‘Spirit-empowered Ministry’
President
Alabama Baptist State Convention
I am fascinated by the 21st-century church in the Western world. Is there anything we don’t have? We have acquired the expertise of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. These things are not all bad. But as we watch Christianity move at lightning speed from the Western world to the Southern Hemisphere, we have to wonder why.
Could it be that in the process of acquiring all this technology and expertise and ability to “do church” that we have forgotten our need for the power of the Holy Spirit?
Many of us have traveled and ministered in Third World countries. Christians and church leaders in those countries may envy our resources and our libraries and our seminaries and our training and our literature and our buildings.
But we usually return from those Third World countries saying: “They have something we don’t have.” They may not have our resources, our training, our know-how, but there seems to be the touch of God upon them. My prayer for Alabama Baptists is that we will have the power of God upon us. I pray that our ministry will be Spirit-empowered ministry.
This message is an invitation to you to join me in examining the promise of Christ to His church. He promised power, the power of His Spirit.
Jesus spoke often of the promise of His presence. In John 14:16, Jesus said, “And I will pray to the Father and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever.” Look at this — the word helper or comforter comes from the Greek word Parakleton, which means “one called alongside” for protection or counsel. It can mean advocate. The Helper, the Comforter is the Holy Spirit.
The word another is taken from the Greek word Allon, which means another of the same kind. So when Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit, He promised to send His other self — One just like Him. When you became a Christian, something supernatural took place. You became the dwelling place for the Holy Spirit.
On Aug. 14, 1966, I stood on the bank of Lake Guntersville. It was my 15th birthday. It was a Sunday afternoon. I was there to observe my dad’s baptism. He became a Christian a few days earlier and requested to be baptized in the lake. Just a minute or two before the service was to begin the pastor approached me and asked me if I was a Christian. I wasn’t and I confessed that I wasn’t. He asked me if I wanted to be. I told him I wanted to be a Christian more than anything in the world. He showed me how. I received Christ into my heart and in a matter of minutes I was standing beside my dad in the water as we yielded ourselves to believer’s baptism.
Several years passed before I had any comprehension of what happened to me. But now I know that at about 3 p.m. that day, my life was invaded by Deity. Jesus Christ took up residence in me. Christ, in the Person of the Holy Spirit, came into my life to take up residence and to provide all the power required for Christian living and service.
Reflect upon that day in your life when you received Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and be reminded that in that moment the Holy Spirit entered into you.
What is the greatest need in your life this morning? What is the greatest need in your church? What is the greatest need in our state convention and in our Southern Baptist Convention? It is a need for the manifest power of God.
The word used by Luke in Acts 1:8 is dunamis or power. This is the word for dynamite, dynamo and dynamic.
• We need His power because we are weak. Philippians 4:13 says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens (empowers) me.”
• We need His power for spiritual warfare. Second Corinthians 10:4 teaches, “For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty (empowered by God) for pulling down the strongholds.”
• We need His power for our daily walk. Colossians 1:10–11 tells us “that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; strengthened with all might (power) according to His glorious power.”
We say we want the power of God in our lives, but are we willing to meet God’s requirements for the outpouring of Holy Spirit power upon our lives?
I want to say a word to my fellow pastors. I am one of you. I know the struggles you face. You need this power. You need the power of the Holy Spirit in your life and in your ministry.
In 1952, at the Keswick Convention in Keswick, England, Dr. Wilbur Smith, speaking to a gathering of pastors, said, “The power of the spoken word in preaching by itself is not enough — it must have power … the power of the Holy Spirit. No profession so exposes the inner life of a man as the ministry. Congregations watch and examine the preacher, and all that hundreds know about God and the Lord Jesus Christ, they hear from the preacher. This is a work that requires the power of the Holy Spirit.”
In 1973, Sandra and I married. I had been a pastor for about two and a half years prior to our marriage, serving a small church and going to college. We went from our honeymoon to serve Cherry Street Baptist Church in Attalla.
We served that sweet fellowship for six years. Much of that time I was still trying to complete my education. I was stretched about as thin as a young, inexperienced, newlywed pastor could be. One Sunday, following the evening worship service, one of the dear ladies of the church approached me and said one sentence that is as clear in my memory today as it was when she spoke it 33 or 34 years ago. She said, “Brother Roger, I can hear the dipper banging against the bottom of the bucket.”
I knew exactly what she meant. There was an emptiness and weariness in my life. I was tired. I had become a victim of the barrenness of busyness. I wasn’t doing bad things. In fact, I was doing good things. But I was not doing the necessary things. I was running on empty. I had become disconnected from the Power Source. But I determined that night that I would always strive to never run empty like that again.
My friends you can fake a lot things, but you cannot fake the power of God. It doesn’t take bad things to drain you of that power. Many are barren of power out of the sheer busyness of ministry and neglect of a personal walk with God.
Eric Alexander, of Glasgow, Scotland, said, “Service to God never takes the place of knowing God.”
• Yield to Him. One of the most dramatic and meaningful illustrations of the person and work of the Holy Spirit is found in 2 Kings 4:1–6. Elisha instructed the woman to borrow empty vessels, go into her house and close the door and pour the oil from the only thing she had left to her name, the little jar of oil. The picture is dramatic. As long as she yielded an empty vessel to the flow of oil, the oil continued to flow.
Are you a yielded Christian? Is your life an empty vessel before the Lord, waiting for Him to pour the oil of His Spirit into your life?
• Obey Him. In Acts 5:29, Peter and the other apostles answered and said, “We ought to obey God rather than men.” Verse 32 adds, “so also is the Holy Spirit who God has given to those who obey Him.”
We will know the power of God in our lives in direct proportion to our obedience to His Word.
• Desire Him.
• Be clean.
Do you have an insatiable desire to be endued with the power of the Holy Spirit?
We live in such a narcissistic society. We think everything revolves around us and is about us and is for us. This mind-set permeates our contemporary Western culture. Unfortunately this attitude now exists in our churches.
How many people would be in church next Sunday if God was the only attraction and His glory the only objective?
We need to be reminded that the ultimate goal of our existence is for the glory of God and His purposes in time and in eternity. We are here for His Kingdom and His glory. The ultimate reason for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit is the Glory of God and the advancement of His Kingdom.
Acts 1:8 says, “You shall receive power and you shall be witnesses to Me.”
The word witness comes from the word martus, or martyr. Someone said that “death does not make martyrs, it only discovers them.” Isn’t this the teaching of the apostle Paul in Romans 5 when he says in verse 6, “Knowing this, that our old man was crucified with Him”?
You and I must be able to speak from our personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Secondhand information does not make a credible witness. Do you know Jesus personally?
We are His witnesses for the advancement of His Kingdom. God promised the power of His Holy Spirit to the church, to the denomination, to the person who is involved in advancing the kingdom of God on earth.
I have been asked many times what I consider to be the strength of the Alabama Baptist State Convention. I believe God has honored Alabama Baptists in a unique way because you are — we are — a missional people.
We have taken seriously God’s mandate to go to our Jerusalem, to Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.
We are a people who have joined our hearts and our hands and our resources to advance one kingdom, His Kingdom. I believe God has smiled upon Alabama Baptists for this reason. And it is my prayer that we will stay the course.
On his first visit to Britain, D.L. Moody heard words from Evangelist Henry Varley that set him to hungering for a deeper Christian experience. Varley said, “The world has yet to see what God will do with … the man who is fully consecrated to Him.” Moody vowed to be that man.
It was about this time that the Great Chicago Fire destroyed Moody’s church and he went to New York City to collect funds to help those who had lost everything in the fire. Moody said, “My heart was not in the work of begging.
I could not appeal. I was crying all the time that God would fill me with His Spirit. … One day … 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 had to ask Him to hold back His hand.”
Can you imagine having to ask God to hold back because you cannot take the blessing He is pouring out on you?
Moody’s ministry was never the same again.
Would you pray with me that God would pour out His Spirit upon us in such a way that we might be compelled to ask Him to hold back His hand because we can take no more?
It is my prayer that every Alabama Baptist would know this power. Imagine the difference it would make in our churches, our entities, our schools, our homes and in our very lives if the Holy Spirit had a monopoly on us.
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