Materials
What We Believe
#5
The Spirit Who Is Making Us
Holy
Isaiah 61; Romans 8:9-11
by R. Todd Bouldin
I think one of our greatest fears that we face in life is that we
are stuck with ourselves. We would all love to be somebody or something
a little different than we are. The marketing departments of most
corporations are counting on that so they flash products before your
eyes that promise to make you into the person you wish you could be
but aren’t.
Here is just a sampling from this week’s New York Times
bestseller list for Advice Books:
Natural Cures They Don’t Want You To Know About
Your Best Life Now
Jim Cramer’s Real Money
French Women Don’t Get Fat
The 3-Hour Diet
And for all you women already struggling with self-esteem:
He’s Just Not That Into You.
Apparently, dieting, money, health and relationships are among our
favorite ways for improving life. But no matter how much money you
save, or how many pounds you lose, you still show up in the mirror
in the morning. And that is the person we’re all most worried
about seeing.
Since the beginning, we have been worried about ourselves, and
that has caused most of the problems with both ourselves and the world.
We were placed in a garden that was filled with good fruits, and we
could eat all we wanted. So many blessings were ours, except the fruit
of one tree which happened to be in the middle of the garden. That
evidently is God’s idea of a good creation, and even in its
perfect state we weren’t supposed to have it all. This drove
Adam and Eve, and you and me crazy. So life always feels like it has
a hole in it. Something is missing. We want it all. So where do we
pitch our tent? Beneath the one thing we do not have. “To heck
with the rest of the garden. I want the fruit on that tree.”
So we are exiled from the garden, and we realize then that the place
we were before was paradise, even though we couldn’t have it
all. But it’s now a paradise lost. The hardest thing about
this exile is not just the blessings lost but the loss of a place
where we knew communion with God. When we fell from this communion,
we brought all of creation down with us (Romans 8).
The second half of the book of Isaiah has Isaiah speaking to exiles
who were as homeless as those who fill the Convention Center in New
Orleans and the Houston Astrodome this week. The exile was devastating
to the Hebrews because they lost everything that they had built for
themselves at the hands of the Babylonians. But most of all, they
had lost their place of communion with God. Now they were exiled in
a foreign place far from home and it felt as though they were far
from their God.
Isaiah is relentless in explaining God’s justice in leveling
this judgment against them, but he also offers consoling words that
promise a coming restoration from exile. But his promise isn’t
just that the exiles can one day return home. His promise is that
one day a servant of The Lord will restore all creation to the glory
of the first paradise. Isaiah says that you will know this servant
when He arrives because The Spirit of The Lord will be upon Him, the
same Spirit that moved aside the chaos and darkness on the first day
of creation and brought beauty and light in its place. When The
Spirit comes to rest upon this Servant, all will be restored to its
communion with God.
Isaiah weaves this promise in and out of his long judgment sermons.
In Isaiah 11, we are told that “a shoot shall come out from
the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots. The
Spirit of The Lord shall rest on Him.” (Isaiah 11:1-2a). When
this happens, the wolf will lie down with the lamb. In chapter 42,
Isaiah says that justice will break out when this Spirit comes upon
God’s Servant. Then in chapter 61, Isaiah proclaims a vision
of the day when The Servant of The Lord will say, “The Spirit
of The Lord is upon me, because The Lord has anointed Me to bring
good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim
liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners, to proclaim
the year of The Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our
God to comfort all who mourn.” (Isaiah 61:1-2).
For centuries, the people waited for this servant, this Messiah, who
would bring about the restoration of all things, who would reverse
the fall and bring all of creation back home to God. Then one day
in a removed village in Galilee, a rabbi named Jesus was asked to
read the Scripture on the Sabbath day. He stood up, opened the scroll
to Isaiah 61, and read, “The Spirit of The Lord is upon Me .
. .” and then went on to rehearse all the dimensions of this
great reversal (Luke 4:18-19). And at the end of the reading, He said,
“Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
It seems to me that Jesus is saying that He has come to remove
the judgment of exile from us and from all of creation. He has
come to remove the scourge of the Fall: to release captives, to bind
up wounds, to give freedom to the poor, and to declare God’s
favor again. As God’s incarnation that takes upon Himself the
creation, Christ restores us to communion with God. Exiles are brought
home, humanity is restored to those who had been dehumanized, and
all creation can know re-creation. And it is God’s Spirit that
has anointed and created this, just as The Spirit did at the beginning
of creation. Now The Spirit is upon Jesus, and as we learn later,
the church, to carry out this new creative act of restoration.
Luke won’t let us miss this point. He says that when Jesus was
conceived, it was the same Spirit of God at work in creation. When
Jesus was baptized, it was that same Spirit that descended upon Him.
It was the Spirit that drove Him into the wilderness to be tempted.
The Spirit led Him and gifted Him for a ministry of healing and forgiveness
of sin. Day after day, The Spirit was there, pressing the incarnation
deeper into the wounded creation, binding Christ to us and to all
things, bringing it back to life and home again to God.
When we get to the epistles of the New Testament, we find the authors
constantly referring to the role of this Holy Spirit who binds us
into Christ. In Romans, Paul says that The Spirit is God dwelling
in you (Romans 8:9), The Spirit is life in you (Romans 8:10), that
The Spirit will bring your dead body to life (Romans 8:11), and that
it confirms over and over again to you that you are the child of God.
(Romans 8:14-16). And then Paul says in Galatians 5 that this Spirit
is so binding you to Christ that the fruit of your life will show
the character of Jesus (Galatians 5:22-26). That is how you will become
holy again.
What that means is that you will not become holy by trying. That is
just another exercise in self-improvement that isn’t going to
work any better than your last diet or your last investment scheme.
You will be made holy by the work of the Holy Spirit who adopts you
into the relationship of The Son to The Father that you become like
The Son as you settle in at Home again. And the world won’t
be made holy by our improvement projects either. The Spirit has anointed
Jesus to do that work. There is only One Servant who has the job of
being The Messiah, and He doesn’t need our help making the improvements.
But that doesn’t mean that there is nothing for us to do. We
are called to be witnesses who are Spirit-filled. The Spirit too
has come upon us and indwelt us, and now we have a mission to go into
all the creation proclaiming the good news that God is putting it
all back together again in Jesus. And that will naturally lead
the church collectively to do even greater things than Jesus did alone
as we start turning back the Dark Force and start rebuilding a world
redeemed and restored by God.
There is no more one place that is holy land. Now no land is foreign
to God for in Christ all places and things are being restored to Him.
That includes your days which are jam packed with car pools, dirty
laundry, cell phones that won’t quit ringing, computers that
keep crashing, copy machines that won’t quit breaking, and meetings
that keep going. It is true even in the dank and watery streets of
New Orleans today too. It is true in the places where thousands of
homeless sleep in churches, stadiums and city streets. It is true
in third world villages ravaged by famine and disease. It is true
in all affluent homes too.
Christ has brought all of creation back to God. Jesus can be found
in every place and in every corner of the earth – wherever The
Spirit of The Lord is there, is healing, forgiving and bringing exiles
back home. So we too will look at the watery grave of the Gulf, we
will go home and go to work, we will look into the eyes of the poor
and hungry this week, and there we will find more than just need.
We might just find The Spirit of the Lord healing, freeing and renewing.
And so we look all around us, and our Savior is bringing it all back
home to Him through The Spirit who is creating a new heaven and earth.
“Holy, Holy, Holy. The whole earth is full of His glory.”
September 4, 2005
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