“Kingdom/God: Part 2: Spirit Preserves In Persons/Church”  

Again, let us read 1 Sam 10:6-7 - 1 Sam 10:6-7 - and I include part of verse 9.

This is Samuel speaking to Saul before Saul became Israel’s first king.

Samuel said to him: ’And the Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, and thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another man.

And let it be, when these signs shall come upon thee, do as the occasion requires: for God is with thee.’

And in v 9: ‘...God gave him(Saul) a changed heart.’

Last week we saw, in a very broad way, how the Spirit of God hovered over God’s plan of salvation from before the foundation of the earth down to the final day.

Tonight, let us also see how the Spirit’s hovering over individuals in a personal way carries God’s plan to its eventual crescendo.

Starting in 1 Samuel, Saul was chosen by God and anointed by His Spirit.

He was anointed in order to be ruler over God’s people, to save them out from the hand of their enemies. (1 Sam 9:16)   

In this new place, he was specifically told to ‘...stand still for a while...’, so that he could be shown the Word of God. 
(v 27)

This is not the one and only time that the Spirit, in His hovering over God’s salvation plan, rested upon and anointed individuals.

There is a pattern of the Spirit’s anointing and visitations that resounds throughout Scripture.

It is seen next in 1 Sam 16:13 where David is singled out and ‘...the Spirit of the Lord came upon him from that day forward...’. 

In David, God saw a heart that would respond in obedience to the Spirit’s hovering over the divine testimony. (16:7)   

Not only was he able to carry on the leadership of Israel, but, through his lineage, God’s salvation purpose also moved forward to the time of Christ’s coming. 

When Christ arrived, the Holy Spirit anointed Christ as an affirmation of His divinity since He came as the promised Messiah.

The establishment of God’s spiritual kingdom within men’s hearts was made possible through His ministry and work.

The thrust of His testimony was not going to be denied nor thwarted by men who refused to ‘stand still’ and be shown God’s Word!

Then, it is in Acts 2 that we see the Spirit descending upon God’s people, confirming His church upon earth.

It ratified and authenticated the Holy Spirit’s continuous brooding over those who have the testimony of Jesus within.

This placed the church, then, as the God-chosen vessel to contain the testimony of Jesus in the same pattern that began with the Spirit’s anointing of Saul.

So, then, what pattern is noticeable in Saul’s anointing that will be carried through to the eternal moment of completion? 

How is the Holy Spirit’s hovering over God’s plan carried forward in such personal measures? 

To start answering this, we will begin with Saul’s anointing.

First, we notice that it certainly is not man’s mind working this out toward God’s intent.

This was ‘divine intervention’ taking place in Saul.

It effectively spoke of God’s way which exceeded the bounds of rationality.

The creative, vitalizing force of the Holy Spirit was advancing God’s intent upon the earth.

His anointing caused Saul to prophesy just as the other prophets did and that surprised his peers.

But it was God’s way of confirming God’s choice of him as their king.

However, it caused a big raucous with the people.

It was unsettling to them!

It disturbed them!

‘What is this with Saul? He is acting like a prophet when he knows he is not listed among the prophets! Has he gone mad?’, they asked among themselves.

But God was making the people know the reality of His moving Spirit - making them aware of the Unseen, the moving of the life within a man anointed by His Spirit.

He was showing Himself as a Divine Being creatively changing a man.

It made clear that the Spirit surprises and upsets! 

He transforms and reorients!

Both the individual and the church universal are in His scope of such spiritual activity.

Thus, we see Him lifting Saul out of Saul’s former modes of thought and feeling.

He was filling Saul with kingly thoughts that related to God’s purposes. 

And He was changing Saul’s desires in giving him ‘another heart’.

Please understand - Saul, in no wise, thought himself worthy of God’s favor. (9:21)

So he was certainly not aspiring to be the leader of God’s people. 

And neither did Samuel appoint him out of his own choosing.

Up to this point, Saul was a hand on his father’s farm.

His thoughts were centered in the livestock his father kept on the ranch. (9:5,20)

And he thought himself to be inadequate and valueless to service for his country.

What did Saul really know about the administrative duties of a king?

Nothing! 

So - we can surely see that Saul needed something more than his natural abilities.

We can see that Saul needed to step beyond his concerns about himself!

What he needed was knowledge and experience toward a regal demeanor.

He needed to know how to be a representative of God to God’s people and perform his work in a kingly and majestic way!  

He needed to see that things went beyond himself, beyond the concerns of the people, and even beyond the narrow vision they had of God’s concerns! 

What he really needed was to ‘stand still for a while’ and be shown the Word of God! ((9:27)

Why?

It was because the Holy Spirit was showing His transforming power which was bringing all things into alignment to God’s end, even the mind and life of an individual man.

The Spirit was breaking through Saul and his life.

He was even breaking through the nation’s economic and political system.

He was going far beyond either of them.

For - the Holy Spirit will not be held back on any account in His ministry of protecting and preserving divine Truth.

‘The Spirit of Truth Who proceeds from the Father shall testify of Me’, Jesus said of Him. (Jn 15:26)

He is set upon the culmination of all God’s work in Christ so He breaks into everything that does not follow through to that end.

He - along with the Lord’s bride - ‘...hold the testimony of Jesus. For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.’

To that end, He continues onward - no matter what!

We may as well count on that!

We may as well realize, once and for all, that all of this entire plan is not about us!

We humans seem to have the notion that everything centers around ‘us’!  

We are so narrow in our vision of God’s mind, so numbed and callused that we think of ourselves as the hub of it all! 

Even the needle of our moral compass today has gone out of line because of this!
 
But if we were to truly reflect on the scope of God’s concerns of His world, we would see how all we say, do and are is of great ultimate significance in His mind.

Yes - even the commonplace matters are important for either they reflect the testimony of Jesus or they reflect the testimony of ourselves.

We would not remain indifferent if we would see Jesus - as the Holy Spirit knows Him to be - as the foundation of all existence.

If we would have that vision we would fully have the testimony of Jesus and catch why the Holy Spirit is so fixed upon it.

And we would see why He is so set upon breaking into everything that does not follow that vision. 

Some are prone to ask the question: ‘What is the Lord doing in you these days?’

The answer to that is always the same: The Holy Spirit is protecting and preserving in me the ‘testimony of Jesus’.

That takes some doing, I know, but that is what it is all about.

It is not about ‘me’!

It is not about a notion that concentrates upon us.

It is all about ‘Jesus Christ the Lord and Savior of the universe!’ 

Do we really believe what we sing on Sunday nights when we sing: ‘It’s all about you, Jesus, it’s all about you’?

Yes - it is all about Him!
 
We cannot escape from having to face the world and the problems of the world: we are ‘in’ it, and thank God, He has given us the opportunity to be ‘in’ it.

For without that, we would not be recipients of His
unbelievable grace in Christ if we were not ‘in’ this world.

But - ‘in’ it, although we know there is no safe place to hide, especially in our world today with all of its evil influences and ideologies, we do have the distinctive identity of holding within the ‘testimony of Jesus’.

And as the Holy Spirit safeguards that, He develops habits of resistance that transforms and reorients our thoughts and feelings.

So - through the events of anointing and possession of God’s Spirit, Saul was transformed to ‘carry’ the Word of God to the world.

The Holy Spirit was given access to protect and preserve it in Saul, as He does in us today.

And He put Saul’s abilities and capabilities into a new purpose and gave him a new center.

So - yes, of course, we can expect transformation and change when we are open to God’s Spirit leading on.

We know that nothing can change this world. Change will only come through the inroad of the divine power which is greater than anything the world offers.

But we Christians are called to pay attention to the Holy Spirit’s patterns of God’s grace through Christ operating within.

It is part of the work of God’s saving plan in the world.

It is under the Spirit’s preservation and protection to bring it all forward to the final day.

So - I urge each of us to yield to His promptings toward righteousness that guard the testimony of Jesus we hold.

Yes - He will disturb some of our notions!

And - yes - He will upset and fluster us!

But we still abandon ourselves to Him - and, as we do, many times, He will speak His ‘stand still...I will show you the Word of God.’

We bow to Him - simply because the love that Christ is in us constrains us to yield - even as hard as it seems and even as many times as we may have done so already!

We just keep yielding to His promptings - for they are designed to guard the precious Treasure of the Christ we carry!

When you and I do that, when His Church universal does that, it is one step closer to when the Spirit and we, the Lord’s bride, stand together on the final day!

I leave you with the story about one of the recent rescues of a young lady - sixteen years old - out from a brothel in Southeast Asia.

One of her relatives, on the pretense of getting her a job to help with family expenses, handed her off to sex traffickers.  

In their clutches, she was forcibly kept in a brothel, and for seven months, was raped repeatedly, day and night.

Was such a despicable evil forced upon her a just act? Obviously - the answer to that is ‘NO’!

Was it easy for her to endure? Of course not! 

But - in spite of the sin committed against her, the testimony of Jesus within her was kept held high.

For - when she was rescued - her liberators found on her wall many Scriptures she had written in her own language, Scriptures such as ‘The Lord is my strength, of whom shall I be afraid?’

And they found a part of Scripture telling how David trusted the Lord: ‘...even though evildoers assail me to devour my flesh...’, yet she comforted herself in the Lord!

That is the royal demeanor distinctive of the testimony of Jesus that the Holy Spirit guards so carefully and will carry forward to the final day!

I will close for tonight. 

May the Lord bless these thoughts to our hearts this week in a new and living way! Amen! Let us pray!