In the interests of preserving interest in this blog for its three readers, I thought, ‘how might I generate content without having to do too much work?’ And struck on the brilliant idea of at least posting up the sermon series that I’m working on as they go by. That way, two of my readers might see something new and worthwhile here. They might, if it’s really a compelling series, comment, and that would be exciting.
So we kick off with the first big series of 2010, appropriately enough titled
“The Ghost in the Machine: the Holy Spirit in the Christian Life”
And then I copy and paste…
January 31 • John 3:1-8
The Spirit Absconditus
We begin with the problem: how do we look at God’s Spirit, when he seems to hide from us?
February 7 • Acts 2:14-39
The Doubly Promised Spirit
Promises, promises! The Spirit had always been something promised for the future, but the wait was getting ridiculous. This had better be good…
February 14 • Luke 4:14-30
The Man of the Spirit
… and for that matter, what would it look like, to live with that promise fulfilled?
February 21 • Psalm 104
The Giving Gift: Creation
The Spirit is a gift, but he is a gift that keeps on giving. First, there is the gift of being…
February 28 • 2 Corinthians 3:7-18
The Giving Gift: Conversion
… then, the gift of truly being …
March 7 • Romans 8:1-17
The Giving Gift: Sanctification
… and finally, the gift of truly being ourselves, ourselves as we are meant to be: men and women of the Spirit.
March 14 • 2 Corinthians 12:1-11
Given for the Common Good
With our annual meeting following a combined service, this makes the perfect time to consider the gifts of the Spirit. Who are they, and why ‘what’ is wrong!
March 21 • Ezekiel 37:1-14
The Giver of Life
Who is the Spirit? He is who he has always been, the one who breathes life into us, from cradle to grave. The one who engineers our humanity. The one who makes Life. Worth. Living.
There, that was easy!
5 comments:
Nice! I particularly like the gift of being, of truly being, and of truly being ourselves. I hope that you draw out the links between the three (conversion is into becoming truly alive/human/ourselves).
Out of curiosity (not that I doubt their many talents), how many of your congregation know what absconditus means?
Yeah, I liked the way that the language accommodated me there. And yes, that's my intention - it shows the Spirit doesn't have a grab-bag of activities and interests, unrelated to each other, but that's he's been giving life since the beginning. And it should help conceive of the significance of union with Christ/adoption, I hope.
Absconditus? They all know it, now at least! It was the title in my head as I was thinking about the series, and I gave plenty of thought to changing it, but in the end I liked it - because it carries that hint of disapproval (from abscond) which I think we can attach to the fact that the Spirit isn't sufficiently clearly revealed (or so we say, anyway) to prevent the squabbles we have now amongst varying stripes of evangelicals. My intent was to turn that around a little.
Thus, the major application from the first sermon, as regards the Spirit at least, was that there's no reason for us to know (of) him at all...except for Rahner's point about economic/essential Trinity: God wants us to know him, and to know we know him, in truth if only in part.
Oh - and the joke: when I posted up the first sermon recording on our website, I went to test it worked. It crashed the browser. And the local copy of the file made Media Player hang. And Audacity refused to open, let alone look at the file.
Ghost in the Machine indeed!!
Ha - the Spirit blows where it will...
Fair enough on absconditus. I have no problem with actually expecting people to learn things in a sermon.
Just a short note for those who like to leave spam comments:
1) Blogger deletes them immediately, you know. And there aren't enough people getting RSS comments feeds to make it worth your time.
2) The title of this post was a joke. It wasn't meant to focus your spam efforts on this particular post. If you're going to keep doing it, feel free to branch out. Maybe the 'Clayton's Post' would be more appropriate for Clayton's comments? Just saying.
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