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Listen to Sunday’s message by Pastor Phil Olsen

Empty space always gets filled. This is just a physical law of our world! Evidence? The junk drawer. You designate an extra drawer as a catch all and before you blink its filled with all kinds of useless things, most of which don’t work or only work part of the time! Again as we said last week, as it is in the physical so it is in the spiritual. We cannot be neutral in our relationship with God or our lives and our pursuits will soon be full of junk. We can’t begin a relationship with God through Jesus and then go on auto pilot or we crash. We can’t stop at the point of forgiveness with God…we were designed for more.

We see the “junk drawer” principle spoken by Jesus in Luke 11. In verses 23-26 we see that when we make and attempt to clean out our lives, the enemy will quickly move back in and our lives will be filled with more junk than before. Just like an attempt to empty a junk drawer, this is the rule of the natural world. Only by the power of the Supernatural can your drawer be completely cleansed and kept that way. How does God keep it clean? He doesn’t allow it to remain empty. If we will ask Him He will fill it with His Holy Spirit and give it purpose. As we talked last week God gives us the Holy Spirit so that through it filling our lives we can be holy or set apart from the rest of the world. He will give us a singular focus that will keep us clean and on purpose.

Listen to Sunday’s message by Pastor Phil Olsen

There is nothing greater than the gift of God’s forgiveness through His Son Jesus. Nothing compares to the feeling of being released of everything you’ve done wrong, but we were created for so much more. Being forgiven is just the beginning of the journey.

Acts 19 describes the opportunity of more. The opportunity to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Drop all your previous notions of whatever this idea of being filled with the Holy Spirit brings and listen to 3 important truths that this scripture presents. 1- You can’t fake the Holy Spirit. 2- You’re running on empty without the Holy Spirit. 3- It changes your life when you’re filled with the Holy Spirit.

1-You can’t fake the Holy Spirit. You can be religious, because everyone has seen how to act and what to say, but can’t fake a real relationship with God. In the day of the early church there was nothing to fall back on, and what made them real was the miracles the Holy Spirit was doing through them. Yet today many are faking it, and it’s obvious like the sons of Sceva running away naked and bleeding. A real relationship with God is marked by righteousness and holiness, which simply mean living right and being set apart from the rest of the world. Apart from the Holy Spirit filling your life you cannot accomplish these. You can try harder to achieve righteousness, but you will fail frequently and soon grow frustrated and disillusioned. You can try to be holy and go live like a monk losing ability to impact the world. You can set up such strict laws and boundaries on yourself, but you’ll end up a hypocrite apart from the Holy Spirit. God desires to give you more, a righteous and holy life, through the Holy Spirit filling you doing what you cannot fake.

2- You’re running on empty without the Holy Spirit. Being forgive is huge. having the chains of our mistakes and the guilt from our past removed is critical to run the race of this life well, but it is just the starting line, and if we stop at the starting line we can’t finish well. God does not desire to just be with you in this life, He desires to be in You filling you, strengthening you, and guiding you, allowing you to run the race well.

3- It changes your life when you’re filled with the Holy Spirit. When we look at what Paul is accomplishing in Acts 19 we can see that He is a changed man. None of those abilities (or desires) existed in Him before He met Jesus on the road to Damascus. He is accomplishing things that are humanly impossible, they are only possible with the Holy Spirit filling His life. Without the Holy Spirit we are left to try and do life on our own strength and our own compass. It’s entirely possible to ask Jesus to forgive you of your sins and then turn around and try and live on your own power. The Holy Spirit provides the power to follow through on the how and why God created us. We were forgiven for a purpose and being filled with the Holy Spirit gives us the ability to fulfill this purpose.

There is no bureaucracy or red tape to go through when it comes to being filled with God’s Holy Spirit. Jesus makes it very clear in Luke 11:13 that all we need to do is ask and we will receive this life of more.

Listen to Sunday’s message by Pastor Phil Olsen.

Is our pursuit of more frantic or focused? Panicked or purposeful? Are we going about the right thing in the wrong way? There’s nothing wrong with pursuing more, God designed us for it, but how are we going about it? Is it about more of us and more for us or is it about more of God? We were designed for more of God as we learned last week.

God’s success is not based on us doing or being better. It’s about letting Him become greater in your life, by making yourself become less. It’s not about Him getting more of you, it’s about you getting more of Him. This requires spending time with God in His word. Pastor gave us some passages to study that talk about the more God wants for us.

Galatians 2:20-21, 3:1-4; Ephesians 3:20; Philippians 2:12-13; Romans 8:1-3, 12-17, 26-28, 31-39

God’s desire for us to experience more of Him is constant. He desires for you to experience more than just forgiveness. He desires for you to live this life of more just as much as He desires you to begin a relationship with Him through His son Jesus. God’s definition of more, and what He wants for you to experience will blow your mind! God works from the God-side out…so the prerequisite for experiencing more is allowing Him on the inside of you.

In Ephesians we see God’s promise of a life of significance and impact and we see that it’s dependent on His power at work within us. In Philippians we see God’s promise for a life on purpose and again we see it depends on our obedience and Him working in us. In Romans we see a promise of a life with no shame or condemnation and we see its dependent on us being in Christ and Him being in us. Also in Romans we see God’s promise for us to live in victory and be more than conquerors and as in all cases it depends on Him alive in us and His love at work within us.

A life of more is not about doing more. It’s not about being forgiven and then trying to help others. Anytime we try to do something good we will fall short. We can’t do it, He can and He promises to if we will let Him fill us. The more is about God filling our lives. We are forgiven by believing and trusting in the Spirit of God are we now gonna try to live on our own, just trying harder now that we’re forgiven? That will never work. We are not central to more, Him filling our lives with His Holy Spirit is all that’s necessary for a life of more.

Listen to Sunday’s message by Pastor Phil Olsen

God has designed us for more. However, it is possible to live our lives with less and never know there is more to be had. God designed us for more, but it is of critical importance that we understand in our pursuit for more we can end up with the mess of less, if in our quest for more we pursue the wrong things. This misguided pursuit was the reason for the fall.

We see in Genesis 3 Adam and Eve go after the more and get the mess of less because they listened to the serpent. We fight this same serpent today, and his goal is to misguide our desires. The first thing he always wants to convince us of is that we are missing out. Despite all that God has given us to enjoy in this life within His law, we become easily convinced its not enough, and that we’re missing out. Understand this: The pursuit of more begins with the understanding of something greater and mess of less begins with a complaint of not enough.

When you listen to what the enemy says long enough you’ll begin believe him. You’ll believe him when he says you’re missing out and from missing out we begin to believe that God is holding out. We think that if God was really loving then we wouldn’t be where we are or experiencing whatever pain we are. Its almost as if we blame God for the fall. If we’re honest, what we’re mad about is that God hasn’t saved us from ourselves. He made us powerful enough to screw up our lives and we followed suit. Yet in His mercy, He is still passionate to give us more. All we need to do is release our fear of less, that has only driven us to complain and covet.

From missing out, we begin to believe God’s holding out, and from holding out we move into checking out- checking out what we can’t have. What is Eve doing sitting at this tree staring at it when she has an ENTIRE WORLD to look at!?! The problem with checking out is it eliminates all other views in our life and destroys our vision for what God has for us - everything that is good in our life becomes corroded.

In our world we’ve made good evil and evil good, just as Isaiah says. We think what God wants for us is boring and what the world offers us is exciting. When we look at the tree of good and evil what does that represent? A simple way of phrasing it would be the tree of success and failure. If we look at what Adam and Eve had accomplished thus far we would see that everything had succeeded. In other words God had given them success all He was withholding was failure! God doesn’t want us to experience failure! Yet all the while we’re checking out we’re simply pining for failure! And if we continue checking out eventually we’ll take the bait and we’ll get taken out by our failure.

Instantly the more that God intends for us becomes the mess of less. Scripture says Adam and Eve realized they were naked and made coverings for themselves whereas before it says they were naked and felt no shame. They went from utter confidence in full exposure to utter fear and total shamefulness. Where there was once freedom to roam the garden they were holed up, hidden in a corner. Peace was replaced with anxiety, love was replaced with fear, the beauty of relationship was replaced by broken relationships, the more was replaced by the mess of less.

More by its very definition is something you don’t have, so in order to get it you must look to somebody. The question is, who? How you answer that will determine whether you get the more or the mess of less.