 Well, amen, it's good to be with all of you tonight. It shows some commitment that you're here at midnight. So I'm grateful for your interest in hearing some of the word. A few years ago, I was at an airport in Chicago, the O'Hara Airport, a well-known airport. And airports are emotional places for me. They're emotional places because, on the one hand, I love airports because they're so international. And you get to see people of all different skin tones and ethnic dress. You hear lots of different languages spoken. And I enjoy observing people, and I often wonder what their stories are and who they are. But then on the other side, I find airports to be difficult places. There's a lot of sin there. There's a lot of materialism. There's a lot of bondage. The perfume stores with all of the glamour and the fashion, those are difficult places for me to walk in around and experience in the different hallways and terminals. My heart is often heavy when I'm there. Well, this particular time when I was there at O'Hara, I'm walking around and feeling unusually heavy. And I look down a little ways. And there, I see a, to me, would look like a plain couple. And I was so excited to see them. And I could tell she was wearing a head covering. I could tell from his beard and the dress. And so I came up to him and said, hi, my name's Spinny. I introduced myself to them. And I just wanted to strike up a conversation for a few minutes. And indeed, they were an Anabaptist couple. And I was so excited telling them about my journey. And I wanted to hear about theirs. But they just sort of seemed a little uninterested, a little bit apathetic. And I was trying, trying, trying for a couple of minutes to just get some conversation going and to have a bit of a spiritual spark. But they seemed, in general, apathetic. And I often asked people, tell me your testimony. And if you're not excited to describe your testimony, I have to admit, I get frustrated inside. And I left that encounter with my hopes dashed. I don't understand how people can call themselves followers of Jesus and not be overflowing with passion and zeal. I just don't understand it. When you think of the magnitude of the call and the greatness of our God and what He has done, I mean, we should just be brimming with excitement. The world is very excited about its mandates, no matter how trivial they might be. When I was in college, I played on the college tennis team. And it was not a particularly highly ranked team. So for those who know what NCAA is, we were Division III. Division III is the lowest division. And I was actually the last person to make the team. So we were in the lowest division. And my school wasn't particularly good in Division III. And I was the last person to make the team. And I remember, though, we would often play teams that were much better than we were. And I remember one time I went to one of our tennis matches against another college. And this particular college had two players who were on what's called Davis Cup. Some of you know what that is. But the Davis Cup are people who play internationally. They represent their country. It's almost like the Olympics for tennis. And wow, I had never seen people hit the ball so hard and so accurately. And the time comes for me to go walk onto the court. And I walk onto the court. And the individual comes up to me, who was very, very skilled. And the look of passion and flame and fury in his eye, I just wanted to crawl into a rock and say, you win. You win. I don't need to be here. It's yours. He defeated me with the look of his eyes. It was so intense. It's interesting. There's actually a comparable story in the Bible. There's a story that I find very interesting. It's the story of Jesus flipping the tables of the money changers. And it's very interesting how the different gospel writers describe this account. In John's gospel, the disciples see Jesus flipping the tables over and driving out the animals. And they see something in his eyes that almost frightens them. It alarms them. And it says that they remember a particular prophecy. It's from a psalm, Psalm 69, that says, zeal for your house consumes me. And they say, this is him. This is the one that the whole messianic psalm was about, because we see in his eyes, in his demeanor, this zeal, this fire that's inside of him. That's the trigger is Jesus's zeal. We get our English word zeal from the Greek word, zealos. It sounds like zeal. The Son of God was a very zealous man. I often think of a verse in Hebrews that describes his prayer life. And it says, in the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears. Think, wow, that's how Jesus prayed with loud cries and tears. In Romans 12, 11, we are commanded to, in the New King James, it says, be fervent in spirit. If you were to look that up, it's the same root word as zeal, zeo. And the root of that word is actually to boil. I like that. And I looked it up in the leading Greek lexicon, B-DAG, that says to be fervent in this, with this word, it means to be stirred up emotionally, to be enthusiastic, excited, or on fire. One of the reasons why I love Kingdom Fellowship Weekend, this is actually my eighth time coming to Kingdom Fellowship Weekend, I believe, is that this is intended to be a conference of fellowship, revival, and unity. And I want to ask all of us here to take a really hard look at our lives right now. And if I were to ask you, the last 12 months, since last KFW, which I know was virtual, but over the last year, how has your zeal been? If the people around you were to say, fill in your name here, on a scale of one to 10, this is that person's zeal. How would you say they would rate you? Have you personally been making new heights of worship, prayer, time in the word, loving others, evangelism? Or has your life been monotonous, dry, or even a season of backsliding and sin? So I'm here to challenge you at KFW 2021 for this to be an inflection point higher, a turning point higher in your life. My message is for those who have perhaps had a difficult year, maybe the cares of the world have bogged you down and you want to change your trajectory. It's also for those who want to just elevate their spiritual life to new heights. Maybe you haven't led anyone to the Lord in the last year. Maybe you're doing okay, but deep down, deep down in your core, you know that God has something more for your life. The passage that I've chosen for today is Ezekiel 37. And so please turn in your Bibles or your devices to Ezekiel 37. We're going to read 14 verses from this chapter. Ezekiel 37, one to 14. It's a familiar passage, but I hope to put on new light into this, I think very intriguing passage. Ezekiel chapter 37 verses one to 14. The hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the midst of the valley and it was full of bones. Then he caused me to pass by them all around and behold, there were very many in the open valley and indeed they were very dry. And he said to me, son of man, can these bones live? So I answered, oh Lord God, you know. Again, he said to me, prophesy to these bones and say to them, oh dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones. Surely I will cause breath to enter into you and you shall live. I will put sinews on you and bring flesh upon you, cover you with skin and put breath in you and you shall live. Then you shall know that I am the Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded and as I prophesied there was a noise and suddenly a rattling and the bones came together, bone to bone. Indeed, as I looked, the sinews and the flesh came upon them and the skin covered them over but there was no breath in them. Also he said to me, prophesy to the breath, prophesy son of man and say to the breath, thus says the Lord God, come from the forewinds, oh breath, and breathe on these slain that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me and breath came into them and they lived and stood upon their feet and exceedingly great army. Then he said to me, son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They indeed say our bones are dry, our hope is lost and we ourselves are cut off. Therefore prophesy and say to them, thus says the Lord God, behold, oh my people Israel, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves and bring you into the land of Israel. Then you shall know that I am the Lord when I have opened your graves, oh my people, and brought you up from your graves. I will put my spirit in you and you shall live and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken it and performed it, says the Lord. The title of my midnight message here is From Bones to a Battalion. This is a well-known passage that is considered a vision. It's a bit like a parable that is designed to teach us lessons. The background of this passage that we just read in Ezekiel is that the people of Judah or Israel have been exiled to Babylon and there in Babylon they have become apathetic. They don't believe that they will be restored to Jerusalem. In their mentality, they are not strangers and pilgrims anymore. They're mixing with Babylon more and more. They're committing idolatry that's described in earlier chapters and they're losing faith in God's promises. So that's the background. In the first two verses here, God shows Ezekiel the magnitude of the problem by using this powerful image of a valley of dry bones. And I want us to appreciate the magnitude of the problem. Okay, so it says that, looking with me in verse one, it says that the valley is full of bones. You see that? Right there at the end of verse one, it says it was full of bones. That's the New King James I read. So as far as the eye can see in this valley, just bones. There isn't just one little pile of bones here or just one little pile of bones over there. There's a wide distribution of bones. The problems of Israel were not confined to one family here or one family there or one synagogue over here or one synagogue over there. It was pervasive throughout the culture. I believe that there is an analog of this picture to us today. It's hard to say that there's just one group over here or one group over there that is in a state of apathy or disrepair. The next thing that God wants Ezekiel to see is it says in verse two, then he caused me to pass by them all around. So I picture God showing Ezekiel this valley of dry bones from lots of different angles. Over here, over there, up, down, sideways, all these different vantage points. It's always intrigued me that in the world when they have some sporting event, professional sporting event, when the person hits the home run or kicks the goal or scores the touchdown, they show you that event from like six different angles in slow motion. I mean, it's unbelievable the amount of cameras that they have to capture all this. They want you to just celebrate and relish these accomplishments, these athletic accomplishments. Here, what God wants Ezekiel to do is he wants him to see the real situation, the dire situation, not sugar-coated from every side. God wants Ezekiel to mourn. He wants him to appreciate how bad things really are. Think about even in our experience here, just the last 10 years, how much things have changed. I was explaining this to someone the other day about how much, if you just look carefully, over 10 years, the laws have changed, the acceptance has changed of every manner of evil, particularly in the area of sexual sins. The every reputable survey has shown a massive erosion in the number of professing Christians in the United States. And then we have all these tragedies in the world broke the Boko Haram kidnappings, thousands killed in Syria, the Uyghur people in one of the most tragic concentration camps in the world. There have been a number of studies done just in the last year looking at pornography usage during COVID, and it has skyrocketed. It is alarming to see how much, as people have been shut in and isolated and just on their screens all the time. We have to appreciate and take stock here. Look at this from a few different angles, like God shows Ezekiel, the magnitude of the problem. Remember that Jesus says, "'Blessed are those who mourn, woe to those who laugh.'" Why does he say that? He says that because it's an accurate appraisal of the world today. Okay, in verse two, if you follow along with me, it says that the bones were very many. Okay, so we saw in the first verse that the valley was very full, so they were extensively distributed. But now we see that it's not just that they're scattered around, but they're actually dense. There's a lot of dead bodies that contributed to these bones. There's a skull over here. There's a rib over here. There's an ankle bone over here. There's a vertebrae over here. There's a metatarsal over there. There's all these scattered bones all over the place. I get the picture that there's almost some depth to these bones here. The picture thus gets more grim. There's more and more bodies that have fallen in this valley. When Jesus sees Jerusalem, he weeps. And do you remember what he called people? He called them whitewashed tombs. Perhaps he was even thinking of the scene. I don't think many of us appreciate sometimes how dire the situation is with how few will be saved on the last day. I was in Uganda, was it last month? Yeah, last month I was there. And it's always hard to part with my wife and I took my older children. And I remember two times ago when we went how my wife was just crying and crying. I was only leaving for a couple of weeks, but she was crying and crying for the time that I was gonna be away. My children were all crying. I was getting choked up just for going away for two weeks, right? And as I was walking into the terminal, I remember having this thought, this is what judgment day is gonna be like. There's gonna be a separation between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, parents and children. It is going to be horrible. And the weeping and the gnashing of teeth is gonna be unlike anything we've ever heard. Open your eyes. Can you see the bones? When I was in medical school, now many years ago in 1995, I remember spending four months dissecting a cadaver all the way down to the bones. We worked hard on this particular cadaver. And I remember there was a skeleton up in front of the classroom that we would look at. We would look at these skeletons and try to map on all of the different anatomical relationships. But there was a coherence. There was a structure. You've all seen skeletons. You've all seen them in different places. Here in Ezekiel, it's a different picture. There's a pile of bones. There's very many bones. They're scattered. Most of you probably have not seen piles of bones that are disconnected or disjointed. Again, when I was in Africa just recently, I was walking in a field. There were a lot of giraffes in this field. It was a beautiful field. And as I was walking in this, I came upon, a few of us came upon some bones of some kind of animal. Maybe it was a deer or something like that, that had obviously been completely destroyed, completely consumed by another animal. This is a picture of disconnection and disjointedness. I wonder how much this resonates with you as we look at the world today. Do we see organized, unified United churches? Or do we see disconnection and disunity? Okay, to further worsen the scene, I hope you caught it in verse two. What do we learn in the scene? It says these bones are, quote, what does it say, very dry. What does that mean if these bones are very dry? It means that these bones have been here for a long time. These bones are bleached by the sun. They're desiccated. These bones don't represent some recent death. They represent years, decades, generations of deadness. And let's honestly look at whatever background you're from, Protestant, Catholic, Anabaptist. No matter where we're from, can we not humbly confess to God that there have been generations of comfort, materialism, easy living, sectarianism, nationalism, prosperity, lack of evangelism, chasing entertainment and sexual sins. The bones are found across geographies, persons and generations. If there was ever a hopeless scene, this is a pretty hopeless scene, I think. We usually call it the Valley of Dry Bones, but I think you could call it the Valley of Hopelessness or the Valley of Apathy or the Valley of Sin or the Valley of Impossibility. If someone were to ask you if you were to survey this scene of these bones, if someone were to ask you, can these bones live? I wonder how many of us would have the faith to even answer as Ezekiel did. Ezekiel just said, oh, Lord God, you know. It strikes me that his answer is full of faith and humility. It's faith in God. He knows that God can do something, but at the same time, he doesn't presume to know. So what does God do? God tells Ezekiel to do two steps to these bones. It's a two-step act. By the way, before I go on, I'm not gonna spend much time on this, but it's a favorite topic of mine, the word prophesy or prophecy. This is a word that in the New Testament is ascribed to both men and women. This is not preaching here. This is prophesying. It's a different office that's described in Acts 2, 1 Corinthians 11 and other places. So I want everyone here, both men and women, to appreciate this is not preaching here. This is prophesying. Okay, what a sight this would have been. So the first step that Ezekiel does is he tells these bones and we won't read it again, but if you go and look at that, that's described in verses four to six. He tells the bones that they're to hear God's word and that they are to live again. And it says there's a noise. And I like this and suddenly there's a rattling. I like that, there's a rattling. You can almost hear the clanking of these bones as they come together. So they come together, these bones, and Ezekiel is doing what God tells him to do. But he's a very impressive prophet in a lot of ways. He understands that after this first step, he sees all of these, I don't know what we call them, these figures, these people, but they don't have breath in them yet. And he understands that a rattle isn't enough, a commotion isn't enough. Just some people, some bodies there isn't enough. It looked seemingly like there was something going on, but there was still not true life yet going on in them. I wonder how many of us confuse commotion, rattling with true Holy Spirit-inspired life. There's a big difference. Now at this point, before we explain the second step, you have to know just one word of Hebrew. It's a very simple word. The word is ruach, it's one of those fun Hebrew words that has that ha at the end. So ruach, you can say that, ruach. All right, good. All right, so ruach here. And in Hebrew, that one word ruach is translated several different ways in English. It can be translated as breath or spirit or wind. It's all the same word. And it's just the translator's decision about how to render it. It's all the same word. In verse eight, look at verse eight with me. It's a really, really interesting decision that the translator's made here. So in verse eight, it says here, no, it's not verse eight. In verse nine, where it says, also he said to me, prophesy to the breath. You all see that? Prophecy to the breath. Guess how you could also translate that? What do you think? How else might we translate that? What's that? Wind, could be wind, absolutely. Kids, it could be prophesied to the spirit as well. Completely translator's decision here. Now I'm not faulting them and I think prophesy to the breath is reasonable, but I think there's some merits to at least considering the fact that it's one word that in the original language, they would have heard all three or some sense of all three. I believe that this two component ministry here is speaking to people and speaking to God. That Ezekiel prophesies to these bones and he prophesies to the spirit. And we need both. We need both. Not in either or. We need to prophesy. We need to speak to people and speak to God without either. We will not achieve true life. Now, what happens when he does? Look at verse 10. So I prophesied as he commanded me and breath came into them. Guess what else you could translate that? And spirit came into them or the spirit came into them and they lived and stood upon their feet an exceedingly great club. Oh wait, I'm sorry, I misread that. I prophesied as he commanded me and breath came into them and they lived and stood upon their feet an exceedingly great charitable organization. Oh wait, I gotta get my computer fixed here. Let me try it again. It's glitching. So I prophesied as he commanded me and breath came into them and they lived and stood upon their feet an exceedingly great group of lecture goers an exceedingly great group of businessmen an exceedingly great group of intellectuals an exceedingly great group of people who wanna have a grand old time. Of course, you know what it says. An exceedingly great army. This is what God is trying to constitute out of these bones. He is trying to build an army. Not a club, not a charitable organization not a bunch of business people not intellectuals but an army. Did you know that this is your calling to be an exceedingly great army to be an army of men and women who make disciples of all nations. I worry a lot. I worry a lot that we're too much like a disjointed pile of bones not a well-trained unified army. The new cancer at least of the church in America is individualism. It is ravaging the church today. We live in a world where individualism and splits and egos prevail not a world of discipline, submission and unity. Are we okay with this? No, we should never be. I love how it says it in the King James when David is there with confronting Goliath. Is there not a cause? Is there not a cause? With God's help, could we not form an army? I mentioned to you before that the word ruach or spirit can be obscured in English but it's all throughout this passage. Look at verse one. And now I want you to see this in verse one. The hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the spirit of the Lord and the ruach of the Lord. It's found all through that second stage of the miracle and the last verse has as well. Look at verse 14. I will put my spirit in you and you shall live and I will place you in your own land. It is the key word of this passage, the spirit. I mentioned to you before that Ezekiel did not stop when he saw just these bodies assemble. That was not sufficient for him. He was not content with just rattling and commotion. One helpful analogy that various people have used which I like is the analogy of a glove. So I pulled this out of my Boston coat. So here's my glove. I keep two of these in my pockets when I'm wandering the streets of Boston. And in a lot of ways, all of us are like a glove. All of us are like a glove. Now a glove on its own doesn't really have a lot of impressive power. All right, glove, go shovel some snow. Go. Hmm. All right, glove. Climb this mountain. Go. Man, it's not doing a lot. All right, glove, pick up my child. I gotta speak to the glove. A glove alone is almost a joke. It's almost a joke. I, my undergraduate degree and one of my graduate degrees is a degree in chemistry. And in chemistry, not surprisingly, you deal with dangerous chemicals and you wear gloves a lot of the time, usually latex gloves. And to illustrate to you how big of a joke gloves are, what we would do, I have pictures of this, we would blow up our gloves and we would do, we would play volleyball tournaments in the lab with gloves, right? You can just like, believe it or you can spike a glove. You can, you can bump a glove and we would have a grand old time with our latex gloves before we threw them away. We'd draw little faces on them. They're a little bit of a joke. You see, it doesn't work to just look at a bare glove because a glove is meant to be inhabited by hand. Time to shovel some snow, hand, let's do it. Time to climb this mountain, time to carry my child. I can, I can now move. This glove is now doing what it's supposed to be doing. A glove is meant to be inhabited. You were meant to be inhabited. You were meant to be inhabited by the spirit. If you are not inhabited by the spirit, you can't serve in God's army. There may be some rattling, there may be some commotion, but you're just gonna be worthless to the cause. You're not gonna have to rezeal, you're not gonna be able to overcome the sin and the world. Why is there apathy going back to my earlier question because there's a lack of the spirit? How does this battalion emerge from bones? How is there a revival in a graveyard? It's the Holy Spirit. I'm gonna give you three points on the Holy Spirit here that I want us to meditate on for a little bit, and then I'll close. My first point is that we should love the spirit for his introduction. When I had finished my medical training, I did my MD, I did a residency and a fellowship and a postdoc, I did a lot of year's training, and I was sending around my resume, they call it a CV, same thing. I was sending around to all these different companies and organizations, and I was getting Zippo. I was not getting people who wanted to hire me, and I remember feeling very discouraged about this, and I'm thinking all these years of training, all this hard work, and I can't even get somebody to hire me. Well, I met an individual, his name is Steve Israel, and Steve saw me and he connected and he introduced me to someone else named Nick Gallicatos who works at a company that was my dream job, and because of Steve's introduction to Nick, Nick hired me, and every single time I see Steve Israel, I wanna like fall down and kiss his feet, because he like changed my whole life through that introduction. I mean, it really did, it changed, I ended up working in this kind of intersection of medicine and business, and it was a tremendous experience to work there for those eight years that I would be a very different person if it weren't for that. Did you know that all of you have had a person, if you know Jesus, who introduced you to Jesus? And that person is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the one who goes before us, who prepares the way, who illuminates truth, who preserves scripture, who is doing all kinds of introductory meetings for us to meet Jesus. Just like I wanna fall down and kiss Steve Israel's feet sometimes, you oughta just wanna fall down and worship, glorify the Holy Spirit for who he has introduced you to, the Son of God and the Father above. I remember specifically my encounter with the Holy Spirit, my first true encounter with the Holy Spirit. I will never forget this day. I was, it was my senior year of high school. I was raised in a Christian home, and I knew truths about God. I knew a lot of truths about God, and I'm very grateful for that. But I had read in a way that I had never read before because the Holy Spirit was introducing me to Jesus. I read, interestingly, Romans 8, 38 to 39. And I still remember this day like it was yesterday. I was sitting in my bedroom, and I was reading this passage, and you're all gonna hate me now, because I'm actually gonna read it in the NIV, which is what I read it in when I was at that age. And we're all like primed for the New King James tomorrow, right? I know I am, I'm ready to get up here and recite it. So I hope this is interfere with you too much. But I read these words, that was the Bible we had in our house. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. I read that, and I just had this sense of like, whoa, what just happened? And I remember this sensation, it was like electricity going through me, and I got up in my room, nobody was in the room, and I got up to start dancing. I was just like, yeah, I get it, God loves me. Not just the world, but he loves me. And I was, it completely changed my whole life. The spirit illuminated that passage to me in ways that unaided with just my pure reading capabilities I missed. It became alive in my heart. Point number two, the Holy Spirit is given only with conditions. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has a fascinating line in there where he says, do not give what is holy to the dogs. You all remember that, right? Do not give what is holy to the dogs. The Holy Spirit is the holiest person. Do you think that God would violate that principle and give the Holy Spirit to those who are not meeting the conditions? They are not ready. They would trifle the Holy Spirit. There are several conditions that the Holy Spirit several conditions that we have to meet in order to receive the Holy Spirit. So the most clear place where the Holy Spirit is given is at baptism. So we see that, for example, at Jesus's baptism, the dove lights upon him, the Holy Spirit like a dove lights upon him. In Acts 238, Peter says, repent and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. This is how the early church interpreted this as well. Acts 19, Paul meets those people from Ephesus and you ask them about the Holy Spirit and they don't know what's going on. And what's his response? It's to baptize them, right? This is how the early church understood this as well. Okay, so I'm not gonna spend time on that. I have messages online on that. I want to additionally explore how the Spirit only dwells in those who are humble, dependent and desperate. Only in those who are humble, dependent and desperate. Now, I could spend an hour on each of these headings here and I'm not going to. I'm just gonna give a high level bird's eye view of some of these conditions. So the first condition is to ask. And when Jesus says ask, if you look at the tense of the verbs, it implies a continual asking. It's fervent, persistent prayer. Did you know? Did anybody know how long that first prayer meeting was? In Acts two, sort of starts in one and goes into two, that the disciples had, says where they met in one accord in that upper room. 10 days, who said that? Brother Philip, good job. Jesus met with them for 40 days after the resurrection and then Pentecost, Penteconda, 50 days. So 50 minus 40, 10 days. They had a continual prayer meeting for 10 days. A nonstop prayer meeting for 10 days. I've never been in a continuous prayer meeting for 10 days. I'm gonna go quickly on this through this list. Fasting is something that humbles you. Radical giving is something that the Holy Spirit is drawn to, confession. Oh, I wish I could spend multiple hours on that one. Giving admonishment, hard to do, hard to do, right? Man, I hate giving admonishment, but that's something that the Spirit is so bound up with. Receiving and acting on admonishment. These are things that humble us. They're hard to do, right? Who likes to give admonishment? Who likes to receive admonishment? Not me. The things that are hard, I, Brother Philip gave a good message earlier and I like how he put it, where how do you receive life by dying? It's the things that tend towards self-mortification that will invite the Holy Spirit to come. So in your mind, if you sense that something is hard to do, think that's probably where I need to go. When you feel your stomach growling and you're like on day one or day two of a fast and you're feeling like, oh, I gotta go for it, that sensation is designed by God to be something that invites us to taste a little bit of the sufferings and some of the pains of what it is to enter into self-abasement. Loving your enemies, hard to do. You have to humble yourself. Evangelism, this is something we talk about a lot at Sattler. Wow, hard to do. Oh, they're gonna say no, they're gonna think I'm a fool on and on and so we shut ourselves up from that. Submitting the body, lifting up hands. I am so blessed. I've seen a handful of people just up here or in the seats here just lifting up hands, praising God, I love that site. That's one of the most beautiful sites that I see at KFW and I know it's hard to do here. It's not part of the culture as much. That's biblical. It's 1 Timothy 2, it says that. Suffering, these are the kinds of things that the Holy Spirit is about. Now one common title, in fact it's very common in the book of John for the Holy Spirit is the title Comforter. We all know this, right? Holy Spirit is called the Comforter. Now I want you all to crucially understand this point. Hey, pay careful attention to what I'm gonna say. If you are already comfortable, why would God give you the Holy Spirit? You hear me? If you are already comfortable, what is the point of giving you the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit is designed by God for this ministry of comfort. I want you to take stock again of your life over the last year and ask how much of my life, if I look back at my life, would people say it was comfortable? We need to really ask ourselves this question. We've been as a family practicing Romans 8 and I have to say there has been one part of Romans 8 that every time I come to it, I just have this hiccup in my throat and I just think, can I say this? Can we get up here on Sunday morning and say this? It's been easily the most convicting line for me in all of Romans 8. It's verse 36 for it says, for your sake, we are killed all day long. And I've been reading this thinking, can I say this? Can you say this or is this a complete and utter joke? I'm gonna read it again. For your sake, we are killed all day long. That's pretty easy to understand, isn't it? The preceding verse, there's this train of nouns that Paul uses there to describe the experience of the Christians and a lot of you have this memorized. He says, tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, sword. This is a description of what he's saying is how they're living. We can pray and ask all we want. We can sing songs, we can do nice meetings, but really, if we can't say these words with integrity, I think we have to do some serious structural repentance and some massive changes here to life. Again, why would God give a comforter to those who do not need comfort, to those who are already comfortable? My third and final point is that we are to understand the advantage of the Holy Spirit. So often you will hear people say this, if I could just have been there and seen Jesus multiply the loaves or seen him raise Lazarus from the dead or do one of these things, it would have been amazing and that would have satisfied all my problems and I would just be all set. Everything would be great. You've all heard things like this. People are saying like, if I could just have seen. And what I like to respond, how I like to respond and I encourage you to respond like this and to think along these lines. Jesus says in John 16, he says something that should completely shatter that. He actually says to his disciples, hey, disciples, it is to your advantage that I go away because if I go away, I'm gonna send the comforter, the Holy Spirit. Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that it's more advantageous to live now without seeing Jesus in the flesh, without seeing all these miracles occur but to have the Holy Spirit inside of us? A.W. Tozer said it well, where he says, modern churches are about filling churches with people. True Christianity is about filling people with God. I love that. The significance of what Jesus promises there, I think people in that era would have understood it. They would have understood, wait a minute, the same Holy Spirit that came down on Samson and on David and that if you messed around with that Holy Spirit, you would get obliterated in the temple. You're telling me, Jesus, that we get to permanently have that Holy Spirit inside of us. I think they would have just had this head exploding moment where they would have thought, wow, what is happening? I'll close with a story of, I've told you about how the Holy Spirit introduced me to Jesus through Romans 8. Romans 8 and John 15, those are my two passages that he kept bringing me to again and again and again and I fell in love with Jesus, my senior year of high school. I went away to college and I had plenty of sins that I had to reckon with and to repent of and the Holy Spirit, wow, what a helper, what a friend he has been. I remember this one time that I went to a secular college and it was early in the morning, I don't know why I was up so early, but I remember getting up early in the morning and I went for my room and we had common bathrooms that we shared in the dorm. So in one hallway there would basically be one bathroom. And so I went to this bathroom early in the morning, nobody was up, college students don't get up early in the morning, but I was up for some reason and I go into one of the stalls and there was a whole stash, a whole stack of pornographic magazines and I remember seeing that and thinking it's early in the morning, nobody's ever gonna know, quiet as can be. I could just sit here, watch, look at these magazines and it's gonna be fine. But it's very similar to that experience that I had in high school. There's this power, this sense of a hand entering the glove that happened. And I remember this because it was so, again so almost surreal. So I go there and I march back to my room and we had a trash can that had one of those thick black and a hefty trash bags. And I go back to this stall and I take all these magazines and I throw it in this bag and I tie it up. Again, it's early in the morning, I think it was like six in the morning, something like that. And then I just, I go and I start running and I decide to run. So I'm running outside and I'm screaming at the top of my lungs. I kid you not, I'm screaming at the top of my lungs. Come and see my zeal for the Lord. And I remember, I knew no one could hear me but I knew that God could see. I knew that some kind of powers could see. And I remember the sensation of, wow, I could never do this on my own. And here I am running and I go, like there was a dumpster there and I take this thing and I just pitch it in. And it falls in, I'm thinking, this is awesome. This is amazing. This is exactly this power of, again, the hand in the glove, right? There is something about a floppy glove compared to the power of a hand in a glove that simply can't be compared. I wanna invite all of us as we close this message to think long and hard about these topics that I have mentioned. I truly believe in my heart of hearts, I prayed long and hard about what to share here. I believe that these topics are both individual and systemic and I know there's a range of people here in the audience, but I believe we truly need to repent, to decisively repent and to change much of our lives in order to bring the power of the Holy Spirit that there would yet be an army that would stand before God. A battalion that God raises up out of bones. Let's close in prayer. Our Father in heaven, please forgive us for the trifles, for the comforts, for the materialism, for the sin, for the entertainments, for the needless pursuits of the world when we have a cause that you have commissioned us to to make disciples of all nations when people are eternally perishing. We have yet to coalesce and to surrender to our King Jesus. Father, we pray today, we beg today that we would change not just with our lips but with our actions that we would not be people who would say, for your sake, we are killed all day long in vanity and in almost just total joke fashion. I pray that we would repent and place ourselves in positions of suffering, positions of sacrifice, of hunger, of desperation, of humility. Have mercy on us God, but I know that in so many ways we need to speak to ourselves here. But I call on you God for the assistance that you can provide, the help that you have already given us and I pray here as KFW rolls out that you would help us to truly, truly seek the Holy Spirit to believe, to believe, believe, believe what Jesus said in John 16 that it is an advantage that Jesus has sent us this great Comforter, this great Helper. Father, I repent myself and I invite any here to join me in a time of repentance and I pray these things all in the name of Jesus, amen.