Theme: The gifts of the Spirit
Text: Acts 2:1-11; I Corinthians 12:3-7, 12-13; John 20:19-23
The “coming” of the Holy Spirit is a key event at the beginning of the Book of Acts and sets the stage for what is to follow. Just as the ministry of Jesus in the Book of Luke begins with His birth, so also His ministry through the church in the Book of Acts begins with the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. Pentecost simply means “fiftieth” since it fell on the fiftieth day after the resurrection of Christ. With the presence of the Holy Spirit, a veil was taken away to reveal the prophetic significance of Pentecost. The Jews suddenly saw their whole Jewish heritage in a new light. Not only were the Jewish festivals memorials of what God had done but they also pointed to something God was going to do. These festivals, instituted by Moses under direct instructions from God, are a divinely prepared Timetable of God’s Dealings with His people and mankind. They show us how God dealt with His people in the past, what He wanted them to do in the present, and how He would work with them in the future. They present and reveal an outline for the work of Jesus Christ. Passover commemorated the deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt and found its final fulfilment in the death of Christ on Calvary as the Lamb of God. The feast of first fruits, the ceremony of presenting the first fruits of the harvest to the Lord, found its fulfilment in the resurrection of Christ Who “became the first fruits of them that slept. The Feast of weeks, held fifty days after Passover, was observed in celebration of the first ingathering of the harvest of each year. It was no coincidence that on the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was given, there was an amazing harvest of souls. The great harvest which began on the day of Pentecost, continues today, and will continue until the end of the Church age when the prophetic aspects of the remaining festivals will be fulfilled. On the day of Pentecost Christ filled the Church with the gifts of the Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the only One Who can take the weak and make them strong as happened on the day of Pentecost. But different people have different ideas of who the Holy Spirit is. The Bible teaches that He is a person. Jesus spoke of Him as a Person saying in John 14:26 “But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” The Holy Spirit is not a force or a thing. He is a person and the Scriptures confirm this by the personal ways in which He responds and the personal things He does. The Bible also makes it clear that the Holy Spirit is God and we rightfully speak of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. This is seen in the attributes, which are given to Him and which are without exception, the attributes of God. He is eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. We all need the Holy Spirit. Whatever the Holy Spirit did when He came at Pentecost, He is still willing and able to do for all believers today. Everywhere the early Christians went they made a spiritual impact on the whole community winning many people to Christ. We also need Him to make a spiritual impact in our communities.
To understand Pentecost we need to see it in the light of Babel. At Babel, an ambitious people wanted to build a great city with a big tower but God confused their tongues and scattered them. At Pentecost, the disciples preached the good news of Jesus in all the languages of the world. Two completely opposite events, at Babel God created confusion and scattered, and at Pentecost, He created order and gathered. At Babel, the diversity of tongues brought an end to the ambitions of men. At Pentecost, a diversity of tongues marked the beginning of the preaching of the good news of Jesus to the nations of the world. At Babel the people wanted to reach to the heavens, to be famous, and to control their future destiny. They wanted to be like God, and they used their skill and know how to do it. Baked bricks and tar was the key to their fame and future, much the same way people today speak of computers, the Internet, cell phones, and genetic engineering. Today we are using technology to be “like God,” to declare independence from God, to make a name, and to control the future. The movie Titanic is about man’s misplaced trust in his own inventions and ingenuity. It was claimed at the start of the voyage that not even God could sink the Titanic. They were so confident that they did not even carry a enough life rafts to cater for all the passengers. The latest technology assured them that the ship was unsinkable. And yet, ironically, the very technology that made the Titanic "unsinkable," made her sink even faster. There is nothing wrong with technology, just as there is nothing wrong with baked bricks, tar, and tall towers. It is what we do with them and why we build them. When our faith, hope, and trust is in our tools, when we use our technology to reach up to the heavens, to amass fame and fortune, to seize control of our destiny and shake our fist at God, then we are committing idolatry. Technology is to help us through life but we should not put our trust in it because it cannot save us. Our tools and toys can not bring us to heaven; they can’t secure our destinies. Only God can do that. Only He can reach down to us to help us and He did this by giving us the gift of His Son and the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit empowers the believer for witness and service. We are to be filled with the Spirit and to refuse to be filled with the Spirit is to act contrary to the will of God. We need His power constantly if we are to serve God effectively. On Pentecost the scattering of people, which began with the tower of Babel, is reversed, and the gathering of all people into the one household of God begins. At Pentecost it was not human beings but God who was the centre of attention. The disciples did not preach about themselves and their own accomplishments, but about God and what he had accomplished in his son Jesus Christ. It is only the Holy Spirit who can reveal and interpret the Word of God, both the written Word and the living Word, which always agree with each other. He glorifies Jesus by revealing His nature, character and ministry. It is very interesting to note that once the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles and the disciples on the day of Pentecost, they no longer had any doubts about where Jesus was. They knew that He had arrived in glory at the Father’s right hand.
When a loved one leaves us on a journey, we always urge him to write and inform us of his safe arrival. It is only when a letter arrives in the loved ones own handwriting, postmarked with the name of the place, that we are sure he has arrived. On the day of Pentecost the disciples received a personal letter from Christ postmarked heaven confirming that He “had arrived at the seat of all power and authority.” From there He has equipped us by sending the Holy Spirit. Human efforts to rise up to heaven are doomed to failure. The mission of the Church is to proclaim the mighty acts of God so clearly that all may hear and believe and be saved. The Holy Spirit did not come to the Church on Pentecost to make us feel better about ourselves, but to send us into the entire world with the Gospel. The Holy Spirit did not come to be a substitute for God the Father or for Jesus Christ, but to lead the world into a fuller relationship with the Triune God. The Holy Spirit did not come to help us build a tower of devotion up to heaven, but to push us into the world with the Word that in Jesus Christ God has dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, and has redeemed us. The Holy Spirit did not come to bless our pursuit of self-centred piety, but to send us to all sorts and conditions of people in reckless self-abandon for the sake of the Gospel. When the disciples were baptised and filled with the Holy Spirit, they understood the plan of God and the ministry of Jesus far better than they had ever understood it before. They had been very slow and limited in their understanding, but the moment the Holy Spirit came, they had a totally different understanding of the ministry and the message of Christ. They were also empowered and became extremely bold. Before they had lived in fear, even after the resurrection of Christ, hiding behind locked doors and not willing to stand up to preach and proclaim the truth. They made very little impact on the people and Jerusalem was hardly changed or affected by the death and resurrection of Christ. The moment the Holy Spirit came, however, that changed. Peter boldly told the Jewish people in Jerusalem the whole story of Jesus and the part they played in His crucifixion. The whole of Jerusalem immediately felt the impact. Within a short time of His arrival, many thousands had gathered and before the day ended, 3000 unbelievers had been converted, baptised and added to the Church. The moment the Holy Spirit came, miracles began to take place. It was just like when Jesus was with them in person. Jesus Christ has fulfilled His promise to His followers by sending the Holy Spirit. The gift has been sent. It is up to us to receive Him if He is to be of benefit to us.
We can only receive the gift of the Holy Spirit when we acknowledge our sin of rejecting Christ. Jesus Christ presented Himself to His people in Jerusalem, even as the prophets had foretold. He did not only come with the claim to be the Messiah, but God Himself testified to His identity and authority through the signs and wonders He performed through the Holy Spirit. In spite of this, He was rejected as the Messiah. Worse still He was nailed to a cross. God’s purposes were not overthrown in all of this, for He raised Jesus from the dead and has given Him full power and authority. We can only be spared His judgement when we acknowledge our sin of rejecting Him and call on His name. This is the only way to be saved. Those who have rejected Christ must repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. This is the only way their sins can be forgiven for them to be saved from God’s wrath, and to receive the promised gift of the Holy Spirit, the first fruits of the kingdom to come.
There were two ways in which the Israelites of that day were saved by their repentance and faith. They were saved, first of all, from the coming wrath of God upon that city and that generation, for rejecting the Messiah and putting Him to death. They were also saved from God’s eternal wrath and assured of eternal life and the blessings of His promised kingdom. While God’s wrath was poured out on Jerusalem in 70 A.D., there is a coming day of judgment, which will precede the establishment of the kingdom of God on the earth. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit, according to the prophet Joel was a sign, which was to precede the coming “day of the Lord”. On that day the Holy Spirit took one hundred and twenty people who were gathered together in one place, and made them into one Body. Here were one hundred and twenty isolated individuals who had been living their lives quite separately, held together only by a mutual interest in Jesus Christ. But now they are baptized by the Spirit into one body. That is the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise that, when the Holy Spirit would come, the Holy Spirit would baptize them and make them one body. The fire of Pentecost spread like a brushfire in dry grass on a windy day. It spread through the Roman Empire and Asia Minor to all nations. It is a fire that has blazed for two thousand years of history, across nations and peoples. Great political empires have come and gone. Great leaders have risen and fallen. Great churches have been built and torn down. Men have tried to put this fire out. But the harder they tried, the more it spread, the hotter it burned. The Spirit of Christ who brings the fire of the Father’s love continues to fan the flames over His Church. The Spirit of God comes to us at our Baptism, filling us with heavenly fire, breathing life into our death, melting the chill of our cold and hardened hearts with God’s burning desire to save us in the death and resurrection of Jesus. And He continues to come to us whenever His Word is read or preached or sang no matter the place. There is a coming day of judgment for everyone, one-way or the other. That Day of Judgment may come before our death or it may come after, but there is a day of judgment. To the threat of eternal judgment is God’s offer of salvation, to all who will “call upon the name of the Lord.” By admitting your sin, and by trusting in Jesus of Nazareth as God’s Messiah and your Saviour, you will be forgiven, receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, and look forward to the coming kingdom of God and all of its blessings. Have you, in simple faith, done this?
Only the Holy Spirit can lead the believer into a full understanding of God’s revelation to man. When the Holy Spirit came at Pentecost and the disciples began to speak in other languages, Peter explained what was happening by quoting and interpreting a prophecy by Joel. Almost half of what Peter said was a direct quotation from the OT, and his teachings on these Scriptures was applied in a most vivid way to the events of Christ’s death, resurrection and the coming of the HS. As soon as the HS came to indwell them, their understanding of Scripture was supernaturally illuminated. Their previous doubts and confusion were immediately replaced by clear understanding and right application of Scripture. The same thing also happened to Paul, who had been trained by Gamaliel, a famous teacher of his day. Yet in spite of all his training and knowledge, Paul in his early years had no understanding of the correct application of Scripture. When he received the Holy Spirit, he understood everything perfectly. All Christians believe that in the next age we will function in a totally different way. We will have a different kind of body and a totally different lifestyle. But through the Holy Spirit we can taste a little of this lifestyle now in this life. He gives us a foretaste of the powers of the age to come. He is the greatest single help that God has provided for believers who sincerely desire to enter into all the fullness of victorious and fruitful Christian living. We all need the Holy Spirit. Indeed Jesus places an obligation on all believers to seek Him when He says “If you then being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” On this day of Pentecost let us ask the Lord to fill us with the Holy Spirit. Amen!
