Unless God gives me a very strong indication to go another way, I intend to preach in these

last four Sundays of winter on the ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

I feel a tremendous yearning in my own heart to know more of the power of the spirit of God for holiness and

for witness. I have a tremendous need that I feel for guidance by the Holy Spirit, the spirit of wisdom and truth. And I believe that God's life-giving, renewing Holy Spirit is blowing on this congregation in a remarkable way.

And my desire, and I hope it's yours too,

is to unfurl the sails in that holy wind

and watch them billow out so that I can say I'm being born along in his

direction, at his speed, by his power. That's what I want for all of us in this church. The wind blows where it

will and we don't see it. We hear the sound of it, but we don't know where it comes from or where it's going to.

And so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

James says, draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

We're going to see this morning there's a paradox in that statement because you can't begin to draw near to God until he's already helped you, which means that in our efforts

to draw near to God, we find that he is already near to us. But that doesn't negate the promise. If we draw near to him, he will

draw near to us. Let your sails unfurl in the holy wind of God and he will cause them to

billow out and bear you along in his direction. We need the Holy Spirit here at Bethlehem in these next weeks.

So much is in the offing it worries me that I can't keep a handle on it, which is great, because I'm not supposed to handle it anyway. For example, we have our sights set on doubling the number of La Ocean and Hmong people that we minister to on Sunday morning.

And you'll be hearing more in the weeks ahead on how we can do that without disrupting our own ministry in this service.

Here's another one.

In four weeks we're going to enter on an income expansion program that I am praying will supply the needs to do what needs to be done to be a powerful ministry in the shadow of the dome.

We want to close off that 13th Avenue and turn it into parking instead of a street. We want to raise 12, 12, 8th Street and make an entrance onto 8th Street and more parking. Block off all the back entrances and beautify and secure the area and anything else that needs to be done

to make this church able to go on and grow in the shadow of this dome, which I view as only opportunity.

Here's another example. I plan to propose to the deacons this Wednesday night that we moved to two services on the first Sunday of spring on Sunday morning and call for

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