Sermon Tone Analysis

God's Longings for Your Life #2: Relationship

Hebrews 10:15-17, John 14:16-23, John 16:5-11, Romans 3:19-26

Sermon by Rick Crandall

Grayson Baptist Church - Sept. 7, 2014

BACKGROUND:

*We are taking a look at some of God's greatest desires for our lives, and last Sunday we started with God's rescue.

God wants to rescue us from our sin and eternal death.

And His commandments help, because they teach us how much we desperately need to be rescued by God.

You see, no matter how hard we try to obey God's laws, we can never keep them all.

So vs. 1 tells us that God's "law, having a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with these same sacrifices, which they offer continually year by year, make those who approach perfect."

*Nobody but Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has ever lived a totally perfect life.

And the only way He could rescue us was to come into the world as a man.

That's why in vs. 5-7, we hear God the Son speak to His Heavenly Father about coming into the world:

5. Therefore, when He came into the world, He said: "Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but a body You have prepared for Me.

6.

In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin you had no pleasure.

7. Then I said, 'Behold, I have come in the volume of the book it is written of Me to do Your will, O God.'''

*Our rescue never could have happened without Jesus coming into the world, but even that wasn't enough.

Our rescue could only be possible through the cross of Jesus Christ.

That's why vs. 10-12 tell Christians that by God's will:

10. . .

we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

11.

And every priest stands ministering daily and offering repeatedly the same sacrifices (i.e. the same Old Testament sacrifices), which can never take away sins.

12.

But this Man (Jesus), after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God,

*One of God's greatest desires for your life is to rescue you from eternal death, and He will, if you will trust in Jesus Christ and what He did on the cross for you.

God wants to rescue you.

But that's just the beginning, because God also wants to have a relationship with us.

Think about this great truth as we read vs. 15-17.

INTRODUCTION:

*When I explain God's plan of salvation to people, I like to use my hand, because every finger tells part of the story.

And my ring finger highlights the fact that the heart of Christianity is a personal relationship with God.

The Bible uses human relationships to help us understand God's desire for us to have a personal relationship with Him.

*The Church is called the Bride of Christ, Jesus wants to be our best Friend, and God the Father wants to be our Heavenly Father.

This is the heart of Christianity: God the Father wants to have a close, personal relationship with us through His Son Jesus Christ.

*Nothing could possibly be more important.

Listen to what Jesus said when He was speaking to His Heavenly Father in John 17:3: "This is eternal life, that they may KNOW You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent."

*God wants to have a close, personal relationship with us.

How do we know this is true?

1.

First in today's Scripture: we know by Holy Spirit's witness to us.

*Verse 15 tells us that the Holy Ghost or the Holy Spirit "witnesses to us."

But who is the Holy Spirit?

The Lord wants His followers to know, so in the hours before He died on the cross, Jesus had a lot to say about His Holy Spirit

*Please turn to John 14:16-18.

There Jesus said:

16.

And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever

17. the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you.

18.

I will not leave you orphans (or comfortless); I will come to you.

*Then in vs. 22, one of the disciples asked the Lord: "How is it that You will manifest Yourself to us, and not to the world?"

And in vs. 23, Jesus said: "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him."

*One of the most wonderful things about being a Christian is that God the Father and God the Son come to live in our hearts through the Holy Spirit, so the Holy Spirit is God.

The Holy Spirit is not an "it," though sometimes the Bible uses that pronoun to describe Him.

The Holy Spirit is God.

*He is not just a source of power like electricity.

The Holy Spirit is God the "Helper" or "Comforter".

And when Jesus said, "I will send you another Helper," the original word means "another of the same kind."

And since Jesus is God, then the Holy Spirit is also God.

He is God everywhere.

He is God here with us right now, and He is our witness!

*The most important way that the Holy Spirit witnesses to us is by the Word of God.

Peter made this truth clear in his second letter when he wrote:

20. . .

that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation,

21. for prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit.

(2 Peter 1:20-21)

*The Holy Spirit witnesses to us through the Word of God.

And over in John 16:5-11, Jesus gave us more crucial insight about how His Holy Spirit works.

Here Jesus was talking about the fact that after He rose again from the dead, He was going back home to be with His Father in Heaven, and Jesus said this to His followers:

5. "But now I go away to Him who sent Me, and none of you asks Me, 'Where are You going?'

6.

But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your heart.

7. Nevertheless I tell you the truth.

It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you.

8.

And when He has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment:

9. of sin, because they do not believe in Me;

10. of righteousness, because I go to My Father and you see Me no more;

11. of judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged."

*After Jesus went back to Heaven, He sent the Holy Spirit to the world in a brand new way.

[1] And He sent His Spirit to witness to us, first of all, about our sin.

*Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit "has come, He will convict the world of sin, because they do not believe in Me." God's Holy Spirit witnesses to us that all of us are sinners, that the wages of sin is death, and that we must believe in Jesus to escape the eternal death we all deserve.

*Without Jesus Christ, you are on a dead-end road in life.

The Holy Spirit helps us to see that.

That's what happened to me way back in the summer of 1972, three years before I got saved.

I was going down a road, headed to work.

It was a road that I had been on many times before, and it ended at a stop sign, where you had to turn left or right.

*Just as I came to the end of that road, a song came on the radio.

It wasn't a spiritual song at all, and I can't even remember which song it was.

But just as that road ended, I heard some words from that song, and suddenly it dawned on me that I was on a dead-end road in life.

My life had no purpose, and there had to be more to life than the life I was living.

*That may not seem like much, and it was 3 more years before I got saved, but it was a huge step for me.

For the first time in my life, I started searching for the truth, and the Holy Spirit was patiently leading me to the Lord.

The Holy Spirit witnesses to us about our sin.

[2] But also about Satan's defeat.

*Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit "has come, He will convict the world . . . of judgment, because the ruler of this world is judged."

The ruler of all the corruption in this world is Satan, and he may be causing trouble today, but his days are numbered!

The Holy Spirit witnesses to us about Satan's defeat.

[3] But also about our Savior.

*Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit "has come, He will convict the world of righteousness, because I go to My Father and you see Me no more."

Jeremiah 23:6 says this about the Lord: "This is His name by which He will be called: THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS."

Christians: Jesus Christ is our righteousness!

He is our only real source of righteousness.

And God wants us to know that, so the Holy Spirit witnesses to us.

*Randy Aly told about a lady who needed the Holy Spirit's witness.

She was a Christian, but she was very backslidden, and her husband had never come to faith in Christ.

When they moved to a new community, they were visited a couple of times by members of the local church, but this couple rudely said they wanted to be left alone.