Freedom

Freedom!

Summary

Uncover a powerful story of freedom and transformation through prayer and action. Experience the deep joy and spiritual freedom that comes from being filled with the Holy Spirit and living out the kingdom of God.

Transcript

It is so good to be gathered together. One of my favorite parts of our gathering together is hearing the Word of the Lord read aloud. So many of us, the majority of the time when we're interacting with the Bible, we're interacting in a reading way, which is a wonderful practice for anyone and everyone. But originally, the Scriptures were read aloud to the church, to the community of people. People didn't have Bibles in their homes. They were listening to the Scriptures read aloud, whether they were read by Jesus, like in Luke 4, or the early church fathers as they went along. And it was this reading of the Word that connected them to one another and to God's story.

And so I hope that that serves as the same for us as we gather together each week to worship. I want to say today, thank you all for being here. You being here is a gift that you have given to those around you. And it's something that we want to acknowledge and something that we want to thank you for. We certainly do not take your presence for granted, whether you are here in person or for those who are gathered with us online. We are thankful for everyone today. Today is Prayer Sunday, so we will spend some time after the message today in prayer.

I want to just give you an encouragement as you sit and listen and are present today. Be considering what are things that are going on in your life that maybe you want to be prayed for about. Maybe it's an issue of wisdom that you need, or a situation that you want to change or find reconciliation with, or an illness or an ailment that's bothering you. Whatever it is, we would love the opportunity to pray for you and to gather together as a community and to pray. I want to teach you a prayer today. It's one that we've been saying over the last couple of weeks. It comes from Acts 13.

It's pretty simple, and we're going to do the good old-fashioned repeat after me. If that's comfortable for you, I invite you to repeat after me. Let's pray this prayer. God, fill us with joy and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Such a beautiful prayer for us. An interesting context to that prayer is the early church, the disciples in Acts 13.

They just received a bad situation. They were basically kicked out of town. I don't know if you've ever been kicked out of somewhere. That's not a fun feeling, right? Typically, whenever something goes on that we don't like, joy and full of the Holy Spirit are probably not the things that come out of us. It's probably anger or sadness or fear or depression or having felt judged. But for them, they left with being full of joy and the Holy Spirit.

It is my contention today that in the world that we live in, if the church could capture that, being full of joy and the Holy Spirit regardless of what is going on around us, then others would notice that and desire the fullness of the Holy Spirit themselves. With all that said, and with today being Prayer Sunday, I want to say to us today that as much as we believe in prayer and find freedom in prayer and hope in prayer and pray together as a community, prayer is not a magic formula. Prayer is not a magic formula.

Amen is not equivalent to abracadabra or bibbidi-bobbidi-boo. Those are two totally different things. Prayer is not a magic formula. And if we as a community and as individuals, if we desire the fullness of the Holy Spirit and the fullness of joy, then we need to pray, but also our prayer needs to be joined in with action. Prayer and action. We think about this conversation as it's played out in the scriptures. There's a conversation of are we saved by grace or are we saved by works?

And the theologically sound answer is, of course, yes. Both are equally true. We are saved by grace, but grace fills us to good works in the kingdom of heaven. Prayer is the same way. We pray, but also we act upon what we know to be the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Dallas Willard says it like this. Grace is not opposed to effort.

It is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Sometimes people pray thinking that once they say amen, God is bound to give them what they want or do what they want. Similarly to the idea of abracadabra. But prayer is not that. Prayer is an opportunity for us to be in communion with God.

Prayer is an opportunity for us to be formed and shaped by God. Prayer is an opportunity for us to tell God what frustrates us, what fears we have, how we're moving through the world, the needs that we have, the desires that we have. Prayer is all of that. Prayer does change things.

It changes people. It changes situations by the power of the Holy Spirit. It does. But it is not a magic formula. It requires action. And if we are truly seeking the kingdom of God, then our prayers must be accompanied with action. Unfortunately, many Christians, what the experience of the church today is, we tend to pick one of those, prayer or action.

We focus on praying, praying for the spirit to come, praying for the kingdom to come. Or we focus on action, on the doing and the making happen and the work. But if we are serious today about being full of joy and the Holy Spirit, it requires those two to work in tandem together. Prayer and action. We pray for God's kingdom to come. But we also seek to do the work of the kingdom as we have been instructed to in the scriptures and in the teachings of Jesus.

You have to have both. Here at Journey this year, we have been focusing on two things, daily prayer and good deeds. Daily prayer that forms and shapes us. Daily prayer that leads us in the ways of Jesus, that helps us to see the areas of our lives that are out of sync, that are askew with the kingdom of God. And forms and shapes and unites us and roots us in the way of Jesus. We believe in that. We subscribe to that.

We want to do that daily. But also, we want to do the work of the kingdom daily. And if we are praying in a way that is seeking the fullness of the Holy Spirit and joy, then we are going to be moved to those good deeds and action. And when those two things are present simultaneously in us as individuals and in us as the church, that is where we become full of joy and full of the Holy Spirit to do the work of the kingdom of God. In 2 Corinthians 3, we read this. Now, the Lord is spirit. This is one of those verses that confirms the theology of the Trinity and the church.

The Lord is spirit. And where the spirit of the Lord is, there is what? Freedom, right? Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. Now, we might be asking, freedom from what? And we might ask, freedom for what? Freedom from what?

Freedom for what? And my suspicion is that if we asked everyone in this room today to respond to that freedom from what, freedom for what, there may be some similar answers. But there also would be some unique ideas or understandings about it. If we're talking about freedom from what, if we use the biblical example of that, we might think of freedom from sin. Freedom from the chains that bind us. Freedom from fear. Freedom from judgment.

If we think about, we are free for what? What is our purpose? What is the purpose of freedom? What does it lead us to? That one might be a little bit more difficult, and we might get a little bit more varied answers.

But just some ideas. We are freed for a life of loving God and loving neighbor. We are freed for a new direction in life and a new energy for God's mission. We are free for a bold proclamation of the grace of God. We are freed for living by life-giving patterns rather than life-grinding patterns. We are freed for the opportunity to reflect the love of God in our daily lives. We are freed for the sake of our neighbors.

We are freed to be the hands and feet of Jesus. Freedom from and freedom for go hand-in-hand, just like prayer and action go hand-in-hand. It all works together, and it all tells the story of salvation, the story of God. As we are full of the Holy Spirit and with joy and move about our lives in that way. So I want to read for us a very fascinating passage. It's one probably you've heard at least to a certain degree. It's a strange story.

As you can see here on the screen, there are several depictions of this story throughout time. Some of them somewhat modern. Some of them ancient works of art. This story actually is one of the more painted and depicted stories in the Bible. There is so many different images of this particular story, which I think tells us something about the compelling nature of this story. And I want to read it.

It's a little lengthy. But as we read it, I want you to listen for two things. First of all, listen for how people deal with problems when left to their own strength. And then listen for the freedom that Jesus brings to life's situations, the difficult situations of life.

So it begins in Luke 8, verse 26. It says this. They sailed, they being Jesus and the disciples, to the region of Gerasene, which is across from the Lake of Galilee. When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town. For a long time, this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but had lived in the tombs. When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell at his feet, shouting at the top of his voice, What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don't torture me.

For Jesus had commanded the impure spirit to come out of the man. Many times it had seized them, and though he was chained hand and foot and kept under guard, he had broken his chains and had been driven by the demon into solitary places. Jesus asked him, What is your name? Legion, he replied, because many demons had gone into him, and they begged Jesus repeatedly, they being the demons, not to order them to go into the abyss. A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into the pigs, and he gave them permission. When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.

When those tending the pigs saw what had happened, they ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, and the people went out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus' feet, dressed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. Those who had seen it told the people how the demon-possessed man had been cured. Then all the people of the region of Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, because they were overcome with fear. So he got into the boat, and he left. The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, Return home, and tell how much God has done for you. So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.

Quite an interesting story. We could spend hours, I'm sure, talking about the significance of all of the actions here. Ultimately, though, to understand for us today, that Jesus came to set people free. People find themselves in situations where they are in bondage, where they are in chains, whether that be of their own making or of something else that is gripping them, and Jesus desires to set people free. Now, this person was obviously in a bad situation. To be a person who goes around unclothed and unable to interact with people in a productive way or in a healthy way, to have been chained up is how the people around him deal with him, just simply because there are really no other options for them. And here's where we sort of pause and think about, obviously, so much has changed since Jesus walked this earth, but even today, we still treat people like this.

People have a bad way. They get into some destructive patterns, and we cry out, lock them up and throw away the key as some sort of, like, if you can't see them, then you can't know them. If they're out of society, then we don't have to deal with them. And so we still, unfortunately, isolate people and lock people up. And that's a societal problem that we face, and that we should get our best minds together and collectively decide how we can do that differently, for sure. But for us today, while this is an extreme example of this happening, think about the ways in which we are tempted in our lives to treat others in this way. We label people with some sort of label that puts them in their place, that puts us as superior to them.

We build walls around them. We put them in their corner and say, you can't come out and have what we have or do what we do. You have to stay over there. And we're tempted to do this by the media that we consume, by the stories that we read. We have this temptation for us to dehumanize people, to make them less than us, and to control them, not with physical chains all of the time, but a lot of time with the labels that we put upon them and how we view them. But Jesus's vision for the church is never for us to mirror what our culture does and to make it righteous, but rather to have a kingdom imagination where we see salvation at hand, where we see freedom on its way, and to trust fully in the truth of the kingdom of God and to proclaim that Jesus has come to set us free. And this is both in our prayers and in the actions of our lives.

And so my prayer for us today is that we would have eyes to see and ears to hear the ways in which we need individually and collectively as the church for our trust in the kingdom of God to expand, to become greater, and where we need to proclaim in Jesus's name, enough is enough, and salvation is at hand. As we mentioned earlier, today is Prayer Sunday. And this is a moment, we believe, where we get to gather around one another to really lean into the benefit of sharing life together. The burdens that we carry, the things that have us in some sort of chains, we do not have to navigate those things on our own. God has given us his spirit, but also given us the community of one another. And so this moment is an opportunity for us to be together as the body of Christ and to pray for whatever freedom that you might seek. Now, if I was a salesman of some sort, a gospel salesman, if you will, I might say, if you come forward and pray today that you're going to walk away and everything will be just the way that you want it.

But that, of course, is not true. That is an over-exaggeration of what this moment is. You may come forward and be prayed for and you experience some type of freedom or deliverance. There are people in this room that can testify to the way in which they have experienced a similar freedom or deliverance in their lives through the power of prayer. But what we can rest assured of is that if we seek the Holy Spirit together, if we spend time in prayer and we follow that up with the actions of the kingdom of God, then regardless of the situations around us, if it's feast or famine, that we can be in the midst of that filled with joy and the Holy Spirit. So that is the promise of this moment today. So what is it that burdens you?

Is there something that's weighing heavily upon you? Maybe it's a situation where you need wisdom. Maybe it's an ailment that you're dealing with. Maybe it's a resolution that needs to be offered to some sort of conflict or issue in your life. Maybe you don't even have the ability to verbalize what it is. You just simply want your brothers and sisters to gather around you and to pray for you. That's what this time is for.

There will be three stations set up and people who are here to pray for you. Each of them will have oil if you desire to be anointed. And the reason why we set this time aside, if I can master the English language here, is because in James we are instructed that when someone has a need, to come forward and to surround them with the church and to pray for them. And so to set the stage for this time of prayer, we want to invite us all into a moment of confession. This is a time for us to recognize the parts in our lives where we know we are out of sync and perhaps the parts in our lives where we've turned a deaf ear or a blind eye to. And we need the grace of God just as much as anybody. So there will be some words up on the screen and we invite you to prayerfully read through this together as a community.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we ascend against you and our neighbor through our own fault, in thought, in word, in deed, in what we have done and what we have left undone. We humbly repent for our sins and the sins of the world. For the sake of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, forgive us our sins. All our offenses and grant that we may serve you in newness of life. To the glory of your name, amen. In the prayer of confession, we're talking about prayer and action, there's repentance and blessing. Those two go hand in hand just as much as any of it.

So if you have prayed today, know that God loves you and forgives you of whatever it is that you have been caught up in and that ultimately God will one day heal this land. And so we come together and pray today. If there's something that you wish for us to pray with you about.