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The Spirit’s Landing
A sermon by Dr. James Flamming
Pastor, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, October 23, 2005
From the New Testament perspective, nothing begins
spiritually until it begins with the Holy Spirit. Last week we looked at
Ezekiel and Ezekiel was giving us a warning. He was giving it first to the King
of Tyre. He said, “You have forsaken your wisdom for the sake of your
splendor.” Cross out splendor and put whatever you will there. How easy it is
to forsake wisdom for the sake of whatever it is that we have elevated to the
top spot – our planning, our dream, our motivation. What the New Testament
teaches us is, spiritually speaking everything begins with the Holy Spirit.
After the resurrection of our Lord, He came to the
disciples and He didn’t retell the Sermon on the Mount. He didn’t retell any of
His parables. What He did was to re-emphasize that it was the Holy Spirit who
would come upon them and then everything would fall into place.
What does the word “landing” mean to you? If you’ve been
on an airplane lately it means you have landed safely once more. Landing can
also mean a bird landing in a tree or a kite landing in a tree, yuck! But in
the early days of our country, landing took on another meaning entirely. It was
not a meaning that was air bound, but river bound. And if you were to go
Highway 5, you would come across landings.
For example, Berkeley Plantation was originally called
“Harrison’s Landing.” The Harrison family owned it, one of them signed the
Declaration of Independence, later one of them became President of the United
States – it was called Harrison’s Landing. Coming closer to Richmond, Rockett’s
Landing and now they’re putting a development there from what I read in the
paper they will keep the name.
What in the world is a landing? Well, it’s not a harbor
and it’s not a port, it’s a place where a boat or a ship can pull up to the
shore, anchor, let off people, take on people, put off stuff, take on stuff, but
it’s not so much as going into a port as it is interrupting a voyage for a short
term enterprise.
This morning I want to speak to you about the Holy Spirit’s
landing. The Holy Spirit doesn’t always ask us to get into a port or a harbor –
the chorus we have sung, “Spirit of the Living God fall fresh on me,” requires a
landing. For the Spirit to fall fresh on us we have to stop and interrupt
something. It may not be a week or a day or even an hour. It doesn’t have to
be three hours or thirty minutes or three minutes. It could be 30 seconds, but
it’s an interruption of the voyage of the day, of the currents of stress that
circulate through our lives and it is a turning to the Holy Spirit for a
moment.
The Holy Spirit’s landing is a place where we can be in the
middle of the river of our lives, but then turn briefly to the shore and
replenish and restores and get guidance and be filled and then go our way. The
Holy Spirit’s landing – sometimes the Spirit comes and whispers to us, “You are
selling yourself too short. I have given you gifts. Use them! Get on with
it! Why are you so timid?” But other times, the Holy Spirit comes to us and we
don’t hear that at all. The soft wind of the Spirit says, “You’re doing this
all yourself. It’s all about you.” And the Lord of life comes to us and says,
“You are not the life giver. You are not the joy provider. You are not the map
maker.” And He says, “Give me a chance.” You see, there are many different
ways in which the Holy Spirit comes to us and we can’t predict which of the ways
will happen when. What He wants is a landing.
Now let me talk to you just a little bit about the need for
a landing. Let’s talk about the fact that life needs its landing places. The
river can get swift and the journey can get long and the stress can become
intense and the care giving can become overwhelming – life needs landing
places. Hearts and schedules can become cluttered, even spiritually speaking.
The Holy Spirit needs a landing. Our relationship with God can get neglected
and this usually rubs off on others as well. You see, love too needs its
renewal places, its landing places. And when God gets thrown overboard and He
can get thrown overboard by neglect just as well as by disbelief. And when do
we put God back on board? The landing places…
Now God knew that we humans would need some landing places
and in the early part of the Old Testament He did a very genius, strategic
thing. It is as if God said to all of the humans of that early era, I have put
in you ambition, motivation, emotion, the urge to be number one, I have put in
you competition, I have put in you caring, and I have given you the
responsibility of caring for one another. But then, says the Lord God, if you
live that out and that’s all you do, you’re going to break. Sooner or later it
will become larger than you can handle so I tell you, says God, what I’m going
to do. I’m going to put aside one day every seven and I’m going to call it the
Sabbath and I’m going to put it in the Ten Commandments and the fourth
Commandment says, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it Holy.” Six days you will
do all of your work just like God did, but on the seventh day He rested and so
should you.
Fast forward please to the modern world where in the
secular world that organizes itself completely without God you’re winding up
with what God tried to prevent. The overcomeness of life, the stress upon
stress, responsibility upon responsibility, all of which is good, but no landing
place. What this means is, that God is going to come to us and He knows there
isn’t anything you can change about a secular mindset, but He knows there’s
something you can change in your life and He says, I’m going to send the Holy
Spirit and the Holy Spirit will come upon you.
As He did this, it is not a withdrawal from life, it is an
interruption for renewal and it isn’t a withdrawal from ambition and it isn’t a
withdrawal from responsibility or from caring or care giving, it’s an
interruption, a redemptive, healing, restoring, filling, freshening
interruption.
Well who is this that wants us to land at His place for
just a moment or a while or for a day or longer? It is the Holy Spirit. Who in
the world is the Holy Spirit? I like the explanation that Ester Burrow gives on
her little book on the Spirit. She says, “The Holy Spirit is Jesus without a
body.” Hang that in your head for a minute. Sounds a little bit – but the Holy
Spirit and Jesus the Son of God and the Father are one. You can’t separate
them, but we experience God in three very distinct dimensions and the one
reason, one of the reasons that Jesus came was because we have a distinct need
for a God who has been there, been like we are, walked like we walk, lived with
the pressures we live with.
Recently, I was with a mother who had lost her son, I mean
her daughter, pardon me. It was a tough time. Amidst the tears I said to her,
we lost a son and that’s all I said. And she looked up from her tears and she
said, then you understand. Well, I’m always cautious to say I know where you
are to anybody because everybody’s different and everybody handles things
differently, but in some sense, I did know where she was and she knew it because
I had been there.
Put that on a cosmic scale and you have the need for our
Lord Jesus Christ. We have such a need for a God who’s been there, who had a
face and a name and lived in a house and had a family and worked with His hands
and had the pressures of following the Father. But there’s one great weakness
to that…to be like we are means you can only be one place at one time. And
that’s why Jesus said before He went to the cross and was raised from the dead
and then ascended into heaven, Jesus said, “I’m going to send you the Holy
Spirit because the Holy Spirit will teach you everything I have taught you, but
He will be with you always everywhere until the end of the earth.”
You see the Holy Spirit can be everywhere present at the
same time and not only that, He can be everywhere present at the same time in a
group like this and be speaking to your specific needs. Incredible! That’s why
you begin with the Spirit and so the Spirit is here today.
Someone, a tear rolls down their cheek, the Spirit is
there. Someone else, Bible open, says to themselves silently, “Oh, I never saw
that before.” The Spirit is there. Somebody is working on a grocery list, not
even close, but the Holy Spirit’s there. You see, we are in this room and the
Holy Spirit is present all around us, but we perceive the Holy Spirit
individually and the Spirit calls us by name.
The Chorus ‘Fall Fresh on Me.’ There are times when we pull
over from the rushing current of our lives and we say, ‘Fall fresh on me, O
Lord.’ I’m exhausted, overcome, empty – fall fresh on me O Lord. I need
direction, I’m facing a crossroads and I don’t know which way to go, you know
the map O Lord, I don’t. Which way do I go? Some would pray, ‘O Lord, I feel
far from you. There have been times when I felt so close to you, but now I feel
estranged. Lord, fall fresh on me.’ Some would confess, Lord, I’ve sinned and
I know it. I feel guilty about it. Only you and I know about it, but Lord, fall
fresh on me.
What will you take on and get rid of at the Holy Spirit’s
landing? My experience tells me that there are three ways in which at least
take on the Holy Spirit. As the Holy Spirit comes upon me the first one I would
call ‘fill up power,’ because that’s what’s promised – power. Power is the
presence of God in your heart working from the inside out. Nobody may see it
for a while, but they will know it eventually. Power, the spiritual power of
the Holy Spirit brings starts deep within and then surfaces in flowering
fashion.
Well, there’s fill up power. Like when you go into a gas
station and you drive up to the pump and you fill up. Sometimes when we turn
into the Holy Spirit’s landing, we just need to fill up, we’re empty, we’ve
given all we can give, we’ve cared all we can care and empty we need the Holy
Spirit to fill us up again.
But there is another kind of power, you could call it
surrendering power or confessing power and it’s that time when we realize – I’ve
been running my own show lately. I’ve been going my own way lately and what we
need is a freshening of the Spirit; a forgiving of the sins, a purging of the
guilt. Sometimes when we dock at the Spirit’s landing we not necessarily
literally, but spiritually need to fall on our faces before Him and confess our
sins. Sometimes it’s nothing more than surrender; Lord, I’ve been doing it all
by myself, now I surrender my life to you again. And sometimes, and this is the
toughest of all, we pull into the gas station to fill up and the Lord says to
us, go ahead and fill up, but that’s not the problem. The problem is you’re in
the driver’s seat and you have the keys and when you drive off, however full the
tank is, you’re going to drive your way. You have the steering wheel and you’re
going to turn it your way. And the Lord says, let me have the keys. Let me sit
behind the wheel. Whispers in our souls – I don’t necessarily have the need to
control, it’s just you don’t know the way and I do. Let me have the keys. Let
me sit behind the wheel.
Three ways in which the Lord could come to you through the
Holy Spirit this day – the first one is simple enough. As you pull over into
the Holy Spirit’s landing just to fill up, Holy Spirit, fall fresh on me.
Another way is just to get rid of the stuff and surrender once again and empty
your self so that there’s some power that could come in from God. But, there’s
that third one – is it possible that this morning you would turn the keys of
your life over to the Lord and you get in the right seat and let Him sit in the
left seat behind the wheel and you say to the Lord, Lord, it’s yours. I will
follow.
Pray with me will you? With your head bowed and your eyes
closed I want to ask you, the Holy Spirit comes to you and asks you to take a
landing right now, to just pull over; to just pull over and let Him be there
with you. Do you need to fill up? Let Him fill you full. Do you need to clean
up? Surrender your life to Him. He died on a cross so that could happen. Do
you need to give Him the keys and let Him sit behind the wheel?
Some of you have never received Jesus Christ to be your
personal Lord and Savior and the Jesus comes to you without a body today in the
Holy Spirit and says, how about letting me have the keys and this day you will
let Him have the keys to your life and follow Him. Lord Jesus, as we come this
day, move among us, sweep through us, O Holy Spirit, land on us. We pray in
Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.
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