There’s a Holy Spirit?

There are two major encounters with the power of God in Acts 19. The first involves some of John the Baptist’s disciples who have heard about Jesus but haven’t experienced the fullness of His presence. Paul meets them, prays over them, and they get saved. The second involves some Jewish sorcerers who hear about Paul performing miracles and attempt to wield the power of God for their own gain. Their attempts fail, the real power of God prevails, and revival sweeps across Ephesus. Although we don’t live in a city as obsessed with magic and spirituality as Ephesus, we still need power today. And like the disciples of John and the Jewish sorcerers, most of us are missing something. We either neglect the presence of God altogether, or we try to manipulate the power of God for our own gain. But by naming the fears, distractions, and sins that separate us from God, we can experience His real presence and power in our lives today.

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 If you have a Bible, uh, would you open to Acts chapter 19? Uh, we’re gonna start in verse 13. So Acts 19, 13. Uh, as you’re turning there, let me pray for us. And then we will get started.

So God, we give you, uh, over these next few moments, uh, we just, we give you our attention. Uh, we give you our, um, our hearts and our desires. And We give you our lifestyles, and we ask that over these next few moments as we learn from your word that you would impact each of those areas of our lives, our minds, our thoughts, our desires, and the way that we live.

Father, we ask that you would meet us here this morning, and that you would help us leave this place better followers of you. So, God, we pray all this in your name. Amen. Another demon story. That’s where we’re headed this morning. And if you’re counting, this is going to be the third time that we’re told where Paul encounters dark spiritual forces in the story of Acts.

So we had Elymas the sorcerer from Acts chapter 13. We had the slave girl possessed by a demon in Acts chapter 16. Not to mention the countless times Luke just casually includes exorcism among the many signs and wonders performed by Peter and some of the disciples as they’ve planted churches and spread the gospel.

And now in chapter 19, Paul. Fresh off a few fruitful years of ministry in Corinth, clashes again with powerful forces in opposition to the name and power of Jesus. And I got to be honest, it’s a weird one today. It’s full of all the stuff that we don’t really know what to do with, and so we just kind of skip over it.

So let’s read it. Acts 19, starting in verse 13. Now some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists already, it’s a good start, You Now some of the itinerant Jewish exorcists also attempted to pronounce the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had evil spirits, saying, I command you by the Jesus that Paul preaches.

Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish high priest, were doing this. The evil spirit answered them, I know Jesus, and I recognize Paul, but who are you? Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them, overpowered them all, and prevailed against them, so that they ran out of that house naked and wounded. When this became known to everyone who lived in Ephesus, both Jews and Greeks, they became afraid and the name of the Lord Jesus was held in high esteem.

And many who had become believers came confessing and disclosing their practices. While many of those who had practiced magic collected their books and burned them in front of everyone. So they calculated their value and found it to be 50, 000 pieces of silver. In this way, the word of the Lord flourished and prevailed.

So, Talking Demons and Nudity, Witchcraft, Revival, easy story, right? Now on the surface, uh, and I gotta be honest, in all the times I’ve heard this preached growing up, which, again, I have to be honest, it was only once, uh, it just seems like a historical account, again, about spiritual forces clashing with the kingdom that Paul has come preaching, threatened by its king, Jesus.

So the takeaway of that one sermon I heard as like a fifth grader or something was basically go home, collect all your Harry Potter books, burn them, and call it a day. Which is not the takeaway of today, by the way. So you can keep your Harry Potter books. That’s between you and God.

Now, like most of Luke’s writing, there’s actually a deeper truth being communicated through this story. It’s a profoundly powerful passage that scholars believe serves as the high point of Paul’s ministry as a free man. Because after this, much of his life, the rest of his life, is going to be characterized by letter writing and imprisonment.

Now we’ve talked about the gospel uprooting economic and cultural foundations of pagan cities before, but this is mass revival on a citywide scale. So how did this happen? What caused this mass repentance and what captured the imagination of the Jewish sorcerers in the city? Now to answer that question, to see how we got here, we’re gonna do like a, uh, Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino thing and work backwards.

Uh, we’re gonna, so we start at the end. This is the high point of Paul’s ministry. We’re gonna work backwards to see how we got there, to see why Luke is telling us the story, and then we’ll end with what this has to do with us today. Sound good? Good. All right. Three questions to help us guide our time, our movement through this passage.

Uh, where is Paul now? What is Paul doing? And how does Paul do it? So first question, where is Paul now? Now the short answer, Paul is in Ephesus. So after spending a few years in Corinth, 18 months to be exact, Paul goes to Syria, and then to Ephesus, where he debates with some Jews in the synagogue. But he leaves Ephesus pretty quickly, so he can head back to Jerusalem, revisit the churches in Antioch, Galatia, and Phrygia, and then head back around to pick up where he left off in Ephesus.

That’s the short answer. But the long answer, Paul is actually deep in the trenches of the magic capital of Asia Minor. See, like Athens and like Corinth, Ephesus stands as a powerhouse city for the rest of the Mediterranean world. It’s the second largest city next to Rome. It’s a port city, which means that merchants from the East and the West came in and out, bringing wealth in and taking culture out.

In fact, poets and scholars from this era call Ephesus the door that connects the East to the West for that reason. We talked about this, uh, last week. Ephesus is like the city of LA. It’s a cultural capital with influence that reached far beyond the city itself. But what you need to know for today is that like Athens, Ephesus is a center of power.

But unlike Athens, instead of philosophical or ideological power, and unlike Corinth, full of sexual power and influence, Ephesus is the center of magic power. As one scholar puts it, Paul had spent a day or two in each of the Galatian churches. He’d stayed a few days in Philippi, a few weeks in Thessalonica, a day or two in Berea, a few days in Athens, and then he had spent 18 months in Corinth.

And now, as a kind of climax to his work, he’s He was in one of the major centers of the Mediterranean world, Ephesus itself. A great city at the hub of the trade routes of the world, full of culture and money and temples and politics and soldiers and merchants and slaves and power. Everything we know about Ephesus indicates that it was a place where not only social and civic power, but also religious and spiritual power were concentrated.

Now to borrow a little bit of research from a few different ancient Near Eastern scholars, uh, here’s what we know about magic. In the first century ancient Near East. Now Ephesus was a city of superstition. Think of it like L. A. mixed with like New Orleans or something. Voodoo, magical power, they were obsessed with the occult, spirituality, all of that stuff.

And magic in the ancient Near East actually meant something really specific. For us today, it’s like something that you do for kids birthday parties. Magic tricks and illusions and things like that. But, in the first century in this story, part of the world. Magic was specifically about one’s ability to manipulate deities and spirits in order to use their power to do your will.

And so the job of a sorcerer or a magician in Ephesus was to discern between spirits, figure out which ones were helpful, which ones were harmful, and how to get their attention. Now hang on to that. There were even six common names believed to hold tremendous spiritual power. As far as I know, these were like really common names, like Mark, things like that, like just names that everybody would have known.

But these names had significant spiritual power that were used as mantras or written on totems people would hold in order to ward off evil spirits. Those six names were collectively called the Ephesian letters. Now Jewish exorcists were actually really successful here for that reason. Jewish amulets were commonly sold and worn to ward off demonic spirits.

There was even a magical book called the Testament of Solomon that compiled these supposed incantations and formulas and spells from King Solomon in the Old Testament. Their line of thinking went like this, Solomon in the Old Testament is regarded as the wisest and smartest person to ever live. And his wisdom went beyond political knowledge and things like that, it went into the spiritual realm.

So there is some folklore that said that Solomon’s temple was actually built by Solomon manipulating the spiritual forces to build the temple for him. Obviously, we would say that that wasn’t true. But that was a common myth at the time. Now these Jews in Ephesus were likely committing the same sins as the people in Athens that we learned about two weeks ago, the sin of syncretism.

Which, if you remember, was the sin of adding and mixing ideologies, religions, worldviews, and spiritualities, adding Christianity to those things, and just making some kind of new belief system. These Jews had the Torah, where witchcraft and divination and sorcery was forbidden in passages like Deuteronomy and Numbers.

And yet, they were mixing their worship of the one true God, Yahweh, with the common occult practices of Ephesus to create something new. Now these specific Jewish sorcerers that we read about were called the Sons of Sceva and we’re not really sure who Sceva was. According to the 1st century historian Josephus and his records, there’s actually no account of a high priest named Sceva.

So it’s more likely that this man Sceva was some kind of pagan cult leader who had Jewish heritage and was forming a small cult of disciples around him to send them out and overturn and manipulate the powers that were so common and prevalent in Ephesus. It wasn’t uncommon, then, for magicians in this time to use the names of people they believed to have immense spiritual power.

We have examples of this earlier than this period and after the Book of Acts. For example, these Egyptians in the late Roman Empire period would use Jesus name to ward off evil spirits, to use as incantations for healings. They would say, We invoke these spirits in the name of the Hebrew God, Jesus.

There’s a common practice. So the Jews in Ephesus, these itinerant, these traveling Jewish sorcerers, had heard about Jesus, and they’d heard about Paul. And they were attempting, like every magician in the city, to use and manipulate the power of God. All of this to say, for a religious revival that resulted in the mass burning of magic books, totems, totems.

For that to happen, to come into a city like Ephesus, is astounding. These people have seen and heard about real power. They’ve encountered God, and like the rest of what the New Testament authors called the ends of the earth, the foundation of their city has been disrupted by the power of the gospel. But how did they hear about it?

Second question, what did Paul do? So we go backwards in the text, starting in verse 8. Now Paul entered the synagogue and spoke boldly over a period of three months, arguing and persuading them about the kingdom of God. Remember, we’ve talked about this at length. This was Paul’s M. O. Go to a new city, go to the synagogue, meet with his own people, reason with them to show them that Jesus is the fulfillment of their Hebrew Bible.

But when some of them became hardened and would not believe, slandering the way, that’s what Christianity was called in this time, it wasn’t, Christianity was called just the way, in front of the crowd, he withdrew from them, taking the disciples and conducting and conducted discussions every day in the lecture hall of Tyrannus.

Now what’s happening here is there’s, uh, really common for, uh, popular lecturers and teachers, professors, basically, in the city to have their lectures at night, their evenings in the morning or at night, and then during the day when they weren’t using their classroom, they would rent it out to these traveling preachers.

Paul likely rented one of these classrooms from a lecturer named Tyrannus. This would have been something that people familiar with Ephesus would have known about. So Paul rents out this classroom. He conducts these lectures and these studies about the kingdom of God. This went on for two years. Hang on to that.

So that all the residents of Asia, both Jews and Greeks, heard the word of the Lord. Now God was performing extraordinary miracles by Paul’s hands. So that even face cloths or aprons that had touched his skin were brought to the sick of And the diseases left them, and the evil spirits came out of them.

Now, a few things to note. First, notice the similarity between these miracles done by Paul through his clothes and the story of the woman who reached out to touch Jesus robe in the middle of a crowd to stop her bleeding. If you’re familiar with that story, that’s where your mind is supposed to go as you’re reading this story from Luke.

Now, this is actually, again, a really common practice in Ephesus. People with this sort of divine, dark, spiritual power would sell totems and clothing, items, That they believed to have magic power in them so that people could use them to ward off spirits and perform healings and things like that. Now, we can trust the Apostle Paul was not selling his clothes.

Uh, likely people were getting hold of some of the tools that maybe he used in his tent making business, like his face cloths to keep sweat out of his eyes or his apron to keep his clothes clean as he’s making tents. Stolen them and used them to perform miracles through the power of God. But what’s really important to know in this passage.

is that this is not a normative practice. Luke actually uses a word translated extra ordinary to mean just that. These events were extra ordinary. They were not normal. They were out of the norm. Something unique was happening through Paul specifically powered by God for this specific moment in this specific city.

Now, it’s not to say that miracles don’t still happen today. I fully believe that they do. I’m just saying that the level of intensity here is not normal. It serves a purpose. But most importantly, Luke wants us to know that these are not acts of magic that Paul is doing, these are miracles of God. So you picture the scene.

In a hyper spiritual city, obsessed with occult practices and magic power, in walks a former Jewish Pharisee, that somehow is able to wield immense spiritual power that even the city’s most seasoned magicians haven’t seen. Of course they want that power. Of course these itinerant traveling Jewish exorcists and local magicians want to emulate the power that Paul has by invoking the name of this deity, Jesus, to gain control over demonic spirits.

Of course they want to use it. But do you see what Luke is doing? In a city known for its magical and spiritual power and obsession, the power of God is coming in and breaking through. Healings, exorcisms, and revival is the result of God’s kingdom. That Paul does this, uh, such extreme and extraordinary miracles simply through his clothes is a testament to the miraculous supernatural power of the gospel.

Now at the end of his letter to the church that he’s about to start here in Ephesus, a church that’s going to end up serving as a kingdom outpost in the middle of a pagan occult city, Paul will write this. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against evil spiritual forces in the heavens.

What do you think the church in Ephesus would think about when they read those words from Paul? For this reason, take up the full armor of God. So that you may be able to resist in the evil day and having prepared everything to take your stand. See, it’s not just that God’s power is stronger than the dark powers and spiritual forces of Ephesus and can therefore be added to your personal collection of talismans and incantations.

God’s power is drastically opposed to those lesser powers. The powers that have held dominion over Ephesus and its citizens have no real power anymore. That’s the moral of the story. But what does this have to do with us today? The last question, how does Paul do it? Acts chapter 19, starting in verse 1, the beginning of the story that Luke’s telling.

While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul traveled through the interior regions and came to Ephesus. He found some disciples and asked them, Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? No, they told him. We haven’t even heard that there is a Holy Spirit. Well, into what then were you baptized, he asked them.

Well, into John’s baptism, they replied. Paul said, John baptized with a baptism of repentance, telling the people that they should believe in the one who would come after him, that is, in Jesus. When they heard this, they were baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they began to speak in other tongues, and to prophesy.

Now there were about twelve men in all.

So Luke starts this whole new section, this whole little story he’s telling about Paul’s ministry in the magic capital of Asia Minor, in the city of Ephesus, with this little story, about Paul meeting some disciples at the entrance to the city. And again, it’s a weird story that kind of raises more questions than it answers.

Wait, whose disciples were these? Wait, what, what exactly is John’s baptism? How can they be disciples of John the Baptist and not know about the Holy Spirit, whom surely John would have told them about because the Spirit is all throughout the Hebrew Bible? And why did Paul have to give them the Spirit?

Can he even do that? What about the tongues and the prophecy? What is that about? Now, honestly, there’s not enough time for me to answer all of those questions, but I do believe that this has the answer to a lot of the, what this text has to do with us today. But before we get there, let me get some of these questions out of the way.

Now, first, there’s debate on whether these were true believers or not. Some scholars say that these were true believers, they just hadn’t heard about the Holy Spirit yet, and so they just needed, they were missing something. Other scholars say, no, these were not believers, these were non Christians, and the moment they believe in Jesus, they hear the fullness of the gospel, they receive the Holy Spirit, And that’s that.

Honestly, I think it’s probably that. I think these were probably, uh, disciples of John the Baptist. They mention John’s baptism. John, uh, the Baptist, if you’re unfamiliar, was, uh, the last Hebrew prophet whose life’s work was to appoint people towards the coming Messiah, uh, Jesus, who just happened to be his actual literal cousin.

John the Baptist, being a prophet, would have had different disciples, just like Jesus had disciples, just had different rabbis, had different disciples, people that would follow him, hear his message. His whole job was to point people towards the coming kingdom and its coming king, and he did baptisms of repentance, meaning he would baptize people for the symbolic purification of their sins so that they might be ready for the kingdom when it comes.

But at the very beginning of Luke’s story in Acts chapter 2, a new baptism happens. Those who profess faith in Jesus immediately receive the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit. Now these disciples of John had the beginning of the story, but they were missing the ending. What John had said would happen, had happened.

The king had come and given his spirit to all who would submit themselves to Jesus and enter the kingdom. Now why would Luke start with this story? Or better question, what does this story have to do with everything that comes after it? Or an even better question, how does this encounter with these random disciples and the entrance to Ephesus lead to the mass conversion of nearly an entire magical city?

Or probably the best question. What was missing from these disciples that Paul immediately noticed, and what was missing from the sons of Sceva that the demons immediately noticed? Is the intimate, personal, manifest presence of God through the Holy Spirit.

So here’s the story, start to finish. Paul comes into the city. And immediately meets some disciples who seem to have it together, decent theology, but they’re missing some things. They’re missing the power of God through the Holy Spirit. So Paul gives them the ending to the story, they believe in Jesus, enter the kingdom, and immediately receive the Spirit.

Now after that, Paul makes his way deeper into the city, spending years teaching about Jesus and the Holy Spirit, working through Paul, advances the kingdom of God by pushing the dark spiritual forces of Ephesus back, reclaiming God’s creation through healings and miracles. Now people in the city catch wind of this.

They like the power that they’re seeing. It’s effective. It works. So they try and manipulate it. They try and invoke the name of God for their own gain, but they can’t fake it. And yet the spirit of God still moves. It gets a hold of an entire city. It gets a hold into the hearts of the people in Ephesus.

The gospel spreads and revival happens. Here’s why this matters for us today. Our world is not like Ephesus. I feel like we talk a lot about this. We say, Athens, our world is like Athens. Or Corinth, our world is like Corinth. Uh, we are not like Ephesus. Now that’s not to say that there aren’t dark spiritual forces behind the scenes manipulating people’s hearts and keeping them from entering the kingdom.

I believe that there are. I know if that sounded weird to you, that’s okay. Uh, stick around. Um, maybe we’ll address that in the future. What I am saying is that even non Christian sociologists have recognized and studied this. Since the Enlightenment, we live in what they call an age of disenchantment.

Charles Taylor specifically, who was a believer, called this the imminent frame, meaning we no longer have a collectively agreed upon moral compass for truth because we no longer believe that there is a transcendent sacred order to the way that the universe runs. Now that we’ve discovered the natural mechanisms by which God causes the sun to rise, we no longer believe that it’s God causing the sun to rise.

There’s no longer belief in any transcendence. There’s cynicism about the supernatural. This is pervasive in our world at large to say that there are spiritual forces. Again, if you had a weird reaction to that, that’s proof. We live in the imminent frame. Some of us have no category for God’s power breaking in through our lives because we, unlike the New Testament authors, divide our lives into natural and supernatural.

We assume that God sets the natural world in order and then sometimes intervenes, but for the most part he lets it run. We are not in Ephesus.

But we are like Paul. And we are like the people in Ephesus. We still need spiritual, transcendent power.

Some of us, we need real power.

Some of us, we need power. We have something that the closest thing we might describe, be able to describe to it is, is that. Dark spiritual forces we’ve encountered and experienced in our lives that are oppressing us, tormenting us, things that we probably don’t even have language for. We need power.

Others of us, we just need power to overcome the language we would use as sin or addictions or whatever it is that we feel like we’ve not been able to gain freedom from. Things that are holding us captive and keeping us from experiencing God in our lives. We need power. Others of us can’t muster up the power within ourselves to endure the things that we’ve been talking about.

Suffering, pain, persecution, the crucible of formation. Others of us just need power to give these practices a try. Now as a church centered around putting into practice the way of Jesus, we must not forget that none of this is done by our power. Sabbath, scripture readings, silence, simplicity, all of the things that we’re doing, generosity, hospitality, all of these things, we don’t make anything happen.

We are relying on supernatural power that we see on the pages of scripture. To put it bluntly, we need something outside of us to come and do something within us. In fact, I would say that’s what it means to be a follower of Jesus, is to depend on a power that extends beyond what we are able to do. We are relying on and living based on the power that is described here in Acts 19.

The power that Paul promises, that God promises through Paul in his letter to the Ephesians. And here’s the good news. You don’t need anybody to lay hands on you for you to receive that power. If you’ve committed your life to Jesus, if you’ve been justified to use that language, opened up, invited Jesus into your heart, whatever.

If you are a Christian, if God has made you new from the inside out, you are a follower of Jesus, you are in the Kingdom of God, you have that power. You have the Holy Spirit. The moment that you profess faith, God’s Spirit comes on you, comes in you, you have the power of God inside of you. But, that leads us to a problem.

And I would pose the problem by asking a question. Are you a sorcerer or are you a skeptic?

See, the minute we start talking about power and the Holy Spirit and the expressions of the Spirit, some of us experience and approach the Spirit and the power of God like the Jewish sorcerers. We want to manipulate God to our own ends. For those of us who live this way, our, our, our discipleship to Jesus looks more like superstition than devotion.

Maybe if I pray this morning, God will give me a better day. Maybe if I Sabbath, then God will give me a promotion. Maybe if I pray for my boss, God will give me a promotion. Or maybe some of us are just after sensationalism. We are looking for the experience of the Spirit, but not bearing the full fruit of the Spirit.

Some of us have experienced misuse and abuse of the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The stuff that makes us uneasy, like tongues, healing, and prophecy. Or others of us, I think, live in this camp because we are just trying to do what the sorcerers, the seven sons of Sceva, were trying to do. Faking it till we make it.

Relying on our own abilities and willpower to do something in us that only God can do. If all we do as a church is use the way of Jesus, use the practices of Jesus to make our lives better and to become better people, but our lives are actually absent of the presence of God, I would argue we are no better than the sons of Sceva.

Who attempt to use the name and power of God for our own gain. Some of us are skeptics. We look more like the 12 disciples that Paul meets as he enters the city of Ephesus. Our experience with the presence and the power of God is like theirs. Wait, there’s a Holy Spirit? I forgot about that. The spirit is a forgotten doctrine that we skip over because the weird stuff like exorcisms, healings, and naked beating seem to happen when he shows up.

And again, I know some of you in this room, you get a little twitchy when we start talking about the spirit and the stuff the spirit does because I know your stories. I know you come from experiences where you’ve seen the expressions of the spirit abused. But maybe we fear the misuse and the abuse so much that we throw the baby out with the bathwater.

And remember, we talked about this a few weeks ago. It’s okay to be a skeptic. We don’t want to stay there. What we want to avoid is being a cynic. Being the type of people who deny that this is a reality altogether. Now, I’m not saying, before you come at me, I’m not saying we’re going to start seeing and doing miracles, speaking in tongues, prophesying, all of that.

I’m not, not saying that happens. I just, I, this isn’t a teaching on that right now. Uh, what I am saying, though, Is that I think it’s become far too easy for us to live and look like followers of Jesus. Who actually promised, by the way, in the last days to his disciples that his spiritual presence with us through the Holy Spirit is better than his physical presence with us as Jesus.

Jesus actually believed it was better for him to leave and not be present with us so that we might have the Holy Spirit. That’s a better experience for us as followers of Jesus. It’s easier for us to live and look like followers of Jesus who really look like the disciples of John the Baptist. Doing the right thing.

Believing mostly the right things. And yet missing the core and central component that brings power through Paul and frees an entire city from magic oppression. I am saying that I’ve become fully convinced that following Jesus should do something in you and through you and around you. We are not just after forming you into people who have good habits.

I believe that God’s power isn’t confined to the pages of scripture, but it’s something meant to be experienced in our daily lives. And again, the things that we need power for vary. Maybe we do need healing. Maybe we just need patience to get through another day. We need power. Maybe the deep longing we have inside of us that expresses itself in buying more, becoming more, doing more, is really a longing for the transcendent presence of God in our lives.

Maybe the thing that we want most and we really need most isn’t another vacation, another romantic partner, or another job. Maybe what we really want and need is the in breaking of God’s presence and power through his Holy Spirit into the mundanity of our day to day lives. To experience a power so pervasive that we can’t help but turn over the cheap alternatives we’ve settled for, burn them, and surrender the whole of our lives to God.

Maybe we have not, because we’ve asked not. And again, before you come at me with all the cessationist stuff and your thoughts on healing and prophecy, that’s not what this is about. But let me just point you again to the way that the Spirit works in this text. Profound and immediate miracles through Paul?

Yes. But also slow and inward repentance through the crowds in the city? Also yes. How many years was Paul in Ephesus before revival happened? Two. The Spirit works in the miraculous moment and in the mundane marathon. We need the power of God in us. So our series is finishing the race. How do we finish the race?

How do we finish well? By that I mean, how do we endure the crucible of pain that forms us, the hardship that results from our commitment to Jesus, the persecution that may or may not come for us, the disappointment that God both allows and sometimes leads us to? How do we finish that race?

By personal presence. and powerful experience of the Holy Spirit in our lives. See, the same power that flowed through Paul and brought the city of Ephesus to its collective knees is a power that’s accessible to you and to me today. Again, you have this power. So why don’t I feel it? That’s the question I’ve asked my whole life.

Honestly, I’ve come, this is, just be vulnerable for a moment. This is still very new to me as well. I know what it’s like to know how to exegete a text. I know how to research the city of Ephesus and give you cool facts about magic in the first century.

But I’m a baby when it comes to experiencing the power of God in my life.

So as we land the, I just want to give you, Some things that, in my experience, I know have prevented me and will prevent us from experiencing the power of God in our lives. The power that God is trying to give us and allow us to experience. Three things. First, fear.

Now maybe, again, I know some of us are afraid of the misuse and abuse of the expressions of the Spirit. I want to be sensitive to that. I get that. And again, this is not a full, uh, you know, official teaching on Cessationism, Continuationism, any of that, the weird stuff, Prophecy Tongues, again, maybe next year, stick around, I don’t know.

Maybe some of us are afraid of that. Or maybe, we are just too attached to the things that the Spirit of God might give us the power to let go of and burn, if we really asked Him to. Maybe we’re afraid of surrendering the addictions that we have to God. We’re afraid of saying no to our distorted desires.

We are afraid to say no to the powers around us. Fear will keep us from experiencing the power of God, not because God can’t come near it, but because it will keep us from going to God in surrender. Second, clutter. And for some of us, we live so deeply in what Charles Taylor again called the imminent frame, this secular ideology, that we don’t even have a category for God’s in breaking power in our lives.

We’ve drowned out the promptings of the spirit with the noise of media, news, busyness, soccer games, dishes, everything else. All that matters in our lives is the here and the now. We don’t give any thought to God outside of Sunday mornings or maybe during our meals with our together groups. Our lives are more defined by clutter.

We’ve oriented around things that have immediate needs, need immediate answers. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But Paul gives another warning in his letter to the Ephesians. He says, don’t get drunk with wine, but instead be filled by the Spirit. Don’t get hung up on the wine part. What he means there is that it’s possible to live in such a way that our lives are more defined by excess and self indulgence.

That we’re actually unable to receive the power that God might have for us. If that resonates with you, I would just say, uh, stay tuned. We’re going to talk about fasting February next year. And I think that’s going to answer a lot of the questions that this, uh, problem brings. Third, sin. Paul gives, again, another warning to the the church in Ephesus.

Do not grieve the Holy Spirit. By that he means unrepentant and unconfessed sin can block out what God wants to free us from. Um, I’m not saying that to shame you, but I am saying that to, to say again, like fear, sometimes we think sin is the thing keeping us from God, and yet it’s the very sin that we’re the most ashamed of that God is inviting us to bring into the light, as 1 John tells us.

See, I have enough biblical evidence and personal experience to tell you confidently that if you consistently turn away from God’s whisper and towards cheap desires, eventually God just stops speaking.

What we have in Acts 19 is a story about spiritual power. It’s a story about demons and witchcraft and Harry Potter and all that fun stuff. It’s really a story about us. A story about how we, living in cities that are just as spiritually oppressed, though we might not realize it, as the city of Ephesus, need power.

We need power in us. I believe God wants to give power through us to take back creation, reclaim what is his, and advance the kingdom. So why don’t we stand and respond?