This Sunday is Mother’s Day. We will take a few moments at the beginning of the service to highly value mother’s before turning our attention and energies to highly exalting our Lord. This would be our normal pattern on Mother’s Day, but certainly is the case on the Sunday we commemorate the ascension of our Lord.
What is the ascension? I am referring to Jesus being taken up in bodily form before his disciples’ very eyes. We read the account in Acts 1:9. “After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.” We know from the Scriptures that this occurred forty days after His resurrection. [That would mean we would celebrate Thursday, but we will move it to Sunday since there will be more of us at church.] After appearing to a large numbers of his disciples at a variety of different times Jesus was taken up into heaven. He ascended into the clouds. Then angels appeared to announce to us that He would come back in the same way He went into heaven. What good news! I hope you believe that.
Do you remember what Jesus said just before He was taken up? His “famous last words” are recorded in Acts 1:8. After reminding his disciples that only the Father knows the time of His return to establish His kingdom He told them, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." Acts 1.8 As much as I hope you believe in His ascension, I hope you believe His promise here! We have been given the Holy Spirit. [The Day of Pentecost-ten days after His ascension-next Sunday]. We have been given power!
What does that power look like in your life? How are you exercising that power in your daily living? As we have been considering lately in our services, we need to confess and repent if we are not experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives. I want to encourage you today to claim the power of the Holy Spirit. If you have surrendered your life to Christ, repenting of your sin and self, and relying totally on His finished work on the cross for your redemption, then you have received the Holy Spirit. You have been sealed by the Spirit until the day of redemption. (Ephesians 4.30) The problem is that most of us place ourselves under the influence of other things instead of the Spirit of God.
We have been bought at a great price, the blood of Jesus Christ. Let us no longer live for ourselves and the passing comforts of this world. But let us live for Jesus and the eternal pleasures of the one to come. Let us build not our kingdoms of earth and stone, but the kingdom of the living God in the hearts of men and women, boys and girls. Surely as we turn from the pursuits of the former and give ourselves over the latter, we will know the power of the Holy Spirit. So let us claim it. But as we do, let us make certain we have determined we will use it for His glory, for otherwise to ask is vanity.
In Christ,
Pastor Scott
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