The First Baptist Church of Redlands
T A PE S T R Y
June 2022
Wo v e n To g e t h e r I n L o v e : C o l o s s i a n s 2 : 2
Issue No.6
As the Spirit Moves A Message from Pastor Shawn
But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s! Romans 8:9-11 The Message June brings with it so many things! For those of us who have lived or are living on an academic calendar, we notice right away, with great relief, that it is the beginning of summer! We think of all those things that we like about summer: vacations, no school, the Redlands Bowl, change of pace, and more. This year, June also brings Pentecost, the day that we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit in a big way in and through the people of God. We consider this the birthday of the Church.
We have spent all of May and a little bit of April considering what it means to us and the world that Jesus rose from the dead. This year we have looked at it from the “already but not yet” of the book of Revelation. We have found the book of Revelation to be a book of hope, despite all the images that baffle and confound us. We know that in the end God’s Kingdom wins. It outlasts every other kingdom and defeats all the tactics of empire. We see the power of the resurrection despite the awful awfulness of what is going on in the world. We have seen how it all ends. What now?
