Matt Chandler - I Believe in the Holy Spirit

Well, if you have a Bible, grab one. John chapter 14 is where we’re going to be. If you don’t have a Bible with you, there should be a hardback black one somewhere around you. If that’s not on your device or anything like that, you can grab one of those. If you don’t own a Bible, that’s our gift to you, so please take that with you. As always, I want you to turn to John 14. It’s important that you see that what we’re reading and talking about today doesn’t originate with me, but rather has its roots in the Creator God of the universe. While you’re turning there, just one brief announcement that I’m going to make across all campuses: we have a week left in our covenant renewal season. If you’re a member of the Village and have yet to finish that process, click on that link and check off the boxes needed. Can you do that for us? This week, we’re currently sitting at about 2,000 people across the five campuses who have yet to do that. So, what that means is 2,000 phone calls that the pastoral staff has to make. If you can help us whittle that down to like 1,200, that would be awesome. If it’s just been sitting in your inbox and you haven’t had a chance to get to it, can you please take care of that for us? If you don’t know or have deleted that email, you can head to Connection Central after the service, and they can get you lined up on one of our computers in there. If you can knock that out this week, it should take about seven minutes tops if you don’t have a lot of complaints. If you have a lot of complaints, I want to hear those complaints. Again, we value that; we’re not power-hungry individuals trying to rule and reign. So, if there’s feedback that we can learn from you, please let us know. That process shuts down next week, and then it’s just us calling you. So, if you can help whittle down our call volume to just a thousand, that would be super helpful. If you can knock that out, that would be great.

In 1977, Charles Strouse and a man named Martin Charnin wrote the lyrics to this very well-known tune. Please forgive me in advance: «The sun will come out tomorrow; bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun. Just thinking about tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow till there’s none. When I’m stuck with a day that’s gray and lonely, I’ll just stick up my chin and grin and say, 'Oh, the sun will come out tomorrow, so you’ve got to hang on till tomorrow, come what may. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you. Tomorrow, you’re only a day away.'» Now, Strouse is this accomplished composer, and he’s writing this song for a Broadway play called «Annie,» right? It’s the movie that we all watch, and if you have children, they watch a different version of it, right? So, Strouse wrote songs for The Beatles, and you’ve got this coolest man alive writing «Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow, ” and then it transitions right into „You’re never fully dressed without a smile.“ I mean, there’s this type of optimism built into this thing that seems silly, given the character of Annie.

So, Strouse, talking about writing the lyrics and music for this song, mentioned their desire to help Annie be a character whose optimism transcended her circumstances. They wanted her to be a type of hopeless romantic, despite the fact that her parents had abandoned her and had not returned, despite the fact that she was stuck in this terrible orphanage where a woman was making bathtub booze—whether it was Carol Burnett or Cameron Diaz, depending on your generation—she was stuck in this awful situation with seemingly no hope of getting out. They wanted to infuse optimism into her character.

Now, the question you should probably be asking yourself is why in the world I’m using this as an introduction to a sermon on the Holy Spirit. I’m glad you asked because I actually put that in my notes. You’re so good; every week you do this. By the way, what’s happening to you, just so you have language for it, is that later today, you will find yourself singing „Tomorrow, ” right? That’s called an earworm; it’s what happens when a song gets stuck in your head and you can’t get it out. So later today, you’ll be watching football or cooking, and just out of nowhere, you’ll say, „Tomorrow, tomorrow…“ all right? And so you can expect that. That’s why I apologize before I started. The key to beating an earworm is to put an equally awful song into your head that replaces that earworm, all right? And then just ride it out. That’s all you’ve got.

The reason I wanted to use „Tomorrow“ as the illustration while creeping towards the Holy Spirit is that when it comes to the Holy Spirit, people tend to wrongly think about who He is and what He does. They tend to make the Holy Spirit kind of the weird uncle that shows up at the family reunion and makes things awkward, right? They equate the Holy Spirit to emotionalism and spontaneity; they often remove the Holy Spirit from all the beauty of the biblical text that informs us about what He does.