1. Spirit Empowerment is for weirdos & wingnuts
2. Spirit Empowerment is only for the super spiritual 
3. Spirit Empowerment was just in the book of Acts
4. Spirit Empowerment is all about the fruit of the Spirit, not about miracles. 

John 7:37-39 - On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive. Up to that time the Spirit had not been given, since Jesus had not yet been glorified.

John 4:13-14 - Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Jeremiah 17:5-8 - This is what the Lord says: “Cursed is the one who trusts in man, who draws strength from mere flesh and whose heart turns away from the Lord. That person will be like a bush in the wastelands; they will not see prosperity when it comes. They will dwell in the parched places of the desert, in a salt land where no one lives. “But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.”

Those who trust in man

• Draw strength from man
• Turn away from the Lord
• Like a bush in a wasteland
• Dwell in the desert
• Isolation

Those who trust in the Lord

• Confidence is in the Lord
• Live the abundant life
• Tree planted by streams
• Experience heat and drought
• Courage and faithfulness

1. Comforts of our world - Deuteronomy 8:10-14
2. Our hearts are deceitful – Jeremiah 17:9 
3. We don’t really know how good God is – Jeremiah 17:6

“The creative power of God is to be found not only in the beginning but in the process of history, amid the currently unfolding human story” (Augustine)

“God is always doing something new in history, always creating or re-creating a new people, ever restoring that which has fallen to nothing” (Athanasius)  

Classic Christianity by Thomas Oden (pg. 133)

1. We need God to create a thirst in us for HIM! 
2. We need to take initiative 
3. “plant your tree next to streams of living water”
4. We need to drink deeply

1. Absorption
2. Conduit
3. Storage
4. Anchorage