Compelling Spirit

Holy Trinity Church, Huddersfield, Sunday 8th September 2019

Guided by God: 2

This was a two bottle service. I was playing percussion in the worship band at the second contemporary service and the church was warm. It was bright and sunny and the heating was on. Two sports bottles of water are required on those days, we refer to it as drummer juice.

We were winging it. The leader had a migraine in the evening we were supposed to be rehearsing, so we turned up with no rehearsal on Sunday morning, ran through a couple of songs in the gap between services and I pointed out the echo on the vocals in my monitor. I was told it would be OK.

It was not OK. The service started and on the first song the echo in the monitor was so strong that I could not hear the vocal I was supposed to be following instead there was the vocal delayed, behind the beat and not on the beat at all. I followed the unechoed bass I could hear, augmented by watching the bass player’s hands. Somehow we kept in time. At the end of the first song the worship leader said some words of encouragement to the congregation to help then to worship God, and I went to the back of the church to get the monitor feed changed leaving her to ad-lib till I got back. Technology, huh!

I was not the only one having trouble. The leader said this after the service.

When you stand up to lead worship and your throat cracks in song 2 … blustered through the rest of the service, it was only really obvious in a couple of places.

Despite all this, things went smoothly from the congregation’s point of view. God is good.

The service theme was the second on being Guided by God. Last week was Commanding Scripture, today’s theme was Compelling Spirit. I can see a ‘C’ theme developing. if we can do a ‘CS’ theme I’ll be impressed.

Now onto the sermon.

‘How can we say “I am a child of God?”‘ was the question at the beginning of the sermon. ‘The Bible says so,’ is one answer, but it is also because of the Holy Spirit within that we know we are God’s. Last week the service was about where we are going, this week was more about the Holy Spirit guiding us on a journey

The Holy Spirit lives in us.  Fashionable wisdom will be out of date in a year or so.  God has prepared things for those who love him.  The Spirit dives into our spirit and brings out what God wanted to say all along. The Holy Spirit lives in us and guides us.  The person without the Spirit rejects the things of the Spirit because he does not understand them.  We don’t tap into this. We don’t live like that.

The Spirit is sent to comfort and guide. As a good friend.  This wisdom is different from the wisdom of the world, it is not just head knowledge. Jesus had his disciples doing things, joining in with his ministry.  The Holy Spirit speaks deep within a gut feeling—at this point, there were examples of personal experiences how the Holy Spirit had guided in the preacher’s life.

All in all, it was a good service, despite the problems of technology and throat infections.