Maybe you came from a church that they were like, we got to keep those people out of here. We got to keep the Holy Spirit.

These things that were happening, these tongue speaking, you know, whatever they're doing. People, that's the devil, right? There's, there's, there's, there's, that's devil talk, right? Yeah. So, we got, so we, we, we got these, these presuppositions about the Holy Spirit, right?

And, and, and, and it, and it's hard to really navigate that, but we've got, we've got to go to the Word of God. People just simply don't know the Word of God. What does the Word of God say about the Holy Spirit? We listen to people. We listen to people and we take in one.

What people say and we form our theology based on what people say that with from people who probably haven't even really done a deep dive into it themselves. They're trying to figure it out and that's okay where people are trying to figure it out because we can't understand the Holy Spirit, right? So we need to throw those things to the side and start really digging in and asking and being open to the things of God. That's why Psalm 34-4 says, I sought the Lord and He answered me, He delivered me from all my fears. I don't need to be afraid of the Holy Spirit.

I don't need to be scared that He's some kind of ghost, you know, or it's some kind of force out there. He is a person. He is your friend. He is available to you and you need to lean into that. Open your heart up to what the Holy Spirit wants for you.

Let's not be skeptical. Let's not be cynical. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let's be open, okay? What the Holy Spirit is, who He is.

And that is clear Scripture. And honestly, look, from a pure Bible teaching standpoint from beginning to end, there is nowhere in Scripture that says that the Holy Spirit has ceased, that the gifts of the Spirit have ceased. We had somebody, I had somebody recently tell me, I don't, you know, I don't believe this Holy Spirit gifts of the Spirit for today. Where do you get that? One little Scripture, two little Scriptures, three little Scriptures pieced apart to make it fit your mold.

There's nothing in Scripture that says that God is not working still today like He did in the New Testament until His return. It says, until the perfect has come. What is the perfect? That is the coming of the Lord. It's not...

Yes, we have the Word of God to help and guide us, but in that time, the Word of God wasn't there. They were writing the Word of God and they said, until the perfect has come. They're talking about the return of Jesus Christ. The church needs to work. The gifts of the Spirit are available.

God is available to all of us until the return of Christ. So we need to be open to that. So what do I do next? I've got to go all in. I've got to go all on.

If I really want to experience the Holy Spirit, I can't just tiptoe, I can't put a toe in the water and say, You know, I'm interested, I'm curious, Holy Spirit, but if you misbehave yourself, if you do something weird... But let me say this, the Holy Spirit is not weird. A true experience of the Holy Spirit, a true outpouring of the Holy Spirit, when we experience the Holy Spirit in a church service, you will know it's the Holy Spirit. You will know it's not, you know, some psychological manipulation, crowd suggestion. You will know it.

It is the Holy Spirit. He is a gentleman and He works and He endows and He induces with power. He gives us all we need in an environment where He is working and He is doing His work. Good work. And we will be a church that will honor the Holy Spirit, and we will not be a crazy church, okay?

If you start barking like a dog, we will definitely have some problems. If you start shaking on the floor, we'll have to kind of figure that out. Now, I don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater again, okay? I ain't getting a little too personal here with some people, maybe. I don't know.

But the Holy Spirit, we don't need to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let's go all in. Let's ask the Holy Spirit to give us power. Jeremiah 29, 13. You will seek me and find me when you seek me, what?

With all your heart, not part of your heart. If you're ready to receive something powerful from the Holy Spirit, if you want to really have an experience, the presence of... If you want to experience the presence of God, you've got to go all in. You've got to build your expectation up for what God has available to you, and just go all in with the Holy Spirit. And then, finally, we need to develop an intimate relationship with Him.

And it is a Him. It's not an it. It's a Him. And I wish all of you, all of you could have an intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit. I can tell you, if I did not have an intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit, I could not do what I'm doing.

There's no way. There's no way I could have started a church with all the obstacles we had going on. I left my job. Miranda lost her job. We had a little baby.

The church that was supposed to support us financially reneged. We had everything that said not to do this in the practical. But I walked out of my house every day, walked out of my condo, and I said, Lord, I have to depend on you. I have to depend on you. If this is you, and that calling and that unction in my heart, the Holy Spirit was pulling me and pushing me, come on, Leon, we've got to do this.

There's people out here that are lost. There's people out here that are far from God. And he led me all the way. I heard his voice. I continue to hear his voice.

You don't go through a pandemic and move seven times. Some of those times are on the beach and in parks. And when we had no building at all and not trust the Holy Spirit, you have to trust the Holy Spirit. And look at us. We're still here.

He tried to kill us. He brought us down to like 20 people, right? I mean, nobody knew what to do, but we are back. And God is moving, and God is doing things, and people are being saved, and people are being baptized, and God is doing things again because the Holy Spirit is involved. I'll never forget that statement a church planner told me one time before I started church.

You have to put yourself in positions where you have to depend on the Holy Spirit, that there's nothing more than the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit we seek. I better move on because some of you are hungry here. Hopefully you're hungry for the Holy Spirit. But I want to end with this.

with this piece, and I love this benediction, 2 Corinthians 13 and 14, it says, "...the amazing grace of the Master, Jesus Christ, the extravagant love of God, and the intimate friendship of the Holy Spirit be with you." See, what's beautiful, and if the band wants to come up and start getting ready as we close the service, what's beautiful about this, just notice the beauty of this benediction. Because of the unique relationship we have to Jesus' grace, think about Jesus for a minute. We have a connection with Jesus.

What is grace? Grace is getting something you don't deserve. I didn't deserve Jesus. I was a wretched sinner. I was far from Him.

I didn't want to obey Him. Yet, grace was bestowed upon me because of Jesus Christ. The unique relationship that I gave my life to Jesus, and by the Father's mentioning of it, the extravagant love because of Jesus, I can experience the extravagant love of the Father, a Father who gave His only Son on the cross so that I could be saved. He gave me that, so I have this friendship with Jesus and this extravagant love for the Father because of what they did for me, for what He did for me. Now, every day is available to us, the Spirit of God.

He is available that I can experience Him every day, the extravagant love of the Father. But I have an intimate friendship with the Holy Spirit, an intimate friendship. We need an intimate friendship with the Holy Spirit. We need Him every day. And it's just not a one-time baptism event.

It's an everyday event, guys. It's an everyday event where I say, God, fill me. I wake up morning, first thing I say, God, fill me with your Spirit today. I need your Spirit. I've got to have your Spirit.

Guide me, Spirit. Guide me throughout my day, my life, an everyday experience. So I leave you with breathing principle number four to end this message. Get to know the person of the Holy Spirit. Get to know the person of the Holy Spirit.

Look at this scripture. Don't grieve God. Don't break His heart. His Holy Spirit moving and breathing in you is the most intimate part of your life making you fit. Bye-bye.

Have a great day. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Thank you. Don't take such a gift. We all bow our heads and close our eyes just for a moment. Stillness in the room.

Nobody leave. This sacred moment right here. Perhaps you've never given your life to Jesus. Because that's the story. You can't experience God's presence because you've never really made a decision for Jesus.

Or maybe you've walked away from Jesus. Maybe you went to church and you've been out of church for a while. But you're feeling led and you're feeling drawn back to Him. You're here today because you really... There's something in you that says, I need to be here.

Let me tell you, that's the Holy Spirit calling you back to Him. Calling you home. You were never intended to walk life alone. You were intended to be a child of God. And the Holy Spirit through Jesus ascending is convicting your heart to come back to Him.

That give your heart to Jesus. To confess your sins and give Him your world and give Him your life. So that He can come in and make home. If that's you today, would you pray this prayer for me? With me?

And everybody here, let's just all pray it together. Dear Father, thank you for sending your Son. I receive you, Jesus, as my Savior. Forgive me of my sins. Come into my heart.

Make me a new creation. I receive your gospel message. In Jesus' name. Where they leave dinner. Police sayania...

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