I. Why Aren’t We There Yet?
We gather in this room tonight with a shared sense: God has a purpose for our lives. We are here because we know we haven’t arrived. Something in us longs to move forward, to break through. But the question must be asked: Why haven’t we?
If we can answer that, the delay ends. It could end tonight.
But if we get it wrong, the pattern continues—stuck in the same cycles, week after week, month after month, year after year. We’re good at identifying that we’re broken. But we are terrible at diagnosing why—and worse at pursuing the right prescription for healing.
Let’s start with a basic question: How do we understand the work of the Holy Spirit in the Body?
Tonight, I felt His presence. Through the worship. Through the testimonies. Through the way the saints sang and prayed. My soul has been fed.
I was changed by the words you shared, by the faith you expressed. God was more real to me when I walked in the door than before. That’s not emotionalism—it’s the evidence of His Spirit moving in His people.
But here’s the question: if we experience the Spirit through the ministry team, what about the rest of the Body?
What has God called you to in the ministry of the Spirit? Who among us is exempt from needing Him?
Jesus was clear when He introduced the Holy Spirit to Nicodemus: “Unless one is born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
We chase the Spirit for our own sake, but the Spirit wasn’t given just for us. The Spirit is the doorway into the kingdom. And the kingdom is not about isolated individuals—it is about a people governed by God.
We heard repentance described beautifully tonight—giving up all the lordship we once reserved for ourselves and returning it to God. That’s the heart of the kingdom. But it’s not the kingdom until more than one of us starts doing that—together. That’s where it becomes more than a testimony. It becomes a Body.
But none of that works without the Spirit.
II. The Spirit: God’s System of Government
Why do we need the Spirit for the reign of Christ to become real in our lives?
It’s not just because the Spirit makes us feel better or helps us overcome our problems. It’s because without the Spirit, we remain lord over our own lives. There’s no throne room for Christ if we haven’t vacated it.
Paul writes in Romans 8, “If you live according to the flesh, you will die. But if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.” In other words, you can’t die to the self-life without the Spirit’s power. You can’t enthrone Jesus without surrendering your own crown—and we can’t surrender our crown without help.
Let’s borrow a worldly analogy. If Trump wanted to establish his kingdom, what would he need? The reins of power. A vast network of communication. A bureaucracy of experts and enforcers. He’d need a system.
Jesus, too, has a kingdom to establish—but He doesn’t do it through earthly tools. He doesn’t sit in a White House. He doesn’t have orange hair or hold press conferences. Instead, He said, “It is better for you that I go away, for if I do not go, the Advocate will not come.”
Why? Because Jesus’ government doesn’t operate from the outside in—it works from the inside out.
The Holy Spirit is His administrative system.
Jesus explained it clearly: “The world cannot receive the Spirit because it does not see Him or know Him. But you know Him—for He dwells with you and will be in you.”
That “in you” is everything. The Spirit is not merely God’s comfort—He is God’s media. He is the medium through which Christ, our head, governs His body on earth.
Every U.S. general carries secure communications—encrypted devices that relay classified directives. That’s how power functions in a modern state. This microphone I’m using is another form of media. If I turn it off, you can’t hear me. If I walk out, my voice is gone entirely.
Now imagine a government with no communication. Imagine a church with no Spirit.
Jesus is not here in the flesh, handing out iPads. Instead, He’s giving something better: the Holy Spirit—the internal medium that links us directly to the throne. That’s how His kingdom comes and His will is done on earth as it is in heaven.
So what does that mean?
It means you need a new operating system. You cannot run a heavenly kingdom on a self-centered heart. You can’t download divine commands into carnal priorities. You can’t run iOS on Android hardware.
Until God rewires your thinking, dethrones your ego, and installs His Spirit, you will always be the center of your world—and nothing will work.
But even once the system is in place, it needs power.
That’s what the Spirit gives: not just direction, but energy. And beyond that—design. There’s an order to His kingdom. It’s not just passion and gifts and feelings—it’s structure, purpose, and coordination.
And all of it begins with the Holy Spirit.
III. The Spirit Is Not Just for You
If the Spirit is the operating system of the kingdom, then we need to ask: What is the kingdom supposed to look like?
That’s part of the problem—we don’t have many good examples. We can’t simply point to another church or community and say, “Let’s do it just like that.” In fact, many of us have looked at other examples and said, “I don’t want it like that at all.”
Even here, where God is doing so much among us, I don’t want to replicate this community exactly. I want to build on it. I want to see something we haven’t yet seen.
But for that to happen, every person in the room must realize they have a part.
If God has given you His Spirit, it’s because you belong to Him. You’ve been sealed. You’ve been anointed. You’ve been invited into His government. You are part of the administration of the kingdom of God.
That’s exciting, but also sobering—because we’ve individualized and personalized the Spirit to the point of distortion. We’ve made it all about our personal healing, our personal growth, our personal sense of belonging.
Yes, the Spirit brings comfort. But it is not primarily comfort—it is power. And not just power to fix your life, but power to fulfill God’s strategy, to advance His kingdom, to serve others, and to love sacrificially.
So if you come seeking the Spirit solely for yourself, you will end up frustrated. It’s like trying to run iOS apps on an Android phone—you’ll experience glitches, incompatibilities, and spiritual breakdowns.
That’s because the Spirit was never meant to serve your ego. It was meant to crucify it.
And that’s hard.
Even when we taste freedom in a meeting, in a prayer, in an act of surrender, it’s so easy to return to the center. To re-center the whole spiritual experience around ourselves again.
This is why kingdom life is so rare: it demands a level of maturity, sacrifice, and spiritual coordination that few of us consistently maintain. None of us have fully arrived. None of us have built the city we long for. But how can we quit?
Jesus told us to pray every single day: “Your kingdom come.” That means every day, we wake up to a new chance to re-center not around ourselves, but around Him and His Body.
The kingdom, Paul says, is “righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit is not just the power—it’s the how, the when, the why, and the with whom. It’s the entire ecosystem of God’s will on earth.
So if you’re asking, “Why am I not where I want to be?”—start here.
Somewhere, somehow, it’s still about you.
And here’s the thing: God allows that—for a season. When you’re a spiritual baby, the whole world revolves around you. That’s fine. It’s beautiful.
But if you stay eleven months old for five years—we have a problem.
We confuse our early spiritual dependence with spiritual maturity. But real growth hurts. You can’t learn to walk without falling. You can’t grow without stumbling, without scraping your knees, without breaking your illusions.
And that’s when we start saying things like, “I just want to go back to the beginning, when it was easy, when God fed me milk at every cry.” But God isn’t spoiling you. He’s raising you. And love doesn’t leave you in infancy.
At some point, you’ve got to grow up. You’ve got to graduate from drinking the bottle to filling it for someone else. And then to serving someone else at the table of grace.
IV. Love Unlocks the Gifts—and Lordship
You might say, “But I’ve tried. I want to stop making it about me, but I can’t seem to do it.”
Paul anticipated that. In 1 Corinthians 12, when he introduces the gifts of the Spirit, he begins with something foundational, “No one can say, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ except by the Holy Spirit.”
That’s not just about words; it’s a spiritual reality. You cannot genuinely submit to Christ’s lordship unless the Holy Spirit is present and active in your life. And the very next thing Paul emphasizes is how the Spirit expresses Himself—not in isolation, but through the many-membered body.
He makes it clear: there are different gifts, different ministries, different operations—but the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God working all things in all people.
In other words, Jesus isn’t fully your Lord unless you’re encountering Him through the Body.
You cannot bypass the Body and still experience His lordship. Why? Because it’s through the gifts of the Spirit in the Body that Christ actively governs His church. That’s His media. That’s His strategy.
So if you isolate yourself from the functioning Body—if you dismiss the living, Spirit-filled expressions of Christ through others—you’re cutting yourself off from the very means by which Jesus exercises His Lordship in your life.
That’s why many of us stay stuck. We say, “Jesus is Lord,” but we won’t submit to the Spirit when He speaks through a brother, or corrects through a sister, or prompts through a prophetic word, or builds through the coordinated movement of the church.
The Spirit doesn’t just speak in your head—He speaks in the Body. If you’re not in the Body, you may not be hearing Him at all.
Paul goes on to say, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” The Spirit does not manifest just for your personal breakthrough. He manifests so that the whole Body may grow, mature, and come under the rule of Christ.
And that’s why Paul urges us, “Earnestly desire the greater gifts.” But then he pivots and says, “And I will show you a more excellent way.”
Most of the church takes that to mean: “Forget the gifts; just focus on love.” But that’s not what Paul is saying. He’s not contrasting love with the gifts—he’s contrasting love with the desire for gifts as an end in themselves.
The better way to receive and walk in the gifts is not to crave them harder; it’s to love more deeply. Love unlocks the gifts because love gives them their purpose.
So if you’re stuck in your spiritual walk—if your gifts feel dry or forced—it’s likely because something is choking your love. The Holy Spirit is the breath of love in the church. When love is stifled, the body can’t breathe—and the gifts can’t flow.
Paul says the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. You don’t even have love apart from Him. And when He is grieved or resisted, both love and lordship are hindered.
We think Jesus is Lord because we’ve said the words. But until we’ve submitted to His governance through the Spirit working in the Body, we haven’t yet come under His rule.
So Paul’s argument is not just pastoral—it’s radical.
Jesus is not your Lord unless you’ve yielded to the Spirit that speaks through the Body.
And love is the only pathway into that submission.
V. Ambition or Anointing?
If love is the only way to truly receive and walk in the gifts of the Spirit, then we have to ask: what suffocates our love? Why, if we are born of the Spirit, sealed and gifted, do we still find ourselves spiritually dry, disoriented, and disillusioned?
Often, it’s this: our fears give birth to ambition. And then, subtly, our ambition begins to blend with God’s purpose. We start formulating a story for our lives—one filled with certainty and heroism. And when we look at others, especially those walking visibly in their gift, we say, “I want what they have.”
Now, on the surface, that might not sound wrong. But often, we don’t want what they have—we want what their gift represents: visibility, affirmation, purpose, glory. And instead of saying, “God, how can I serve the one You’ve put in front of me?” we say, “God, when is it my turn to be seen?”
We fall in love with what is visible. We see the fruit, but not the blood. We see the gift, but not the sacrifice.
We want the glory, but we do not want the cost.
So we start chasing spiritual breakthrough, not to glorify God, but to escape our own meaninglessness. We want the gifts, not because we want to serve, but because we want to matter.
And here’s the truth: that desire will never get you across the threshold.
If it’s still about you, then when the scent of sacrifice rises, you’ll back away. But if it’s about love, then when the cross appears, you’ll say, “This is the path. This is what I was called to.”
And you’ll step forward.
You’ll go the extra mile.
You’ll give your tunic, also.
And when you do, no one may see it. There will be no applause. No spotlight. You may be bruised, misunderstood, accused.
But God will see it.
And He will get the glory.
And when that happens, some will look on and mistake your sacrifice for elevation. They’ll say, “Look at her! Look at him! They’re on the inside now!” And the Cain spirit creeps in.
They begin to demonize the very people God raised up to show that His grace really is for everyone. That if He can use them, He can use you.
But envy blinds us. We forget that God loves to use the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He raises up the broken, the foolish, the overlooked. Not because they’re more gifted—but because when He works through them, no one can mistake it for human greatness.
So if you’re looking at someone else and thinking, “I could never be used like that,” you’ve already missed the point.
That coat of many colors? Joseph didn’t wear it for 13 years. He wore chains. He lost everything. But God was with him.
We make excuses. We nurse our vanity. We try to keep control.
We say, “I’ll sacrifice—if it works. I’ll obey—if I get results. I’ll give—if I see it’s worth it.”
But God says, “No. You don’t purchase the kingdom. You surrender to it.”
A purchase implies possession, control, strategy. But a sacrifice says, “This is Yours. No strings. No demands.”
That’s where the Spirit begins to move.
Because God isn’t looking for the clever. He’s looking for the surrendered. He doesn’t need your plan—He needs your yes.
VI. From Grasping to Giving
If we could only keep our image intact—our strategies, our ambitions, our plans—we’d gladly run ahead and attempt great things for God. But when the cost is our own control, when the call is to lay down not just our sin but our strength, we hesitate.
And yet, this is precisely the threshold we must cross.
We want to evaluate the sacrifice first. We want to weigh it, measure it, and decide if the reward will be “worth it.” But God says—that evaluation itself is what I’m asking you to surrender.
He’s not asking for your best strategy. He’s asking for a living sacrifice.
And here’s the good news: a sacrifice isn’t a payment. A payment implies a transaction—something bought and claimed. But a sacrifice? That’s a relinquishment. It says, “This is Yours. I release my grip.”
You can’t grip the kingdom. You can only give yourself to it.
And that’s freedom. Because we are ashes, and He is beauty. We are dust, and He is glory. We can’t earn it. We can’t prove ourselves. But we can love Him for His own sake.
When that happens, everything changes.
You stop obsessing over your ministry, your gifting, your trajectory. You start asking different questions:
Who am I here to love today?
Whose burden can I carry?
Where is the place God wants to touch—through me—right now?
And something shifts.
You start to realize: I don’t need a spotlight. I don’t need a title. I don’t need results. I just need to love.
You won’t even know what song to sing until you realize whom you love.
You won’t know what message to preach until someone you care about is bound and broken and needs deliverance.
The Spirit will not give you your “platform” until your burden is no longer centered on yourself.
Eventually, you stop coming to meetings for yourself. And that’s not to say the early years were wrong—those newborn seasons of faith where everything revolves around us are natural. But as we mature, we must learn to come for others.
That’s how the kingdom grows.
Not by programs, but by people who carry others in their hearts.
I’ve seen it in brothers and sisters—when they were laboring for the restoration of others. They weren’t doing it for themselves. They were captured by the vision of the kingdom. They were losing themselves in the love of others.
That’s the calling.
I remember a man—now passed on—who thought he had a burden for the Jewish people. He was brilliant, gifted, intense. But when someone else was invited into the room—someone who could articulate the truth with more grace than he could—he grew angry. Violent. Abusive.
Within a year, he had left his wife and children. He died alone in a nursing home, bitter and broken.
He mistook love for a strategy. He thought calling meant visibility. He saw love as a means to spiritual promotion—not as the first commandment.
He had never truly known the cross.
But his children—raised by a faithful single mother—many of them continued on in the faith. They visited him near the end. He had no teeth left, ravaged by alcoholism. All he had wanted was love. But he never understood it wasn’t something to be acquired. It was something to be given.
Jesus didn’t die for visibility. He died because of love.
And because of that, He rose with power.
VII. Your Place in the Kingdom of Love
If God has given you His Spirit, then He has already given you a place of service—a role in His body, a function in His kingdom. A word to speak. A burden to carry. A prayer to pray. A person to serve.
Everyone has a place.
And if you ever feel purposeless, if you ever feel alone, chances are it’s because you’re withholding the very thing you’ve already been given—love. You’re waiting to receive a mission, while God is waiting for you to release what’s already in your heart.
Loneliness often doesn’t come from being unloved—it comes from not loving.
And purposelessness doesn’t come from lack of calling—it comes from curating our sacrifices.
We say, “I’m willing, Lord . . . but not that way.”
“I want to serve . . . just not them.”
“I’ll sacrifice . . . as long as it fits with my strategy.”
We make lists in our hearts:
Sacrifices I’ll consider.
People I prefer.
Places I’ll go—if they’re not too uncomfortable.
Ways I’ll give—as long as they don’t hurt too much.
But those aren’t sacrifices. Those are strategies.
And there’s a world of difference between sacrifice and strategy.
A CEO may sacrifice sleep to make a million dollars, but that’s not surrender. That’s ambition.
In the kingdom, the only valid motive is love. Not love for recognition. Not love for platform. But love for Him. And for them—the people He’s placed in your path.
You say, “But I want to make a difference. I want to be real. I want to change lives.”
Then want it for Him.
Want it because they deserve to know they’re loved.
Want it because He is worthy.
So pray:
“God, forgive me. Help me fight this self-centered spirit that still haunts my walk. Help me recognize that the real evidence of my repentance is not how broken I feel—but how deeply I love.”
Put to death every Cain instinct that whispers, “This works for others, but not for me.”
Every lie that says, “I’ve missed it.”
Every argument that keeps your sacrifice in escrow, waiting for better terms.
No, Jesus didn’t wait for a better deal. He gave it all.
He emptied Himself, not for strategy—but for love.
What I long to see is a church where everyone knows they are anointed to love.
Where no act of kindness is too small to carry heaven’s weight.
Where every gesture becomes a gift, every burden an offering, every member a minister.
Whether it’s loving your family.
Caring for an aging parent.
Encouraging a struggling brother or sister.
Welcoming a stranger.
Bringing joy to a friend.
There is no shortage of need.
And if you step into love, even in the smallest way, you’ll begin to see—you have something. Something divine. Something powerful.
VIII. Small Obedience, Eternal Impact
One of the first times I felt this—this sense that God had placed something inside me—was when I was just eleven years old. Greg Godsey came to visit. He wasn’t even part of our family yet, just someone asking questions. We rode around in his Jeep, and he asked more and more.
I didn’t have the answers. I went home and asked my dad. He helped me understand.
And for ten years I thought I had failed—that I hadn’t given Greg what he needed.
I kept telling him, “You should talk to someone else. I’m not the one.”
But now, all these years later, I see my own kids down in Mexico. They’re having those conversations. They’re stepping into the same questions. They’re carrying something.
Because the kingdom doesn’t grow by brilliance. It grows by obedience.
It grows when you say, “I’ll love the one in front of me. I’ll carry this moment with reverence, even if I feel small and unsure.”
You may not feel like your five loaves and two fishes are enough.
You may say, “Lord, I’ve poured out everything. I have nothing left.”
But He whispers: “Give it anyway. Watch what I can do.”
You step forward in faith. And suddenly, things start to move. Doors open. Hearts open. Grace flows. And you fall to your knees saying, “God, I can’t believe I get to be part of this.”
That’s the mystery. That’s the joy.
And this calling? It’s not for some elite few.
Which one of us is exempt from it?
No one.
The Spirit was not given to a special class of people. It was poured out on all flesh—sons and daughters, young and old, servants and leaders alike.
So what do we do?
We leave this meeting with steps of love in our hands.
Prayers to pray. Texts to send. Truth to speak. Service to give. Someone to lift. Someone to believe in.
We pray:
“God, show me the place no one else may ever see.
Show me the task where no credit comes to me.
Show me where You want to love through me.”
And if you go to that place—the one your flesh warns you against—you’ll find grace there. You’ll find Jesus there. Not just in idea or doctrine—but in power.
IX. The Kingdom Comes to the Low Place
This whole message—about surrender, about the Spirit, about the kingdom and its power—is not a theory. It’s not just a plea. It’s a pattern. And I’ve seen it before—in my own father’s life.
Before he was a believer, my dad was a student of philosophy and English literature. His mind was sharp, his thoughts deep, and his heart stirred by the great questions of life. But when he truly encountered Christ, he left all that behind—not out of contempt, but out of surrender.
He knew he couldn’t find God merely in concepts. He needed discipleship. He needed formation. And that pursuit didn’t land him in a seminary. It didn’t take him to some academic hall. It took him to a used car lot.
There, he worked under a church brother with bad English and strong convictions—someone he could barely understand half the time. It wasn’t glamorous. But it was exactly where God wanted him.
One of the employees at that lot was an older man named Brother McDonald—a quiet, faithful man who carried no worldly accolades, but who had a secret: he knew how to pray. Behind his house stood a small wooden hut with a dirt floor. No stained glass. No microphones. Just a place where heaven met earth.
But to a surrendered man, that was holy ground.
And it was there—on his knees in that humble shack—that my father learned the language of heaven.
He prayed. He served. He swept the lot and polished cars. No platform. No title. Just faithfulness.
Then one day, while my dad was still working at the lot, Brother Denny came running out of the office with urgency in his voice:
“Blair! I was praying, and the Lord showed me—He’s calling you to the ministry, like Peter, James, and John.”
That moment wasn’t a break from the mundane—it was the fruit of it. The call didn’t come in spite of the low place. It came because of it.
Later, Brother Barnes confirmed the word: God’s call to minister to the Jewish people.
But again, it didn’t start with a pulpit. It started with a broom.
Brother Phillips called and said, “I want you at every meeting.”
And then came the test.
One Wednesday evening, a major church meeting was planned. But just before it began, his boss—Brother Carlot—called and said, “Stay. I’ve got a buyer coming. He’s driving in now. I need you to close the sale on a Cadillac.”
My dad was torn. He’d just been told by Brother Phillips to be at every meeting. But this was his job, his livelihood.
He prayed. And then he made the call.
“Brother Carlot,” he said, “you’ve been good to me, and I appreciate everything. But I need to be at that meeting. I have to obey the Lord.”
Carlot told him, “I understand. But you don’t have a job tomorrow.”
That night, my dad went to the meeting. No lightning bolt. No burning bush. Just obedience.
The next morning, the phone rang. Brother Phillips said, “I don’t know if this is God or not—but I’ve been thinking of asking you to come help at the church.”
It wasn’t glamorous. “I need you to clean the sanctuary, sweep the parking lot, run the mimeograph machine. We’re behind on Sunday school materials. I can’t pay you much. Just enough to survive.”
And my dad said yes.
That’s what kingdom looks like.
It’s not a treasure hunt where you despise everything until you find the “breadcrumb” moment. It’s loving faithfully in the place you are—believing God can do miracles in parking lots, and in car lots, and in tiny prayer huts no one else will ever visit.
And then another call came. It was Brother Carlot.
“Blair,” he said, “you did the right thing. You still have your job.”
But by then, my dad had already stepped into his new assignment.
The decision had been made. Not for prestige. Not for advancement. But for love.
For the next fifty years, those of you who knew him saw it. You watched him sweep that parking lot. You heard him pray. You saw him serve. The call was never about “doing something great.” It was always about loving greatly.
That’s the Spirit’s power. That’s the kingdom’s purpose.
This is the story that brings everything together.
We began with the question: Why are we stuck? Why are we not yet walking in the power and purpose of God?
We’ve answered it.
It’s because we’re still at the center.
Because we still view the Spirit as a self-help force instead of the organizing life of the kingdom. Because we want the gifts without the cross, the calling without the cost, the glory without the sacrifice.
But tonight, we’ve seen the better way.
The kingdom comes when the Spirit comes.
And the Spirit comes where there is love.
And love is most real—not in our strategies or ambitions—but in our sacrifices.
So here’s the call:
You don’t have to wait for a “moment.” You are the moment.
You don’t have to search for the kingdom. You build it—every time you love.
You don’t have to wonder if God can use you. He already has. He gave you His Spirit.
Now go walk in it.
You were born to be part of a kingdom.
Not a consumer of glory, but a contributor of grace.
Not a seeker of gifts, but a vessel of love.
Not the hero—just the faithful part.
That is more than enough.