Body Building:
God builds the body with spiritual CPR: The Holy Spirit

Sunday, August 1, 2004

Pastor Timothy Phillips

Typed from audio transcript

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Please pray with me. Heavenly Father, it is your Holy Spirit that guides us and directs us and shapes us and molds us spiritually, so we pray for that Holy Spirit today as we learn about spiritual CPR and how you breathe life. Bless us in Jesus' name. Amen.

Ephesians 1 begins with Verse 3: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing.” And then it goes on later in Chapter 1 talking about, “and you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, having believed you were marked with Him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit.” “For this reason,” Verse 15, “ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints and His incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of His mighty strength, which He exerted in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly realms, far above every rule and authority, power and dominion and every title that can be given, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under His feet and appointed Him to be head over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way.”

As we look at Paul's letter to the Church in Ephesus , this is a very powerful letter. It's one where you and I, as young confirmation students learned, Ephesians 2:8-9, “By grace we are saved, not of works lest any man should boast,” and other wonderful bible passages. And so we are going to learn about the Book of Ephesians and specific themes coming from that.

Today, we're going to begin by talking about spiritual CPR, God breathing. This is very interesting. It begins with Genesis 2:7 and following. This is where we read earlier for our Old Testament reading in Genesis. “The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” This is a very important passage for us. It says that God created, God made the first person. He named him Adam. Adam is another word for earth or clay, so He named him after what He made him out of. But as Adam was formed completely, perfectly, he could not live until God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. Think about that. Adam could not move. He could not speak. He could not think. He could not do anything until God breathed into the breath of life.

Last summer, I went through fire school and I learned all kinds of interesting things about saving people and putting out fires and all that kind of stuff. And I had to take a CPR class, which many of you have taken. And it's very interesting to think that these simple movements, these simple efforts can save lives because very often an airway is obstructed or very often, for some reason, they've stopped breathing or their heart needs to be restarted or something like that. It's amazing to think that you and I possess the necessary tools that bring someone back to life. It's so simple to do, yet so powerful and so precious.

Well, this is basically what God did to Adam. He brought him to life, after He had fully formed him. He was just lying there. He was helpless. Yet, God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. And it says, “The man became a living being.” The word in Hebrew for “breath” is ruach, and it means spirit, breath, or wind. All three of those, spirit, breath, or wind. That's very interesting when you think about it, because when it talks about the spirit of God, it's the same as the breath of God. As God breathed into Adam, the Holy Spirit went into Adam. And instantly, God and Adam had a relationship. They knew each other, because God's spirit was in Adam. When we continue to think about the difference between inanimate and alive, it's powerful. God makes alive everything. God is the author of life.

It's funny when we talk about things now days with cloning and stuff like that and have these deep, philosophical questions, “Is this ethical? Is it okay for us to clone?” Well, it hasn't been very successful, not according to what I've heard, that most of the creatures that have been cloned have died very quickly. That should be very humbling to us, and it should point us back to Jesus and our Heavenly Father who created all things perfectly. It didn't take God two or three tries to get it right. He didn't have to experiment, because God is all knowing. He knows everything, and He made us perfectly in the beginning.

The second aspect of God breathing that I want to talk about today comes to us from Paul's letter to Timothy, his second letter. See if you bible scholars know where I'm headed. Talking about God breathing is 2 Timothy 3:16. This is another one we memorized in confirmation when I was a kid. “All scripture is God breathed.” You see the connection with Adam? God breathed into him. God breathed into His Word. All scripture is God breathed. Spirit, breath. See the combined meaning there? “All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” Thirty-nine books of the Old Testament. Twenty-seven books of the New Testament. People used by God to record His sacred words. The bible is like no other book. There is nothing even close to the bible. And I don't know about you, but I have this experience when I read the bible, it's not like reading a novel or reading the newspaper, or reading a textbook. There's something different that happens as I read it. It's almost as if I can hear God's voice speaking very quietly, very gently, guiding me, comforting me, encouraging me, teaching me because God's Word is different than every other word in the bible. Now we know that elsewhere in the New Testament, it says that God's Word is living and active. It's like a two-edged sword, sharper than any two-edged sword. It always accomplishes the purpose for which God sends it. God's Word always has an effect on a person who reads it or hears it. It is inspired. God-breathed. His spirit is in His Word.

Here is a connector. God breathed physical life into Adam. God, by the Holy Spirit, breathed every syllable of scripture and through that scripture, God breathed spiritual life into us. Now we're not talking about physical life. We're talking about spiritual life. If you want to turn to Romans 10, I don't know if you have your bibles with you, but Romans 10:17, somebody mentioned this in bible class Wednesday, “Consequently, faith comes through hearing the message and the message is heard through the word of Christ.” How does faith come? Through hearing God's words. He breathes His words into our hearts, and we come to life. Just like Adam. As he lay there, a pile of dust until God breathed into his nostrils and he stood up a living being. We are born spiritually dead. If you have your copy of the Weekly Word as you came in, it's right on the front page. We were dead in our trespasses and sins, living in the ways of the world, following the spirit of disobedience, by nature the objects of wrath, separated from Christ, foreigners and aliens, without God and without hope. That's how we are. That's how we come into this world. Spiritually dead. Now can a dead person do anything? Before Adam came to life, could he do anything? No. This is what governs our belief about conversion, that it's all God's work, that God takes something that's dead and makes it alive. And now you and I are in the family. We are part of God's family. We are brought to faith in Christ.

Now I've heard many of these things and you have, too, about accepting and deciding, making a decision, and all of those kinds of ways of talking about conversion. But I think what it is, it's really people struggling to describe what God has done in their lives, that miracle of faith that God has accomplished in their heart as He breathes life into them through His Word. And so, instead of talking about accepting and deciding, I talk about confessing. Confessing our sins and confessing our faith, because that's what the bible says. That's exactly what it says. And when I teach in confirmation class about conversion, I talk about it like this. If somebody strikes a match and lights it, blows it out and touches it to you, when are you burned? Are you burned when you say, “Ow,” or when that match touches your finger? See, when we hear the word of God, God breathes into us faith, trust, and then we confess it and say, “Yes, I believe. I trust in Jesus.” You're not saved by what you said. You're saved because God created that faith in your heart, because God breathes into us physical life and spiritual life.

Deuteronomy talks about this in a different sort of way. Deuteronomy 8 talks about the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness and how God took care of them. And then Chapter 8:3, “He humbled you causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known to teach you that man does not live on bread alone.” You know the rest of it. “But on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord, God breathes into us the breath of life, the Holy Spirit.” We are sustained in our faith by the Holy Spirit working through God's Word. This spiritual CPR. It is absolutely essential for God to create that faith in our hearts and to sustain it.

Now we've all seen people, loved ones and others, on oxygen because their lungs aren't working properly anymore. They're weak. And without that oxygen, they would really be in bad shape and maybe even die. That's the way it is with God's Word. It is essential for us to read our bibles, to study together in groups, to come together in worship, to sing those beautiful praises, which are simply His Word. We're singing God's Word, these wonderful hymns that you and I have grown up with. They're God's Word, and we're singing it back to Him because He's put it first in our hearts.

Let's pray. God, we thank you for breathing into us physical life and spiritual life. We thank you that you continue to monitor us day by day and you feed us our daily bread as it is called. Bless us, Lord, to see how crucial it is for us to be in your Word, to have a hunger and a desire to grow beyond spiritual infancy into maturity through your Word. And also, Lord, as we hear your Word and we believe your Word, help us not to be hearers only but also doers of your Word. We thank you for those beautiful words that announce our forgiveness, for those beautiful words that say you so loved us that you sent your Son, Heavenly Father. We thank you for those beautiful words of comfort that you will never abandon us or forsake us. And for those beautiful words describing heaven, bless us to respond with joy, to open our homes to study groups and to communicate your love and mercy to all around us. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Copyright 2004 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church