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Fall Asleep to The Holy Spirit EXPLAINED _ The Person You Believe In But Have Never Really Met · truthunedited

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Something has been moving through your day, not a thought
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: you chose, not a mood you made, something quieter than
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: both of those. It was there in the moment the
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: music stopped and the silence felt fuller than the music had.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: It was there in the second you looked at someone
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: you love and felt something that words arrived too late
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: to catch. It was there in the morning you woke
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: with a desire to be different, and no one had
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: said anything, and nothing had happened, and the desire was
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: simply there, like light under a door you did not
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: know was in the room. You may not have noticed
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: it at the time. Scripture gives us a name for
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: the one who meets us there tonight. We are going
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: to find that name together, not through argument, not through
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: a list of doctrines to memorize before sleep, but through
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: the the oldest kind of knowing, the kind that happens
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: when you sit quietly with something true long enough that
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: it stops being information and starts being recognition. He is
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: more than a rumor. He is more than a symbol
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: on a ceiling. He is more than a feeling that
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: comes and goes depending on the quality of your attention.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: He is a person, and he has been closer to
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: you than you have thought, for longer than you have known.
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: Breathe in slowly, Let the day release its hold. Tonight
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: belongs to something different. Tonight we meet the Holy Spirit.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: Chapter one, The Problem of the Missing Person. There is
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: something strange that has happened in Christian life across almost
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: every century and almost every tradition since the first one.
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: People learn to speak about God the Father with a
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: kind of natural fluency. They have images for him, King, Judge, Father, Creator.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: The language comes without too much reaching, The songs come easily,
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: the prayers address him in ways that feel familiar, almost
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: like a long established habit of the heart. And people
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: learn to speak about Jesus with even more ease. There
• 2:26
  Speaker 1: is a story. There is a face, or at least
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: the sense of a face. There is a hillside in Galilee,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: and a table in an upper room, and a cross
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: outside a city wall, and a garden at dawn with
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: an empty tomb in it. The story has wait, because
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: stories always carry weight. You can follow it, you can
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: return to it, you can find yourself inside it. And
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: then there is the third person. The Holy Spirit ask
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: some one sitting in a pew on a Sunday morning,
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: some one who has believed for years and reads the
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: Bible and means what they pray, what they actually understand
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: about the Holy Spirit. Something interesting happens. They pause. The
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: confidence that was present when they talked about the Father
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: or the Son becomes something less certain. They reach for
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: language and find it thinner than they expected. They say
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: things like a presence, a wind, a warmth, a fire,
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: something you sense in the good moments, something that moves
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: when things feel spiritual enough. And none of those descriptions
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: are wrong. Every one of them comes directly from scripture.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: The spirit moved like wind over the waters. He descended
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: as a dove at the baptism of Jesus. He came
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: as fire at Pentecost. These are not inventions, They are
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: recorded real. But an image is not the same as
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: a person. A photograph of someone you love is not
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: the same as knowing them. You can carry the photograph
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: for years, you can look at it in difficult moments.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: It can comfort you. But the photograph does not speak.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: It does not know your name, It does not stay
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: when things get hard. What has happened, slowly and without
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: anyone deciding it is that the third person of the
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: Trinity has drifted to the edges of everyday faith, not
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: because anyone intended to push him there, but gradually, the
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: way a chair gets moved to the corner of a room,
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: across many small rearrangements, until no one can quite remember
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: when it stopped being part of the main space. The
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: Father is God above us. The Son is God who
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: came among us in history on the pape of the Gospels,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: in a story with a beginning and a middle and
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: an end that changed everything. And the Spirit becomes something
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: like God nearby, presents somewhere in the background, available somehow,
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: filling the category of things we believe but cannot quite describe.
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: And yet the New Testament tells a different story. Across
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: the twenty seven books of the New Testament, the Holy
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: Spirit is mentioned more than ninety times, not as background,
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: not as a supporting character with a few quiet lines
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: at the edges of more important scenes, as an active, specific,
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: present reality woven through the life of every person who
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: belongs to Christ. Paul writes to the church in Rome
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: that the Spirit of God dwells in you. The Greek
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: word is oike from oikos, meaning home, visits, not passes
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: through when the conditions are favorable, Dwells has made a
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: home is living there now in the same way that
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: a person lives in a house present, not just in
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: the ceremonial rooms, but in the ordinary ones, in the
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: unremarkable hours of a Tuesday afternoon, when nothing feels spiritual
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: at all. And Jesus, on the night before he died,
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: chose to spend the longest uninterrupted teaching he gives anywhere
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: in the four Gospels talking about the Spirit. He did
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: this on the worst night of his disciples lives, when
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: fear was in the room and betrayal was minutes away,
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: and everything was about to come apart. He chose that
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: night to talk about the Spirit. This tells us how
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: deeply Jesus wanted them to understand the spirit. What you
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: give the precious and numbered hours to when you know
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: the hours are running out, reveals what you believe cannot
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: be left. One said, what the people you love will
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: need most after you are gone. He gave those hours
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: to the spirit. And yet most people who have followed
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: him for years, who have read carefully, who have sat
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: through hundreds of hours of teaching, carry only a blurred
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: impression of the person who lives inside them, not because
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  Speaker 1: they have been careless, because the blurring has happened so
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: gradually that no single moment marked the change. Tonight that
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: begins to change not through a lecture, not through a
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: theological examination you must pass before you are allowed to rest,
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: through the oldest method available for turning a blurred impression
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: into a clear one. We are going to look closely,
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: We are going to look slowly, and we are going
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: to be willing to be surprised by what we find. Because, yes,
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: the person we have been drifting away from in our
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: attention is not a minor figure in the story of God.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: He is the one who brings every other part of
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: that story home. He is the one who takes truth
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: from the page and presses it into a life until
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: the person holding the page is changed by what they read.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: He is the one who turns words you have read
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: before into something you can feel the weight of at midnight.
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  Speaker 1: He is the one who is praying for you right
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: now from inside you, in a language that goes deeper
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  Speaker 1: than any language you have ever learned. And he has
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: been doing all of this whether or not you are
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: paying attention, which means tonight is not an introduction to
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: someone new. It is the beginning of recognizing someone who
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: was already there. To understand who the Spirit is, we
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: have to go back to where he first appeared. Not
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: to the Upper Room on the Last night, not to
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: the River Jr. Not even to Pentecost, which we will
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: come to in time. We have to go back further
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: than all of those. We have to go back to
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: the very first page of everything that exists, Chapter two.
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: Before the world the Spirit in Genesis, before there was light,
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: there was darkness. Before there was land, there was water
• 9:26
  Speaker 1: without a shore. Before there was a name for anything,
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: there was silence. And before any of what we call
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: the world had taken shape, there was God, and the
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: Spirit of God was already moving. The second verse of
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: the First book of the Bible says this the earth
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: was without form and void, and darkness was over the
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: face of the deep, and the Spirit of God was
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: hovering over the face of the waters. That is the
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: first appearance. No announcement, no oh introduction of who the
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: Spirit is or where he came from, just this quiet, certain,
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: almost understated observation. The world is unformed, Darkness is everywhere,
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: and the Spirit of God is already present. Most people
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: read past this verse quickly. They are moving toward the light,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: toward the land, toward the animals and the humans and
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  Speaker 1: the story they came to read. The second verse can
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: feel like stage setting, background detail before the main event begins.
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: But the word the original Hebrew uses for hovering is
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: mera chaffete, and mereschaffete is a word with a very
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: specific weight. The same word appears one other time in
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: the entire Hebrew Bible, in the Book of Deuteronomy, describing
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: an eagle over its nest, hovering over its young, not drifting,
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: not circling with casual interest, holding itself above them, with
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  Speaker 1: the deliberate attention of something that is there on purpose, tending, watching, present,
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  Speaker 1: with a specific care of something that knows what it
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: is protecting and why. The Spirit of God over the
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: formless waters is not a passive presence drifting across a
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  Speaker 1: dark surface. This is the posture of something that is preparing,
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: something that is caring for an unfinished thing, with the
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  Speaker 1: attention of someone who knows what the unfinished thing is
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: meant to become. And then God speaks and light appears.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: The Hebrew word for the spirit is ruach breath, Wind, Spirit,
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  Speaker 1: all three at once, without the need to choose between them.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: In Hebrew understanding, these were not three separate categories requiring
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  Speaker 1: careful distinction. They were three ways of describing the same invisible, living,
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: moving reality. The ruoc of God is the breath of God.
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: The breath of God is the life of God. And
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: the life of God was moving over the unfinished world
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: before the first morning had a name. This is not
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: a minor theological detail. This is a foundation because when
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: we speak of the Holy Spirit as a gift given
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: at Pentecost or as a promise made in the Upper Room,
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: it is possible to accidentally suggest that the Spirit is
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  Speaker 1: a relatively recent arrival, something added to the story after
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  Speaker 1: the main chapters were already written. But the Spirit was
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  Speaker 1: there before the story had a first chapter, before God
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  Speaker 1: said let there be light, a person was already present, hovering, tending,
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  Speaker 1: holding himself over the darkness with the patient attention of
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  Speaker 1: someone who knows what is coming and is committed to
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: being there when it arrives. The early theologians of the
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  Speaker 1: Christian Church thought carefully about this. Irenaeus, writing in the
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: second century, described the Sun and the Spirit as the
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  Speaker 1: two hands of God in the work of creation, not
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  Speaker 1: tools held at a distance, hands engaged, personal doing the
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  Speaker 1: work from the inside. And Basil of Caesarea, writing in
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  Speaker 1: the fourth century, said that the spirit perfects the work
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: of creation on the way a craftsman finishes what the
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  Speaker 1: initial sketch has begun. The hovering over the waters was
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  Speaker 1: not waiting, It was the beginning of the making. The
• 13:47
  Speaker 1: Spirit was not sent to Earth from somewhere else when
• 13:50
  Speaker 1: Pentecost arrived. He was here before the earth had a
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: shape to be sent to Now there is something else
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: in that first appearance that deserves more than a passing moment.
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: The earth in Genesis chapter one, verse two is tohu wabohu.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: That is the Hebrew phrase formless and empty, chaotic, without
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: shape or purpose or the capacity to sustain anything, the
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: raw material of a world that has not yet become
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  Speaker 1: what it is meant to be, and into that condition,
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  Speaker 1: before any correction, before any word of creation has been spoken,
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  Speaker 1: before any light exists to make the darkness less, the
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: Spirit comes. He does not arrive after the world is beautiful.
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  Speaker 1: He arrives when it is not. He does not wait
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  Speaker 1: for the light to exist before he shows up. He
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  Speaker 1: shows up in the darkness, and this pattern runs through
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  Speaker 1: the entire Bible, from that second verse to the last page.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: The Spirit present in the unformed places, present in the
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: dark places, present in the places that have not yet
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: become what they are meant to become. There is a
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: reason this matters on a night like to night, because
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: most people arrive at the end of a day carrying
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: some version of Tohuwabo who inside them some formlessness they
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: cannot name, some emptiness they have been living around, rather
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: than through some darkness that has been present long enough
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: that they have almost stopped noticing it is there. And
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: the Spirit's first instinct, established before history began, is to
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: go precisely there, not to wait until you are ordered
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: and full and bright before he shows up, to hover
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: over exactly the condition you are in, with a specific,
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: intentional presence of something that has not come by accident
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: and is not passing through. There is one more moment
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: in the early pages of Genesis that changes how we
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: see everything that follows. When God creates the first human being.
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: The text says he formed the man from the dust
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: of the ground, and then he breathed into his nostrils
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: the breath of life, and the man became a living soul.
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: The breath of life in Hebrew is nishmatchayim, but the
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: animating force behind that breath, the living quality that transforms
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: dust arranged in the shape of a person into an actual,
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: living soul, is consistently associated in Hebrew thought with the ruach,
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: with the spirit. You are alive because God breathed into you,
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: and what he breathed was himself. This is where the
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: intimacy begins, not at the cross, though the cross is
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: where it is secured forever. Not at Pentecost, though Pentecost
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: is where it becomes fully available to all. Here in
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: a garden on the first morning, before any distance had
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: entered the story, when God leaned close to something made
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: of dust and breathed his own life into it. You
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: have always been at the deepest level of what you are,
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: a creature whose life comes from the breath of God.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: The Spirit is not a stranger visiting a human life
• 17:28
  Speaker 1: from the outside. He is the oldest presence the human
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: soul has ever known, long before you had language for God,
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: long before you had a theology or a tradition or
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: a name for the thing that made you feel. Sometimes
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: that the world was threaded through with something invisible and
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: real and more than you could account for on your own.
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: The Spirit was already there, not as a distant influence
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: as the breath that made you alive in the first place.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: He is hovering still over you, over whatever is formless
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: and empty in you to night, over the questions that
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: have not yet found their shape, over the grief that
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: has not yet found its name, Over the hope that
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: is still too fragile to say out loud. He is
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: not waiting for you to become finished before he arrives.
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: He was there before the beginning. He is here now.
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: Let your breathing slow. The spirit's story is not over,
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: but this much is settled for to night. You are
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: not alone in the dark. You have never been alone
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: in the dark. Before the first word of creation was spoken,
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: some one was already hovering, and that some one has
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: not moved. Chapter three, The Farewell Room. What Jesus said
• 19:04
  Speaker 1: the night before he died. There is a room in
• 19:08
  Speaker 1: Jerusalem that most people have never thought carefully about. Not
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: the court room where Jesus stood before Pilot, not the
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: hill outside the city wall where the soldiers drove nails,
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: not the garden where the arrest happened, or the tomb
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: where he was laid before the stone was rolled. The
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: room I am thinking of is quieter than all of
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: those smaller borrowed, probably lit by oil lamps that threw
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: warm light on the faces of thirteen men eating a
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: meal together. The smell of bread and wine in the air,
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: the particular closeness of people who have traveled far together
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: and do not yet know they are about to be scattered.
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: Thirteen people sat down together that night. One would be
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: dead before the next sunset. One would betray the man
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: at the head the table within the hour, one would
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: deny knowing him three times before the rooster announced the morning,
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: and all of them, before this night was over, would
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: scatter into the dark like birds startled from a branch.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: Jesus knew all of this before the first cup was poured.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: He knew who would betray him, and who would deny him,
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: and who would run. He knew the next twelve hours
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: would be the most violent and the most important hours
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: in the history of the world. He knew that by
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: morning the disciples would be in hiding, that the movement
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: they had given everything to follow would appear to everyone
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: watching from the outside to be finished, and knowing all
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: of that, he chose to spend the long middle section
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: of that final evening talking about the Holy Spirit. Not
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: about courage, though they would need it desperately, not about
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: serve though that too, Not about what to do when
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: the soldiers came with torches in the dark. He talked
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: about the Spirit. This choice deserves more than a passing moment.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: When you have only one evening left with the people
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: you love most, you choose carefully what you say. You
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: do not fill the hours with things that can wait.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: You reach for the things they will most need after
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: you are gone, the things that will carry them through
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: what is coming, the things that cannot be left unsaid.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: He reached for the Spirit. The Gospel of John records
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: what he said across four chapters, chapters fourteen through seventeen.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: It is the longest uninterrupted teaching Jesus gives anywhere in
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: the four Gospels, and woven through it, returning again and
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: again like a thread the speaker cannot set down. Is
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: the promise of the one who is coming. He calls
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: this one by a name that has no single English equivalent.
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: The Greek word is Paracletos, translators have tried for centuries,
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: and none have fully succeeded. Comforter, counselor helper, advocate. Each
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: word captures something real, none captures everything. The reason no
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: single word works is that peracletos is not a job title.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: It is a description of a relationship. Para means beside,
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: Calio means to call one who is called to come alongside.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: In the courts of the Roman world, a paracletos was
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: the person who stood next to the one being accused,
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: not across the room, not at a professional distance where
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: the help could be offered without the helper being fully present,
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: next to close enough that the accused could feel the presence,
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: close enough that the presence itself changed what it felt
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: like to stand in that room and face what they
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: were facing. The paracletos did not argue instead of the accused.
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: The paracletos stood with them in the room where the
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: stakes were highest, beside them, in the specific place where
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: beside mattered most. That is what is coming, Jesus says,
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: someone to stand beside you in the rooms were standing
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: is hardest. He says, I will ask the Father and
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: he will give you another paracletos to be with you forever.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: The word another is important here. The Greek word is allan,
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: meaning another of the same kind, not a different category
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: of presents, not a lesser's substitute offered to consul people
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: who came too late to meet the real thing. Another
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: of the same kind as Jesus himself, the same quality
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: of presence, the same depth of knowing, the same care
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: that does not run out, which means the Spirit is
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: not a downgrade from the physical presence of Jesus. He
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: is the same quality of presence, delivered in a form
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: that has no geographic limitation. Jesus in a body could
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: be fully present in one place at one time. He
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: could walk with twelve people in one small country during
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: one specific generation of human history. The Spirit can be
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: fully present with every person in every place at every moment, simultaneously,
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: not divided between them, fully present with each. The way
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: of fire is fully present in every part of a room.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: It warms without any corner receiving less warmth because other
• 25:02
  Speaker 1: corners are also receiving it. Jesus then says something his
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: disciples could not yet understand from inside the moment. He says,
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: it is to your advantage that I go away, for
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: if I do not go away, the Paracletos will not
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: come to you. But if I go, I will send
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: him to you. It is to your advantage. Imagine sitting
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: in that room and hearing those words. The person who
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: had reorganized the entire geography of your life, whose presence
• 25:37
  Speaker 1: had been the most real thing in your world for
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: three years, looks at you and says, it is better
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: for you if I leave. They did not understand it yet.
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: They were still inside the story, experiencing the physical presence
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: of Jesus as the most irreplaceable thing they had ever known,
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: unable to imagine what kind of press presence could be
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: more valuable than the one sitting across the table from
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: them at that moment. But Jesus could see what they
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: could not yet see. Through the Cross and Resurrection, the
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: promise of the Spirit would be opened to his people,
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: not a replacement for what he had been to them,
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: a fulfillment of it. The same love, the same knowledge
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: of each person by name, but now available to everyone
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: who would ever believe, in every century, in every corner
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: of the world, without the limitations of a body moving
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: through physical space. He continues, the Spirit will teach you
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: all things. He will bring to your remembrance all that
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: I have said to you. He will guide you into
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: all truth. He will not speak on his own authority,
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: but whatever he hears, he will speak. Listen carefully to
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: what is being described. The spirit is not a filing
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: system for theological information. He is not a recording that
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: plays back the sermons of Jesus when some one presses
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: the right sequence of buttons. He is a living person
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: who actively teaches, who actively reminds, who reaches into the
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: library of what you have read and heard and places
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: exactly the right word in exactly the right moment. When
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: a verse you have read many times before suddenly opens,
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: when a sentence lands differently to night than it ever has,
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: when you find yourself understanding something about your own life
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: that you did not understand yesterday, and you cannot fully
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: explain why the understanding came. That is the paraclitos doing
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: precisely what Jesus said he would do in the upper
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: room on the last night, when he chose to spend
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: the precious and numbered hours on this rather than anything else.
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: And then Jesus says the sentence that should reach every
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: person who has ever lain awake in the dark, feeling
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: utterly and completely alone. He says, I will not leave
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: you as orphans. I will come to you. Orphanis children
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: without the presence that was their primary source of safety
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: in the world, children who have lost the one who
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: knew them most and loved them best. He looks at
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: the people around that table, and he sees them as
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: they are about to become scattered, frightened, hiding. The center
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: of everything they had built their lives around is about
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: to be taken away in the most violent and public
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: way imaginable. And he says, I will not leave you
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: like that. The spirit is how Jesus keeps this promise
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: to people who were not in that room, to people
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: who came centuries later, to people lying in the dark
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: in any century, in any country, carrying the particular quiet
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: grief of feeling unseen and unknown and further from God
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: than they can account for. He will not leave you
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: as orphans. He has not. The Paracletos is here not
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: as a memory of what Jesus once said, not as
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: a historical record of a promise made a long time
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: ago in a borrowed room, as a living person present
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: beside you. In the specific place where beside matters most
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: to you. Tonight, the oil lamps burned through the long
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: hours of that evening. The bread was eaten, the wine
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: was poured. Judas left early, and the night air came
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: briefly through the door behind him, and the remaining eleven
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: felt the change in the room without fully understanding it.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: Outside the city, in the valley below Jerusalem, passover fires
• 30:03
  Speaker 1: were burning in the darkness. The smell of wood smoke
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: drifted through the windows. Somewhere below the city, lambs had
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: been slaughtered, as they had been slaughtered on this night
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: for fifteen hundred years, and the old story of rescue
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: was being told again around fires and courtyards across the city.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: And in the upper room, the lamb of God was
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: telling eleven frightened men about the one who was coming
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: to stay with them forever. Tomorrow everything would break, and
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: the breaking was exactly what had to happen, so that
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: the promise made in this room could be kept through
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: the Cross and resurrection. The door to the Spirit was opened,
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: not just to twelve people in one room in one city,
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: to every person who had ever turned toward God, in
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: any room, in any city, in any century. From that
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: morning forward, every word he spoke that night was a
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: word he was prepared to die to keep. The lamps
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: burned on the night moved toward the garden and what
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: was waiting there. But the promise had been spoken, And
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: a promise spoken by Jesus on the night he knew
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: he was going to die is not a wish, It
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: is a guarantee. Rest in that, for a moment, the
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: most important night in human history included a long and
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: careful conversation about someone who would come and stand beside you,
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: someone who would not leave, someone who would teach and
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: remind and guide, someone who would be with you forever
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: in the rooms wherefoever matters most. He promised, and he
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: has kept it. Chapter four, Pentecost, The Day Everything changed.
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: There is a morning in history that most people have
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: heard mentioned, but very few have actually stood inside long
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: enough to feel the full weight of what happened there.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: To stand inside it, you first have to feel The
• 32:19
  Speaker 1: city Jerusalem during the Festival of Pentecost was not a
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: quiet place. Pentecost was one of the three great pilgrimage
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: festivals of the Jewish calendar. Every Jewish man within a
• 32:34
  Speaker 1: reasonable distance was expected to come to Jerusalem and appear
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: before God in the Temple. And the crowds came not
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: just from Judea and Galilee. They came from everywhere. The
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: Jewish people had been scattered across centuries of history, from
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: Parthia in the east, from Media and Cappadocia, from the
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: regions around the Black Sea, from Egypt and Libya in
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: the south, from Rome in the west, from the island
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: of Crete, from Arabia. The historian Luke names fifteen regions
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: by name in the Book of Acts. Jerusalem at Pentecost
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: could hold, by some historians estimates somewhere between one hundred
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: thousand and two hundred thousand people beyond its normal population.
• 33:23
  Speaker 1: Every road into the city was crowded, Every courtyard was full.
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: The sound of the city was the layered, overlapping sound
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: of many languages being spoken at once, the particular music
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: of a world gathered into one place, into this city.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: On one particular morning, the Spirit came. But before he
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: came to the city, he came to a room. One
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: hundred and twenty people had been gathered continuously in an
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: upper room in Jerusalem since the ascension of Jesus forty
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: days after the resurrection. Luke tells us they were not hiding.
• 34:03
  Speaker 1: They were praying together, persistently, waiting for what Jesus had
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: promised before he left. He had said, wait in Jerusalem
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: for the gift the Father has promised. You will receive
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. So
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: they waited. Breathe here for a moment. Think about what
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: it means to wait for a promise you cannot yet
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: see the shape of You know it is coming, you
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: do not know what it will look like when it arrives.
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: You do not know what it will feel like, or
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: whether you will recognize it when it does. You wait anyway,
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: day after day, praying the same prayers in the same room,
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: trusting the same words that were spoken by the same
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: voice that has never yet said something it did not mean.
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: And then the morning comes. Luke records what happened with
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: the precision of someone reporting something that actually occurred. Suddenly
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind.
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: It did not come from inside the room. It descended,
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: and it filled the entire house where they were sitting,
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: the way a storm fills a valley completely without leaving
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: any corner untouched. And then divided tongues as of fire
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: appeared to them, and one rested on each of them.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: Not one tongue of fire for the group collectively, one
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: for each person individually, one hundred and twenty individual flames,
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: each one resting on one specific person. The Spirit did
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: not come to the room as a shared atmosphere distributed
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: equally across everyone in it. He came to each person personally, specifically,
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: with the same attention he had been bringing to each
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: face across all those days of waiting. And they were
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: in other languages as the Spirit gave them utterance. The
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: sound brought the crowds in from the street, and what
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: followed was one of the most remarkable moments in the
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: recorded history of human language. People from fifteen regions, each
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: carrying a different mother tongue, heard these Galileean men and
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: women speaking in the specific language of the place they
• 36:34
  Speaker 1: had come from, not a common trade language that educated
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: travelers would recognize, the particular dialect of home. The sounds
• 36:46
  Speaker 1: a person learns before they learn anything else, the words
• 36:51
  Speaker 1: their mothers used to pray before they were old enough
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: to understand what prayer was. The crowd was bewildered. They
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: asked one another, are not all these who are speaking Galileans?
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: And how is it that we each hear them in
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: our own native language. Stay with that question for a moment,
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: because behind it is something that reaches back to one
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: of the earliest stories in the Bible, in the eleventh
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: chapter of Genesis. The tower of bable humanity gathered in
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: one place, speaking one language, building a monument to their
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: own sufficiency, and God confused the languages and scattered the
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: people across the face of the earth. The confusion of
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: languages at Babel was the outward sign of something that
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: had already happened inside the human heart, the fracture between
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: creature and creator, the scattering that begins whenever a person
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: chooses to be the center of their own world rather
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: than to know the one who made it. And on
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: the morning of Pentecost, in a city filled with people
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: from every nation under head heaven, the reversal began, not completed, begun.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: The fracture was not instantly healed, the languages were not
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: merged back into one, but for one morning, across one crowd,
• 38:16
  Speaker 1: the spirit moved through human voices in such a way
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: that every person heard the same truth in the language
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: of their earliest memory, Parthian and Egyptian, and Roman and Arab,
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: all hearing the same word in the tongue their fathers
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: had used to read the Psalms. The long scattering was
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: beginning to be undone. And then Peter stood up to
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: understand what this means. You have to hold in your
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: mind who Peter was the last time he stood near
• 38:46
  Speaker 1: a fire in Jerusalem. He was the man who had
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: walked on water and then sunk when he looked at
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: the wind instead of the face, who had declared Jesus
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: the Messiah and been called Satan in the same conversation,
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: who had promised he would never deny Jesus and then
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: denied him three times beside a charcoal fire in a
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: cold courtyard, while Jesus was inside being questioned by the
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: people who wanted him dead. This is the man who
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: stood up in front of thousands of people on the
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: morning of Pentecost, and he preached not with hesitation, not
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: with the careful qualifications of someone unsure of what he believes.
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: He preached from the prophet Joel. He preached from the Psalms.
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: He anchored every claim in the scripture. His audience had
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: grown up hearing the texts. They trusted the words they knew,
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: and he said, God has made him both Lord and Christ.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: This Jesus whom you crucified. Luke records that the crowd
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: was cut to the heart. Something went through the outer
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: layers and reached the part of a person that is
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: usually protected from direct content with truth. They asked Peter, brothers,
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: what shall we do. Peter said, repent and be baptized,
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ,
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: the gift of the Holy Spirit. That day, three thousand
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: people were added to the community of believers. Now Here
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: is the question that matters most for to night. What changed?
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: The disciples had been with Jesus for three years. They
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: had watched him heal the sick, and raise the dead,
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: and feed thousands with almost nothing. They had heard every sermon,
• 40:42
  Speaker 1: They had seen the risen Jesus multiple times over forty days.
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: They had been in the upper room on the last
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: night and received the promise. And yet before the morning
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: of Pentecost they were in a room waiting yet ready.
• 41:02
  Speaker 1: What the Spirit gave them that morning was not new information.
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: They already knew the resurrection had happened. They already knew
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: Jesus was Lord. They already had the words. What changed
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: was the power to live inside the truth they already held,
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: the difference between knowing something and being carried by it,
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: between understanding a truth and being transformed by it at
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: the level where transformation actually happens, in the choices made
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: without thinking, in the courage that appears when there is
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: no time to prepare for it. Peter knew Jesus was
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: Lord before Pentecost. After Pentecost, he could not stop saying
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: so in front of people who had the power to
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: kill him for it. That is what the Spirit does.
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: He does not come to give you better theology. He
• 41:58
  Speaker 1: comes to make the theology you already have become real
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: in the parts of you that actually make decisions, in
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: the part that chooses what to say when the pressure
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: is on, in the part that decides what kind of
• 42:13
  Speaker 1: person to be to day, in the ordinary hours of
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: an ordinary day. Pentecost was not the beginning of the
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: Spirit's presence in the world. We have already watched him
• 42:25
  Speaker 1: hover over the waters in Genesis. We have already heard
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: him promised in the upper room. But Pentecost was the
• 42:33
  Speaker 1: moment the door opened fully to every one who turns
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: and believes, to the fisherman and the widow, and the
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: person in the first century, and the person in the
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: twenty first, to you. The gift is not reserved for
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: people who have earned the right to receive it. Peter
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: had not earned it. He had failed publicly and recently
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: and spectacularly, and the Spirit came to him and threw
• 43:03
  Speaker 1: him to thousands, which means there is no condition of
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: failure or confusion or distance that puts you outside the
• 43:13
  Speaker 1: reach of what happened on that morning. Pentecost is not
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: a historical event sealed in the past. It is an
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: open door. It has been opened since that morning. The
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: same spirit who descended like wind and rested like fire
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: on one hundred twenty people in a borrowed room is
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: the spirit who is present in this room to night.
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: Not a lesser version, not an echo of something that
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: was once real and has since faded, the same person,
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: still moving, still filling, still giving utterance to things that
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: words alone cannot carry. The city quieted again as the
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: day went on, the pilgrims returned of eventually to their
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: homes in fifteen regions, carrying something with them that they
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: had not arrived with. Three thousand new believers scattered back
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: into the world like seeds carried by a wind that
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: had not yet stopped blowing. The fire has not gone out.
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: And the same spirit who gave Peter words on the
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: morning he needed them most is the same spirit who
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: is present in this quiet room. He has not run
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: out of what he gave that morning. He never runs
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: out Chapter five. He is a person, not a power.
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: There is a question worth sitting with before we go
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: any further. When the name Holy Spirit is spoken, what
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: forms in your mind? Not the theologically correct answer, the
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: actual image, the one that arrives before you have time
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: to choose it. For mo most people, it is not
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: a face. It is not the sense of someone turning
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: towards you with recognition and warmth, the way you feel
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: when a person who knows you well walks into a
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: room where you have been alone. It is something more
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: like atmosphere, something more like the quality of air on
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: a particular morning, a warmth that arrives without a source,
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: a wind you can feel but cannot locate a movement
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: in the room when everything else is still, and none
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: of that is entirely wrong. The Spirit did move like
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: wind over the waters. He did appear as a dove
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: at the river Jordan. He did come as fire at Pentecost.
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: These images come from the text itself and carry real
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: and permanent meaning. But when images become the whole of
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: our understanding, something quietly goes wrong in the relationship. We
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: begin to relate to the Spirit the way we relate
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: to weather. We notice him when he is strong, We
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: appreciate him when he is warm. We wait for him
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: when he seems absent, and we do not in the
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: unremarkable hours of an unremarkable Tuesday, think of him as
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: someone we might affect, someone who might grieve, someone who
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: has a will and a voice and a particular attention
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: fixed on us that does not waver when the moment
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: stops feeling spiritual. He is more than an atmosphere. He
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: is a person who is already here, and the difference
• 46:38
  Speaker 1: between those two understandings changes everything about how you live
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: inside the relationship. Listen to what Paul writes to the
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: church in Ephesus. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: God by whom you are sealed for the day of redemption. Grieve.
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: The Greek word is lupeo, the same word used elsewhere
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: for the deep sorrow of a father watching his son
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: walk away from everything good. For the grief of disciples
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: learning that the person they love most is going to
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: be taken from them. Not irritation, not mild disappointment, the
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: kind of sorrow that has real weight, the kind that
• 47:20
  Speaker 1: changes the quality of a room when it enters. You
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: cannot grieve. Whether you cannot grieve a force or an
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: atmosphere or an energy field, You can only grieve a person,
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: and a person can only be grieved by someone they love,
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: Which means the very fact that Paul tells believers not
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: to grieve the Spirit is itself a declaration about how
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: much the Spirit loves you. He is close enough to
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: be affected by what you do, near enough that your
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: choices reach him in a real way, present with enough
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: attention and enough in essment that what happens in the
• 48:02
  Speaker 1: ordinary details of your ordinary days actually matters to him.
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: His commitment does not waver. He promised to stay forever,
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: and he is the kind of person who keeps his promises.
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: But the quality of what is experience in the relationship
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: can be shaped by what you bring to it. He
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: has a mind. Paul writes in Romans that the one
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit,
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: not the spirit's general inclination or theological orientation. His mind
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: specific active in communication with the Father in a way
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: that goes deeper than any communication available to us. He
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: has a will. When Paul writes to the Church in
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: Corinth about the gifts the Spirit gives to believers, he says,
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: the Spirit apportions to each one individually as he wills,
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: not as you request, not according to your assessment of
• 49:04
  Speaker 1: what you need or deserve. As he wills. The Spirit
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: makes real choices based on his own understanding and his
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: own purposes for each person he is working in. He
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: speaks in the Book of Acts, the Spirit addresses the
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: leaders of the Church in Antioch directly set apart for me,
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: Barnabas and Saul, for the work to which I have
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: called them present tense first person. I have called them
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: not that God somewhere has a plan for these two men,
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: and the Spirit is relaying the information. The Spirit speaks
• 49:44
  Speaker 1: of his own intentions in his own voice, and he
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: can be lied to. There is a moment in the
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: fifth chapter of Acts that carries the full weight of this.
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: A man named Anonius sells a piece of land and
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: brings part of the proceed to the Apostles, while claiming
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: to bring all of it. Peter says to him, why
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: has Satan filled your heart? To lie to the Holy Spirit?
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: You can only lie to a person. Deception requires an
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: audience with understanding, someone who has expectations of truth, someone
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: whose trust can be deliberately violated. You cannot deceive a force.
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: An atmosphere has no expectations and cannot be betrayed. But
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: the Holy Spirit can be lied to, which tells you
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: precisely what kind of being he is not, whether not energy,
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: a person present, attentive, aware of what is true and
• 50:46
  Speaker 1: what is not. And then there is the work that
• 50:49
  Speaker 1: is most intimate of all. Paul writes in Romans, the
• 50:55
  Speaker 1: Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: chillchildren of God. Think about what is actually being described here.
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: There are moments in the life of a person who
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: belongs to God that do not always arrive at the
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: expected times. They do not always accompany the high experiences
• 51:16
  Speaker 1: of faith, or come on the days when you feel
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: most spiritually adequate. They come quietly, sometimes in the most
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: unremarkable moments of an unremarkable day, a moment when something
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: inside you simply knows, not as the conclusion of an
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: argument carefully built from evidence, not as the result of
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: talking yourself into a more confident position. Something speaks at
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: a level below where arguments happen. And what it says,
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: in a language that does not use words, is this.
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: You belong to God. You are loved. You are not
• 51:56
  Speaker 1: an orphan in this universe. And the quality of that
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: knowing is different from anything you can produce by thinking
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: more carefully or trying harder to believe. That is the
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: Spirit bearing witness with your spirit, a person speaking into
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: the interior of your life in a language that reaches
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: below words, confirming something the Father has already declared to
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: be permanently and unalterably true. You are His. The Spirit
• 52:28
  Speaker 1: says this not once, and not only in the dramatic moments.
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: He says it in the quiet ones, in the stillness
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: underneath the noise of an ordinary day, in the moment
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: just before sleep, when the performance of the day has
• 52:43
  Speaker 1: finally fallen away, and what remains is what is actually
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: true about you. Now, all of this moves toward one thing.
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: The way you understand what someone is determines how you
• 52:57
  Speaker 1: relate to them. If you under stand the Spirit as
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: a force, you will try to access him. You will
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: look for the right conditions, the right words, the right
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: posture that opens the channel. You will think of your
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: relationship with the spirit in terms of technique, in terms
• 53:16
  Speaker 1: of levels of spiritual attainment, in terms of whether you
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: have done what is required to earn the flow. But
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: if you understand the Spirit as a person, everything changes.
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: You do not access a person. You know a person.
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: You spend time with them, You listen to them. You
• 53:37
  Speaker 1: are honest with them about what is actually happening in you,
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: rather than presenting a more favorable version. You learn their
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: voice the way you learn the voice of anyone you love,
• 53:47
  Speaker 1: over years and ordinary days, until you can recognize it
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: without effort, until you can tell the difference between what
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: they are actually saying and what you are projecting on
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: to them from your own fears or wishes. The relationship
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: the Spirit is extending to you is not a transaction.
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: It is a friendship, not between equals, because the Spirit
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: is God, and the distance between that reality and our
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: own is beyond any measurement we have. But within that
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: distance the Spirit has chosen genuine relationship. He has chosen
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: to know you, to be known by you, to be
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: close enough to be grieved by what you do, to
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: bear witness in your interior, to pray for you from
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: inside you, to stay when every human relationship has conditions
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: attached to it. Somewhere, Paul writes to the church in Corinth,
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: do you not know that your body is a temple
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God.
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: A temple is not a temporary shelter. A temple is
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: a dwelling, a place where someone has chosen to live,
• 55:01
  Speaker 1: not for a season, but his home. Not in the
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: ceremonial rooms only, but in all of them. The Spirit
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: has not checked in for the night. He has made
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: his home in you, in you, not near you, not
• 55:18
  Speaker 1: available to you under the right circumstances, when you have
• 55:21
  Speaker 1: prepared adequately in you, right now, in this room, in
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: whatever condition you are in tonight, which means the conversation
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: is always already happening. The presence is always already there.
• 55:38
  Speaker 1: The question is never whether he is present. The question
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: is only whether you are paying attention to the person
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: who has never left. Think about the last week in
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: its ordinary moments, not the high ones, the unremarkable Tuesday,
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: The moment you are tired and short with someone who
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: did not deserve it, The moment you sat with something
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: you could not name and did not know what to
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: do with. The moment you made a choice you already
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: knew somewhere below the level of conscious thought was not
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: the best one available to you. In every one of
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: those moments, the Spirit was there, not watching from a
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: safe distance with arms crossed, not absent because the moment
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: was too ordinary or too compromised to qualify for his attention.
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: There in the middle of the failure, in the middle
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: of the confusion, in the middle of the thing you
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: still cannot explain, not to condemn present, the way a
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: person who genuinely loves you is present in a difficult moment,
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: near attentive, hoping you will turn toward them rather than away,
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: grieved sometimes by what he is, says, sees, but not leaving.
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: He does not leave. That is the promise Jesus made
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: in the Upper Room on the last night. The Paraclidos
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: will be with you forever, not until you fail seriously enough,
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: not until the accumulation of your choices exhausts what he
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: is willing to give forever, which means tonight, in this room,
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: in whatever condition you are carrying into sleep, the spirit
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: is present, not his atmosphere, not as a feeling waiting
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: for better conditions to arrive, as a person specific here,
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: aware of you in the way that only a person
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: who loves you can be aware of you, knowing your
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: name and your history and the things you have not
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: said to anyone, and not leaving, not tonight, not ever.
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: Let that be the thing you carry from this chapter
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: into the next. He is more than a power to
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: be accessed. He is a person who is already here,
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: and he has been here longer than you have known
• 58:12
  Speaker 1: to look for him. Chapter six. What he does inside you,
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: the Anatomy of transformation. There is a man who comes
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: to Jesus in the dark. His name is Nicodemus. He
• 58:29
  Speaker 1: is a Pharisee, which means he has spent his entire
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: adult life in the serious and disciplined study of the
• 58:35
  Speaker 1: Law of Moses. He is a member of the Sanhedrin,
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: the governing Religious Council of Jerusalem, which means he is
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: not a figure at the edges of the faith he
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: has devoted himself to. He is at the center of it.
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: He is the kind of man other serious men bring
• 58:54
  Speaker 1: their hardest questions to. And he comes to Jesus at night.
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: John notes the hour with a specificity that feels deliberate.
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: Not in the afternoon, when the crowds were around and
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: the conversation could be observed by people who would form
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: opinions about it. At night, when the streets were quiet
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: and the city was dark, and the meeting could be
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: private and the risk could be managed. He opens carefully, Rabbi,
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: we know that you are a teacher come from God.
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: For no one can do these signs that you do
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: unless God is with him. It is a diplomatic sentence.
• 59:35
  Speaker 1: It acknowledges Jesus without committing to anything specific. It extends
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: genuine respect while leaving the speaker room to retreat if
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: the conversation goes somewhere uncomfortable. It is the kind of
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: opening a careful person makes when they are not yet
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: ready to say what they actually came to say. And
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: Jesus does not respond to the sentence that was spoken.
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: He responds to the question underneath it. He says, truly, truly,
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: I say to you, unless one is born again, he
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: cannot see the Kingdom of God. The Greek word translated
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: again is a NOTHERN and ANOTHERN holds two meanings at
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: once without choosing between them. It means again, as in
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: a second time, and it means from above, as in
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 1: from heaven, born again, born from above, both meanings pressing
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: against each other in the same word, which is exactly
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: what the writer of this gospel intends. Nicodemus hears the
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: more literal meaning and is genuinely confused. He asks, how
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: can a man be born when he is old? Can
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 1: he enter a second time into his mother's womb and
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: be born? He is not being absurd. He is one
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: of the most educated people in Israel. He knows he
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: is not being asked to do something physically impossible. He
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: is pushing back on the image, exposing what he hears
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: as its difficulty, trying to get Jesus to say more
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: precisely what he actually means. And Jesus says, truly, truly,
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 1: I say to you, unless one is born of water
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 1: and the spirit he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 1: That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Two births.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: The first is the birth. Every human being experiences the
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: arrival into a physical world through physical means. No choice
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 1: is made about it by the one being born, no
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: preparation is required. It happens, and the result is that
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: a person exists who did not exist before. The second
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: is something of a different order entirely, something that does
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: not come from human effort or human lineage or human decision,
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: something that comes from above, from the Spirit. Jesus continues.
• 1:02:08
  Speaker 1: The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear it sound,
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: but you do not know where it comes from or
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: where it goes. So it is with everyone who is
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: born of the spirit. In Greek, the word for wind
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: and the word for spirit are the same word numa wind, breath, spirit,
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: the natural world pointing at something that operates by the
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: same principle. You can hear it, you can feel its
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: effects moving through the leaves of a tree in the dark.
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: You can know that something real is happening, but you
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: cannot manufacture it, or schedule it, or produce it. By
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: arranging the correct sequence of conditions. It moves from where
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: it moves from, and arrives where it arrives. Demons came
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: to Jesus that night with credentials and careful language and
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: a question he had not yet learned to ask directly.
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: He left with the beginning of understanding that what he
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: needed was not more information about God. What he needed
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: was new life from God, and that new life comes
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: from the Spirit. Now, something important needs to be said
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: carefully here. The new birth is not something a person
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: produces in themselves by trying hard enough, or believing intensely enough,
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: or achieving the right level of spiritual readiness. The initiative
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 1: belongs to the Spirit. He moves, he gives life. He
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: opens what was closed. But this is not a transaction
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: that happens to a passive object. It happens in a
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: person to a person, and the person receives it, turns
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: toward it, responds to it in the way that every
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: real receiving involves an actual person actually receiving. What matters
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: most to night is this, if you have come to
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: genuine faith in Jesus Christ, something has happened in you
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 1: that did not originate in you. A life has been
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 1: given that you could not have generated on your own.
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 1: Eyes have been opened that could not open themselves. Something
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: real and irreversible has taken place, as concrete in its
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: own way, as the moment of physical birth itself, and
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: birth does not unhappen. The new life the Spirit gives
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 1: is not un lone, pending your subsequent performance. It was given.
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: It is yours, and the one who gave it did
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: not give it carelessly or conditionally. But birth is only
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: the beginning. After the Spirit brings new life, he stays,
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: and he does not stay quietly in the background, waiting
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: to be summoned when you finally need something. He stays
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: as an active and ongoing presence, working continuously in the
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 1: interior of the life. He has entered, doing things that
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 1: you often do not notice until you look back from
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: a distance and see how far you have come from
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: where you were. Paul writes to the church in Rome
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: about something he calls the witness of the Spirit. The
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: children of God. There are moments in the life of
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 1: a believer that do not always come at the expected
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: times or in the expected forms. They do not always
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: accompany the high experiences of faith, or arrive on the
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 1: days when you feel most spiritually adequate. They come in
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: the quiet ones, a moment when something inside you simply knows,
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: not as the conclusion of an argument you have been
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: carefully building, not as the result of talking yourself into
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: a more confident position. Something speaks at a level below
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: where arguments happen, and what it says, without words, is this.
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: You belong to God, You are loved, You are not
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: alone in this universe. That is the spirit bearing witness
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: with your spirit, a person speaking into the interior of
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: your life in a language that reaches below words, confirming
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: what the Father has already declared to be permanently and
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: unalterably true. And then there is the work Paul describes
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: in his letter to the Galatians. He calls it the
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness,
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: self control. It is easy to read that list as
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 1: a set of targets, a standard to be achieved, a
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 1: checklist to be measured again and found inadequate. If you
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: read it that way, it becomes one more weight to
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: carry into the night, one more area where you are
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: not yet enough. But Paul does not call them the
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 1: disciplines of the spirit. He does not call them the
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: achievements of the spirit or the goals of the spirit.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: He calls them the fruit of the spirit. And fruit
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 1: does not happen because the tree tries harder. There is
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 1: a man named Thomas who has been a believer for
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: eleven years. He is not a pastor or a theologian.
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: He works in a warehouse in Cincinnati, Ohio. He would
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: not describe himself as particularly spiritual. He has read the
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 1: Bible inconsistently, and prayed with varying degrees of conviction, and
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: gone through seasons where the whole thing felt very distant
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: and seasons where it felt very close. But something has
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: been happening in Thomas that he only noticed recently. When
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: his sister pointed it out, she said, you used to
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: lose your temper every time something went wrong at work.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: You do not do that any more. When did that change?
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 1: He did not have an answer. He could not point
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: to a decision he had made or discipline he had adopted.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 1: He had not taken a class or resolved to try harder.
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 1: He had not tracked the change or engineered it something
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 1: had been growing in him, slowly, quietly, over years, in
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: a way he had not noticed until some one else
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: saw it first. That is fruit, not the result of
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: trying harder to produce the quality, the natural result of
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: a life that has stayed, however imperfectly and inconsistently connected
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: to the one who produces the quality in people who
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: remain in him. A tree in good soil with adequate
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: water does not strain toward its fruit. It simply grows,
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: and fruit appears as the natural result of a tree
• 1:09:03
  Speaker 1: that is alive and connected to what sustains it. The
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: question the Spirit is asking in your life is not
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: how hard are you trying to become more patient, more loving,
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: more peaceful? The question is are you staying connected to
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: the one who produces those things in people who remain
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: in him? And the answer to that question is not
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 1: a technique. It is a relationship. It is the ongoing
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 1: and sometimes stumbling practice of turning toward the person who
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: is already inside you, of paying attention to his presence
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: rather than running past it in the direction of the
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: next thing on the list, of co operating with what
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: he is already doing in you, rather than trying to
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: get ahead of it, or substitute your own effort for it.
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: There is one more work of the Spirit to re
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: rest with. Before this chapter closes, Paul writes in Romans,
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 1: the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: not know what to pray for as we ought. But
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: for words. We do not know what to pray for
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: as we ought. This is one of the most honest
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 1: sentences in the entire New Testament, and Paul is not
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 1: describing beginners. He says we He includes himself, the man
• 1:10:32
  Speaker 1: who wrote thirteen letters in the New Testament, who had
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: walked with God through years of extraordinary difficulty and extraordinary grace,
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: says we do not know, because no human being, regardless
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: of how long they have walked with God, has the
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 1: angle of vision required to see their own life clearly
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: enough to know exactly what they truly need. We see
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: from inside the story. We cannot see how the chapter
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: we are in connects to the one that follows, and
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 1: so we reach for the language of prayer and find
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 1: it inadequate. We say what we can and feel that
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: the real thing, the actual longing underneath the attempt did
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 1: not quite make it through. But the Spirit himself intercedes
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: for us with groanings too deep for words. He takes
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 1: what we cannot say and says it. He takes the
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: inarticulate reaching and carries it to the Father. And God,
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 1: who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit,
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: will of God, which means the prayer being prayed for
• 1:11:48
  Speaker 1: you right now from inside you is always the right prayer,
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: not your best attempt, the right prayer, the one that
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: knows what you actually need, the one that sees your
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: life from an angle you cannot see it from. You
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: have never had a prayerless night. You have had nights
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 1: without words. But the Spirit had what the words could
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 1: not carry. Birth, witness, fruit, intercession, four works of one
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 1: person happening continuously below the level of your daily awareness,
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: in the interior of a life that belongs to God.
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: You did not have to understand all of this for
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: it to be true. It has been true since the
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: day the Spirit first moved in you. But knowing changes
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: the quality of attention, not what is happening, what you
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: notice while it happens. The tree is growing, the fruit
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 1: is forming, the prayer is being prayed. And the person
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: doing all of it is not watching from a sufficient
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: distance to remain unmoved by what he sees. He is
• 1:13:02
  Speaker 1: in you, working even now, even in this quiet, even
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: as you rest. Chapter seven. The Spirit and the Word,
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: why they always go together. There is a room in
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: a monastery in the city of Erefurt, Germany. The year
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: is somewhere in the early fifteen hundreds. A young monk
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: named Martin is sitting alone with a copy of Paul's
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: Letter to the Romans. He has read this letter before
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: many times. He is a trained theologian who has studied
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: the text in Latin and in Greek. He knows the structure.
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: He knows what the established commentators say. He knows this
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: letter the way a person knows a road they have
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: walked in all seasons, every turn familiar before it arrives,
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: every landmark recognized without effort. And then he comes to
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 1: a sentence in in the first chapter, the righteous shall
• 1:14:03
  Speaker 1: live by faith. He has read it before many times.
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 1: The ink has not changed. The Latin is the same Latin.
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: But something happens in the reading of that sentence. On
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 1: that particular morning that has not happened in any previous reading.
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: The sentence opens, not slowly, the way understanding accumulates across
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 1: careful years of study. It opens the way a door
• 1:14:30
  Speaker 1: opens when someone turns the handle from the inside. Light
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: coming through that was not coming through before. Martin Luther
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: later described this as the experience of paradise opening before him,
• 1:14:44
  Speaker 1: not because the sentence was new, because something had made
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: it real in a way that all the previous readings
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: had not achieved. The words went from being accurate to
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 1: being alive, from being true on the page to being
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: present in the room with him, as though the sentence
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: had traveled across fifteen centuries and arrived at exactly the
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: place and the moment it was always meant to reach.
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: He did not fully understand what had happened, but he
• 1:15:16
  Speaker 1: could not stop thinking about it, and the thinking became questions,
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 1: and the questions became challenges nailed to a church door,
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 1: and the challenges became a reformation that reshaped the Western
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: world and continued reshaping it for centuries. What opened the
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 1: sentence from the inside, Luther believed it was the Holy Spirit,
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: not his intelligence, though the intelligence was real and had
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 1: done genuine years of preparation, not his devotion, though the
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: devotion was sincere and had cost him much. The Spirit
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: opened what study alone could not open. He was present
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: at both ends of that moment. He had been present
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 1: when Paul wrote the words in Corinth, and he was
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: present in the cold monastery room when Luther read them,
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: the same author, at both ends of the same conversation,
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: separated by fifteen centuries, and present in both. This is
• 1:16:18
  Speaker 1: the relationship between the Spirit and the Word that the
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: New Testament describes quietly and consistently, not a competition between
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 1: two sources of truth, not a tension requiring careful balance,
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: a collaboration so close that separating them does real damage
• 1:16:37
  Speaker 1: to both. Peter writes in his Second Letter, no prophecy
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: of scripture comes from some one's own interpretation, For no
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, But
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: men spoke from God as they were carried along by
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: the Holy Spirit. Carried along. The Greek word is pheromenoi,
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: from pharoh, meaning to carry or to bear, the same
• 1:17:05
  Speaker 1: word used elsewhere for a ship driven by the wind.
• 1:17:08
  Speaker 1: The sailors are on the ship. They have skill and experience,
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 1: and genuine knowledge of the sea. But the ship moves
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: because the wind fills the sails. The sailors work with
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 1: the wind. The wind does what the sailors cannot do
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 1: for themselves. Think of it this way. The men who
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: wrote the books of the Bible were real men, with
• 1:17:33
  Speaker 1: real personalities and particular concerns and specific audiences they were
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 1: writing for. Peter wrote like Peter, Paul wrote like Paul,
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: John wrote like John. No one smoothed them into uniformity.
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: Their voices are distinct and recognizable on every page, separated
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: by personality and background and decade. But underneath and through
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 1: and in all of those distinct voices, the spirit was moving.
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 1: The spirit was carrying. The result was not simply the
• 1:18:10
  Speaker 1: thoughts of educated men about God. It was the word
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: of God breathed through human voices, preserved in human words,
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 1: carrying a weight that no purely human writing has ever
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: managed to carry across twenty centuries without losing it. Paul
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: writes to Timothy, all scripture is breathed out by God.
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 1: The Greek is the onustos, theos God. Neustos breathed. God
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 1: breathed the same root as the word for spirit, for breath,
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: for the ruach that moved over the waters before the
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: first light existed. The scripture is the spirit's book. Think
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 1: for a moment about what that means. When you open it,
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 1: the author is in the room, not a record of
• 1:18:57
  Speaker 1: what the author once said to other people in other centuries,
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 1: preserved carefully for study. The spirit who inspired the writing
• 1:19:05
  Speaker 1: is the same spirit who lives in you as you read.
• 1:19:10
  Speaker 1: He was present when the words were put down. He
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: is present when you take them up. The author at
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 1: both ends every time without exception, and he has the
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: ability to do what he did for Luther, to turn
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: the handle from the inside of a sentence you have
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: read before, to make a truth that was previously accurate
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: becomes something you can feel the weight of, something that
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: changes the quality of the room where you are sitting,
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: Something that is not just information about God, but a
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: word from God arriving in the specific place it was
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: always meant to reach. Jesus promised this in the Upper
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: Room on the last night. He said, the Spirit will
• 1:19:56
  Speaker 1: bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 1: Bring to your remembrance. Every reader of scripture has had
• 1:20:04
  Speaker 1: this experience, often without recognizing what it was. A person
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: facing something they are afraid of, and a sentence about
• 1:20:13
  Speaker 1: God not giving a spirit of fear, but of power
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: and love, and a sound mind arriving in their mind
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: without being searched for at the exact moment it was needed.
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: A person carrying guilt they have lived with for a
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 1: long time, and a sentence about there being no condemnation
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 1: for those who are in Christ, landing with a weight
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: it has never carried in previous readings, as though it
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: were being said for the first time. A person at
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: the edge of something they cannot name, and a psalm
• 1:20:46
  Speaker 1: arriving not as a poem they have heard before, but
• 1:20:49
  Speaker 1: as something being said directly to them to night in
• 1:20:53
  Speaker 1: this room by a voice that knows their name. That
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: is the spirit bringing to remembrance, not memory functioning well,
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: the spirit reaching into the library of what you have
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: read and heard, and placing exactly the right word in
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: exactly the right moment, with the precision that belongs to
• 1:21:14
  Speaker 1: someone who knows both the text and the person reading
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: it completely. Now there is a tension worth naming directly
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 1: before this chapter closes. Some traditions emphasize the spirit so
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 1: strongly that the scripture becomes secondary the Spirit told me this,
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 1: they say, and what the spirit apparently told them contradicts
• 1:21:35
  Speaker 1: what the Spirit inspired in writing. The inner experience is
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 1: treated as a higher authority than the written word, and
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: other traditions emphasize the scripture so strongly that the spirit
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 1: becomes practically invisible in daily life. Everything necessary has been written.
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: Study it carefully, and you have everything you need. Spirit
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 1: is affirmed in theology and nearly absent in experience. Both
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: miss something essential. The Spirit does not contradict the word
• 1:22:08
  Speaker 1: he breathed. John says in his first letter, test the spirits.
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: The standard for that testing is always the word. The
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: spirit will not lead you somewhere that contradicts what he
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: inspired in scripture. He is not inconsistent with himself. But
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: the word without the spirit in the reader is not
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: fully alive in the way it was meant to be alive.
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: It can be studied and analyzed and systematized with great care,
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: and all of that has real value. Luther needed those
• 1:22:44
  Speaker 1: years in the monastery. The preparation was not wasted, but
• 1:22:49
  Speaker 1: the moment of opening, when the handle turns from the
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 1: inside and the sentence becomes real rather than merely accurate,
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: that require wires the spirit. You need both the faithfulness
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: of returning to the text even on the mornings when
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: nothing seems to open, the willingness to be present with
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: the word, even when the presence feels dry and the
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 1: sentences feel closed and nothing is moving, And the Spirit,
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: who is always already present in you, working in the
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: ground that faithful reading has been preparing, waiting for the
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: moment when what has been planted is ready to emerge.
• 1:23:34
  Speaker 1: Neither replaces the other. They are the same God, speaking
• 1:23:38
  Speaker 1: in two modes, one inscribed on pages, permanent and available
• 1:23:43
  Speaker 1: to anyone who picks up the book, one living in you,
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 1: personal and present, able to make the inscribed words arrive
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: in the specific place they were always meant to reach.
• 1:23:54
  Speaker 1: When you open the Bible tomorrow morning or in some
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 1: future dark hour when you need something you can name,
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: you are not opening it alone. The Author is with you.
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: He has been with you every time you have ever
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 1: opened it. And some of the times you thought nothing happened.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: Something was being prepared that you will not see the
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: results of until later. The ground was being made ready,
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: the seed was going in, and the Spirit was already
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: planning the morning he would open the sentence you have
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: read before, and let you feel for the first time
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 1: the full weight of what it was always carrying. That
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 1: morning may be closer than you think. Chapter eight, The
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 1: Groaning When you do not have words. There is a
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: kind of night that most people have had at least once.
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: It is not the night of obvious crisis, not the
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: night when the phone rings and the news arrives and
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: the world rearranges itself around something undeniable. Those nights are terrible,
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: but they are at least clear. You know what you
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 1: are carrying, you have a name for it, and you
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: know where it came from. This is a different kind
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: of night. Nothing specific has happened. The day was ordinary
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 1: or close enough, nothing broke in a way that could
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 1: be pointed to. No single moment stands out as the
• 1:25:30
  Speaker 1: one that made everything heavy. And yet here you are
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 1: in the dark, and something in you weighs more than
• 1:25:36
  Speaker 1: it should, and you cannot locate the source of the weight,
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 1: and you cannot find the words for it. You want
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 1: to pray, but the words are not there. You reach
• 1:25:48
  Speaker 1: for the familiar sentences, and they feel thin. They do
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 1: not go far enough, They do not reach whatever is
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: actually happening in the deeper parts of you. You say
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 1: what you can and feel that the real thing, the
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: actual ache underneath the attempt, did not make it through.
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: And then there is the silence, And in the silence
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 1: a question forms that you do not want to examine directly.
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: Whether you are actually as known and as held as
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: you believed you were on the days when believing was easier,
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 1: if you have been there, or if you are there
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: to night. I want you to hear what Paul wrote
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: in the eighth chapter of Romans, as though it were
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: written for this specific night, this specific silence, this specific
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 1: reaching for words that will not come. He writes, The
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: know what to pray for as we ought, But the
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 1: Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: We do not know what to pray for as we ought.
• 1:27:03
  Speaker 1: Paul is not describing beginners, He says we and means
• 1:27:08
  Speaker 1: it completely. The man who wrote thirteen letters in the
• 1:27:12
  Speaker 1: New Testament, who had walked with God through years of
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: extraordinary difficulty, who had seen things in prayer that he
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 1: could not find words to describe, says we do not know,
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: because no human being, regardless of how long they have
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: walked with God, has the angle of vision required to
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: know exactly what they truly need. We see from inside
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 1: the story. We cannot see how the chapter we are
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 1: in connects to the one that follows. We cannot see
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: what the silence is making room for. We cannot see
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 1: what the difficulty is building in us, or what the
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: waiting is growing in us that could not be grown
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: any other way. We do not know, and so we
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 1: grope for words. We say what we can, and feel
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: the gap between what we said and what we meant.
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: But the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: deep for words. The Greek phrase is stenagmois a la letois.
• 1:28:16
  Speaker 1: Stenagmos means groaning, not a polite sigh, a groaning, the
• 1:28:21
  Speaker 1: kind of sound that comes from below comfortable speech, from
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: the place in a person where the real weight is carried,
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 1: and al letois means inexpressible, beyond the reach of language.
• 1:28:35
  Speaker 1: What cannot be put into words, because words do not
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: go that deep. The Spirit intercedes with groanings that have
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: no language, because what needs to be said between him
• 1:28:44
  Speaker 1: and the Father cannot be contained in the language available
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: to us, which means the Spirit is not taking your
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: clumsy sentences and rephrasing them into something more precise before
• 1:28:56
  Speaker 1: presenting them to the Father. He is not improved your
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: prayers from the outside. He is praying something that begins
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: below the level where your words start, something that comes
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: from a place in the interior of your life that
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: even you cannot fully access, a place where your actual
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: condition is known completely and held without judgment, and prayed
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: over with a full understanding of someone who knows both
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: who you are and who the Father is, and exactly
• 1:29:28
  Speaker 1: what is needed in the space between those two realities.
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: He is groaning on your behalf. Now, I want you
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: to hold the man who wrote this in your mind
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: for a moment. Paul wrote these words from the city
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: of Corinth around the year fifty seven of the first century,
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 1: what we now call fifty seven a d. By the
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 1: time he wrote this sentence, he had spent nights lying
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: on stone floors in Roman prisons, cold and damp, listening
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 1: to the sounds of a city that did not know
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 1: he was there and would not have cared. He had
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: been beaten with rods three times. He had received thirty
• 1:30:09
  Speaker 1: nine lashes, five times each one account calculated to bring
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: a man to the edge of death without crossing it.
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 1: He had been shipwrecked three times, spent a full night
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: and day adrift in the open sea, not knowing if
• 1:30:23
  Speaker 1: the water would take him before morning came. He had
• 1:30:26
  Speaker 1: also prayed three times for a specific difficulty in his
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: own life to be removed. He called it a thorn
• 1:30:33
  Speaker 1: in the flesh. God did not remove it. God said instead,
• 1:30:39
  Speaker 1: my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: made perfect in weakness. This is the man who writes
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: that the spirit intercedes according to the will of God,
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 1: not from a comfortable distance from suffering, not as a
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 1: theory developed in the absence of unanswered prayer from inside
• 1:30:58
  Speaker 1: a life that had known darkness most of us will
• 1:31:01
  Speaker 1: never face. Where he had asked specifically and not received specifically,
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: where the will of God had looked from inside the
• 1:31:10
  Speaker 1: story like something he could not always reconcile with what
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: he knew of God's love. And still he wrote it
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: not because the will of God always feels like what
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: you would have chosen. Because the will of God is
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: the only will that sees everything, the only will that
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: knows what is actually good, the only will large enough
• 1:31:37
  Speaker 1: to hold your entire life at once, and act from
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 1: that complete knowledge, rather than the partial knowledge available to
• 1:31:44
  Speaker 1: you from inside one difficult chapter of it. Paul continues,
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: of the spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: according to the will of God. The Father searches hearts.
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: He does not evaluate you based on the quality of
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: your sentences or the emotional intensity of your faith on
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: your best days. He searches. He goes into the places
• 1:32:13
  Speaker 1: below the surface. And what he finds there, underneath your words,
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: underneath your performance, underneath everything you could articulate and everything
• 1:32:23
  Speaker 1: you could not, is the intercession of the Spirit. And
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: the intercession of the Spirit is always according to the
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: will of God, which means the prayer happening in you
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: right now, the prayer that is occurring, whether or not
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: you are aware of it, is always the right prayer,
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: not your best attempt. The right prayer, the one that
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 1: knows what you actually need, the one that sees your
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: situation from an angle you cannot see it from, the
• 1:32:53
  Speaker 1: one that holds your present moment and your future, and
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: your past, and the purposes of God for your life,
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: all at once and asks for the thing that serves
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: all of them. There is one more thing in this
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: passage worth resting with, Paul says, the Spirit helps us
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: in our weakness. The Greek word for helps is sun
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: anti lombanamai. It is one of the longer words in
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: the New Testament, and it carries a very specific image.
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: Sun means together with anti means facing. Lambano means to
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: take hold of, to take hold of something together with
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 1: someone facing it from the other side, bearing the weight
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: with them. The image is of a heavy thing that
• 1:33:39
  Speaker 1: one person cannot carry alone, and someone coming alongside, taking
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 1: hold from the other end, facing the same direction, present
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: in the same difficulty, not carrying it instead of you
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: with you. You are still carrying. But you have never
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 1: been carrying alone. Not on the nights when it felt
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: like you were, Not on the mornings when the weight
• 1:34:08
  Speaker 1: was the first thing you felt when you opened your eyes,
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: Not in the long middle sections of a hard season,
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: when relief seemed far away and the prayer you had
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 1: been praying seemed to be returning empty. The Spirit was alongside,
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: holding the other end, groaning with you and for you.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: In the language that goes below every language you have
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: ever learned. Let your breathing slow now. If there is
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: something you cannot say to night, you do not have
• 1:34:37
  Speaker 1: to say it. You do not need the words. The
• 1:34:41
  Speaker 1: spirit has what the words cannot carry. He has been
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: carrying it since the moment he came to live in you.
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: The Father is listening, He is always listening. The groaning
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: is not the sound of things falling apart. It is
• 1:34:58
  Speaker 1: the sound of things being held together by someone stronger
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: than the weight. And the morning is already on its way.
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: Chapter nine. Do not grieve, Do not quench the fragility
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: we forget. There is something about love that everyone understands instinctively,
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 1: but rarely stops to examine directly. Love can be wounded,
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: not ended, not turned into something other than love by
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 1: the wounding, but wounded, affected, changed in its experience, though
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 1: not in its commitment, by what the beloved does or
• 1:35:40
  Speaker 1: fails to do. A parent loves a child with a
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 1: love that does not end when the child is careless
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 1: or cold or cruel. That love does not stop, but
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: the parent feels what the child does. The love is
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: not armor that keeps pain out. It is precisely because
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: the love is real that the pain gets through. The
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: deeper the love, the more available it is to be
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: hurt by the one it loves most. This is obvious
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: when we think about the people in our lives. We
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: almost never apply it to the Holy Spirit, and yet
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: Paul writes it plainly in a letter to a church
• 1:36:24
  Speaker 1: he loves, in a sentence that should stop every reader
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 1: who takes seriously the claim that the Spirit is a person.
• 1:36:33
  Speaker 1: Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: you are sealed for the day of redemption. Do not
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 1: grieve him. The Greek word is lupeo, the word for
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: deep sorrow, not mild irritation, not the brief frustration of
• 1:36:50
  Speaker 1: a moment, The word used elsewhere for the grief of
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 1: a father watching his son choose destruction, For the sorrow
• 1:36:58
  Speaker 1: of disciples learning that the person they love most is
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: going to be taken from them, the kind of sorrow
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: that has wait to it. You cannot grieve. Whether you
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: cannot grieve a wind or a force or an atmosphere,
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: you can only grieve a person, and a person can
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 1: only be grieved by someone they love, which means the
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: very fact that the apostle tells believers not to grieve
• 1:37:27
  Speaker 1: the Spirit is itself a declaration about how much the
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: Spirit loves you. He is close enough to be affected
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: by what you do, near enough that your choices reach
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: him in a real way, present with enough attention and
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: enough investment that what happens in the ordinary details of
• 1:37:47
  Speaker 1: your ordinary days actually matters to him. His commitment does
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: not waver. He promised to stay forever, and he keeps
• 1:37:57
  Speaker 1: his promises. But the quality of what is experienced in
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 1: the relationship is shaped by what you bring to it.
• 1:38:06
  Speaker 1: Now look at what Paul places on either side of
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: this command before it, The apostle writes, Let no corrupting
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: talk come out of your mouths, but only such as
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: it may give grace to those who hear After it,
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: he continues, let all bitterness and wrath, and anger, and
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: clamor and slander be put away from you, along with
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: all malice. Be kind to one another, tender hearted, forgiving
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: one another, as God in Christ forgave you. The things
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 1: that grieve the Spirit are not primarily the dramatic and
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: obvious sins. They are the sins of the tongue, the
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: sins of the ordinary day, words that tear down, rather
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 1: than build. A bitterness that has been held on to
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 1: pass the poor where it was serving any honest purpose.
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: Wrath that rises faster than it should, Slander, malice carried
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: quietly from one week into the next. The way you
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: spoke about someone this week when they were not in
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: the room to hear it. The bitterness you have been
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 1: carrying towards someone who hurts you, that has not been
• 1:39:25
  Speaker 1: brought honestly before God and released. The anger that lives
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 1: just below the surface of your ordinary patience and occasionally
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 1: breaks through in ways that leave you feeling like a
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 1: version of yourself you do not want to be. These
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: are the things the Apostle says, grieve the spirit, not
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 1: because the spirit is easily offended or quick to punish,
• 1:39:48
  Speaker 1: but because the Spirit knows what those things do. He
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: knows what bitterness costs the person who carries it, how
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: it slowly narrows the room where a life is lived,
• 1:40:00
  Speaker 1: how it makes every ceiling lower and every doorway smaller.
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: He knows what words that corrupt do to the people
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: who receive them and to the person who spoke them.
• 1:40:12
  Speaker 1: He knows that the person capable of those things in
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 1: their worst moments is not the person he has been
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: carefully and faithfully and patiently working to form. He is
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: grieved the way a skilled craftsman is grieved when something
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: they have been patiently making is damaged. Not a cold
• 1:40:30
  Speaker 1: professional disappointment from a safe distance, a personal grief, because
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 1: the making has been personal from the beginning. And then
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: there is a second command, from a different letter with
• 1:40:44
  Speaker 1: a slightly different weight. Paul writes to the church in Thessalonica,
• 1:40:51
  Speaker 1: do not quench the spirit. The Greek is me spenute
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 1: from spenumi to put out, to extinguish the word for
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 1: what you do to a lamp when you want the
• 1:41:03
  Speaker 1: light to stop. The spirit can be quenched, not permanently extinguished,
• 1:41:11
  Speaker 1: not removed from a life that belongs to God, but dimmed,
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: made less effective in what he is able to do
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 1: through a person who has consistently chosen to ignore or
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 1: suppress what he is doing. And quenching works the way
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: all slow processes work, not in one dramatic moment of refusal,
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: in the accumulation of small ones, the quiet prompting toward
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 1: generosity that was noticed and set aside, the nudge toward
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: honesty in a conversation where honesty would have been costly,
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: and the nudge was recognized and overridden, the sense that
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: you should reach out to some one say the thing
• 1:41:53
  Speaker 1: that needed saying, and the sense was noted and filed
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 1: away and eventually forgotten entirely, the invitation to stillness in
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: a moment when noise was chosen instead. Again, none of
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: those are catastrophic individually. Each one taken alone, is a
• 1:42:12
  Speaker 1: small thing. But quenching works across time, one small suppression
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 1: at a time, until the sensitivity that was once clear
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 1: becomes dull, until the voice that was once recognizable becomes
• 1:42:28
  Speaker 1: harder to distinguish from your own preferences and habits and
• 1:42:32
  Speaker 1: the general noise of a life. I want to say
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: something directly before this chapter moves further. This is not
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: a chapter about fear. The purpose of understanding that the
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: spirit can be grieved and quenched is not to produce
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: a new kind of anxiety, not to make you lie
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: awake cataloging your failures and wondering whether you have damaged
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 1: something beyond repair. That kind of downward spiral is not
• 1:43:00
  Speaker 1: from the spirit. Paul writes elsewhere that God has not
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: given us a spirit of fear, but of power and
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: love and a sound mind. The purpose is something different.
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 1: It is the purpose that belongs to understanding any real relationship.
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: When you know that the person you love can be
• 1:43:19
  Speaker 1: affected by what you do, it changes not just your
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: behavior but your attention. You become more aware, not in
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: the sense of walking on eggshells, which is the posture
• 1:43:34
  Speaker 1: of someone living under threat rather than love, but in
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 1: the sense of caring, of noticing, of asking in the
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: ordinary moments of an ordinary day, whether what you are
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: doing is moving toward the person who is always present
• 1:43:50
  Speaker 1: or away from him. This is what it means to
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 1: walk by the spirit, which is Paul's phrase in his
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: letter to the Galatians. A technique, not a series of
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 1: spiritual exercises performed at prescribed intervals, a quality of ongoing attention,
• 1:44:09
  Speaker 1: a way of moving through the hours of a day
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: with the awareness that a person is present in every
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 1: one of them, a person who can be cooperated with
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: or worked against, listened to or passed over, turned toward
• 1:44:24
  Speaker 1: or turned away from, in the small choices that accumulate
• 1:44:27
  Speaker 1: into the texture of a life. The word walk is deliberate,
• 1:44:33
  Speaker 1: not run, not sprint, not the language of maximum effort
• 1:44:37
  Speaker 1: and peauk performance the language of the ordinary pace of
• 1:44:41
  Speaker 1: a life, one step, one ordinary moment, one unremarkable choice
• 1:44:48
  Speaker 1: at a time, and when you grieve him, which you will,
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: because every person living in a body with a history
• 1:44:56
  Speaker 1: has grieved the Spirit, the answer is not to perform
• 1:45:00
  Speaker 1: your way back to a sufficient level of spiritual adequacy
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: before approaching him again. The answer is the same answer
• 1:45:08
  Speaker 1: that restores any real relationship. You turn back, you acknowledge
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: what happened with honesty rather than with excuses. You receive
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: the forgiveness that is already there, because the one you
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: grieved is also the one who sealed you for the
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: day of redemption. And sealing is not a conditional act.
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: It is permanent. And you find when you turn back
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: that the Spirit was not waiting at a distance with
• 1:45:39
  Speaker 1: his arms crossed. He was already close, already present, already
• 1:45:45
  Speaker 1: working in the grief and the gap to bring you
• 1:45:48
  Speaker 1: back to the awareness of how near he has always been.
• 1:45:53
  Speaker 1: This is the mystery at the center of the Spirit's love.
• 1:45:57
  Speaker 1: It is strong enough to be wounded, and it is
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 1: stronger than the wound. The God who made everything chose
• 1:46:05
  Speaker 1: to be close enough to you to be affected by you.
• 1:46:09
  Speaker 1: He did not have to do that. He could have
• 1:46:12
  Speaker 1: remained at the distance that makes wounding impossible. He could
• 1:46:18
  Speaker 1: have loved you from a remove that kept the love
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 1: intact and unaffectable and safe. He chose not to. He
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: chose nearness. He chose to be close enough that what
• 1:46:31
  Speaker 1: you do reaches him. That is not fragility, That is love,
• 1:46:37
  Speaker 1: choosing the vulnerability that comes with nearness because the alternative
• 1:46:42
  Speaker 1: to vulnerability is distance, and distance was never what he wanted.
• 1:46:48
  Speaker 1: He wanted to be near. He is near, and the
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 1: nearness is not at risk Tonight, regardless of what this
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 1: week has looked like, turned toward it, it is closer
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: than your next breath. It has always been that close.
• 1:47:08
  Speaker 1: Chapter ten. The name you already know. We began tonight
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 1: with a feeling you could not name, something that had
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 1: been moving through your day, not a thought you chose,
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 1: not a mood you made. Quieter than both of those.
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: It was there in the moment, the silence felt fuller
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: than the sound that came before it. In the second,
• 1:47:33
  Speaker 1: you looked at someone you love and felt something words
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: arrived too late to catch. In the morning, you woke
• 1:47:40
  Speaker 1: wanting to be different and no one had said anything,
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 1: and the wanting was simply there, like light under a door.
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: Scripture gives us a name for the one who meets
• 1:47:54
  Speaker 1: us there. We have traveled a long way to night
• 1:47:57
  Speaker 1: to find it. We went back before Jennie, before the
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 1: first morning existed, before the first word of creation was spoken,
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 1: to a darkness over formless waters, where a person was
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 1: already present, not drifting, hovering, tending, holding himself over the
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 1: unfinished thing with the specific attention of someone who knows
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 1: what the unfinished thing is meant to become, and is
• 1:48:25
  Speaker 1: committed to being there when it does. We sat in
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 1: a borrowed room in Jerusalem on the worst night, lit
• 1:48:32
  Speaker 1: by oil lamps, smelling of bread and wine, and we
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 1: heard Jesus speak longer about this person than about anything else,
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: on the night he had only hours left. We heard
• 1:48:44
  Speaker 1: him say the Perakleitos was coming, that he would stand beside,
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 1: that he would teach and remind and guide, that he
• 1:48:53
  Speaker 1: would not leave his people as orphans, that through the
• 1:48:56
  Speaker 1: cross and resurrection, the door to the spirit would be opened.
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: Because Jesus was prepared to pay whatever the promise required.
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: We stood in a Jerusalem street on a Pentecost mourning,
• 1:49:10
  Speaker 1: and heard wind descend from heaven, and watched fire rest
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 1: on one hundred and twenty individual people, and listened to
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 1: fifteen languages carrying one truth. We watched a man who
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: had failed publicly stand up and discover to his own
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: astonishment that the words were there, and the power to
• 1:49:31
  Speaker 1: speak them was there. And the door that opened that
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 1: morning has never closed since. We sat with the truth
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 1: that the spirit is a person, That he has a
• 1:49:42
  Speaker 1: mind and a will and the capacity to be grieved,
• 1:49:47
  Speaker 1: That he speaks and intercedes and bears witness, and gives
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: life and distributes gifts according to his own purposes. That
• 1:49:56
  Speaker 1: he is more than an atmosphere. He is a person
• 1:50:00
  Speaker 1: who is already here. We followed him inside the interior
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 1: of a life. We watched him bring new life where
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: there was formation but not yet living. We felt him
• 1:50:14
  Speaker 1: bear witness to the deepest truth in the quietest moments.
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: We saw the fruit that grows in a life that
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 1: stays connected to him. We heard him groaning in the
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 1: wordless nights on behalf of people who had run out
• 1:50:28
  Speaker 1: of sentences, caring what the words could not carry. All
• 1:50:32
  Speaker 1: the way to the Father. We heard that he can
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: be grieved, and we heard that the grief is the
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 1: shadow side of a love that chows nearness over the
• 1:50:43
  Speaker 1: safety of distance, a love strong enough to be wounded
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: and stronger than the wound. The name we came looking
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: for has been found, but a name alone is not
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 1: what we came for. The reason we came tonight was
• 1:50:59
  Speaker 1: reckackg ignition. There is a difference between learning about someone
• 1:51:04
  Speaker 1: and recognizing someone. Learning is what you do before you
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 1: know them. Recognition is what happens when the person you
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: have been reading about is suddenly present in the room
• 1:51:17
  Speaker 1: and you see them not as a description in a book,
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: but as a face turned toward yours, and the face
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: is familiar in a way that goes deeper than the
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: hours you have spent studying their biography. To night was
• 1:51:30
  Speaker 1: meant to be a night of recognition. The presence that
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: has been with you through this day, through this year,
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: through every quiet moment you could not explain, and every
• 1:51:42
  Speaker 1: morning you wanted to be different, and every night you
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: had no words and still felt somewhere underneath the silence
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: that you were not entirely alone. That presence has a name.
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: That presence is a person. He is the Holy spirit.
• 1:52:00
  Speaker 1: And he has been with you in the full and
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: precise sense of that word, with since the moment he
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 1: first came to live in you, not occasionally, not in
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: the moments that felt spiritual enough to qualify for his attention,
• 1:52:20
  Speaker 1: in the ordinary hours, in the crowded and distracted and
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: unremarkable middle of a regular day, in the moment at
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: the grocery store, in the moment in the meeting, and
• 1:52:31
  Speaker 1: the moment sitting in traffic going nowhere, in the moment
• 1:52:34
  Speaker 1: lying in the dark, not knowing what to pray. Always there,
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: always tending, always hovering over whatever is still unformed in you,
• 1:52:45
  Speaker 1: with the intention of some one who has not finished
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 1: what he started. He is not done with you. He
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: was not done with the waters in Genesis until the
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: light came. He was not with the disciples in the
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 1: Upper Room until the Pentecost morning changed everything. He was
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 1: not done with Paul on the road to Damascus until
• 1:53:09
  Speaker 1: scales fell from his eyes and a life going in
• 1:53:13
  Speaker 1: entirely the wrong direction turned completely around. He was not
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: done with Martin Luther reading in a monastery until a
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: sentence opened and the world felt the effects for centuries.
• 1:53:27
  Speaker 1: He is not done with you, whatever is still unformed
• 1:53:30
  Speaker 1: in you. Is not evidence that he has given up.
• 1:53:33
  Speaker 1: It is evidence that the work is still in progress,
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 1: that what you are right now is not the final
• 1:53:39
  Speaker 1: form of what he is making. The eagle does not
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 1: leave the nest because the egg has not yet hatched.
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 1: It hovers, it tends, It stays with the patience of
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: something that knows what is inside and is committed to
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 1: being present when it emerges. He knows what is inside you,
• 1:54:01
  Speaker 1: he has always known, and he is not leaving until
• 1:54:04
  Speaker 1: everything he knows you can become has had the chance
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: to become it. I want to leave you with one
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 1: question to carry into sleep, Not a complicated question, not
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 1: one that requires study or preparation before you can approach it.
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: The simplest kind, the kind that works best when it
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: is held loosely in the dark, the way you hold
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 1: something smooth and worn in your hand when you are
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: almost asleep, feeling the shape of it without trying to
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: force it into anything. The Spirit has been with you
• 1:54:40
  Speaker 1: to day, in the moments you noticed, in the moments
• 1:54:44
  Speaker 1: you did not, in the quiet that arrived unexpectedly, and
• 1:54:49
  Speaker 1: the weight that settled on a sentence somewhere in the
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 1: wanting to be better, and the not knowing how in
• 1:54:56
  Speaker 1: the reaching towards something you could not quite locate. He
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: was present for all of it, knowing, tending, interceding, hovering.
• 1:55:07
  Speaker 1: The question is not whether he was there. The question
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 1: is simply this, do you want to be more aware
• 1:55:14
  Speaker 1: to morrow? That is all. You do not have to
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: answer it now. He is not waiting for your answer
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: before he continues the work he has been doing. He
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: will be present tomorrow, regardless of whether to night produced
• 1:55:29
  Speaker 1: a resolution or a commitment, or a clear sense of
• 1:55:32
  Speaker 1: anything having shifted. But the question is worth holding because
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 1: the people who have walked most closely with the spirit
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: throughout history were not the people with the most dramatic experiences.
• 1:55:46
  Speaker 1: They were the people who learned, over years and ordinary days,
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: to pay attention, to notice, to recognize the movement of
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 1: a familiar presence in the unremarkable moments of an unremarkable life.
• 1:56:01
  Speaker 1: That learning begins with wanting to learn, and wanting begins
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: with a question held quietly in the dark, do you
• 1:56:10
  Speaker 1: want to be more aware tomorrow? Let us pray, Father,
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: we come to the end of this night with quieter
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 1: hearts than we began it with. We have walked through
• 1:56:22
  Speaker 1: a story that started before the world had a shape
• 1:56:26
  Speaker 1: and has not yet reached its final page. We have
• 1:56:30
  Speaker 1: met the spirit hovering over the dark waters before the
• 1:56:33
  Speaker 1: first light existed. We have heard him promised in the
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 1: upper room on the worst night. We have felt him
• 1:56:42
  Speaker 1: arrive at Pentecost in wind and fire and the sound
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 1: of fifteen languages, carrying one truth. We have sat with
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 1: the truth that he is a person with a mind
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 1: and a will and a love that chose to be
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 1: close enough to be wounded by us. We have heard
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 1: him bearing witness in the quiet moments we almost missed.
• 1:57:05
  Speaker 1: We have heard him groaning for us in the nights
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: when we had no words. We have understood, perhaps for
• 1:57:11
  Speaker 1: the first time, that we have never once prayed alone,
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 1: not even on the nights that felt most silent, not
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 1: even on the nights that felt most empty. And we
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 1: have recognized, in the way that recognition is different from information,
• 1:57:28
  Speaker 1: that this person has been with us all along. Keep
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 1: us through this night, Keep the question alive in us,
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 1: Let it settle into the deeper places where it can
• 1:57:40
  Speaker 1: do the slow work that only depth can do. Let
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 1: it be the first thing we carry into the morning,
• 1:57:47
  Speaker 1: not as a burden, but as a direction a person
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 1: to turn toward a presence, to notice in the unremarkable
• 1:57:55
  Speaker 1: hours of a day that will be full of them.
• 1:57:59
  Speaker 1: And when the morning comes, may we wake into the
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 1: awareness that the one who hovered over the first darkness
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 1: is hovering still, That the Paracletos who was promised in
• 1:58:12
  Speaker 1: the upper room has kept the promise across every century
• 1:58:15
  Speaker 1: between that night and this one. That the spirit who
• 1:58:20
  Speaker 1: has been groaning for us through every wordless night is
• 1:58:23
  Speaker 1: already moving in the day that is coming. Thank you
• 1:58:28
  Speaker 1: for the gift of his presence, for the love that
• 1:58:31
  Speaker 1: chows nearness over safety, for the intercession that has never stopped,
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 1: For the filling that is available every morning. Whatever the
• 1:58:41
  Speaker 1: previous day looked like, we receive it again tonight. Amen.
• 1:58:47
  Speaker 1: The journey through this night is complete. But the presence
• 1:58:52
  Speaker 1: you have found here is not staying in the night.
• 1:58:56
  Speaker 1: It is coming into the morning with you, into the ordinary,
• 1:59:02
  Speaker 1: into the meeting and the commute and the difficult conversation
• 1:59:05
  Speaker 1: and the unremarkable meal, and the moment at the end
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 1: of the next day when you lie down again and
• 1:59:12
  Speaker 1: the quiet returns. He will be there. He is always there.
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 1: The darkness over the waters is not frightening when you
• 1:59:22
  Speaker 1: know who is hovering over it, and he is hovering
• 1:59:25
  Speaker 1: over yours. Good Night, beloved,