Follow the Spirit: Living a Spirit-Led Life

Chandler Dutton: Good morning,
good morning.
How are we all doing?
Good?
Well, if you don't know me,
my name is Chandler Dutton.
I'm a senior here at LCU.
I am majoring in pre-physical therapy in the exercise sports science department.
I'm also dual enrolled in the master's program in human performance.
And my goal as an individual,
as a future strength coach and physical therapist,
is to infuse the kingdom in young athletes and patients
and show them that they are an identity in Christ and what he tells them to be and nothing else.
I just want to start off by thanking every single one of you for being here.
I want to thank Dr. Fraze for letting me speak because I get to share the one truth to everyone,
get everyone in one room.
And so that's just a big thing I'm grateful for.
And to you in the room that are,
I don't know, unbeliever or believer even if,
I just want to encourage you to give your undivided attention,
not for me,
But the book of Hebrews says, faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God.
So I just know that one word can change your life.
So I'm just asking you to sit and listen.
That's all I'm asking.
Just put the distractions away and lock in.
If you don't mind if I pray before we get started.
Dear Lord,
just thank you for this day.
Thank you for bringing everyone here that we're able to encourage each other in faith and gather without persecution,
Lord.
I just pray that we put our faith in you today,
Lord, and that you just speak through me.
And speak what you want to speak.
And that you just activate and move in hearts today.
And your spirit moves in hearts and lands on good soil.
We love you.
We thank you.
And in Jesus' name,
amen.
So usually people have a good reason is why they're up here.
But I'm just going to start off and say that it's not really a good reason for me.
So several months ago,
I was in this lull.
And this lull that I was in happened because I didn't have a true fear of God.
I lost it.
I lost that fear of God,
and then I stopped listening to his voice.
And that's kind of what I'm going to be talking about today,
is how you have to fear God first,
truly,
to then listen to the Spirit and obey the Spirit.
And yes, to answer your question, the Spirit speaks today.
So I'm in this lull,
and I start missing the mark on some things.
And it's actually a couple weeks after that,
the Lord put a fire back in me and woke me up and said,
I need you to turn around.
I need you to speak at chapel.
I said what I just I just failed a couple weeks ago and now you want me to speak in chapel I'm not
worthy and he says go look at my scriptures and find one person besides my son that was not worthy
said okay I guess if you're going to say that I got to do it and so I just want to remind everyone
in this room real quick that you God doesn't call the qualified look all throughout scripture he
doesn't call the qualified he qualifies the called so a lot of you are condemning yourselves for past
mistakes and you're living in a past season because you won't just forgive yourself and move on and
step into that next walk and put your fear back in Christ and just move on.
He uses the people that
submit to him. That's it.
And so I'm talking about this fear of God. You're like, what's this fear of
God, you may ask.
People have this misconception.
Is it like,
oh, I'm scared of God?
It's like,
no.
A fear of God is like a reverence.
It's an awe.
It's a deep respect.
Reverence meaning like this
Bible,
I'm not going to just drop it and kick it out of my deep respect for it. I'm going to elevate
it and put it on this podium and try to take care of it.
In the same way, a fear of God is having a
reverence for him, a deep respect for him,
that I'm elevating him number one above all things in my
life.
What happens when you do that?
You're able to surrender, decrease yourself,
Jesus increase,
and then listen to what all he wants you to do.
Jamie Winship, he defines the worldly fear as
here's this quote he said all human conflict originates from fear and fear originates from
a false view of god so everything everything you fear or scared of is because you believe
the wrong things about god that's how fear happens then he says ourselves and others until we
exchange what's false for what's real so until we exchange what satan's telling me or my flesh is
telling me or even my own spirit with what the actual spirit of living god is telling me i will
keep living in a fearful life.
We will never experience the true freedom of our identity in
Christ.
If we don't learn how to fear Christ, we'll never be able to walk in that freedom that Christ
did the finished work on the cross for.
In Daniel 3,
I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with the
story,
but this is one of the best representations in the Bible of fear.
King Nebuchadnezzar, he comes
and he captures the Israelites and he's now in control of them.
He takes them to Babylon and he
builds this big gold statue and he says,
y'all must all fall and worship me or you will be thrown in
the blazing furnace.
Yet there's these three God-fearing men,
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
that say,
no, I trust in Yahweh.
That's my God.
We will not bow down to that.
He says, okay, well,
I'm gonna throw you in the fire. And they're like,
even if,
you see, that's a fear of God. When you're
face in death, in its face,
you say, even if, even if I die,
I'd still rather the Lord's will be done.
I'd still rather follow Jesus and serve Yahweh and Yeshua.
And so the king takes them to throw
them in the fire, the blazing furnace,
because they disobeyed.
And he throws them in.
And they
come out unscathed. And King Nebuchadnezzar goes, truly,
you must worship the one true God.
And he even says, is that a fourth man in the fire?
And it was Jesus at the time with them.
And that just shows God's favor when you fear him.
So they come out of the fire,
and there's just this thing of like,
when we fear God more than the fire,
we have no idea what could happen.
They trusted a word from the Lord that they got and obeyed it.
That's faith.
That's exercising your faith.
And so the fire today isn't a physical fire.
It's fear of man.
It's fear of your situations.
It's afraid of being wrong.
And what does that do?
That will prevent you from ever hearing the Holy Spirit's voice.
It's sad today because the Western church does not speak on this much at all.
And it really breaks my heart.
Because this is what has changed my life.
Is listening to the Spirit's voice.
But when you go and you ask him, Lord, what would you have me do?
But you have fear that is not placed in him.
and when he asks you to pray for that person, when he asks you to share the gospel, when he asks you
to get on stage and talk or use whatever you do as an avenue for Christ,
you'll say, oh no, I'm too
scared to do that.
And then you wonder why God's not speaking.
He's like, I just told you,
but your
fear of the world kept you from hearing my voice.
So that's my second point. If we learn to fear God
and live fearlessly,
we can live a life that is spirit-led.
A couple years ago,
back to when I was sitting in the park
and sitting at the feet of Jesus for the first time,
I was mourning one of my past friends.
And I was really upset because I wasn't the right person to him in high school.
And I was just sitting there, and I'm like,
Lord,
what does this all matter?
And I just hear this whisper in the back of my head,
you need to do ministry,
son.
And I go,
and this is before I believed in the Lord's voice.
I'm like, what was that?
Like, I'm just overthinking.
But then I'm like, okay,
well,
if it's you,
Lord, show me a sign as we all do.
I go home,
and the first thing my mom asks when I walk in the door is, hey, have you ever thought about doing ministry?
I just look at my mom,
and I'm just smiling.
I'm like, okay.
And ever since that point, something clicked in my head.
And that was that when we pray,
it's not just thanking God.
It's not just talking to him.
We are talking with him.
He can speak back.
I realized in that moment, oh, my gosh,
this changes the game.
The spirit can speak to me.
Now I'm never going to ask for a sign again.
I'm just going to obey.
I realized that it is the whisper.
In 1 Kings 19,
we have Prophet Elijah.
He's on the run,
and he's in this cave.
And he's asking for the Lord to speak.
And it says,
the wind came,
but the Lord wasn't there.
the earthquakes came but the Lord wasn't there the fire came but the Lord wasn't there
but then it says right after then the Lord whispered to him so you may say oh Chandler
that's Old Testament that's a prophet yeah that same spirit of the living God that was speaking
at him now lives in us as New Testament believers so we now can listen to the whisper of the Holy
Spirit all the time every single decision you make throughout the day I've seen people in tears
I just trust what he's saying rather than me.
I just go up to them, hey,
I feel like the Lord's telling me about you.
Just bawling.
Like that's what can happen if we just put aside our fear and we just stepped out in faith.
A lot of us, we'd be walking in the Old Testament.
We don't realize the power that's in us.
And I'm asking you, I'm begging you all today to tap into the supernatural.
Tap into something you may have never been taught and start listening.
Go in your room,
lay on your face,
get on your knees,
put yourself in a closet, and just start listening and praying and asking for him to speak to you and ask what he wants you to do.
In Romans 8,
it's called the Life of the Spirit chapter.
I'll kind of run through a few verses.
Y'all can put it up there if it's ready.
I got some slides.
I'm just going to touch on a few that are important.
Romans 8, 5 says,
Those who live according to the flesh have their minds set on what the flesh desires,
but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires.
So you actually have to pursue a relationship with the third person of the Godhead.
It can't just be Jesus and God.
It's got to be the Holy Spirit that is active today.
You've got to tap in with that and ask him,
put on my mind what you desire for me.
Jesus literally said, it is actually better for me to go away
because I am giving you a helper,
the advocate.
In John 14, 15,
and 16, in all those scriptures,
it says he will remind you of all things,
he will teach you of all things,
and he will speak to you.
I believe in John 16.
How many times do we just ignore that?
We want to pass through those verses and not remember that
because it gets scary,
because there's a bad side of this
where people have taken this for granted
and said, God told me to do this, God told me to do that.
It's like, no,
Scripture and the Spirit have a mutualistic relationship.
Whatever the Spirit tells you, it will be backed up by Scripture.
Whatever the Scripture tells you, it will be reinforced by the Spirit.
If anything that you think the Lord is telling you goes beyond this word,
do not go beyond what is written,
that is not from the Lord.
But what isn't in there is, hey,
Chandler, go pray these exact words to that person over there
that you don't know.
That's where the Holy Spirit comes in.
That's where the helper comes in.
And so I'm encouraging all of you to acknowledge that and actually walk in that.
We go down to Romans 8,
9.
It says, you,
however,
are not in the realm of the flesh,
but are in the realm of the spirit, if indeed the spirit of God lives in you.
It's telling us to tap into the supernatural.
I heard a good quote this past weekend.
My pastor said, we are spiritual beings having a physical experience,
not the opposite.
it.
So every one of you right now that believes in Christ and has been following Christ,
you're
walking in the spiritual realm,
holy and blameless, completely spotless and clean.
Yet we act like
where we are now, we don't have power.
Maybe that's why Islam is the fastest growing religion in the
world.
Because we have now forgotten the power he has given us because we don't want to raise our
faith to what the scripture says because it gets scary.
And now we are walking in a weak Christianity
that is less zealous than another religion.
We go on to Romans later in Romans 8.
It says, therefore,
brothers and sisters, we have an
obligation,
but not to the flesh to live according to it.
So God is calling us to live by the spirit.
He's calling all of you to engage in that relationship with the Holy Spirit and ask him what he wants you to do with your life.
And then we go down.
This is my favorite verse,
Romans 8, verse 14.
For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.
This isn't like in Galatians 3 where it says, child of God through faith.
No, it says the children of God are those who are willing to be Spirit-led.
When you came to Christ,
the Spirit was speaking to you.
He was knocking on your heart saying, believe.
He was knocking on your heart to confess.
He was knocking on your heart to go to the water and get baptized.
He was working on you.
So ever since you became a Christian, you've been hearing the Spirit's voice.
You just didn't realize it.
In the same way, he's whispering to you now.
But Ephesians 5.18 says, continuously be filled by the Spirit.
That's an everyday thing.
Even us as believers, we have the Spirit, but you have to continually go to him.
And Lord, fill me up.
Fill my cup up.
Holy Spirit,
guide me today.
What do you want to me today?
again if we just don't realize this
the abilities that we have
it prevents us to walking fully
in what Christ has for us
we go to 1 Corinthians 2
this is what I like to call
the God thought chapter
it says
these are the things God has revealed to us by his spirit
in verse 10
the spirit searches all things even the deep things
of God for those who know a person's thoughts except their own spirit within them.
In the same
way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the spirit of God.
What we have received is not the
spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God so that we might understand what God has
freely given us.
I call this the God thought chapter because it's literally saying,
look,
the spirit of God that knows his thoughts is now in you and communicates to your spirit.
Romans 8, 17,
2, it says,
the Holy Spirit testifies to my spirit that I am a child of God.
It confirms my salvation.
It tells me who I am in Christ.
And it can lead me in every way.
That's the ability we have.
You can have a God thought every single day.
And you probably are.
You just don't know how to listen.
You don't spend enough time with him.
It goes back to sitting at his feet and surrendering and trying to dissect the whisper from the loud.
Romans 12, 2 says,
Do not be conformed to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
Therefore,
that you can test and approve, meaning know,
the perfect and pleasing will of God.
So that scripture right there tells us if we filter out the devil's thoughts,
if we filter out our flesh's thoughts and our spirit's thoughts,
we can tap into exactly what his will is for our life
and what he wants us to do each and every day.
Like this scripture says, have a mind of Christ.
Do you know what a mind of Christ was?
Jesus literally could see what the Father wanted him to do
and hear what he wanted him to do.
But like us, he was in the flesh,
so he had to battle all the other thoughts too.
I think we forget that.
Why do you think Jesus always went out in the wilderness
because he had to abide in the Father to hear him.
The reason you may not hear him is because you're not truly abiding in him.
John 15, 4 says,
Abide in me and I in you.
We have lost the abiding.
We're constantly scrolling.
We're constantly doing something.
We can't pray throughout our day,
and it's just,
it's killing us.
I learned how to hear his voice in the secret place,
and that's how I can now hear it while I'm out in the loud.
Now when I'm talking to people, I can be praying for them.
Lord, what do you want me to tell them?
Lord, show me something in them.
But if I'm not disciplined in the quiet place and abiding in the Father as a branch to the vine,
I can't hear and naturally flow.
As soon as you take a branch off a vine, a tree, you cut it,
they can't communicate.
You can't grow.
In the same way with us in Christ,
we have to stay connected in him to hear what he wants to say
and obey what he wants to say.
You may ask, why is this important?
Well, John 4 says,
my true worshipers will worship in spirit and in truth.
And in today and all over the world,
we have separated the two.
We have Father,
Son, Holy Bible churches,
and we have, and go on the complete other side,
Holy Spirit churches,
and some of them even say follow your feelings
and call that the Spirit.
we have forgotten what brings power
and Jesus says bringing those together
and maybe
just maybe if we can all tap
into that we'd see real fruit bear
we'd see less half in
half out Christians where they come believe
and they walk away they think they can say a prayer
or get baptized and then go live a
completely different life and not be all in
maybe if we
truly listen to the spirit and what he's telling you
that person's life can be
changed
I can't be the only one doing this.
Why?
Because Corinthians talks about the body and the different parts of the body.
That means the Spirit is specifically talking to one of you,
specifically telling you to go talk to a different person that he's not telling me about,
and he's telling you to get around a whole different group of people to impact them.
So there can't just be a few people doing this.
We all need a call to action in this.
We all need to return to abiding and trying to hear the whisper.
our church we call this the five pillars of kingdom decision making this is how to regulate this
every single decision you make you can follow through these steps
first the written word of god everything must be backed up by scripture
two the holy spirit whatever he tells you
three prophecy there's actually someone prophesying over me not too long ago is what gave me the
ideas to be up here.
Four,
wisdom,
which goes back to fear.
Fearing the Lord is the beginning of
wisdom.
And five, spiritual family.
Not community, that's not biblical.
Spiritual family is people
that know the good, the bad, the ugly about you,
and who are constantly listening to the spirit
about your life.
That's how you make decisions.
Because once you start to hear his voice
and the whisper to the small things,
it's going to get harder when he's telling you to go a whole
different career,
whole different person.
Switch your life like that.
That's why we have these
rules to regulate our decisions by and make sure it's not from us.
And that's truly from the Holy
Spirit.
And my last thing is,
I've been talking to lots of believers here today,
but now I'm talking
to the unbeliever, to the one who I said at the beginning to just listen.
I know the Spirit's
moving in this room. I know the Spirit's moving like wind, and I know He's knocking on your heart.
If you're feeling something weird deep inside,
and something moving with you in your heart, like,
oh, I need to go talk to this guy. Oh, I need to talk to Frey's.
Or, I just feel like I need to
confess Jesus as Lord. I just feel like I need to be baptized and turn away from this sin that I'm in.
I'm inviting you to come talk to us.
Because that is the greatest decision you can ever make.
Jesus makes the most controversial claim of all time.
He says, I am the way,
the truth,
and the life.
And before that, he says, I am the Father of One,
and Revelation says he is the beginning and the end.
So he is claiming to be God and the only way to God.
So that means a lot of you that I come across that say,
I believe in a higher power,
I'm sorry, that's not the truth.
And I'm saying that because I love you.
I care less about your feelings and more about your eternity.
Jesus loves you so much that he made a way for you to get to him.
For we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
That's what the Bible says.
I've messed up, you've messed up.
A perfect, righteous God must have something to get us on his level,
to justify us.
And Romans 5 says, while we were still sinners,
a righteous man, perfect in the flesh,
Jesus died for us.
He died on the cross for your sins so that you may be forgiven.
I'm going to share two last verses
two ways to put together to respond
and if you get tripped up in all this
I'm going to ask you to come talk to us
but I'm not going to let you leave this room
without you knowing the truth
Romans 10 9 says
if you confess with your mouth
that Jesus Christ is Lord
and believe in your heart
that God raised him from the dead
you will be saved
but in also Acts 2 38
it says repent and be baptized
for the forgiveness of your sins
each and every one of you.
So again, I ask you,
why not just give him a shot?
Why not talk to one of us
and see what this is about?
Because every other religion
is going to tell you to work up to him.
That's not possible.
I'm sorry, but every other guy is in a tomb.
Joseph Smith is in a tomb.
Muhammad is in a tomb.
Buddha is in a tomb.
Jesus,
the tomb, is still rolled over.
And he lives in us today.
so I'm begging you and I'm asking you
to give this a shot
to be all in with Jesus
and follow him for the rest of your life
I'll pray and then we can get out of here
dear Lord I just thank you again
for everything that you do
I pray that you move in these students
and wake them up to your spirit
that you start knocking on them right now
that they be aware that you're here
and you're alive and active
and you move and change hearts today
convict minds
and lead us to repentance.
We love you, we thank you,
and in Jesus'
name,
amen.
Thank y'all.
Thank you.