To Experience God | Power for More | Rick Atchley

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Well, hello, everyone. Pastor Rick here greeting you, and so glad that you're with us either in person at Keller, Dallas, West Fort Worth, Northridge, or you're watching us online. I'm in a wonderful mood because last Sunday was Easter Sunday, and this Sunday is the last round of the Masters, the greatest golf tournament on earth. And why would God give us two such spectacular Sundays in a row? It's obvious. He loves us, and He wants us to be happy. And so I'm going to enjoy some golf today, and if that's your jam, then I hope you will too. It was a great day last Sunday. We had huge crowds at every campus, and I need to thank all of you that stepped up to volunteer. We had people that stepped up in welcome teams and in kids ministry and production and so many other ways. Thank you for making such a powerful Easter Day possible for a lot of people who haven't been at church in a long, long time. It was especially a beautiful day in Dallas because the

Dallas campus moved in to the worship center that we have been remodeling on the Skillman property for the very first time on Easter Sunday. And you can see they had a huge turnout for Easter in Dallas, and we're very thankful for that. It is a beautiful room. Ryan Young and his team are doing a great job leading the Dallas campus. A lot of people enjoyed worshipping in a room that had not been worshipped in for over 10 years. And the baptistry had not been used for over 10 years. It was last Sunday three times, and it's going to be used a lot more in the future. So we're so thankful. And I have even more good news. It's now official, and I can tell you, that the deed to the property of the Skillman Avenue Church of Christ has now been given to our church. We own that property, and we own that beautiful building. And I'm so thankful to the Skillman members, and especially to their elders. George Dishman, Ken Teague, and Dan Houser showed incredible integrity through the whole process, spent much time in prayer, and they were determined that that piece of property that for over five decades has been dedicated to teaching about Jesus would continue to do so. And so we're going to use that property to make and grow followers of Jesus. And a lot of the former Skillman members have joined us at the Hills, and I appreciate so much that while they cherish their

memories, they said chasing the mission is more important. So we're so thankful that God has given us this incredible opportunity to steward. And I just want to take a moment and thank God. So bow with me. So God, you've shown favor on our church. We meet in four locations in Dallas, in West Fort Worth, in Keller, and in Northeastern Hills. And in all these places, we get to manage and use incredible facilities and do it debt-free. And God, we recognize we need to steward this gift well at every campus, so please give us the wisdom to do so. And we thank you especially for opening the door in Dallas. And we pray that we will see many, many people find Christ in that location. Blessings on our church, God. We ask for nations and generations in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. All right, I want to show you another cool set. Pictures one of my dearest friends in the world is a pastor in Dallas named Chris Seidman. He's the father of three grown sons. His oldest Schuyler lives in Houston. He's a husband. He's a father a devoted Christ follower and a lousy fantasy football player. Look at this picture. This is Schuyler holding seven Whataburgers and here's

the backstory. Schuyler lost his fantasy football league and the understanding is that whoever came in last would take a day getting their car in Houston buy seven Whataburgers drive north on I-45 and not turn around until they had eaten all seven. His strategy was to eat the meat first to get that down and then to start to work on the buns and it took him over two hours. He got over halfway to Dallas before he could turn around and when he did you could see how happy he was. And the beauty of this whole thing was the idea was Schuyler's. This would be the penalty for the person that came in last place and he had enough integrity to go along with it and do it. Now, let me just tell you as a father of grown kids your daughters never send you pictures like that. Okay, only dudes do things like this and as a former dude myself. I just have to say I admit it's idiotic and I think it's also kind of awesome. Now a lot of you are leaning more to that's just totally idiotic be before you judge too much. Let me ask you what foolish things have you been filling yourself with lately? Oh, see what I did there.

We're in a series called power for more talking about the way we receive the Holy Spirit and the big idea today is simply this. What are you choosing to be filled with? I've been a pastor a long time. I've seen a lot of people come to faith. I've seen a lot of people walk away from faith and I have a theory my theory for those who grow up in churches like ours and then decide later to walk away do so because they know God propositionally but they never encountered him personally. They were instructed on how to be religious. They were not encouraged to seek a relationship. So when a life of just learning propositions and obeying rules didn't satisfy they went on a search for something that would fill them. You see religion is what happens when we settle for knowing about God. But we don't know God it's a way of doing life where you sprinkle a little piety over your daily existence. But the reality is

you face life's challenges using the same resources as someone without the Spirit of God and Jesus promised power for so much more. Jesus said in John 14, I will ask the father and he will give you another helper to be with you forever. The Spirit of truth the world cannot accept him because it does not see him or know him but you know him because he lives with you and he will be in you. No one has ever made you a bigger promise. I call it the dwell promise no one unpack it with you. You see a lot of people think the big goal of the Bible is to get you saved. That is not the big goal. The big goal of the Bible is not salvation. It is fellowship. God has always wanted to live an intimate fellowship with the children. He created he did at the start of the Bible. I mean he is right there in the garden walking with the children. He created

but sin disrupted that kind of fellowship. You get to the end of the Bible and what happens? Heaven comes down and what is the promise? God is dwelling with his people again. So the Bible starts with God dwelling. It ends with God dwelling. But right now how can that be a reality? How can unholy people. Be close to God who's so holy. You see manifestations of God's presence in the Old Testament. His Spirit might come on someone for a special task, but then the Spirit leaves. It's fleeting. You get visitation, but not habitation. Or you have the tabernacle, or later the temple, where God's presence comes to be among the people. But where does that presence go? Into a room called the Holy of Holies with a big veil up. And you can't go in that room because you're full of sin. One person, one day a week, can go in that room and somehow what it was communicating in a way is because of your sin, God is unapproachable. You can't expect intimate fellowship with Him. So how could Jesus say, He's with you and He will be in you? When did Jesus say that? It was the night before He went to a cross because He knew the next day He was going to destroy that veil. And at the cross, Jesus cleansed us with His blood. He imparted His righteousness to us, and get this, by doing so, He made us fit to house the presence of God. I can't put into words how big that is. At the cross, Jesus made it possible for God to live in you and me. That God is dwelling in you. You should know that your body is a temple for the Holy Spirit who's in you. You have received the Holy Spirit from God. So this is what I mean by the dwell promise. God is dwelling in you. The promise Jesus made is not that your heart would be a hotel and that God would drop by every now and then to stay a couple of days and then leave again. The promise Jesus made is, I'm going to leave and prepare a future home for you. And the Holy Spirit is going to come and make His permanent home in you. And Pentecost proved that Jesus was telling the truth. The disciples are praying. He

pours out the Holy Spirit and supernatural things start happening. And people gather, what is going on? And Peter starts to say, this is what God promised. This is what God's always wanted to do. This is what the prophets were talking about. Notice, in the last days God says, I will pour out my spirit and please notice, upon all people, not some people, not the best people, not elite people, I will pour this promise out on all people. This promise is to you, it's to your children, and to those far away, all who've been called by the Lord our God. That this promise is for anyone who's ready to accept Christ. I heard a story about a pastor and he's in Africa on a safari and he got separated from his group. He's walking through the jungle and suddenly he realizes he's being stalked by a lion who's about to pounce. He prays, God would you please instill your Holy Spirit into this beast. Suddenly this light from heaven shines down on that lion and he looks up and he puts his paws together and starts to pray, Lord I thank you for this meal I'm about to receive. You can't say of anyone, it's incapable, impossible for them to ever be a dwelling place of God. Bethlehem means God is with us. Calvary proved God is for us and Pentecost declares that God is in us. And this is a promise that religion never emphasizes. When I was a young boy, my Papa actually had a small cabin on a little lake in East Texas and he would take me there. He loved to fish and I loved to go with him. He would have a trot line, he had an old wooden boat and he would row out to check that trot line and I would go with him and I couldn't resist, Papa let me row the boat. And he finally did. I could not believe how hard it was. It was exhausting to get where I wanted to go using only my strength. Sometime later my father took me one afternoon with a friend he had who had a sailboat on a lake in North Dallas. I'd never been on a sailboat. We'd push out from shore, and they put up that sail, and that boat lurched. I could not believe how fast it was going and how quickly it

could turn. Frankly, it was terrifying, and it was exhilarating that this boat was being taken where it wanted to go by a power that you couldn't see but that you could not deny. Which boat are you trying to do life with God in? In a sense, every church is multi-site because every Christian is a roving temple of the Spirit of God, and this means every moment and every place and every situation you are in holds the potential for a supernatural encounter with God. Listen to Paul. I pray that from his glorious unlimited resources, he'll empower you with inner strength through his Spirit. This is how we're supposed to live. This is not a luxury for some Christians. This is a necessity for every believer. So the question then is, if we have this capacity to be so empowered, why do so many of us feel so empty? Well, that's because you've got to understand the dwell promise in light of the fill principle. You see, you're a Christian because you said Jesus is Lord. Upon your confession of faith that you expressed by getting baptized, Jesus washed you and he filled you. And let me be very clear about a teaching in some churches that I think is completely unbiblical that you can be saved but you don't have the Holy Spirit yet. Listen to Paul in Romans 8. If anyone doesn't have the Spirit of Christ, they don't belong to Christ. Jesus doesn't give the Holy Spirit in installments.

This is why there's not a single command in the entire New Testament telling a Christian to get the Holy Spirit. But there is a command to let the Holy Spirit take over. Paul said in Ephesians 5, don't be drunk with wine because that will ruin your life. Instead, be filled with the Holy Spirit. Now, that's Ephesians 5. Back in Ephesians 1, he told the same people that you have been sealed with the Holy Spirit. So notice, you are sealed with the Spirit but are you filled with the Spirit? The indwelling of the Spirit does not guarantee the filling of the Spirit because people and circumstances and sin can drain your filling. Amen? Amen. This happened to the very earliest Christians. They faced some very serious trials because of their faith but they knew what to do. Acts 2, the Spirit has poured out supernatural manifestations. They're all filled with the Spirit. They start to preach about Jesus and they start to get persecuted. And the authorities throw them in jail and say, if you do this anymore, it's going to get worse. So when they get out of jail, they have a prayer meeting. And the amazing thing is they do not pray, Lord, take away the persecution. They pray, Lord, give us the courage to keep doing what got us in trouble.

And look what it says in Acts 4. After they had prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and they spoke God's word without fear. They got the Spirit at Acts 2. It was poured out on them. And in Acts 4, they're getting a filling of the Spirit. And it's interesting that Paul compares this in a weird way to intoxication. Now, I don't want you to hold up your hand if you've been intoxicated, okay? I don't want to know. But if you have been, you know you don't stay in that state. You're under the influence. But you don't stay there unless you just want to. You're under the influence. You're under the influence. You're under the influence. You're under the influence. You're under the influence. You don't stay there unless you just want to. Paul says, don't.... Instead, be under the influence of the Holy Spirit, but you have to want to be under the influence. So many Christians, they don't avail themselves of the power Jesus has made available to really encounter God. I mean, not just study God, but know God. Maybe this illustration will help. Got four little grandbabies, three and under, and the oldest ones love to play a game with me and Jamie called keepy-uppy. Jamie will blow up a balloon, and we'll get in a room, and we'll smack it up, and it'll come down, and we'll go where it is, and we'll try to smack it up

again, and see if we can keepy-uppy. Now, there's another way to keep a balloon up. You don't have to keep smacking it. You fill it with helium, and it will just stay up, and here's what I've learned. A lot of Christians come to church, so pastor will smack them, right? Be more generous. Pray more often, and it works for a week or two, and it comes back down. Now, I'm not saying that's all bad. In fact, can I be totally honest? There are some people in this church I have been wanting to smack for a long time, but my primary role as pastor is not to keep smacking you. It is to encourage you to be so filled with the Spirit of God that you stay where God wants you to be. This is what Jesus is offering, that we don't have to settle for religion when we could have a relationship. Be filled with the Spirit. Now, this is a present tense command, which means, number one, it's not an option. Paul's not saying, if you want to. He's saying, do it, and it's present tense, which means you got to keep doing it. The filling of today may not last tomorrow. So, present tense. You just keep being filled with the Spirit, but it also means it's a promise, because God does not command what He will not honor. In other words, there's a fresh filling for you, and you don't have to go anywhere to get this filling. Sometimes people say, boy, the Spirit's really moving over there. You ought to go. Well, listen, you don't have to go anywhere to get filled with the Spirit, because the well's already inside you. Jesus said in John 7, let anyone who's thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture said, rivers of living water will flow from within them, and by this He meant the Spirit. Jesus is offering a power for living from the inside that can't be quenched by anything that's going on in the outside in your life. And can I just be honest? Aren't you tired of living in a way that looks almost exactly like people who don't have the Holy Spirit inside them? Don't you want your unbelieving friend to encounter God first, not by walking into a temple, but by meeting a walking temple? It's not a knowledge problem. It's a surrender problem, because the dwell promise and the fill principle depends on the will priority. God will not fill against your will. Look at Ephesians, Galatians 5. Let us follow the Spirit's leading in every part of our lives. You know the problem

in that verse? It's the word every. We welcome the Holy Spirit to make His home in us, but we lock Him out of some rooms of our lives. You can't go in that part of the Holy Spirit. You stay over in this part of my life. But over in this part of my life, I'm on my own. And so we settle for religion instead of relationship. And it works for us until it doesn't. See, you can't have too much God, but God can have too little of you. So the real question is this, God's dwelling in you and there's a fresh filling for you, but how willing are you? Do you want to live a life consciously drenched in the presence of God? Now I wish Paul had said, be filled and this is how you do it, but the truth is God is not a vending machine. You don't punch a few buttons and get what you want. And yet I do believe that we can posture ourselves to experience God. Remember Elijah had this battle with prophets of Baal in the Old Testament and they're up on a mountain and whatever God can send fire is the true God was the test. And Elijah cannot make the fire come down, but he did build an altar. And a good friend of mine, Pastor Dave Clayton puts it this way, you can't bring the fire, but you can stack the wood. You can put yourself in a place to encounter God. That guy on that sailboat, he didn't make the wind, but he put up the sail. He adjusted the jib, whatever that is. He put the boat in a position to experience the power he could not create. In my many years of being a pastor, I've noticed some things about people that I think are genuinely spirit filled. They know God. One thing is they're intentional about their habits. There are things we can do to catch the wind. Right after Paul says be filled, he says sing and make melody in your heart and give thanks. So thanksgiving and worship are things we can do to catch the wind. Spending time in God's word, praying, living in community with other Christians.

Spiritual disciplines are not the end, they're the means to the end. We do these things to posture ourselves to receive God. And let me just say too, it's not just adding some habits, it might be culling some habits. Okay, I'm going to step on your toes, here it comes. With many of us, we don't experience God, not because we're doing bad things, but because we're wasting our time with foolish things. What do you do when you have even a bit of margin in your life? I already know the answer. Get out your phone and stare at it. Time that you could spend trying to seek God, you stare at this phone. I'm just going to be blunt. If you spend all your spare time scrolling, don't expect a filling. You do without what you want, but that's truth. Our habits put us in a place to experience God. And so does our pursuit of holiness. Don't expect the Holy Spirit to ever be comfortable cohabitating in a house with known sin. Now we all sin and stumble. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a part of your life that you know is not in line with God's will and it gets to live in the house. And you say, Holy Spirit, you're welcome in my house, but don't go in that room. That's where I keep my porn. And don't go in that room. That's where I keep all the things that calm me down. My addictions that I say I don't really have. Don't go in that closet. That's where I keep all my grudges. Those people I pretend I forgive them, but I still resent. Don't go in the study. That's where I worry about money and how I can make a lot, because that drives me more

than anything else. I don't like that room. And do not go in that back room. That's where I keep all my political idolatry. It's a mess and you would not like it. And so, you got to understand the Holy Spirit doesn't just want to reside. He wants to preside. He wants run of the house. And every person in my life that I could say, man, they just live full of God, are people that would pray, God, make me nauseous. There's habits, there's holiness, and there's hunger. Maybe most of all, there's hunger. In any great relationship, there's always the element of longing. My wife doesn't want to hear, yes, I will live with you. She wants to hear, I long to be with you. Remember the psalmist? Where can I go and meet God? My heart yearns for God. I'm like a deer in the wilderness. I am panting to be with God. Satan doesn't want that. His aim is to keep you so full of junk food that you never get hungry for God. Many of us are filling our soul regularly with junk that is harming our spirit a lot more than seven Whataburgers could harm our body. Junk food and religion, this is Satan's menu for you, and it'll work until it doesn't. That's what I learned, that it worked until it didn't. I wasn't taught to seek to encounter God. I do not say this to disparage the people that raised me, the good people, but I wasn't taught that I could know God. I was taught to know about God.

God wasn't a person, he was a doctrine. I wasn't even taught the Holy Spirit lives in me. I smacked a lot of balloons, and it worked until it didn't. I had a season in my life where I was so empty, and something had to change, and I did something I'd never done. I got on my knees, and I got desperate for God. And something I was told as a boy couldn't happen, happened. God showed up. I had a powerful, in fact I would say I had a supernatural encounter with the Holy Spirit. I couldn't explain it, but I knew from that moment, I didn't want to live another day of my life not wanting that. No more religion. I wanted God. And the amazing thing is that from the very beginning, that's all he's ever wanted too. In fact, I think I could put it this way, God only cares about the answer to one question, do you want me? He's not asking if you'll follow rules or study doctrines, do you want me? I spoke at a retreat of church planters back in January, I heard a song I'd never heard before. Not a new song, I just never heard it. And then in January I spoke at a church planter, heard it again. And there's a chorus of that song that's been haunting me. Set a fire down in my soul that I can't contain, that I can't control. I want more of you, God. I want more of you, God. Now that is a dangerous song. And that's the song I want to sing. What about you? Bow your head. Do you want God?

I mean, do you want a supernatural life? Do you want a life drenched in the conscious awareness of God? Then ask for it. So God, I know this is a dangerous prayer, and for some it's a confusing prayer. I know some people aren't praying it because that's not what they want. Some people, well maybe they're praying it, but they don't mean it. I'm sure some people are praying this prayer, God, and they're not even sure what they're praying. Would you please show them? There's so much more. And I know some people right now, God, they're praying this prayer because they're desperate. Because it's not working, just smacking balloons and trying to row harder. And so God, I do pray for every prayer, but especially for those desperate for you. Would you give them this week the same kind of powerful encounter you gave me? Would you give us this week testimonies of the presence of God? And I ask for this because I think this is absolutely consistent with your will. So I'm asking in Jesus' name, amen.