Pentecostal Power
Acts 2:1-13
1. Does your walk with God get old? Are you spiritually tired?
2. If you have been faithfully serving God and God’s people, the church, year after year, it is easy to feel burned out or lose your creative enthusiasm.
3. Yet I have found that God can revive my soul time and time again as I spend time with Him and allow the Holy Spirit to massage my tired soul and re-establish His lordship in my life.
4. Many of you have a similar testimony; the Holy Spirit has reanimated your commitment to your marriage, restarted your prayer or devotional life, or simply strengthened you to survive an unbelievably hectic or stressful period of life. Many of these special works of the Holy Spirit are connected to Pentecost.
5. Today’s text deals with the Day of Pentecost, also known as the Feast of Weeks.
6. In Judaism, this was perhaps one of the more minor of the 7 feasts of Leviticus 23. The Spring Feasts were bundled together with an 8 day period: Passover, Unleavened Bread, and First Fruits. The Fall Feasts (high holy days) are Trumpets, Atonement, and Tabernacles, are all within a 15 day period.
7. From our vantage points, looking at the feasts prophetically, the first three feasts have been fulfilled when Christ died and rose again; we live in the age of the 4th feast, and the final three are prophetic of the End Times.
8. But Pentecost is no minor festival. Its implications are enormous and relevant to every true believer.
Main Idea: Pentecost is the inauguration of a new era: the era of the Spirit.
I. The Holy Spirit Did Not Come DISCREETLY (1-4)
A. The significance of the date: PENTECOST (1)
1. What it was: a JEWISH holiday
50 days after First Fruits (Lev. 23:15)
Beginning of the main harvest season
2. The Day God gave the 10 COMMANDMENTS
The Day
The evidence in Scripture seems to indicate that God gave the Law to Moses on the Day of Pentecost, as the Jews believe. Many first century Jews believed that God made the Rainbow Covenant with Noah on this day as well. If so, we might think of Pentecost as "covenant initiation day."
God spoke in a loud, trumpet like voice that scared the people; the mountain shook and a giant fire descended in Exodus, chapters 19:16ff…
The Tongues of Fire
Philo: "Then from the midst of the fire that streamed from heaven there sounded forth to their utter amazement a voice, for the flame became articulate speech in the language familiar to the audience" (Decal. 46), quoted by Ben Witherington III in his commentary, The Acts of the Apostles.
The Languages
We are not sure whether another Jewish belief goes back to the first century or not, but it very well may. It is the belief that when God gave the Law to Moses, God also spoke it in the 70 languages of the nations.
B. The PHENOMENON (2-4)
1. Like Loud WIND
2. Like Individual Tongues of FIRE
The poet William Blake wrote a poem about Pentecost. Part of the poem says:
Unless the eye catch fire, God will not be seen.
Unless the ear catch fire, God will not be heard.
Unless the tongue catch fire, God will not be named.
Unless the Heart catch fire, God will not be loved.
Unless the mind catch fire, God will not be known. [Sermoncentral]
3. The INVISIBLE filling of the Spirit
4. Speaking in UNLEARNED Foreign Languages
5. Evidence that God was moving in a new and great way…
C. The APPLICATIONS
1. A major Milestone: The Spirit and God’s Power is for All believers
It wasn’t just the apostles who were filled with the Holy Spirit
2. The Main Harvest Season in Here!
Although Firstfruits celebrated the beginning of the harvest of early crops, Pentecost represented the beginning of the main harvest season.
The fields are ripe to harvest, Jesus said; today’s great harvest fields include: South America, Asia, Africa, and a real change: The Middle East, especially Iran. That’s why missions matter. Like a mutual fund, a good church should be diversified in what it does for the Kingdom of God.
3. Power to make a difference. Vance Havner once said, "We are not going to move this world by criticism of it nor conformity to it, but by the combustion within it of lives ignited by the Spirit of God."
Although I would caution our understanding of "ignited" as referring to the fruit of the Spirit, I agree with Havner.
We have to stop trying to get lost people to act like Christians and to give up a goal of returning America to its past; instead, we need to make disciples who are well trained.
Although we need to understand the times in which we live and taper our ministries to address those times, we must shed the fear of being "different" if different means conforming our lives to His will as revealed in His Word. Those whom the Spirit is preparing will appreciate that difference.
The younger generations are seeking religion, but generally not the God of the Bible. The fire of God will draw those who are seeking the true God of the Scriptures.
The filling of the Spirit is later not associated with tongues as much as energy for service…
• This is our first year with cell phones.
• Marylu was a counselor up at Camp Emmanuel this year for two weeks…
• Her cell phone kept needing to be recharged, because out at camp, the towers are remote (it said, "extended service area") and cell phones keep looking for a better connection, thus draining the battery
• Likewise we need new fillings of the Holy Spirit, and, in some situations, more often than other times…esp. when we are being drained…
• D. L. Moody was asked why he sought to be filled with the Holy Spirit so many times; his response, "I leak."
• Time with God in His Word, prayer, praise…
• One purpose of a church meeting is to help recharge you, but it is not enough…
Pentecost is the inauguration of a new era: the era of the Spirit.
II. The Reaction
A. Who? Jewish IMMIGRANTS (5)
"every nation under heaven" is limited by the context to mean, "every nation under heaven in which Jews lived…"
B. ATTRACTED by the noise (6)
God never repeats Pentecost again. The big noise doesn’t happen again. 3,000 people are not converted at one time in Acts again. We need to remember that these converts were well grounded in the Old Testament and had heard much discussion about Jesus before.
It is human nature to seek to institutionalize and repeat what is a one-time experience. It is not that these believers were necessarily any godlier than some groups of believers today. Instead, Pentecost was a grand initiation day of the current nature of the Kingdom of God on earth.
C. BEWILDERED and PERPLEXED (6b-12)
D. Others accused them of being TIPSY (13)
I find it amazing that one group is marveling at a great miracle while another writes off the entire experience as drunkenness.
E. APPLICATIONS
1. Noise attracts but does not Convince
2. Open miracles do not persuade Closed hearts
3. God wants all Believers to have an impact
Pentecost is the inauguration of a new era: the era of the Spirit.
CONCLUSION
1. Although all believers are baptized by one spirit into one body, being filled with the Holy Spirit is a repeated experience.
2. So I close today with the refrain from an old hymn titled "Old Time Power"
"Spirit, now melt and move All of our hearts with love,
Breathe on us from above With old time power."
