Tag: holy spirit

The Feast of Pentecost

Adapted from a sermon by Fr Sam Fanous

Passage: John 15:26 – 16:15

Today is the beautiful Feast of Pentecost – the Feast where the apostles and disciples went out and converted the whole world. If you look at the whole history of humanity within the Bible, you can see that it is a process of God teaching humanity. In ancient civilisations, the world was pretty barbaric – humanity behaved in a way that was very depraved in many instances. In those times, they behaved in that way often in service to the gods they worshipped. Some offered up their sons and daughters, and burned them in an act of worship to their gods.

Throughout the Old Testament, God told these people that, though they were primitive, this was not the way to behave. So He revealed himself to them as God the Father, the one God. In those days, the concept of one God was alien to them – there were hundreds of gods. Each tribal group had their own group. He revealed himself to the Jews firstly to teach them the most important lesson: there is only one God. The other gods were idols. But the God of the Jews was the only one to be worshipped. 

And even though he said this to Abraham and Moses, it took about a thousand years for this idea to sink in. Initially, they thought that this was their God who was stronger than all the other gods. But after thousands of years that concept became ingrained that the other gods weren’t real, and were simply works of man. The God of the Jews was the only God. He revealed that He was the transcendent, unknowable, eternal God. 

This is why in the Old Testament the people would question “how can I have seen God’s face?”. They believed that if they saw God’s face they would be immediately killed. But throughout the whole Old Testament there are snippets of revelation that somehow God is further than we could ever imagine, yet somehow close to us. We see Moses in the Burning Bush – the angel of the Lord walks on the earth. But who is the angel of the Lord? 

So somehow, throughout the Old Testament, you get the indication that there may be more to the story than this one, eternal, unknowable God. And finally, when we get to the gospels, we discover a new level of truth: God, the word, the second person, became man.  

He was the angel of the Lord. He was the one who spoke to Moses through the Burning Bush. In the fullness of time, through St Mary, He became man. 

And this movement of revelation from God the unknowable coming towards us moves to another level now. Now, Jesus walks with us. We can listen, touch, hold and see Him. He is there. 

But the movement of God towards us is not finished there. Jesus’ death and resurrection is only the second stage. The next stage is today – Pentecost – when the disciples were gathered together in the upper room, waiting for the Holy Spirit to descend on them. This is the final revelation.

In the Old Testament, we have the eternal God unknowable to us – and that is still true. God the Father cannot be known by us. We cannot put Him in our brains – He is far above us. 

But now, we know Him as Jesus Christ. He is close to us. 

But the final stage of the revelation is the outpouring of the Holy Spirit within us. God is not only beyond everything, He is not only someone we can see, He is someone deep within us, closer to us than we are to ourselves. 

As one theologian puts it,

“God is beyond all things we could think or express, yet closer to us than our own heart”. 

This is God’s revelation to humanity – and we are the heirs of this revelation. We have received the Holy Spirit in baptism and chrismation. God has moved from His eternal throne all the way into our souls, even though we don’t deserve it. 

And now God is fully revealed to the world. There is nothing left for God to teach us from an external perspective. The only thing we have to do is find him. And we cannot say “you’re too far away” or “we don’t know you”. The disciples and Jews saw Jesus walking on earth, but He is closer to us than He was to the disciples because He is within our soul through the Holy Spirit. 

It is the Trinity: God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit that works within us for our salvation. It’s the Spirit within us that pushes us to pray and convicts us when we sin. And when we pray, we pray by the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father. The Holy Trinity, altogether, is working for our salvation. 

So today we have to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Every action and word must be infused with the Holy Spirit. If you are not sowing the Spirit to the people around you, you are giving them emptiness. If you’re a servant in the church, and are empty of the Holy Spirit, your service is futile.

You may do good things for people and help them. Many people help those who are sick, which is a good thing. But what are you doing to make a change eternally? You may ease their pain for a short period of time, but are you easing their eternal pain? Are you giving them eternal glory? Are you giving them anything with substance or meaning? 

If you don’t have the Holy Spirit, whatever good you do will never be eternal. It will only ever be temporary. 

Think about it like a drinking vessel. You could have a drinking vessel that is beautiful and ornaments your house, but when you come to drink from it, it’s empty. Or you could have an ugly jug, cracked, hardly holding itself together, and when you drink from that drinking vessel, it has an outcome. It gives you something.

This is what we have to remember. If we are empty of the Holy Spirit, no matter how good we look, no matter how much we do, we are giving emptiness. We are giving from our own deficiency. 

Without the Holy Spirit guiding our actions, we are like zombies. We can move and do things but there’s no life within us. 

It’s not just in our service. Think about your actions when you raise your own children. When you raise them, you have to raise them with the Spirit. In everything you do, give them the Spirit. Every time you speak to them, when you pray together, when you discipline them, feed them the Spirit. 

We spend so much time making sure we have enough food or clothing so we can provide for them materially, but that doesn’t mean anything. They will only remember if you fed them the Spirit when they looked at you and saw that you had something special, eternal and transmitted it to them. 

St Seraphim of Sarov said,

“Acquire the Spirit of Peace and a thousand souls around you will be saved.” 

Just one person can acquire the Holy Spirit and thousands will be saved. With the Holy Spirit, twelve uneducated fishermen changed an entire empire without lifting a sword. With the Holy Spirit, a poor young virgin gave birth to the Saviour of the world. 

This is the purpose of our lives – to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Any church that is not filled with the Holy Spirit is dead. You can do all the services you want, but it is a dead church. And being filled with the Holy Spirit doesn’t start with the priest or the hierarchy. If every member of the church was filled and overflowing with the Holy Spirit, then the whole country would be changed just from that church. If every single person made that their goal in life, the whole world would be changed. 

So this day of Pentecost, let’s not forget our purpose on this earth – to be filled with the Holy Spirit so that it overflows. Let’s follow the example of the disciples. First, they gathered together in the upper room, waiting patiently for the Spirit to descend upon them. We need to drink daily, hourly, minutely, from the Holy Spirit. 

Every time we lift up our eyes to heaven or bow down on our knees to pray, this is us drinking daily. When we fill ourselves up and then interact with the people around us, it’ll naturally be transmitted to them. Even without words, as St Francis of Assisi said:

“Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary, use words.”

We don’t always need to use words to preach God – we just need to be filled with the Spirit. 

Together, in this season of Pentecost now, remember that God, who is beyond our comprehension and above anything we can begin to imagine is also deep within our souls – our whole purpose in life is to discover and find him there. Glory be to God forever Amen.

Full Sermon Here

The Fullness of Life

The Fullness of Life

Adapted from a sermon by Fr Mark Basily

Passage: John 15:26-16:15

We celebrate the feast of the Pentecost, 50 days after the crucifixion. The day after Pentecost, we start fasting again. On a day like this our minds consider, what are we going to eat tonight? What do we want to eat just before the fast? How much can we eat?

We get really full as though what we eat will sustain us for the next month or so of fasting. There is another kind of fullness that is taking place of this feast day, beyond eating. St Luke gives the entire passage of his description of what took place on the day of Pentecost.

He says, “When the day of Pentecost had fully come” (Acts 2:2). He mentions Pentecost as though the reader knew what is was. This was because Pentecost was a Jewish feast, celebrated 50 days after the Passover. Pentecost meant 50, like a pentagon has 5 sides, the Pentecost was celebrated 50 days after the Passover.

On the day of Pentecost, it was a celebration of the day that they received the law on Mount Sinai. It was also a time that they would bring the first fruits of the harvest. Many of the major Christian events take place on major Jewish dates. On these dates, Jews would travel to Jerusalem to partake of the feast. The Crucifixion took place on the day of Passover. This was to fulfil the law firstly. Also, there were thousands of people gathered from the surrounding villages to celebrate the Passover. When everyone is there and everyone can see, Christ is crucified.

Again, thousands of people flocking into Jerusalem for Pentecost to offer the fruit fruits of their harvest, and then, the Holy Spirit descends. Everyone is there to see, everyone can hear the message. This is why it was essential that the disciples could speak in different languages to cater for all the people that had come from surrounding villages. God uses prime time events for everyone to see and witness. St Luke says, “When the day of Pentecost had fully come. Why not just when the day had Pentecost had come? Why use the word fully?

Scholars suggest that St Luke was deliberately using this word as a running theme throughout his entire book of Acts;

  • Acts 2: 4. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
  • Acts 2:28. You will make me full of joy in Your presence.
  • Acts 4:8. Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit
  • Acts 4:31. and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke the word of God with boldness.
  • Acts 5:3. why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and keep back part of the price of the land for yourself?
  • Acts 6:5. And they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit
  • Acts 13:52. And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.

These, among other examples, were St Luke’s way of emphasising the fullness of the Holy Spirit. That the Holy Spirit would fill them, would fill their lives, would fill their church.

This is the fullness we need to search for in our lives. To be filled with the Holy Spirit. St Seraphim of Sarov, a famous Russian monk of the 20th century, wrote a beautiful book called Acquiring the Holy Spirit.

 He says, “the aim of your Christian life is the acquisition of the Holy Spirit.”

“What do you mean by acquiring?” I asked St. Seraphim. “Somehow I don’t understand that.”

“Acquiring is the same as obtaining,” he replied. “Do you understand, what acquiring money means? Acquiring the Spirit of God is exactly the same. You know very well enough what it means to acquire in a worldly sense, your Godliness. The aim of ordinary worldly people is to acquire or make money; and for the nobility, it is in addition to receive honors, distinctions and other rewards for their services to the government. The acquisition of God’s Spirit is also capital, but grace-giving and eternal, and it is obtained in very similar ways, almost the same ways as monetary, social and temporal capital.

“God the Word, the God-Man, our Lord Jesus Christ, compares our life with the market, and the work of our life on earth He calls trading. He says to us all: “Trade till I come” (Lk. 19:13), “buying up every opportunity, because the days are evil” (Ephesians 5:16). In other words, make the most of your time getting heavenly blessings through earthly goods. Earthly goods are good works done for Christ’s sake that confer the grace of the All-Holy Spirit, on us.”

Before we can even begin to obtain or acquire, we must know – who is the Holy Spirit? Mark Sidhom once asked a group of pre-servants to describe the characteristics of the Holy Spirit.

One said, “It’s the Comforter.” To which he responded, “Wrong.”

Another said, “It is the Spirit of God that fills your heart.” Again, wrong.

Something that makes you feel peaceful? Wrong.

This continued until finally he explained that the problem was that all these answers began with, “It’s.” The Holy Spirit is a Person. He is the Comforter. He is God’s Spirit that fills your heart. He is what gives you peace. He is a Person of the Holy Trinity. He is One whom we can have a relationship with. He is the One that we can be filled with. The Holy Spirit dwells in us that we can acquire Him, obtain Him, be filled with Him and live with Him.

This coming period of the Apostles fast in the time in which we acquire the Holy Spirit. Let us consider what a church that is full of the Holy Spirit looks like. What does a home that is filled with the Holy Spirit look like? What does a father that is filled with the Holy Spirit look like? A wife, a youth, a child? What do I look like when I am filled with the Holy Spirit. Let us spend this Apostles’ fast asking these questions.

? Full sermon ?

The Unforgivable Sin

The Unforgivable Sin

By Daniel Ishak

“Therefore I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men. Anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come.  Matthew 12:32-33

When reading through the Bible, one of Christ’s most attractive attributes is His abundant forgiveness. The gospel are filled with stories of people who have been judged by men, but then forgiven by Christ.  When they brought the adulterous woman before Him to be stoned, Christ looked to her with a sense of compassion and forgiveness, and told the scribes and Pharisees “He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first.” (John 8:7).  When everyone judges, Christ forgives.

But there is a sin that our forgiving Lord says cannot be forgiven: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. “Therefore I say to you, every sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven men. (Matthew 12:32)

At first glance, this seems so uncharacteristic of our forgiving savior. But when we take a closer look at who the Holy Spirit is, and what His role is in my life, we can begin to see why Christ was so strict in warning us of this sin.

Who is the Holy Spirit?
The Holy Spirit is God. He is the third Person of the Holy Trinity and equal to both the Father and the Son. He was there at the beginning of creation, and since then has been present throughout the Old Testament, and continues to be active in the New Testament. He is not only God in heaven above, but also God who lives inside me. Jesus told the apostles, “And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever – the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.” (John 14:16-18).

What is His role in my life?
Living inside of me, the Holy Spirit has many important roles: two of His most important roles are leading me to Christ, and driving my transformation and repentance.

  1. The first role of the Holy Spirit is to lead me to meet Christ. When Simeon the elder saw Christ in the temple, it says that the “the Holy Spirit was upon him…He was led by the Spirit to the temple” (Luke 2:25). The Holy Spirit led Simeon to the temple to meet Christ. He has the same role in my life today – He leads me to meet Christ. There’s a beautiful quote which states, “Just as the air remains in itself invisible to us but acts as the medium through which we see and hear other things so the Spirit does not reveal to us His own face but He always shows us the face of Christ.” When I lose sight of Christ and fall astray, the Holy Spirit leads me back to the temple where I can see Christ.
  2. The second role of the Holy Spirit is to transform my life. We see this clearly in the life of St Peter, an iconic example of spiritual renewal. When told by the servant girl in the High Priest’s house that he was a follower of Christ, Peter gave in to cowardice and denied Christ. However, when the Holy Spirit came upon him on the Day of Pentecost, his weak faith was transformed into perfect faith. He no longer feared people, and so preached to three thousand people, then to five thousand and after that to the Sanhedrin! We see a transformed St Peter. What happened in this period? It was the reception of the Holy Spirit. St John Chrysostom says about St Peter that “He raised his voice, he spoke with great confidence that they might perceive the grace of the Spirit. He who could not endure the questioning of a poor girl now discourses with such great confidence in the middle of people all breathing murder upon him. This in itself became an indisputable proof of the Resurrection, for wherever the Holy Spirit is present; people of clay are changed into people of gold.” Likewise, the Holy Spirit is the Person who drives my repentance and transforms me.

What is blasphemy of the Holy Spirit?
Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is the complete and continuous rejection of the Holy Spirit and His power in my life.

As we saw above, the Holy Spirit is the one who shows me the face of Christ, and who drives my repentance – and so when I make this conscious decision to reject Him continually, my heart eventually becomes so hardened that I will never repent, and as a result lose my chance of salvation. It is the complete and continuous rejection of the Holy Spirit that is the deadly sin, as it is rejecting His power to transform me and lead me to a repentance that produces eternal life.

There’s a big difference between a man who falls in sin, but is repentant, and desires to overcome his sin, and the man who fall in sin – aware of his wrongdoing – and refuses to repent. The problem with the latter is that eventually his heart becomes hardened, and it is impossible for him to respond to God’s word. An example of this type of character is Pharaoh from the Old Testament. In Exodus 9:12, it says that “the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh; and he did not heed them.” God kept warning Pharaoh, sending him soft plagues in the beginning, and then the warning signs became increasingly harsh. However, Pharaoh was unrelenting. His heart became hardened, to the point where he could not heed the warning given to him by Moses and Aaron anymore. Likewise, God sometimes sends us little lessons in our lives. However, if we do not respond, our hearts can become so hardened that we no longer have the will to repent and thus, gain eternal life.

That is why we need to be mindful of the Holy Spirit and be conscious of His signals in our hearts so that we do not blaspheme against Him. He is continually trying to show me Christ, and to lead my transformation and repentance. Let us respond to Him, so that we do not be at risk of the grave sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.

The pastoral irony of all this, of course, is that any Christian who asks a priest with trembling whether or not he has committed the unforgivable sin cannot possibly have committed it, for the question proves that the one asking it loves Jesus and fears being separate from Him.  Let such devout souls fear nothing.  They have clearly been caught in the fishermen’s net, along with other fish.  Let them persevere in their devotion, and rest assured of final forgiveness.

– Anonymous early church father.

May the Lord make us people of gold, a responsive people who continually repent and are welcoming of the Holy Spirit in our lives, singing with David the prophet, “do not take Your Holy Spirit away from me.” Having the Holy Spirit stay with us will then allow us to gain the kingdom and see the face of Christ eternally.

Glory be to God Amen.