When the Spirit Moves 1985

From John chapter 3, starting at verse 4, Nicodemus said to him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born? Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, You must be born anew.

The wind blows where it wills. You can hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

Nicodemus said to him, How can this be? Jesus answered him, Are you a teacher in Israel, and yet you do not understand this? The wind blows where it wills. You hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it is coming from or where it is going. The wind has a mind of its own, which we cannot predict, even with all our technology, nor can we control.

It blows where it wants to. And the Spirit of God moves in exactly the same way. He blows where he wills, moves where he wants to go.

And he carries with him those who are yielded to him. And those who are not, blink their eyes and wonder what is happening. Nicodemus was blinking his eyes, couldn't figure it out.

He saw things happening in Israel which he had never seen before. People were being healed. Lives were changing.

A following was gathering around this Jesus. A following of men and women who had thrown caution to the wind. People who were really committed.

So he goes to Jesus at night to try to figure this out. Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God. No one can do these signs that you are doing unless God is with him.

And Jesus says to him, Nicodemus, if you commit to this thing, if you yield to the Spirit, if you commit yourself, then you will understand what is going on. You will be born of the Spirit, and your eyes will open, and you will see the Kingdom. But if you stand on the fringe, and you just try to figure it out from a distance outside, you will see nothing.

This can only be seen from within. Now the same Spirit that was moving through Jesus at that time, gathering followers, is moving through Jesus now. Gathering followers, making disciples, healing lives, transforming people.

The Spirit is moving among us. He is moving among believers all over the city, out over the suburbs, and all across the earth. And those who are yielding to him are being caught up, and they are beginning to experience some changes.

They are beginning to hear things that have to happen, changes that have to take place in their own lives, and they are moving with it, and they are experiencing life. And those who are not yielded, just blink their eyes and wonder, what in the world is happening? The wind blows where it wills. You hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes.

So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. And those who are born of the Spirit, and those who are now being born of the Spirit, are being caught by the Spirit, gathered by the Spirit, filled with life, anointed with power, and then sent out into that world to force that world to reckon with the fact it has been trying to avoid 20 centuries. That Jesus is Lord.

That Jesus, crucified outside Jerusalem 20 centuries ago, raised by that same Spirit, is Lord over this planet now. Now for many years, many of us have felt that we just had more important things to do than to bang our heads against the wall trying to get the world to listen to that message. And so we come together, and we celebrate Jesus' Lordship, and we sing about it, and we pray about it, and we break bread together, and then we go on about our busy lives.

But the wind blows where it wants to. And when the wind begins to blow in the direction of harvesting the world in crisis, harvesting souls in crisis, those sheep out there with no shepherd, when the Spirit draws near to us and in some way says, I want more. Wake up! Move with me! Speak as I anoint you and inspire you.

Act as I guide you. When the Spirit begins to do this to us, we have to move. We really have no choice unless we want the Spirit to move on and leave us behind.

Now what does it mean to move with the Spirit, people say? What are you talking about? When the Spirit moves in the body of Christ, what happens always is that somehow a word comes forth in the body that calls for some kind of action, some kind of change. And as that word becomes clear, and we see that that is coming to us, really is a word from God. To move with the Spirit is simply to act on that word, to do something about it.

It's like a light that comes on, and you can see at least one step, one change that needs to be made, one act of repentance, some specific thing that you need to do. And I see this thing that I have to do, but I'm not sure whether I have the stamina to sustain that change. I'm not sure what the outcome is going to be a year or two down the road.

But I see that one thing that I have to do now. And if I do that, if I act on that, if I move on that, if I make that act of repentance, if I take that step right away, the Spirit assures me that He will guide me, and He'll take care of my future. I won't have to worry about the future.

That's His problem. My problem is to take the one step that lies ahead of me. In apostolic days, they took the Lordship of the Spirit over their lives as a matter of course.

It was just understood that the Spirit could call a meeting anytime He wanted to, and that He could disrupt their lives in any way He chose, because He was the Lord. An illustration of this is in Acts chapter 13, a passage very familiar to us. Now, in the church at Antioch, there were prophets and teachers, Barnabas, Simeon, who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Mannion, a member of the court of Herod the Tetrarch, and Saul.

While they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said to them, the Holy Spirit said to them, Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them. Now, how did He say it? I mean, it wasn't like they heard a voice coming from up there. A word came forth from one of these people that they all acknowledge as coming from the Spirit.

They call it prophecy. And they tested it, they accepted it as a word from God. Separate for me, set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.

Then after fasting and praying, they laid their hands on them and sent them off. So being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia, and from there they sailed to Cyprus. When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews.

So it was obvious that the Spirit was absolute Lord over their lives. That was a given, they understood that. It was also understood that the Holy Spirit was absolutely dependable, that He would guide them.

He would give them the guidance they needed. If they needed correction, they would get correction. If they needed power, they would get power.

And they wanted to see results, some kind of fruit, something flowing out of all this. It always came. Always.

That same Spirit is still Lord over the body of Christ, including here. He's moving upon the earth in a unique way right now. Everywhere, all over the place.

And He's calling us to wake up and move with Him. And He promises that if we do this, He will guide us. He'll give us guidance.

He'll correct us. He'll give us power. And He'll give us fruit.

More fruit than we've ever seen. We will see lives changed. We will see churches springing up out of nowhere.

We'll see leadership emerging, strong, clear, reliable leadership coming forth from the body from directions we'd never imagined. We'll see all those things if we move with Him. On the other hand, if we don't move, the wind just blows on and we remain behind caught in a desert of dead air to stagnate.

No air, no wind, no life. At the meeting Tuesday night, Helen Campbell read a passage from Revelation 3. And this reading that she gave us, along with just about every utterance that came forth in that meeting, had in it a word from God for us if we had the ears to hear. Interesting that this is the same passage that Anne Hegarty gave me a year ago as a message she felt the Lord was giving for the flock.

And it comes to us not as a criticism, not as some kind of heavy condemnation, but as really a word of life, a doorway to more life than we've ever seen. A word of hope, but a call for all of us to do whatever we have to do in order to let the Spirit have His way with us. Revelation 3, verse 1. And to the angel of the church at Sardis write the words of him who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars.

I know your works. You have the name of being alive and you are dead. Awake and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death, for I have not found your works perfect, that is, wholehearted, in the sight of my God.

Remember then what you have received and heard. Keep that and repent. If you will not awake, I will come like a thief and you will not know at what hour I will come upon you.

Yet you still have a few names at Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy. He who conquers shall be clad thus with white garments, and I will not blot his name out of the book of life. I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels.

He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. The question we need to ask ourselves as individuals and as a flock is, are we being driven by the life and movement of the Spirit of God? Or are we moving on past momentum? Now the tendency in all of us, you know, is to move on the momentum of our past reputation. All of us.

If I draw my satisfaction, if I take comfort from the fact that I have a name for being alive, then I'm immediately dead. Because my life is not in my name and it's not in my reputation. My life is in the Spirit of God, who has to be my life this moment.

Awake and strengthen what remains and is on the point of death simply means that instead of drawing that strength from myself, I draw it from the Spirit. I worship the Spirit who leads me to Jesus, who leads me to the Father. And I open my heart to the Spirit and I obey the Spirit.

The Spirit will give a word for me to obey, something for me to do. And I rise up and I do it. Remember what you have received and heard.

Keep that and repent. What does that mean? It simply means that I draw my strength, my life, not from my name, not from my reputation, not from what anybody thinks I am, but from the Spirit of the living God who is at work in our lives. He alone is my strength.

He alone is my life. He is my power. He is my wisdom.

He's my health. He's my everything. The wind blows where it wants to.

And you can hear the sound of it, but you don't know where it's coming from or where it's going. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. The same Spirit that came to Jesus at His baptism, our Lord, the same Spirit that spoke through His mouth, that moved through His healing hands, that guided Him to go to that cross and lay down His life for us, that raised Him from the dead, that came out over the church on the day of Pentecost and flooded them with resurrection life.

That same Spirit is at work in the body, on earth, and among us here now. And He's calling for us to come forward toward Him with more. I want more.

I want you to wake up. I want you to go out. I want you to go out there and take the Lamb.

He says to us. He will guide us into every new path we need to take. He will give us direction about every change we need to make as individuals and as a body.

He'll give us guidance if we'll move with the light we now have. Walk with that step you have in front of you, you'll get the light for the next ten steps. As you need it.

And He will correct us. The Spirit will correct us. He'll put His finger on every attitude, every idol, every sin, every fear that has to go if we move with Him.

And He will empower us, make us more than conquerors, enable us to break through that wall of indifference out there and in here. He'll enable us to tear down those lies of the enemy and set those captives free and break those chains and make us more than conquerors. And He will give us fruit.

More fruit than we have ever seen. We, individually and corporately, will find ourselves in the coming days, if we move with Him, we will find ourselves leading people from the kingdom, introducing them to the shepherd and seeing them walk right on through. To our amazement, they'll keep on walking right on through.

If we will go toward these people to whom He leads us and if we speak the words He puts in our mouths, this will happen. The wind blows where it wants to. You can hear the sound of it, but you don't know where it's going or where it came from.

So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. And it's no hard thing to be born of the Spirit. It's a matter of receiving and obeying and moving and acting.