Personal

Went on a walk

It's a Sunday, and mine and Allie's day got started off with a walk.

Allie and I started the day going and grabbing coffee down at Scooters, and went down to Tribble Mill Park and did the three-mile loop around the lake. We did this primarily because our worship pastor at Anistown ended up not booking us for the worship set until it was too late. One of the things I told him (his name is JC) a couple weeks ago was that if we weren't booked on time with the music, then we would not show up for band. We didn't get word that we were on band until Saturday night, so we promptly declined it.

Because of that, we decided that this would make for a good reason to sleep in and go to Legacy Church (service starts at 5:00PM), which is what my friend Isaiah helped plant.

Afternoon

When we got back from the park, Allie started up a new game of Expedition 33 on the PS5. She played that for a few hours today while she was doing that.

I decided I wanted to vibe code an app that Allie and I could use to keep track of some of our random life stuff a little bit better. It started out as an idea for creating a to-do list for groceries, which I fully realize there's a million of those out there. That also turned into logging away the restaurants that we would like to go to, how often we go to those restaurants, and various different experiences that we want to go to and have.

I ended up spending basically the whole afternoon building out this tiny little mobile app that lives on Vercel. We can actually log away the various different things that we do. Before we went to bed tonight, I actually showed her what I built, and she liked it. Most of the time with this kind of stuff, she just kind of tucks it under a rug, so I'm actually pretty pleased with it. It's got a good little setup, and I think it'll help us keep tabs on the stuff that we're actually doing on a regular basis and force us to maybe get out of our comfort zone and remember the random things that we say we want to do.

For example, one of the things we haven't done in a while is go down to an event center in Atlanta called Activate. It was a lot of fun. We went with JC and Mary, and we haven't gone since. We really should do that.

Church

This was the first time I have attended church as a member of the congregation, versus somebody actively serving, in years and years and years. Now, that obviously does not count when I go out to Arizona and see David. There are times there that I am only there to participate in the service versus actually serving.

We were in John chapter 14 today, and it was the beginning of a few sermons where we were going to start unpacking who exactly is the Holy Spirit. starting in John 14, Jesus lays the groundwork for who the Holy Spirit is and what his purpose is. At the end of the day, this is the most basic piece. If we don't have the foundation right, then we can't get all the other stuff correct

One of the things that he started with was that we in Protestant churches typically put the Holy Spirit on one of two sides of the coin:

1. In more charismatic circles, the Holy Spirit's purpose is power. It's signs and wonders, miracles, speaking in tongues, and prophesying. All of that.
2. On the other side of Protestantism, it's _ _ _ _

But the thing is, what does Scripture say?

The Commandment

We were primarily in John 14 today (but jumped around into chapter 15 as well).

John 14:15 says: "If you love me, you'll keep my commandments." between verses 15 and 31, there are a multitude of ways that Jesus says the exact same thing, just a little bit differently.

• In verse 21, he says, "Whoever has my commandments and keeps them. He it is who loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him."
• In verse 23, he says, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words."

What is that commandment? John 15:12: "you love one another as I have loved you."

Primary Purpose

John 14:16 -- "He will give you another Helper."

What is the Commandment? "love one another as I have loved you." What is the Holy Spirit's main purpose? "the Helper"

His primary purpose is not sitting here to do miracles. His primary purpose here is not to give power to believers. His primary purpose is to be our helper.

Our primary commandment, what we need to be doing, is to love one another as Jesus has loved us. That right there is the summation of the core purpose of the Holy Spirit

Context for this section

An interesting piece that Casey pointed out while preaching today is that this is effectively Jesus's sermon on the Holy Spirit (John 14-17). During all of this, the people who have been following him are Jews and believe that whenever God comes down to earth, he is going to be taking over, ruling, and setting up his own rule and reign on the earth. It was a conquering type of rule.

Now you have Jesus, whom people have put their faith in, and now He is going to be leaving? All of these dedicated people are having their entire religious views poured out in front of their eyes. Completely being dismantled.