While Hesed doesn’t’ once appear in Esther, it is God’s lovingkindness that is operative behind the scenes in this great book. It is God’s covenant love for a people that He chose and formed and destined to be a demonstration of His love to the world around Him, that is lurking behind the many turns of events in the book of Esther.

Knowing the significant importance of water baptism for believers, and knowing how we believers can easily not see or understand the significant importance of baptism, the Holy Spirit gave us nine different accounts of people being baptized in the book of Acts.

Central to lukewarmness is that of being oblivious to one’s real spiritual need. We in the West especially are easily fooled into thinking we are doing ok spiritually because we are doing ok materially/financially, and there is no apparent crisis going on in our lives or relationships, and we are busy serving the Lord in one way or another.

The whole basis and motivation to repent or reason to repent is the King and His Kingdom had invaded their time and space and reality, and thus their sins and darkness were exposed, and thus they needed to bow to King and be delivered out of the kingdom of darkness and translated into the kingdom of God.

We are doing a six week or so sermon series on the Holy Spirit here at The Well – Los Osos, so I thought it might be helpful to see what leaders of the church down through the ages have said about the Holy Spirit.

My objective below was to try to find as many scriptures as I could that speak to the authority and reliability of scripture....... But hopefully there is enough below to help one see that you can bank your life and eternity on the scriptures.

And I think one of the reasons we so struggle with this is because we see the Holy Spirit use unholy people – even ourselves, and we therefore conclude their lack of holiness (or ours) is no big deal. One of the things I used to justify my own lack of holiness was the fact that God was using me in people’s lives. Therefore He must have been pleased with me.

"....our tendency is to justify ourselves (almost always by contrasting ourselves with someone we deem obviously worse in word and deed). But while we might not do the things they do or say the things they say, God looks at our hearts, our motives, our inner attitudes, and our inner conversations. His weighing standard is of course Himself!

Sound, Christ like, and God pleasing behavior rides on the back of sound, Christ centered doctrine. Sound doctrine protects Christ’s church from confusion and deception. It helps her rightly examine the more subjective aspects of kingdom life like prophetic words, dreams, visions, trances, etc. It provides guard rails for the life of the Spirit.

Even if our fathers were criminals, Jesus died for their sins. To whatever depths their offenses have been toward us, there will be grace to forgive, and the Holy Spirit will cleanse and heal us from the hurts as we forgive.