“The Case for Christ - The Power of the Holy Spirit”

‘Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee...’. (Lu 4:14) 

Jesus was conceived by ‘the power of the Highest overshadowning Mary...’ (Lu 1:35); He had grown strong in spirit...the grace of God...upon Him (ch 2:40); in 3:22, the ‘Holy Ghost...descended upon Him; and, ‘...being full of the Holy Ghost...’ He ‘was led by the Spirit into the wilderness’. (ch 4:1)

And, here, in Luke 4:14, is the conclusion of the temptation where we see the power of the Spirit, the power of God’s Spirit, upon Jesus as He went on into His public ministry.

And, now, let us read verses 16-21: ‘And He came to Nazareth...and, on the Sabbath day He went into the synagogue, as was His custom. And He stood up to read. And there was delivered unto Him the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when He had opened the book, He found the place where it is written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.’ and He closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down...and He began to say unto them, ‘This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears.’ 

In the first few chapters of Luke, the work of the Holy Spirit in Jesus’ life, from birth to this very moment, is of utmost importance.

It is heightened when Jesus read the Scripture describing the ministry of the One Who would come to fulfill it. The Spirit of the Lord would be upon Him and that One would bring good news - the Gospel - to the people; He would proclaim liberty to those who were in bondage, those captive to sin; He would heal those who were spiritually broken; He would illuminate those spiritually blind, those who are unable to understand spiritual realities; and He would ‘preach the acceptable year of the Lord’, that time when God’s grace would flow freely to reveal His heart of love, mercy, and grace toward men.   

This word from Isaiah 61:1-3 spoke of an anointing by the Spirit that would be upon this One Who was to come.

It is that reference to the anointing of the Holy Spirit that connected what Jesus is reading in the synagogue with Himself and with His baptism and His temptation.

And what is described of the work of this anointed Person correlates with the temptation in His having overcome the temptation by being ‘full of the Holy Ghost’ and led by Him.

Yes - this was the One Who was the Messiah having come from their God. He was the One Who was being constrained by the Holy Spirit with an anointing for carrying out the work of the Messiah.

This reading by Jesus there in the synagogue, with its emphasis upon the Spirit’s anointing and on the Scripture,  is more significant than we can imagine.

It is placed at the very beginning of His public ministry and it gave the indication that everything that Jesus would do, He would do by the power of the Holy Spirit. 

And, His actions, governed and guided by the Holy Spirit, would fulfill every bit of the work of the Messiah foretold in the Scripture and all of His Father’s expectations.

And, thus, Jesus concluded with: ‘This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears’.

Now, what Jesus understood by these Isaiah verses differed sharply from what His hearers assumed they meant.

What is it He was saying?

It was the Gospel that Jesus read to them. It was the Gospel of God’s grace that was being revealed in a personal, living way by the personal, living God in the Man, Jesus. 

He is declaring Himself to be the predicted and divinely anointed Servant of Jehovah Who was sent to bring the Gospel of redemption to His people. 

This was the day they were being introduced to the fulfillment of the good news that only He could fulfill. He was not there to teach them better social conditions: He was there only to join them livingly and fully to God, His Father, in the way that He Himself was livingly and fully joined with Him in His manhood, of being led and guided by Divine Unction.

As He stood before the people in the synagogue that day, He stood before them - and before the whole world for all time - as the Chief Evangelist, as the Chief Healer, as the Chief Emancipator, as the Chief Illuminator, and as the Chief Allocator of Divine Grace.

And He not only appeared before them as the Herald of all this Good News, but also as the dispenser of the new and great Gifts of God, including the Gift of the Holy Spirit.

Through Him, He would show them life at its highest and its best, according to the Divine Ideal.

The very Light of Light, the very Light of Love, the very Light of Truth was there with them - the Messiah - the One they were looking for each time they read this Isaiah Scripture.

What if you or I were in the audience that day - would we have understood this?

Just as Jehovah said of Him in Isa 42:1, ‘I have put My Spirit upon Him’, so here, in Luke 4, Jesus said of Himself, ‘The Spirit of Jehovah is upon Me.’

Those things He would do from this moment on were to be understood as the fulfillment of His anointing by the Holy Spirit given to Him by God. 

All were to understand that what Jesus would do was going to be done by the power of the Spirit. His actions and what was going to happen was in order to fulfill the Scriptures. 

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me’,  ‘He is pressing down upon Me’, He said, with the idea being that of the Spirit as the holy unction constraining Him with an anointing for carrying out the full work of the Messiah.

For this, He lacked nothing! He was perfectly endowed by the Spirit with everything requisite to do His Messianic work. 

God promised that in Isa 11:2: ‘And the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.’

His thoroughly spiritual nature of the ‘spirit of wisdom and understanding, of counsel and might, of knowledge and the fear of the Lord’, the whole creative fulness of divine powers, consecrated and equipped Him for His great work. 

Jehovah laid upon Him a firm hold by endowing Him with His Spirit. And, by His Spirit, He would carry out, with absolute and divine right, the true way of life in regard to its practical side, in regard to the rule and authority of life in all of its relations.

His life was going to become the law of life; His Life was going to become the divine prescription!

So, Peter could confidently preach, later, by saying, in Acts 10:36-38: ‘The word which God sent unto the children of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ: (He is Lord of all:)  - that word...[which is] how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and power: Who went about doing good, and healing...for God was with Him.’ 

But, you see, the secret of His life was seen, first, in His identification with sinners, and then, secondly, in His submitting Himself unreservedly to His Father and then doing His Father’s will. 

His love for His Father was demonstrated so vividly in His life that His Father could display Him to all the world and say of Him, even centuries before: ‘Here is My Servant, Whom I uphold, My chosen One in Whom I delight...I have put My Spirit upon Him...’ 

And, now, I will say this with all frankness which, I hope, you will ponder seriously: God, the Father, does not give - does not give - the priceless Gift of the Holy Spirit to just anyone.

Let me repeat that: God the Father does not give the Gift of the Holy Spirit to just anyone - are we all aware of that?

Let me just ask this one question at this point: what is a Christian - really? What is it that has made any one of us a Christian?

There is a sad thing occurring in our day: it is the notion of what a Christian is - of how we define ‘Christian’!

It has become a convenient vague name - and it is getting more vague all the time, it seems.

For the world, the term ‘Christian’ has a certain bitter ill-will connected with it, and, of course, we can understand that in terms of the Satanic opposition against Christ.

But, what is sad, is when someone who says he (quote) ‘knows Christ’ (unquote) and, yet, his actions consistently contradict his claims. That is when the world jumps upon the obvious inconsistency to ridicule or deride, - and - it probably has good reason to do that.

But the problem is that we Christians seem to have the wrong idea of the word ‘Christian’ ourselves.

You see - that is because it does not describe the deepest and the most sacred of the bonds that unite us to Jesus Christ. It does not touch the central, deepest relation between man and God.
  
A Christian is one who has been set apart for God - separated unto God - that is why he is called a ‘saint’.

That is the central idea of ‘saint‘, the reason why we are called ‘Christians’.

But, that separation unto God is only through the truest way in which any one of us can possess and know Him - and -  that way is by means of the Holy Spirit.

It was painful to see, during the charismatic movement years ago, how there were those playing the role of the Holy Spirit, even to the putting of words, supposedly coming from the Holy Spirit, into the mouths of those professing to be Christians.

Let me tell you: they were treading where angels fear to trod!

I have often wondered since then, how many of those people are still living under that delusion - I hope none. 

But we Christians can make such dribble of the things of the Lord when they are really something so sacred, so divine, that we ought to be treading lightly with them.

If we would but realize the value of this Gift of God, we would realize that it has no relationship to any worldly or earthy concepts that we have devised.

It is faith, trust, and a solid belief in Christ and all He is and has done that brings down from heaven upon the one who really is a Christian the Gift of the indwelling of the Spirit of God - the indwelling of God in Christ.

That is the only way - the truest way a Christian is really a Christian, a saint of the living God. Apart from the Gift of the Holy Spirit, we are not joined to Christ. 

We are only obliged to Him in some vague way, and that - perhaps - only on the days we (quote) ‘go to church to do our Christian duty’ (unquote). 

And the true Christian makes no claims to any special purity; we make only the claim that we have been born of the Spirit of God and therefore, are separated unto Him through Jesus Christ. 

He who has God in His heart by the dwelling there of the mystic reality of the Divine Spirit possesses Christ for the life of life.

It can be explained as simply as this: because of Christ’s work of redemption, we are forgiven; because of He having been resurrected from the dead, we have new life in Him; and because He is now the exalted Christ, He can indwell us by the Holy Spirit.

We have not received the Spirit on any other basis: only on the basis of the way Jesus so faithfully carried out His work of salvation that He promised to do when He made the declaration: ‘This day is the Scripture fulfilled in your ears.’

We have an Infinite Spirit to dwell with us, and - yes - we do feel how finite and how little is our understanding of Him and our abandonment to Him and how little He has of us!

We sometimes take stock of ourselves and we say that we are His, and, yet, we live to please ourselves.

We profess to belong to Him, but, yet, we render only fragments of ourselves and scarcely even fragments of our time and of our effort. 

We are His, we say, yet, we keep wallowing in our own selfishness, in our own self-pity, in our own greed and self-worship.

We are His, we say, yet we live godless lives, indulging in the things the world does and says that are so contrary to Christ and His ways.

We are Christian, we are the ‘saints of God’, we say, yet we make a pillow of our ‘laziness’ and of our ‘laxness’ and sleep contentedly upon it, sometimes, years upon years.

Listen - the Holy Spirit is given to us to live! He has been given to us to live!

The power of God’s Spirit is that Divine force acting in a man’s nature and, it is He - the God-given Spirit - Who is capable of producing effects of entire transformation.

He is certainly not given to those of us who are Christians to prove how great and wonderful we are.

Oh, no! It was to prove how great and wonderful the Son of God is - to prove the Lordship of Jesus Christ to this present generation!

God’s facts are the basis of our experience. And our experience will come as we take those divine facts into our hearts and they minister life to us.

The Scripture declares that the Holy Spirit is life to the Christian. And the life of Jesus is always being manifested to us by the Spirit. (2 Cor 4:10)  

If we are the same persons, inwardly, that we were a year ago, 2, 5, 10, 30 years ago, and we still call ourselves 
‘Christian’, then something is wrong. 

The Holy Spirit’s activity in us will affect the way we relate to friends, family, the world, to the attractions of the world.

Our values, goals, behavior, everything about us, is affected by Him. Crises in significant areas of life will be precipitated by Him that are to be met, overcome, and lived in the Spirit and according to the Scriptural basis. And, then, the old patterns of life are changed! 

True - when we look at ourselves, we are looking at an unfinished work, but - what He has started, He is able to finish in us, of that you can be sure.

But - there must come that time when His work produces its appropriate effects. 

I repeat: there must, if we are Christians, there must come that time when His work produces its fruit so that there will be that true exaltation of Christ and we can say, of a truth, ‘We are Christians!’

And that means that we need to cooperate unreservedly and fully with the deep work of the Holy Spirit within us.

When we see Him as Lord, as the effective Ruler in our lives, that is when we will know of the power of the Spirit within us.

Yes - let me say that again - when we actually see Him, see Him as Lord of all we are and do, as the effective Ruler, as the sure Emancipator and the Illuminator, that is when we will know of the power of the Spirit within us. That is when we are enjoying a living relationship with Him.  

Jesus had received from His Father this promise of the Holy Spirit, the promise of the whole, creative fulness of divine powers that kept Him, as a Man, joined to His Father in Divine fellowship with Him.

He was fully equipped by Him for all of His Messianic work, from His birth to His exaltation.

Since He was so highly successful in fulfilling every single Messianic expectation by the power of the Holy Spirit, do you not think that He Himself, knowing all things, having done all things by the Holy Spirit, can He not also lead us along by giving us His Spirit to live the Christian life aright?

By Him and the power of His Spirit, we can ‘bear the image of the heavenly’! 

I leave these thoughts with you tonight. May the Lord bless it to each of our hearts. Amen!

Let us pray!