Scripture: Acts 2:1-21
Listen link: Due to technical difficulties, we didn’t get a recording. ☹
Just for today, we are a Pentecostal Church. Let’s invite the Holy Spirit to awaken us with a charismatic renewal movement in our hearts. You know actually, every church is supposed to be Pentecostal. It’s too bad that’s now the name of a particular denomination. Every church is supposed to be filled with the Holy Spirit all the time. That’s what make the Church the Body of Christ! His Body. His Spirit to make it alive. What an amazing day that was in chapter 2 of Acts!! What an amazing day we could have if we let God move now among us. Stir us we pray. Come Holy Spirit. Revive the church today!
The Holy Spirit came at Pentecost. He came in mighty fullness then. His witness through believers won the lost and multitudes were born again. The early Christians scattered o'er the world. They preached the gospel fearlessly. Though some were martyred and to lions hurled, they marched along in victory!
Come Holy Spirit. Dark is the hour! We need Your filling, Your love and Your mighty power! Move now among us. Stir us we pray. Come Holy Spirit revive the church today.
Then in an age when darkness gripped the earth, the just shall live by faith was learned. The Holy Spirit gave the church new birth as reformation fires burned. In later years the great revivals came when saints would seek the Lord and pray. O once again we need that holy flame to meet the challenge of today.
Come Holy Spirit. Dark is the hour. We need Your filling, Your love and Your mighty power. Move now among us stir us we pray. Come Holy Spirit. Revive the church today. Revive the church today! Revive the church today! (Song by John W. Peterson)
Oh people, when the Holy Spirit came that first time, the apostles were still scared and huddled up in prayer wondering what they were going to do with the rest of their lives. Suddenly, they experienced the rushing mighty wind of the Holy Spirit and everything changed. They didn’t see it coming. All they knew was that God had promised they would receive power. They were praying for that and waiting to see what God would do. But they didn’t know ahead of time what was going to happen to them.
In the wind and through the tongues of fire, the Holy Spirit began to distribute gifts of power, power to proclaim the gospel. The believers were filled with some of kind of power and joy that just could not be contained. They began to praise the Lord and, lo and behold, strange sounds were coming out of their mouths. They must have wondered what was going on. But they knew it was from God, so they didn't stop. And soon they began to understand that this was what Jesus had been talking about. And how appropriate and meaningful that it came on their day of Pentecost.
It was called Pentecost because they had just counted 50 days from Passover. (We can understand that Pentecost is a numerical term for 50 days, or five tens, because we are familiar with the five-sided building known as the Pentagon.) On Passover, the day of Atonement, Jesus had offered himself up as the perfect Lamb of God to take away their sins and ours. And 50 days later, on Pentecost, the day the Jews celebrated as the day God gave them the Law from Mt. Sinai, the believers received the Holy Spirit and the Law of Love was engraved into their hearts while they worshipped on Mt. Zion, in Jerusalem.
As they were caught up in the Spirit and joyfully praised the Lord out loud, the sounds of their worship were heard by crowds of people from all over the world, who were also in Jerusalem to celebrate Pentecost, which was also, by God’s design, known as the feast of first fruits, because it happened during the time of the first barley harvest in Israel. These two holidays coincided. And isn’t that appropriate, for on that day God harvested the first fruits of new believers and 3000 were added to their number that day, and the church was born.
The disciples proclaiming the good news in foreign tongues were heard by all these people because they were loud and boisterous, and they were not far from a public access area. It was the foreigners who first understood what was going on because they heard God's praises being sung in their own mother tongues. They understood what was being said, hearing it proclaimed in their own native languages, that the death and resurrection of Jesus were God’s way of showing His love and mercy for all, and his offer of forgiveness for sin.
And that's how, suddenly, the apostles became involved in the public ministry of preaching the gospel. They received the Holy Spirit. They submitted to the Holy Spirit's guidance and He immediately used them. That's a picture of the living church, living new life in Christ. That’s the day the Holy Spirit came and stayed to abide in the living temple of the Body of Christ.
But that was just one day, right? It wasn’t like that every day. They didn’t win 3,000 more the next day by preaching in the temple in many languages again. No, the next day they were busy baptizing all those new believers! And the next day, all the new believers were telling all their friends and relatives about what had happened to them, and more were being saved because ordinary new believers were talking excitedly about Jesus. And soon they traveled home and told everybody there what had happened to them, and why, and that prepared the way for the evangelists to come.
Meanwhile in Jerusalem, the chief priests and elders didn’t like it and soon began arresting the disciples, trying to stop all this talk about the man they had crucified being risen from the dead. It was embarrassing to the ones who had arrested and executed Jesus! And maybe they were even terrified about what God might do to them if it were true that they had crucified the Messiah. But believers could not be stopped from preaching the gospel. The Holy Spirit came, and he stayed. He did new things among the Jews. He even invited the Gentiles in!
Now some 2,000 years later, here we are, the Body of Christ is still charged with the task of preaching the gospel, with ordinary believers talking excitedly about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that secures our forgiveness, and freedom, and eternal life in joyful glory. But are we still filled with the Spirit? Are we fulfilling this Great Commission the way God would have us do it? Or are we the subjects of Paul’s warning in 2 Timothy 3:1-5? In writing to Pastor Tim, and encouraging him to be faithful to the cause, Paul said, “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power.”
We all acknowledged that we are in the last days. Jesus is coming again soon. He has to be coming again soon. That’s how we feel about it anyway. We can look around us and see the terrible times we are in. We can identify that people are indeed lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” But that’s them not us. Right? Or is it? These would be grievous sins to be laid at our feet as if we were guilty. And yet Paul concluded his warning with this phrase that tells us he was talking about what will be going on in congregations: “having a form of godliness but denying its power.”
Surely, we are aware that there are congregations in the world that call themselves churches, and people in them, who are guilty of these sins. Maybe not all of them at once, but in many congregations, some will love money. In others, some will be unforgiving. Surely only a few are brutal or treacherous, but there are at least some people who act that way, even if they do call themselves Christians. Some are openly so. Those are the ones who make the news.
More are good at hiding their selfish and even evil motives, and still attend church as part of the ruse. There are fine upstanding looking members of churches who are abusing their spouses in secret at home. It’s hard to believe. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, right? But that’s not happening here, is it? That’s them. Not us. But wait. Wouldn’t it be good for us to humble ourselves and pray to God that He should find and make sure we know about whether or not any wicked way is in us? Even the great King David prayed, “Search me, oh God.”
Do we dare be so sure that we are not denying the power of God? Could it be that maybe we’re really having only a form of religion, being just religious enough to imagine ourselves on God’s good side, and yet not consciously dependent upon the Holy Spirit’s power? Could we even be scared of what might happen if we really did let the Holy Spirit take control of our lives the way the first disciples did?
Oh, may it not be so! Come Holy Spirit! Dark is the hour! We need Your filling, Your love and Your mighty power! Move now among us. Stir us we pray. Come Holy Spirit revive the church today. Is that your prayer, as it is mine? I believe that the future ministry of our congregation can only be secured by our unreserved commitment to and hunger for a fresh filling of the Holy Spirit.
I’m not saying we’re all supposed to start speaking in tongues, laughing hysterically, waving our hands in the air, or rolling on the floor. Those are the popular notions of what happens in Pentecostal Spirit filled churches and maybe that’s what we’re afraid of, because it COULD happen. But that doesn’t have to happen for us to know that the Holy Spirit has come. However, we also can’t insist that God can only do what we want him to do, or what we expect him to do.
But there may be another problem. We don’t seem to experience the Holy Spirit’s power at work in us much these days. Perhaps we have become discouraged by many hardships that seem to say that God is not blessing us. Perhaps we feel that we are being punished for a lack of faith, and a nagging failure to completely eradicate sin in our lives. We may believe that God only really uses people who are more seriously dedicated and disciplined, more in touch with Him through spiritual disciplines and practices we just don’t have time for. That’s discouraging. And discouragement is the devil’s tool to keep us from the fullness of joy in the Spirit.
But let’s take heart. The Good News of the gospel is that all is forgiven now! Not after you say the right prayers enough times, NOW! The good news of the gospel is that there is no condemnation for sin. None at all! Jesus is with us now. Jesu paid it all. The Holy Spirit has come to stay. God wants us to rejoice in his great grace and mercy today. You know what re-joice means right? Re- means “repeat.” Have joy again because of the good news of the gospel that is still true and always will be true. The joy of the Lord is our strength.
One thing we know will happen when the Spirit is really in us because the Scripture says so. When the Holy Spirit comes the fruit of the Spirit will be magnified in us to supernatural proportions of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, forgiveness, and self-control. We don’t make that happen. The Spirit in us does.
You know what goes away when the spirit comes? Gossip, selfishness, resistance to change, holding onto unnecessary traditions, clinging to our comfort zones. You know what shows up? Eagerness to witness, an earnest desire to see the lost saved and tell them how to be, love for people gets supernaturally large, so that we find new ways to reach out to people we would otherwise shun, or maybe just ignore, if left to ourselves.
Also, the Spiritual gifts that God gives will be manifest. They are all supposed to be used in ministry, to build up the body of Christ in wisdom, and in numbers, as God sees fit. You know what the spiritual gifts are, starting with 1 Corinthians 12. A message of wisdom, a message of knowledge, faith to believe the impossible, gifts of healing, miraculous powers, prophecy, discernment between spirits, speaking in different kinds of tongues, and also the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and God the Holy Spirit distributes them to each one, just as he determines. These are gifts given to you the members of the congregation for your ministry to “them” out there in the world around us.
Those first disciples had no idea that they were going to start praising God in foreign languages. But when it happened, they went with it. And when the Holy Spirit is really invited and we expect him to come and we are waiting for his arrival, we can’t predict what he will do among us, but when it happens we will know it because it will make an impact on the world around us. The people out there will hear about it and be effected by it.
When the Holy Spirit comes upon the gathered believers, the Spirit makes the impossible happen, and the Spirit empowers human efforts. Let’s pray. Come Holy Spirit! We need Your filling, Your love and Your mighty power. Move now among us stir us we pray. Come Holy Spirit revive the church today. Revive the church today!
Listen link: Due to technical difficulties, we didn’t get a recording. ☹
Just for today, we are a Pentecostal Church. Let’s invite the Holy Spirit to awaken us with a charismatic renewal movement in our hearts. You know actually, every church is supposed to be Pentecostal. It’s too bad that’s now the name of a particular denomination. Every church is supposed to be filled with the Holy Spirit all the time. That’s what make the Church the Body of Christ! His Body. His Spirit to make it alive. What an amazing day that was in chapter 2 of Acts!! What an amazing day we could have if we let God move now among us. Stir us we pray. Come Holy Spirit. Revive the church today!
The Holy Spirit came at Pentecost. He came in mighty fullness then. His witness through believers won the lost and multitudes were born again. The early Christians scattered o'er the world. They preached the gospel fearlessly. Though some were martyred and to lions hurled, they marched along in victory!
Come Holy Spirit. Dark is the hour! We need Your filling, Your love and Your mighty power! Move now among us. Stir us we pray. Come Holy Spirit revive the church today.
Then in an age when darkness gripped the earth, the just shall live by faith was learned. The Holy Spirit gave the church new birth as reformation fires burned. In later years the great revivals came when saints would seek the Lord and pray. O once again we need that holy flame to meet the challenge of today.
Come Holy Spirit. Dark is the hour. We need Your filling, Your love and Your mighty power. Move now among us stir us we pray. Come Holy Spirit. Revive the church today. Revive the church today! Revive the church today! (Song by John W. Peterson)
Oh people, when the Holy Spirit came that first time, the apostles were still scared and huddled up in prayer wondering what they were going to do with the rest of their lives. Suddenly, they experienced the rushing mighty wind of the Holy Spirit and everything changed. They didn’t see it coming. All they knew was that God had promised they would receive power. They were praying for that and waiting to see what God would do. But they didn’t know ahead of time what was going to happen to them.
In the wind and through the tongues of fire, the Holy Spirit began to distribute gifts of power, power to proclaim the gospel. The believers were filled with some of kind of power and joy that just could not be contained. They began to praise the Lord and, lo and behold, strange sounds were coming out of their mouths. They must have wondered what was going on. But they knew it was from God, so they didn't stop. And soon they began to understand that this was what Jesus had been talking about. And how appropriate and meaningful that it came on their day of Pentecost.
It was called Pentecost because they had just counted 50 days from Passover. (We can understand that Pentecost is a numerical term for 50 days, or five tens, because we are familiar with the five-sided building known as the Pentagon.) On Passover, the day of Atonement, Jesus had offered himself up as the perfect Lamb of God to take away their sins and ours. And 50 days later, on Pentecost, the day the Jews celebrated as the day God gave them the Law from Mt. Sinai, the believers received the Holy Spirit and the Law of Love was engraved into their hearts while they worshipped on Mt. Zion, in Jerusalem.
As they were caught up in the Spirit and joyfully praised the Lord out loud, the sounds of their worship were heard by crowds of people from all over the world, who were also in Jerusalem to celebrate Pentecost, which was also, by God’s design, known as the feast of first fruits, because it happened during the time of the first barley harvest in Israel. These two holidays coincided. And isn’t that appropriate, for on that day God harvested the first fruits of new believers and 3000 were added to their number that day, and the church was born.
The disciples proclaiming the good news in foreign tongues were heard by all these people because they were loud and boisterous, and they were not far from a public access area. It was the foreigners who first understood what was going on because they heard God's praises being sung in their own mother tongues. They understood what was being said, hearing it proclaimed in their own native languages, that the death and resurrection of Jesus were God’s way of showing His love and mercy for all, and his offer of forgiveness for sin.
And that's how, suddenly, the apostles became involved in the public ministry of preaching the gospel. They received the Holy Spirit. They submitted to the Holy Spirit's guidance and He immediately used them. That's a picture of the living church, living new life in Christ. That’s the day the Holy Spirit came and stayed to abide in the living temple of the Body of Christ.
But that was just one day, right? It wasn’t like that every day. They didn’t win 3,000 more the next day by preaching in the temple in many languages again. No, the next day they were busy baptizing all those new believers! And the next day, all the new believers were telling all their friends and relatives about what had happened to them, and more were being saved because ordinary new believers were talking excitedly about Jesus. And soon they traveled home and told everybody there what had happened to them, and why, and that prepared the way for the evangelists to come.
Meanwhile in Jerusalem, the chief priests and elders didn’t like it and soon began arresting the disciples, trying to stop all this talk about the man they had crucified being risen from the dead. It was embarrassing to the ones who had arrested and executed Jesus! And maybe they were even terrified about what God might do to them if it were true that they had crucified the Messiah. But believers could not be stopped from preaching the gospel. The Holy Spirit came, and he stayed. He did new things among the Jews. He even invited the Gentiles in!
Now some 2,000 years later, here we are, the Body of Christ is still charged with the task of preaching the gospel, with ordinary believers talking excitedly about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that secures our forgiveness, and freedom, and eternal life in joyful glory. But are we still filled with the Spirit? Are we fulfilling this Great Commission the way God would have us do it? Or are we the subjects of Paul’s warning in 2 Timothy 3:1-5? In writing to Pastor Tim, and encouraging him to be faithful to the cause, Paul said, “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God—having a form of godliness but denying its power.”
We all acknowledged that we are in the last days. Jesus is coming again soon. He has to be coming again soon. That’s how we feel about it anyway. We can look around us and see the terrible times we are in. We can identify that people are indeed lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” But that’s them not us. Right? Or is it? These would be grievous sins to be laid at our feet as if we were guilty. And yet Paul concluded his warning with this phrase that tells us he was talking about what will be going on in congregations: “having a form of godliness but denying its power.”
Surely, we are aware that there are congregations in the world that call themselves churches, and people in them, who are guilty of these sins. Maybe not all of them at once, but in many congregations, some will love money. In others, some will be unforgiving. Surely only a few are brutal or treacherous, but there are at least some people who act that way, even if they do call themselves Christians. Some are openly so. Those are the ones who make the news.
More are good at hiding their selfish and even evil motives, and still attend church as part of the ruse. There are fine upstanding looking members of churches who are abusing their spouses in secret at home. It’s hard to believe. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, right? But that’s not happening here, is it? That’s them. Not us. But wait. Wouldn’t it be good for us to humble ourselves and pray to God that He should find and make sure we know about whether or not any wicked way is in us? Even the great King David prayed, “Search me, oh God.”
Do we dare be so sure that we are not denying the power of God? Could it be that maybe we’re really having only a form of religion, being just religious enough to imagine ourselves on God’s good side, and yet not consciously dependent upon the Holy Spirit’s power? Could we even be scared of what might happen if we really did let the Holy Spirit take control of our lives the way the first disciples did?
Oh, may it not be so! Come Holy Spirit! Dark is the hour! We need Your filling, Your love and Your mighty power! Move now among us. Stir us we pray. Come Holy Spirit revive the church today. Is that your prayer, as it is mine? I believe that the future ministry of our congregation can only be secured by our unreserved commitment to and hunger for a fresh filling of the Holy Spirit.
I’m not saying we’re all supposed to start speaking in tongues, laughing hysterically, waving our hands in the air, or rolling on the floor. Those are the popular notions of what happens in Pentecostal Spirit filled churches and maybe that’s what we’re afraid of, because it COULD happen. But that doesn’t have to happen for us to know that the Holy Spirit has come. However, we also can’t insist that God can only do what we want him to do, or what we expect him to do.
But there may be another problem. We don’t seem to experience the Holy Spirit’s power at work in us much these days. Perhaps we have become discouraged by many hardships that seem to say that God is not blessing us. Perhaps we feel that we are being punished for a lack of faith, and a nagging failure to completely eradicate sin in our lives. We may believe that God only really uses people who are more seriously dedicated and disciplined, more in touch with Him through spiritual disciplines and practices we just don’t have time for. That’s discouraging. And discouragement is the devil’s tool to keep us from the fullness of joy in the Spirit.
But let’s take heart. The Good News of the gospel is that all is forgiven now! Not after you say the right prayers enough times, NOW! The good news of the gospel is that there is no condemnation for sin. None at all! Jesus is with us now. Jesu paid it all. The Holy Spirit has come to stay. God wants us to rejoice in his great grace and mercy today. You know what re-joice means right? Re- means “repeat.” Have joy again because of the good news of the gospel that is still true and always will be true. The joy of the Lord is our strength.
One thing we know will happen when the Spirit is really in us because the Scripture says so. When the Holy Spirit comes the fruit of the Spirit will be magnified in us to supernatural proportions of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, forgiveness, and self-control. We don’t make that happen. The Spirit in us does.
You know what goes away when the spirit comes? Gossip, selfishness, resistance to change, holding onto unnecessary traditions, clinging to our comfort zones. You know what shows up? Eagerness to witness, an earnest desire to see the lost saved and tell them how to be, love for people gets supernaturally large, so that we find new ways to reach out to people we would otherwise shun, or maybe just ignore, if left to ourselves.
Also, the Spiritual gifts that God gives will be manifest. They are all supposed to be used in ministry, to build up the body of Christ in wisdom, and in numbers, as God sees fit. You know what the spiritual gifts are, starting with 1 Corinthians 12. A message of wisdom, a message of knowledge, faith to believe the impossible, gifts of healing, miraculous powers, prophecy, discernment between spirits, speaking in different kinds of tongues, and also the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and God the Holy Spirit distributes them to each one, just as he determines. These are gifts given to you the members of the congregation for your ministry to “them” out there in the world around us.
Those first disciples had no idea that they were going to start praising God in foreign languages. But when it happened, they went with it. And when the Holy Spirit is really invited and we expect him to come and we are waiting for his arrival, we can’t predict what he will do among us, but when it happens we will know it because it will make an impact on the world around us. The people out there will hear about it and be effected by it.
When the Holy Spirit comes upon the gathered believers, the Spirit makes the impossible happen, and the Spirit empowers human efforts. Let’s pray. Come Holy Spirit! We need Your filling, Your love and Your mighty power. Move now among us stir us we pray. Come Holy Spirit revive the church today. Revive the church today!
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