Hope Blog

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Matt Ryniker introduced him as “the illustrious Dr. Hawthorne of international ministry
fame — but to us he’s Steve, and Grandpa,” and named what he was hoping for: Steve has a talent for
taking passages we mangle thoroughly and straightening them out, and Pentecost is one of those. Steve
set the terms immediately. “I’m just gonna do the points as they appear in the scripture. I’m not going
to make stuff up and go on and on and on.”

1. What happened, and to whom

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Penta, five — fifty days. The Jewish name is Shavuot, a plural of weeks: seven weeks, forty-nine days,
plus one. It was a harvest festival, a commemoration of the law given at Sinai, and a pilgrimage every
Jewish man was required to make if he could. That is why the city was full.

And the “they” of verse one is bigger than most of us picture — roughly a hundred and twenty, ten
times the number of apostles, who had been gathering and praying daily since Jesus left.

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Two different kinds of tongues sit in that paragraph — flames and languages. Steve compared the noise
to standing near a tornado, and noted we do not actually know whether air was moving; what we know is
that it came from heaven, it filled the house, and it was loud enough outside to pull a crowd. As for
being filled: they were not empty beforehand. “There was something extra that was added and infused
into their beings.”

2. What they were saying

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They were speaking the mighty deeds of God — mega deeds, in the Greek. Steve’s guess about
the content is grounded in what those ten days had been spent on: Peter had already stood up and said
the
scripture had to be fulfilled, and Jesus’ parting words in Luke were that everything written about
him in
the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. They had been praying the
scriptures. Now they were declaring them.

And the mega deeds are slow on purpose. “He could finish things like that if he wanted,” Steve said,
“but he loves that he’s drawing people of their own will and love — and so that’s taking quite a long
time.” Generations is how Bible time rolls.

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Out in the street it was nine in the morning and nobody was waiting for a concert. Then people started
picking their own speech out of the noise — the dialect of the village where a grandmother came from.
Luke lists ten regions and five peoples, most of them with several languages apiece, and on a map they
scatter in every direction. Twice the text insists on the same detail: each one heard
his own
tongue, telling the mighty works of God.

3. “This is that”

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Peter stands with the eleven and gives a two-part outline: let this be known to you, and
give heed to my words. First he explains the phenomenon; then he delivers a message. Steve was
sharp about the difference. “It was not a speech. He was telling them a clear message that he knew God
wanted declared.”

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Up to that morning the Spirit of God had come on a short list: Moses and the seventy elders, Bezalel
the craftsman who made the tabernacle beautiful, Gideon, Samson, Saul briefly, David, some prophets, a
few women in the era of the judges, John the Baptist. Special people, special purposes. Joel’s promise
is all flesh — young and old, male and female, servants and working people. “Not something for just a
few high-placed leaders.”

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Which raises what prophesying is. Not foretelling, Steve insisted, and not a parlor trick with your
future. “It’s more about why than it is what. Prophecy describes what God is doing and toward what
purpose. It’s about keeping the main thing the main thing.” And the main thing is not our comfort: “we
tend to make the story all about ourselves.” God’s main thing is the relational fullness he intends to
have with a people gathered out of every people.

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Israel expected the day of the Lord to arrive as a military victory. Peter says it arrives as a
rescue, and the way in is to call on the name — to name him, pray to him, publicly declare covenant
trust. “Making it clear: I belong to this one.”

4. Four things God did with Jesus

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Peter numbered four, and Steve simply tracked him. First,
Jesus of
Nazareth, attested by God with mighty works and wonders and signs. “Attested” is a courtroom word —
an attorney’s word, not a witness’s — for setting forth a case. The evidence Peter offers is the room
itself: as you yourselves know.

Second, delivered
up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, and crucified by the hands of lawless
men. The witnesses here are the guilty party. The nails were driven by Romans; the verdict was theirs.
God did not kill Jesus, Steve was careful to say — God knew. He reached for C. S. Lewis’s deeper magic
and for Paul’s version of it: had the rulers of this age understood,
they
would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

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Third, raised — because it was impossible for death to hold him. Peter proves it from a psalm:

Every phrase there is physical — flesh, soul, decay. And David cannot be describing himself:
he died,
he was buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. He was a prophet looking down the line at one of
his own descendants. Witness for this one: “we are all witnesses.”

5. The fourth point, which most of us skip

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“We emphasize the death and the resurrection of Jesus because we’re guilty for our sins and we know
it, and we’re afraid of death and we should be. What we miss is the exaltation.” Not a complaint about
Easter — an argument that Peter’s own crescendo is somewhere else. Jesus was not merely restored to
being alive. He was raised into a kind of life that had never existed before, and then seated.

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There is that word this again — the third or fourth time Peter has hammered it. The noise and
the languages are not the headline; they are the receipt. Jesus had told them to wait in the city until
they were
clothed with power from on high, and said I am sending it. So the outpouring is the work of
the exalted Lord. “Pentecost is more about Jesus being raised to the throne than it is with the Spirit
coming down.”

Steve knows why this lands softly. We cannot see heaven, our cosmology is naturalistic, and what we
do picture is mostly clouds, halos and mansions — a story we have managed to make about ourselves. But
the one thing scripture shows about heaven, over and over, is God enthroned.

6. Lord and Christ

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Watch the seams. Christ came from Psalm 16, Lord from Psalm 110 — and the same
argument covers both, since David neither escaped the grave nor ascended. “This is a tightly crafted
message,” Steve said. Christ is a title, not a surname. And the conclusion is not that Israel’s Messiah
has been given Israel: he has been given all lands, languages and lineages. “I declare to you King
Jesus, king of all the world.”

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He guarded it from the obvious misreading — the old new-age idea of ascended masters, ordinary humans
who transformed their way into divinity. This is the reverse. “The living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob, has in Jesus taken on full humanity.” A human son of man at the throne. And note the grammar
one more time: God has made him. He did not promote himself.

7. Repent, be baptized, receive

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They were cut to the heart and asked what to do, and
Peter
told them to repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Not earned — a gift. Baptism is how
you join yourself to him: “it’s a symbol of dying, of being under the water. His death becomes my death,
so his life can become my life.”

Steve pressed the invitation without pressing the room. “He’ll never force you to serve him. Have you
noticed? You can’t name one thing that God made you do — but you chose to love him.” And the life that
follows is not solitary: “You can’t follow Jesus alone and do what he tells you, because he says love
one another. Have you ever tried to love one another all by yourself?” Three thousand received the word
that day and
devoted
themselves to the teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers.

8. All who are far off

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Pentecost is also the global day of united prayer for Jerusalem and the nations — well over a hundred
million people praying that weekend, Steve said — and for the last six years, the International Day for
the Unreached. He defined the word carefully. Unreached does not mean nobody has tried, or that they have
never heard of Jesus. It means no one among their own people yet follows him in a way their uncles and
cousins could join, in their own language and art, without it feeling like cultural suicide. Something
like forty-two percent of the world lives there.

So the message ended with the congregation standing in threes and fours, reading verse 39 aloud one
line at a time — whole families, then people far off, then the many God himself calls — and answering
each line the same way: do it, Lord.

▶ 1:02:25

Hope Chapel is in the middle of 1 Corinthians, and the letter has arrived at the section on spiritual gifts. Rather than walk straight into it, Matt spent two weeks on the approach — first on having eyes to see and ears to hear, which has less to do with technique than with whether we come to God in pride or with a heart that is broken and open. Part one left one thread hanging: God is living and active, and his sheep hear his voice. What does that actually feel like? That is what part two is for.

1. A word in a Walmart

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Matt opened the old journal before he told the story, and said why: a church that intends to use the spiritual gifts runs on honesty and integrity, and he does not trust his memory of a testimony over what he wrote down at the time. He also wants the gifts to be normal in both senses — more common than they are, and unremarkable in presentation. “You don’t have to wear a jumpsuit that has sequins on it to operate in the gifts of the Spirit.”

Years ago he was walking the aisles of a Walmart praying for strangers, not shopping, just blessing people and asking God for anything he might want to say. Twenty or thirty minutes of nothing. He got discouraged, which he now finds funny — he imagines meeting Jeremiah one day and admitting he gave it half an hour.

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On his last lap he passed an employee stocking shelves, and the description of what happened next is the most useful thing in the message. “If your mind was a desk, it got swept clean.” All the ordinary traffic — bless this person, I might buy that later, I’m hungry — was replaced with a single word: yes. He asked God what that meant, and his thoughts were rearranged a second time, confusion swapped for confidence. “It felt like a third party rearranged my thoughts.”

So he told the man he might sound strange, but that he thought the man had been praying, and the answer was yes. The man’s reply, as Matt wrote it down that day: that makes perfect sense, I’ve been asking if anyone up there is even listening to me. He turned out to be a Christian who had drifted into paganism and was trying to fight evil powers with what he had picked up on his own. They talked a long time, and Matt urged him toward Christ’s authority and back into a church.

2. Open is not the same as wanting it

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Most of us, Matt said, are open to the gifts of the Spirit the way he is open to a Pop-Tart. If you go get it, open it, toast it, put it on a plate and bring it to him, he will probably take a bite. “I’m not gonna stop you, but I don’t want it.” Paul’s word is stronger than that, and the reason to want it is not mainly duty. It is that co-laboring with Christ is a relational thing, closer to building something with one of your kids than to completing a task, and it takes the weight off. “You offload the burden of being Jesus. You are not the savior of the world, and the world is a bottomless pit of need.”

3. What Paul actually says

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After the long body metaphor, Paul fires off a series of questions, and Matt pressed on how to read them.

The expected answer is no, every time — Paul does not set a pattern and break it in the middle. Teaching is the clearest test case: we are not all called to be teachers, and yet any of us could prepare and give a lesson. Work backward through the list on that logic. We are not all prophets, and that does not mean you cannot hear the Lord and speak. We do not all have the gift of healing, and we should all be praying for the sick anyway. There is a difference between a calling with a strong gifting attached and the ordinary availability of asking God for help and serving where you can.

4. Especially that you may prophesy

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Notice the two halves. Pursuing love is for everyone — nobody gets to trade it for a gifting, as though the prophetic were a specialty and love the general track. And the love chapter sits between the two halves of Paul’s argument on purpose: it is how the gifts are exercised, not an alternative to them.

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Why the higher gift, then? Because of what Paul says happens when an outsider walks into a room where it is operating.

5. What prophecy is, taken across the whole Bible

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Matt then ran a fast tour rather than a close reading. The starting definition is Moses’: a prophet speaks supernaturally and calls people to faithfulness to God alone. Both halves matter. A dreamer whose sign actually comes true, but who then says let us go after other gods, is to be ignored (Deuteronomy 13:1–3) — and a word that simply does not come to pass was not the Lord’s (Deuteronomy 18:22).

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In Isaiah, God mocks the idols — a man cuts down a tree, cooks his dinner over half of it and worships the other half (Isaiah 44:14–17) — and then challenges them to a test they cannot pass:

Matt enjoyed that one. “This is God being edgy, and I like that.” The point underneath it is that God holds knowledge no other power holds — “declaring the end from the beginning” — and he can whisper it to his servants. He allowed the obvious footnote: a demon can supply a fortune teller, as with the slave girl in Philippi (Acts 16:16–18). That does not touch the claim.

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But the future is only part of it. Hiding in Keilah, David asked whether Saul would come and whether the men of the city would hand him over; God said yes to both, David left, and neither thing happened (1 Samuel 23:9–13). God knows contingent hypotheticals, which Matt called totally trippy and beyond comprehension. God also speaks about the past — Samuel greets a stranger hunting lost donkeys with the news that the animals were found three days ago, and by the way, you are the man of the hour (1 Samuel 9:18–20). And about the present, as when Peter tells Simon, “I see that you are in the gall of bitterness and in the bond of iniquity.”

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Then Jonah, whose entire prophetic ministry concerned an event that did not occur.

A concise message from a man whose heart was not in it, and no judgment at the end of it — because the word carried a challenge, and the challenge worked. That is the pattern across the prophetic literature, and Matt read one more piece of it to make the point.

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“Is that about the future, the past, the present? That’s an invitation — that’s what that is.” A huge chunk of the prophetic literature is exactly that: an invitation, a challenge, a rebuke, a call, a summons. Christ’s word to the church at Ephesus commends its endurance and then names what it has lost (Revelation 2:3–4). Past, present, future, hypothetical, rebuke, summons — the common thread is not the tense. It is that the word is godward, drawn toward him, and it lands on the purpose Peter states:

6. And what it is not

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Two disqualifiers. Signs and wonders that genuinely happen but lead away from God — impressive is not the standard, and Pharaoh’s magicians threw down staffs that became serpents (Exodus 7:11–12). “Maybe impressive. But that’s not a prophetic ministry. Don’t follow it, don’t listen to it.” And anything God is not behind at all: compliments dressed up as revelation, or thoughts we simply generated ourselves. Which sends you back to the question of what it actually feels like when he does speak — and Matt said plainly he hopes not to be the only one in the room willing to describe that.

7. A checkout line at H-E-B

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The second story is recent and deliberately unspiritual in setting. Matt was unloading groceries, one of his kids was crying, and he was not thinking about prophecy at all. He looked at the cashier, and the desk got wiped again: why am I thinking about how the Lord sees her sorrow? She did not look sad. He told her anyway — that God sees her pain and her struggles and is with her — and she started crying while continuing to scan items, because the register counts items per minute and she could not stop. He felt terrible about the timing and prayed for her to have peace. Months later he saw her twice more, and she told him she was back in church with her daughter. “It wasn’t like I was being real spiritual. The execution wasn’t flawless.” It did not have to be.

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What he told her in that conversation is his standing counsel for a believer who has stopped going to church: start where you were. “Why don’t you start with where you were going — go back there.” He has brought people to Hope, but he would rather someone repair an old connection than burn a bridge and end up isolated because of it. And the reason he keeps this story is the rarest part of it — you almost never get to see the fruit, and seeing it makes him want to do this more. “Which is why we should earnestly desire it.”

8. Guardrails, because this is a church

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Matt warned the room he was about to get rulesy, and then did. You do not get to address this church however and whenever you want; words go through leadership, and they have to be biblical. If someone asks to give a prophetic word, a leader says lay it on me, and the answer is I don’t want to tell you — that is the end of it. “Then the answer is no, you can’t. Sorry. Actually, not sorry.” He recounted a man at Hope years ago who wanted to give half his message to leadership and said the Lord would supply the rest only once he had delivered the first half in public. The answer was no — share the part you have, and if God gives you more, call it a halftime.

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He reserved his strongest language for a formula. “I strongly discourage ‘thus saith the Lord’ — strongly. Because if I disagree with you, am I disagreeing with God? That’s a power play.” He has been told God requires a trumpet during his sermon. He has been on the receiving end of God told me you have to give me a hundred bucks — “well, I don’t want to disobey God, but are you sure?” He has heard of men informing a woman that God has assigned her to marry them. “Oh, did he? Did he though?” Say instead I think this, and here is why — because that can be weighed, and the unfalsifiable version cannot. Paul’s list of what prophecy is for is short and none of it is self-serving: upbuilding, encouragement, consolation, conviction of sin, the disclosing of secrets, the demonstration that God is really among us.

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Peter’s clause is the same test pointed at the speaker: in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ — not us being glorified through our own selfish ambition. So Matt wants a certain reluctance in anyone who gets up in front of a crowd. “I would want somebody to feel a little bit of trepidation before you address a large group of people. This isn’t just ‘here’s how we get our thrills today.'”

9. How to grow in it

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Start with what you already have: if you have been drawn to Christ, you have already been moved by something other than the spirit of this world. Then take extended time in prayer with paper. The to-do list will come — write it down and move on, and consider that some of it may be the Lord telling you to call someone. Sins will come to mind; confess them, and write down what repentance will require. Picture God’s nearness, because it is simply a fact. Keep a record of where you feel moved to obey and which passages surface. You may end the hour without having heard a voice and still have been spoken to at length.

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And do it with people. “Doing this without trust” does not work, because you need honest feedback from people who know you and are committed to Jesus and to walking biblically — thinking a thing does not make it so. He named the concrete step rather than leaving it abstract: join a small group, and Wednesday nights are the place for growing in praying and listening for the voice of the Lord.

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Then, “speaking of honesty” — he admitted he never wrote a conclusion, and recapped from the platform. Earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially the higher ones; prophecy is the one Paul names, and he explains what it is for. Really want it, but do not force it into something weird. Stay honest and humble and normal, and just say the true thing: “If it was a dream, just say it was a dream.”

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That is where the denominational observation landed, out of a life spent among Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists and charismatics: a Baptist says brother, your family has been on my heart and I’ve been praying for you out of Jeremiah; a charismatic says I feel like God is speaking to me from Jeremiah and I’m declaring it over your family; a Pentecostal says God woke me up and told me to open to Jeremiah. Often the same experience, three vocabularies. “The Lord speaks no matter who you are.” He is not asking for the flair — flair spooks the people who would otherwise listen, and the room has weaker members in it as well as strong ones. He is asking for honesty, so that the thing is sustainable and can actually be discerned.

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And then it stopped being instruction and became an appeal, which is the real answer to the two weeks of approach work. “It’s so good. It’s so good. Can you testify? Have you heard the voice of the Lord and you’ve walked in it and you’re like, oh my goodness, this is so good — we should be doing this more. I don’t know why I didn’t do it earlier.” We should want it that much. He prayed it rather than summarizing it: “God, thank you so much for the way you do speak. We trust you. We entrust ourselves to your shepherding. I ask that you would help us walk in this gift to glorify God through Jesus Christ all the more.” Discernment and tongues are coming on other Sundays.

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This was the second Sunday of a run through 1 Corinthians 12–14, and Matt had
deliberately not started with prophecy. Before getting to how God speaks through people, he wanted
the room settled on something prior: that God speaks at all, that he is good at it, and that the
static is ours.

1. First, a house rule about telling the truth

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Matt named the pastoral problem plainly. “It will be very hard for me as a senior pastor to
navigate and shepherd an environment in which I’m not confident that we’re being real with each
other.” Hence his standing discouragement of the phrase thus saith the Lord. Say what you
think God said to you. If it was a dream, say it was a dream, and say you don’t know the
interpretation. It will sound less authoritative and less spiritual. It will also be true.

“I like the authenticity,” he said. “As we discern with each other what God is saying to us, a
core principle has to be truth-telling.”

2. The voice on the curving street

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Then a story from high school, back when he was first sensing a call to ministry. He was dating
a girl who kept getting locked out of her house, so he carried three or four copies of her key in
his wallet and handed one over whenever it happened. One evening they argued in the car, she got
out, slammed the door, and he peeled off without waiting to see whether she could get in.

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Fifteen seconds later, around a bend on a quiet suburban street, a car came fast alongside him
and the driver shouted four words: She can’t get in. He looked back. There was no car.
He kept driving anyway. She was, of course, locked out.

He does not claim to know what that was. An angel, maybe. A drunk driver yelling something
uncanny in the suburbs of San Antonio, possibly. The point he drew from it is the one that matters:
“Many people assume that if they hear the voice of God, the spectacle of it will cause their heart
to be soft automatically. I just don’t think that’s true.”

3. Power experiences do not fix hearts

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Judas was in the group that came back from the mission reporting that demons had submitted and
the sick had been healed
(Luke 10:17–20).
Nobody in the account is exempted. The miracles were real and they did not save him. “A power
experience is not the cure-all that our charismatic brothers often present it as being,” Matt said.
“The inner working of the heart is still so important.”

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Solomon makes the same case with more irony. Deuteronomy had told Israel in advance what their
future king must not do: not amass horses, not go back to Egypt for more of them, not multiply
wives, not pile up silver and gold
(Deuteronomy 17:16–17).
Solomon heard from God directly, asked well, and was answered generously — and then
1 Kings 10
reads like a checklist of the warnings, Egyptian horses included. “Out of all these guys from the
line of Judah, there was only ever one son of David that was trustworthy with riches and power and
authority.” Which is where the whole subject is pointed:
the Spirit of truth
comes to bear witness about Jesus. Gifts that do not do that have lost the plot.

4. Mute idols, and a God who makes people talk

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Back to the text. Paul does not want the Corinthians uninformed about spiritual gifts, and the
first thing he puts in front of them is a contrast:
they were once
led astray to mute idols, and now no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit.
Matt’s reading: the idols cannot even speak for themselves, while the Spirit of God is so alive
that he puts speech in the mouths of other people.

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That same contrast is the whole argument of
Psalm 115,
which opens by refusing the glory and then answers the nations’ taunt — where is your God?
A carved statue is easy to point at. An empty temple looks like an absence.

5. You become like what you trust

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Verse 8 is the hinge, and Matt slowed down on it. What is it like to become like an idol? It
looks impressive and it perceives nothing. So idolatry produces spiritual blindness and deafness —
which is very likely where Jesus got the language of eyes to see and ears to hear that he uses
again and again.

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The obvious objection is that none of us pass a statue of Baal on the way to work. Matt went to
Deuteronomy
4:15–16 for the answer: the warning there is not about a fertility goddess, it is about making
an image of Yahweh himself. They had heard his voice out of the fire and had seen no form. “We can
worship God in name only,” Matt said, “by worshiping a God that we ourselves have constructed” —
a false father, a genie version of Jesus, a vending machine with levers and buttons, a harsh
overlord with no love in his heart for you. His phrase for it was a tiki Jesus. And the danger is
not abstract: worship something deaf long enough and you go deaf. “I don’t want to trust in a false
father or a tiki Jesus and become blind myself to the true and living God.”

6. Rebellion does the same work as idolatry

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Ezekiel is given a congregation described exactly this way —
a rebellious house
with eyes to see that see not, and ears to hear that hear not. Not a God who has stopped
speaking. A people who have stopped receiving. “The problem is on our end,” Matt said — “not that
he’s not good at talking. The problem is that we shut him out. And how do we shut him out? With our
spiritual blindness and our deafness that we have put on ourselves through our rebellion.”

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Then Saul, Israel’s first king, who did not quite do what the Lord asked — and got Samuel’s
answer to a question nobody had dared ask out loud.

Matt admitted he had to look up presumption. The first two glosses he found behind the
Hebrew were insubordination and stubbornness. Which puts rebellion and idolatry in the same
category with the same outcome: “turning from God, either by just outright embracing this idolatry
or by walking in rebellion against the true God — basically the same result, which leads us to
being spiritually blind and deaf, just like the fake gods that we worship.” He conceded the
material was running dark. “But it’ll get brighter.”

7. “And I would heal them”

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Jesus picks the theme up in Matthew 13, this time quoting
Isaiah 6:9–10.

Read it slowly and the tone changes. “This isn’t like a you displeased the Lord on Monday,
so he cursed you on Tuesday and you can’t hear, and he doesn’t want you to hear,” Matt said.
“He’s saying they would turn — if they would open their eyes and turn to me, I would heal them. I
want to heal them. He doesn’t want us in this state.” Their eyes they have closed. It is a
heart condition, self-administered, and the sentence ends with God wanting to heal it.

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Which means the silence is never on his side of it. “The voice of the Lord is present. God’s
Spirit is with us, and he speaks all the time — to believers, unbelievers, people who believe in
the gifts of the Spirit and people who don’t. He’s speaking.” Then the turn:
blessed are your
eyes, for they see. What the disciples saw that prophets and righteous people had longed to see
was the Lord of glory standing right in front of them — the long-expected Messiah, God come to
visit his people. The crowd was looking at the same man. “It wasn’t because Jesus wasn’t revealing
himself.” Same revelation, different reception.

8. None of this is an argument against prophecy

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Matt stopped to make sure the drift of an hour on blindness had not been misheard. “I want us to
experience prophetic words. I really do. I don’t want to sound like I’m poo-pooing it — I don’t
know if that’s an appropriate terminology.” Paul, after all, tells the church to
earnestly desire
to prophesy. The caution is about what the gift is for: “the most important thing is that the
Spirit is revealing Jesus” — and what we block is that, usually not with Baal or Molech but with
presumption, vanity, or the pursuit of a God who is not real.

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So he went back to where he started. Psalm 115 refuses the glory, takes the nations’ taunt, and
answers it flatly:
our God is in the
heavens; he does all that he pleases. “He’s real. He’s not a puppet. He’s been real this whole
time, and he’s fully capable of revealing himself — and he is revealed fully and truly in Jesus
Christ. Who knows what God is like? God does.” Which is why self-revelation is his job and not our
achievement: “We should rely on God to reveal himself. That’s one of our main joys.”

9. He is very good at talking

▶ 1:28:04

We are, Matt said, the
church of the living
God, a pillar and buttress of the truth — not a mute idol. “He doesn’t need our food offerings
to eat. He doesn’t need our prayers like a battery pack — like he gets low, and then we pray, and
then he gets back up.” He is a shepherd pursuing a bride, and “he’s going to get his bride no
matter what,” however incompetent we are. Hearing him is not an athletic event: “It’s not a strain,
like, how much can I focus my breathing so that I hear the voice of God.”

Which relieves us of a job we were never given. “I don’t think we need to strain to make sure
that God’s prophetic words come and happen and are fulfilled. He’s so competent. He knows how to
talk. When he sends his word, he knows how to accomplish it.” That leaves exactly one assignment.
“As far as prophetic stuff goes, our top priority would be the soil of our heart, to receive that
word when it does come” — because the obstruction is domestic: “our biggest shield against hearing
it is our own stubbornness, our own spiritual pride, our own blindness.” And it is all one piece —
the works Jesus did bear witness to him, and
his sheep hear his
voice. Prophetic ministry, he added, is not a spiritual news cycle — not Twitter, not getting
ahead of the curve, not accumulating facts or spiritual-person points. “The target is knowing him,
making him known, so that he can be loved for who he really is.”

10. Dead people don’t get hungry

▶ 1:31:56

An encouragement, he called it — keep the heart soft, because he is speaking, and if you belong
to him you have already heard the voice.
The Spirit himself bears
witness with our spirit that we are children of God. “It was that voice that led you to Jesus
the very first time.”

▶ 1:32:29

Two classroom stories, told back to back for the contrast. Around 2010, newly a youth pastor
here, he got his first request from someone who wanted to meet with a pastor. He was thrilled —
Bible ready, praying beforehand. The young man arrived with a backpack, which Matt assumed held a
Bible, unzipped it, asked “you used to be a math teacher, right?” and pulled out a trigonometry
textbook.

▶ 1:33:32

Back when he was actually teaching, a student did the exact opposite. Matt assumed the question
would be about the unit circle. It was: How do I know I’m a Christian? The boy pushed on
it — the Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children, fine, but how do I know that
happened to me, and not that I’m deceiving myself? Matt asked him to say more. “Well, I want to
be — I’m hungry for God. I just don’t know if I’m doing it right.”

His answer was to hand the question back as evidence. “Dude, you’re hungry for God and you want
to belong to him. Dead people don’t thirst. Dead people don’t have hunger. Dead people don’t have
this longing. Where do you think you even got this longing?”

▶ 1:34:33

He then said out loud what he guessed half the room was thinking: this all sounds pretty
bad, I’m going to be spiritually blind and it’s my fault. “If you’re sitting there thinking
I’m stressed out now — I’m sweating, because I don’t know, am I hearing the voice of the Lord, am I
blocking him out — do you long for that? Do you want to hear his voice?” And if the thought is
I wouldn’t speak to me if I were him, given everything I’ve just done, the answer is the
same one Jesus gave in Matthew 13. “The silence was on our end, not his. He’s always speaking. He
wants that more than you.”

Where it landed

▶ 1:37:26

Four sentences, in his own numbering. Pursue the voice of the Spirit. The reason we can listen
is that he is good at speaking. The obstacle is not his silence but our rebellion. And we do not
have to stay there — we can humbly open ourselves to him and his ministry, “because when he
ministers, he knows what he’s doing.” Then the ask, stated as an ask: “It’s a call for us all to
humbly repent and lay down our vanities and presumptions, and let him do the thing that he’s best
at in our lives — to, alongside of us, till the soil of our hearts.” The receiving is the point,
and the substance of what gets received is Jesus.

He had closed on
the parable of the
sower, where the diverging outcomes turn on the soil — the rocks, the weeds, the shallow depth.
And on the bridegroom, a metaphor he lost hold of mid-sentence and cheerfully abandoned: God is
dressed and ready for his bride; we are the ones who forgot, got distracted, puttering around the
house. “Don’t get the impression that you’re the one with all the longing and he’s aloof. That is
totally backwards. He’s the one with all the longing, and we’re the ones that are slow on the
uptake.”

▶ 1:38:45

The Heart Ministry teams came forward, and he prayed the message back as a request: “God, thank
you for today. We ask that your Holy Spirit would till the soil of our hearts — help us to walk
humbly and openly before you, with receptive hearts to hear, and eyes that are sensitive to see
what you’re doing.” Part two, on prophetic words, comes next week.

▶ 1:25:52

Hope Chapel has been working through First Corinthians, with a long pause in the middle, and this Sunday began what Matt called a series within a series: chapters 12 through 14, the chapters about the gifts of the Spirit. He set the pace up front — relaxed, unhurried, and not promising to say everything that could be said. “One of the main points is that the Lord can lead us in all these things according to his wisdom,” he said, “so we can express trust in him even in that topic.” Then he spent the whole morning on the approach rather than on any particular gift.

1. A bad teacher does not make the theorem false

▶ 1:27:16

The illustration came from Matt’s years teaching high school math. Students would turn up in his classroom for tutoring who were not even his students, because they could not learn from the teacher they had — a thick accent one of them could not follow, a teacher who had embraced an all-natural lifestyle that one boy could not get past when she leaned over his desk, a summer school teacher his whole class described as rude. But, Matt said, “no matter how poorly executed our lessons were as math teachers, or how rude or smelly we were, none of that has any bearing on whether the fundamental theorem of algebra is true or false.”

The room caught where this was going before he landed it. You may have seen the gifts of the Spirit embraced publicly and strangely by people you found unhealthy. Matt declined to argue about whether your assessment was fair. “You’ve seen them abused, you’ve seen people embrace them in a way that you found offensive — but that doesn’t mean they’re not a possession of the children of God.”

2. Two wrong ways to want power

▶ 1:29:45

The first story is the slave girl in Philippi who made a fortune for her owners by telling fortunes through a spirit, until Paul cast it out and her owners started a riot over their lost income (Acts 16:16–19). Whatever she was doing, it was producing results people paid for. Wrong source, results in quotation marks.

The second is Simon, earlier in Acts, who watched the apostles lay hands on people and offered them money for the ability (Acts 8:18–20). Right source. He wanted the actual Holy Spirit. But he approached the free gift of God’s own person the way you would approach magic — as a thing you buy.

Matt was blunt about the first category and then moved past it: very few people in that room are consulting Ouija boards, horoscopes, psychics or palm readers, and if you are, repent, because Christ is the way to the Father and he sets the terms. Simon is the one who has our number. You can approach the true God in an untrue way — with your money or with your time — “feeling like prayer works because you used special words,” as though it is more powerful in Greek, or as though you cast out demons better when you are wearing your lucky underwear.

3. Cut loose from the gospel, cut loose from the story

▶ 1:32:31

Two ways that happens. The first is forgetting the cross. It is only by grace that we enter his fellowship, Matt said, echoing what had been prayed at communion an hour earlier — the Holy Spirit is not for sale, and wanting to buy him suggests we never understood that the cross was God’s love poured out for free. Not free on his end. Free to us.

The second is superimposing the book of Acts onto your own timeline. People read it and conclude they do not yet have the Spirit and must do what the apostles did to get him, and a very appealing story follows: they stormed the gates of heaven, they prayed long enough and hard enough, and that is why the Spirit came. The Bible tells a different story. The Spirit was poured out because Jesus is the one who baptizes in the Holy Spirit and fire (Matthew 3:11), and because he died, rose, ascended and was enthroned. Detach the gifts from that, start reaching for special words and special routines, and Matt’s question is fair: how different is that from what Simon was doing?

“The Holy Spirit and his gifts are not the Force from Star Wars,” he said. “The Holy Spirit is a person in the Trinity, and his gifts are given to us as he desires.”

4. The text itself

▶ 1:34:49

Two lessons before a single gift is named. Paganism offered a variety of routes and they all arrived at the same destination — the kingdom of darkness does not care how you get there. And it is by the Spirit that anyone says Jesus is Lord at all; that confession is itself a gift. Matt tied that straight to why gifts exist: over against mute idols that are deaf and blind because they are wood and stone, we serve a God who is alive, who sees, who speaks, who hears, and who directs his people.

▶ 1:36:31

Matt deliberately did not stop on any item in the list — wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, tongues, interpretation. Those are the weeks ahead. He wanted one word from the passage instead: gifts. Faith is a gift. Healings are a gift. Discernment is a gift. “They’re not payment in exchange for prayer time.” And if they are gifts, they are good, because God gives good gifts — “whatever he offers us is good, because he is good.”

He lingered on the last phrase too. As he wills. Not as we want, and not according to a ranking of who has earned it — a point made unanswerable by the fact that apostleship and the power to work wonders went to Paul, who had been violent toward the church. That does not stop you asking. “You can speak to the Holy Spirit. You can tell him, ‘I’m interested in serving you, I’m also interested in this, if it’s your will.’” What it stops is treating great Christian leaders like a vending machine — I want what you have, push D5, see what happens.

5. Believing more means becoming more like a child

▶ 1:38:23

This was the turn of the morning, and Matt made it while people in the room were in the middle of hard things. A watchmaker God is easy to hold. He made the universe, he stepped back, and that explains why nothing seems to happen when the dark things come. That God costs very little faith.

But once you believe he counts the hairs on your head and wants to reveal himself and would love to give good gifts, you are in a different position — the position of a child with a parent. You ask. You do not know what will happen. You ask again tomorrow. You never get the whole rationale, and you keep asking anyway, because you can trust them. Any parent watching the livestream knows how much a child asks, Matt noted, and then added the part that matters: God is more patient than we are.

6. Not the fringe, not the elite — the rank and file

▶ 1:42:05

Avoiding the gifts, Matt argued, does not make them go away. It relegates them — to the fringe of the church, or to the margins, or to some supposed elite. Both sides of that are distortions. If you have been the one praying when a miracle happened, it can go to your head until you feel like one of God’s Marines and start offering autographs. If you have not, you conclude this is for people overseas, or the really special ones, or the man on television.

“They belong to the regular group of the body of Christ,” he said. “Your grandma. Your niece. Your cousin.” And then the line worth keeping: “You don’t get a free trial version of the Holy Spirit when you enter into Christ, and there’s not a paywall. Regular Christians can walk in his power — in fact, I don’t know if there’s another way to walk in Christ.”

▶ 1:44:06

He traced it back past Pentecost to Abraham:

Blessed in order to be a blessing — and the nation itself a miracle, since Abraham and Sarah were old and had never been able to have children. Every Israelite you ever met was walking evidence that something impossible had happened. Matt called it a good foreshadowing of the body of Christ: nothing about this should be the case, and it is, by mercy.

Yes, God speaks in the still small voice. But Matt pushed back on the idea that this is his only register. He spoke to Egypt through plagues, through a pillar of fire, through a parted sea, through manna every morning. Jesus himself said it: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves.” Jesus is the substance of the message; the works are a tool he uses so that we believe him for who he really is. And over against idols that do nothing, “our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.”

7. For his name’s sake, not ours

▶ 1:46:17

Solomon, dedicating the temple, prays for someone who is not an Israelite at all:

The foreigner hears about God from somewhere. The Exodus, certainly — Israel would tell that story. But Matt read Solomon as asking for more than a recitation of past acts. Solomon is not trying to obligate God to answer anyone who faces the building. He is asking him to keep showing himself, generation after generation, for a stated reason: so that all the peoples of the earth would know his name. Is that finished? Then we can pray Solomon’s prayer with him. Rehearse the great miracles, the Exodus, the resurrection — and also ask God to act again. “It is not for us to build a reputation as gift possessors,” Matt said, “but so that he will build up a reputation for his great name.”

8. The furniture from IKEA

▶ 1:48:54

Here is the picture Matt admitted was imperfect and then used anyway, because it describes how a lot of us actually feel. A father brings home a flat box, hands it to the kids, says put this together, and leaves. All those little wooden dowels. We treat the gifts of the Spirit that way — raw materials to be assembled by people whose father is gone, and if we are diligent enough we will eventually figure it out.

“Jesus didn’t say, ‘Okay, I’m going to die and provide raw spiritual resources, and then I will leave and I won’t come back until you’ve fixed things up for me.’ As silly as that sounds, that is kind of how we embrace him, often.”

Then the question Matt put to the room: where does the responsibility mostly sit — on the sheep to follow, or on the shepherd to guide? Our Lord is not half-hearted and lazy. He did not depart and leave us equipment. “For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church.” We are not shepherdless. We are not here to work out how to use the gifts and console ourselves until he gets back.

▶ 1:51:47

Before the last verse he gathered up what he had: the gifts are good, we should be informed about them, they belong to the rank and file of his body and not to “the few and the proud” or the special — and yes, we should study and practice them, but we go to him for that. “We don’t study and practice them like it’s the Force. We don’t just grow in power generically like Dragon Ball Z. We ask him, and we serve him, and he gives us gifts as he wills.” And the setting matters as much as the stone. Wanting the gifts in order to have them and make a name is the wrong frame; they “need to be like a jewel in a crown, put in their proper setting in the rubric of the gospel and in the overall story of God whom we know and love and trust.”

9. Esther, and the half of the verse we skip

▶ 1:52:21

The book of Esther is short, theatrical and worth reading this week if you do not know it — a king about to authorize the slaughter of the Jews, a right-hand man with a personal grudge, and a queen the king does not know is Jewish. Her cousin Mordecai sends word:

We quote the last line. It has conferences and blog posts built on it, and it feels wonderful, because it means we are special and needed. Matt did the voice: maybe our incompetent, lazy Lord — who is asleep, or gone, or both — maybe he needs me. I’ll rise up like the X-Men, and we’ll make this work. He noted he was not doing the impression very well and that he had no intention of getting better at it.

▶ 1:55:34

The middle of the verse is the profound part, and it is Mordecai’s faith, not his flattery: if you keep silent, relief and deliverance will rise from another place. Suppose we botch it. Suppose this church handles the gifts badly. Jesus still gets his bride. That, Matt said, is what lets us put down the frantic IKEA energy and embrace the gifts with integrity and intimacy instead of the insane pressure to save everyone in Austin — the pressure that sends you back to the closet to shout worship songs louder, trying to mix the anointing to the right recipe, as though the outcome hung on getting the chemistry right.

10. One thing to obey

▶ 1:57:56

“Savior of the world — that role has already been taken,” he said. “We actually call it a Christ complex for a reason.” The alternative is not a smaller life; it is walking proudly as sheep who have a shepherd, on the strength of what he actually said: all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him, therefore go, and he is with us to the end of the age. Not, Matt pointed out, I had it for a minute, but now I’m giving it to you and I’m leaving.

He closed with a habit he is trying to build into his preaching — asking what one thing you could obey Jesus in, from this message or from whatever the Spirit was saying while you were somewhere else. His own summary of the answer: we can trust Jesus with our salvation, with the church, with building a name for himself, and with shepherding us into these gifts even when we are worried they are weird. “As we serve him in these gifts, the whole point is to promote and proclaim Jesus the risen Lord.”

▶ 1:58:50

Then he prayed it rather than merely recommending it — thanking God for all of this, asking that we would walk in the power of his Spirit in a way that honors him, and that our eyes would be fixed on him — and called the Heart Ministry teams forward. They were newly minted, so he told the room to mess with them and form really long lines. Prayer first, then the luncheon. A message about not being left to assemble anything alone ended with people standing at the front, available.