The Person of the Holy Spirit

John · 2024-05-06 · Jason Wolin · Theology Matters

John · Holy Spirit. The Person of the Holy Spirit — sermon from Cypress Bible Church on BibleSlides.

The Person of the Holy Spirit Slideshow for this message PDF Message Download I want to begin this morning with some statistics about giving. The average church attender today gives $17/week. 37% of people who attend regularly never give. How many people do you think give 10% or more? Only about 5%. I have no idea how those statistics line up with our church and it’s not the point. Here’s my point: what do you think most people FEEL when they hear statistics like this? I’m guessing one of the primary FEELINGS that surface is GUILT. Why do we feel that way? Let me hazard a guess. 10% is kind of like the bar in a lot people’s minds because that’s the tithe in the OT. So the guilt arises in most people because they know they aren’t meeting that standard. Here’s a really interesting statistic. Of those 5% who meet that bar, 77% give more than 10%. Isn’t that interesting. It almost seems that once a person has vision for giving, all of the sudden something happens. It moves from something they feel like they HAVE to do to something they WANT to do. Why do I conclude that? Because nobody expects you to give more than 10% and yet 77% of them give more. The only explanation for that is they want to. Do you realize this is the entire point of giving. What does God want? Do you really think God wants your actual dollar bills? Like he is somehow short on money? Of course not. He wants us to NOT love money. He wants us instead to so love him, so cherish him, to be so insanely excited about his kingdom, that we just spontaneously, cheerfully, happily, give to his kingdom efforts in deeply sacrificial ways. That’s what he wants. Now let’s say that this currently does not describe you. You, if you are honest, frankly just love money. Your goal in life is to make tons of money. Your IDOL is money. That’s what you worship. So here’s the question, “How can we change?” People have gone after this a thousand different ways. One way to make people change is through guilt. We could do a w-2 audit system where we make people prove they’ve given 10% of their income and if they haven’t we would garnish their wages with interest. Shame culture. That is one way to change that. That works pretty well. On the oppposite end of the spectruem we could do it through bribery. We could put your name on a plack if you gave the most money to the church in 2024. Or we could distribute rewards based on a voting system with different categories. “Most likely to be seated next to the Apostle Paul.” That is one way to change that. This also works pretty well. But you know intuitively that this is artificial. That’s not real change. All we’ve done is pressure people (positively or negatively) to conform. Take the pressure off and it’s back to normal. How can we actually change at the heart le…

Cypress Bible Church · Full sermon loading below.