One of the oldest festival days in history is the Festival of Pentecost. It was one of the favorites of
the Jews for centuries before Christ, and it has been a significant day in the church for two thousand
years. It became the third great Christian feast after Christmas and Easter. It marks the anniversary
of the coming of the Holy Spirit. Liturgical churches call it Whitsunday because of the early custom
of wearing white clothes on this day to symbolize the illumination which the Holy Spirit brought.
Welcome, white day, a thousand suns,
Though seen at once, were black to thee;
For after their light, darkness comes,
But thine shines to eternity.
In spite of the importance of this day it has been greatly neglected by many Christians. Most of
us would not even know it was Pentecost Sunday, which means 50 days after the resurrection of
Christ. The early church celebrated this day long before they did Christmas. If we are unaware of
this day it is due to the lack of understanding of the place of the Holy Spirit in the life of the church.
Dr. Norman Maclean was teaching the Apostle’s Creed to some students, and he had them stand in a
row and each repeat a line. One morning they began and the first student said, “I believe in God the
Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” The next said, “I believe in Jesus Christ His only Son
our Lord.” This went on through all the doctrines, and then there was silence. The boy who was
next in line said, “Please sir, the boy who believes in the Holy Ghost is absent today.” Dr. Maclean
remarked, “Lots of folks are absent when it comes to that clause.”
E. Stanley Jones referring to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit said, “It is the undiscovered country
of Christianity, the dark continent of the Christian life. The land where our spiritual resources lie
but undeveloped.” The great need of the church, and of each individual Christian, is the power of
the Holy Spirit. It is the power to do the task for which we exist, and so we want to look at this first
Pentecostal experience of the disciples in the light of their reception of power.
I. THE SECRET OF THEIR RECEPTION OF POWER. v. 1
Jesus had commissioned His disciples to go into all the world and preach the Gospel, but He
told them that they must first tarry in Jerusalem until they were endued with power from on high.
For 10 days after Jesus ascended they waited in obedience to His command. Peter had finally
learned to wait on the Lord. He had finally learned to take orders and obey them with perfect
confidence that Jesus knew what He was doing. Ordinarily Peter’s nature would have caused him to
say, “Wait! What do you mean wait! We know Christ is alive now, for we have seen Him with our
own eyes. Why wait? Let’s go tell the world right now.” He would have gone out and instead of
turning the world upside down, would have become an utter failure trying to do a supernatural work
in his own natural powers. But Peter knew better now. He had tried his own power and discovered
it was weakness. He learned that you can have natural powers around you and behind you, but
without supernatural power from above you, you can do nothing. Like his Lord, he learned
obedience by the things which he suffered.
This was the secret of their reception of power. They were all with one accord in one place.
There was unity in obedience to Christ. No longer were the 12 anxious about who was going to set
where in the kingdom. All they knew was that Jesus had promised them power, and so in perfect
harmony and in complete confidence they waited. They were on the launching pad of preparation
waiting for God’s countdown to reach the zero hour and send them soaring out into all the world
with the Gospel. After 10 days you would think that some division would arise. It would have been
easy for some to get impatient and begin to doubt the promise. It is not easy to wait.
Themistocles, the famous Athenian general, once kept his men waiting during a navel battle.
At sunrise they were all ready to advance, but the order did not come. As the hours passed the men
became impatient. Talk spread that he was not going to fight because he was afraid. Themistocles
knew what he was doing. He knew there was a wind that came up in that region at a certain time of
the day. He waited for it to give the command so that he did not need as many men at the oars, but
could have them in arms to fight. He was waiting for greater power. This is what the church was
doing on that first Christian Pentecost. They did so without questioning the wisdom of their Lord.
They obeyed because they had learned to take Him at His word with complete trust. They made
themselves available to receive the promised power.
Someone has said that it is not only your ability, but your availability that Jesus needs if He is
to use you with power, and here we see them being available for the Master’s use. If the church is to
have power in any age, it must have these characteristics. It must be united in allegiance to Jesus,
and completely confident that He is able to do all things, and they must be available to be used as He
sees fit. This means every local church must ask itself constantly, why do we exist? What does God
want us to do, and are we making ourselves available to be used? A proper response to these
questions will lead us, like the first believers, to the discovery of the secret of receiving power from
on high.
II. THE SIGNS OF THEIR RECEPTION OF POWER. v. 2-3
God always gives signs when He performs a mighty act in history on behalf of men. He appeals
to the ears and eyes that men might know the work is of a divine and supernatural nature. When
God gave the law to Moses there was a loud voice of thunder and the terror of consuming fire.
When Jesus comes again there will be the blast of the trumpet, the great shout of the archangel, and
the terrible fire that will melt the elements with fervent heat. Sound and sight play a role in these
great events, and so also in the Pentecostal event. Pay careful attention to the language here. The
sound of the wind and the sight of the fire were real but not actual. They were signs of the reality of
the power they had received. In verse 2 came a sound as of a rushing mighty wind. In verse 3
appeared tongues like as fire. There was no actual wind or fire, but the sound and the sight were
real, and they symbolized the presence of God in power.
What could be a better symbol of the Holy Spirit than wind? What else in the material world is
present with such power, and yet it is invisible? Jesus used wind as an illustration of the Spirit when
He was talking to Nicodemus. He said that you hear the sound of it but you cannot tell where it
comes from and where it goes, and so it is with everyone born of the Spirit. If God had not given
this sign of the sound of wind, the Holy Spirit could have entered the believers in silence, and there
would not have been this great outward evidence. It was given here that the church might always
trace its source of power to the Holy Spirit, and not to some psychological emotion within. The
wind symbolizes a power beyond man. When God spoke to Job He spoke out of a whirlwind, and
when God gave life to the dry bones in Ezekiel He did it with a wind. Now at Pentecost He fills the
house with the sound of a rushing mighty wind, but the filling of the house with sound is only a sign
of the greater fact that He filled their hearts with the Spirit. Now that the Spirit has come to abide
with the church there can be the filling without the sign.
Fire is also a common sign of the presence of God. He appeared to Moses in the burning bush,
and He led Israel at night by a pillar of fire. To the believer God is a cleansing fire, and to the
unbeliever God is a consuming fire. Fire is also a sign of God’s glory. Why do the heaven’s declare
the glory of God? It is because of fire. If the stars were cold masses of stone, and if the sun was but
a flickering candle that kept us in perpetual gloom, where would be the glory? It is the power of the
blazing blinding brilliance of those fires in the sky that bring wonder into hearts and awe into our
minds. They kindle the flame of praise on our tongues. It is when we see God’s power throughout
the universe in the marvelous fires in the heavens that we sing My God How Great Thou Art.
Fire ought to characterize the church in the sense that it is filled with enthusiasm. When we
say a man is on fire, we mean that he is excited and enthused about what he is doing. That is the
picture of the church at Pentecost, and that is a sign of the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.
When the Spirit is present the church is on fire. There is a story about two men watching a church
burn. The one who was a member says to the other, “I have never seen you at church before.” The
other man replies, “I never saw this church on fire before.” When the church is on fire spiritually it
attracts people just as it does if it is physically on fire. Enthusiasm is essential for attraction. If
believers are not excited about what they believe, why should anyone else be?
Emerson once said, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” The very word
comes from the Greek which means God within. When God is within we are enthused. This is a
sign of a Spirit filled church and believers. Put the two signs of wind and fire together and you get a
picture of the early church spreading like wildfire. Someone wrote a history of the early church and
called it The Spreading Flame. The church that is enthused about its message is a church with
power, and so our prayer ought to be,
Grant us thy truth to make us free,
And kindling hearts that burn for thee,
Till all thy living altars claim
One holy light, one heavenly flame.
III. THE SUCCESS OF THEIR RECEPTION OF POWER.
When Jesus gave the promise that they would receive power in Acts 1:8, He made it clear that
the power was for the specific purpose of being witnesses of Him. The power was given not to
glorify the Spirit, or the believer, but to glorify Jesus Christ and make Him known to all peoples.
The test of whether or not a church is successful in receiving the power of God is whether or not it
accomplishes the task for which the power is given. If this group at Pentecost would have ran out
and sold all they had, and bought material to build a large church in Jerusalem, that would have
been a display of dedication, but Pentecost would have been a failure. So it is with the church today.
No matter how impressive a church is, if it does not accomplish the task of the church, which is to be
a witness for Jesus, then all of its show of power is in vain. It is only natural power, and the
supernatural is missing.
The church on Pentecost did not fail. It had tremendous success, for it was noised aboard that
something unusual had happened. The Jews visiting Jerusalem out of every nation gathered where
the disciples were. People were amazed for they heard them speaking of the wonderful works of
God in their own language. For 3 years the disciples had listened to Jesus proclaim the wonderful
works of God, but now they are carrying on in His place by the power which He sent to indwell His
new body the church. No longer were they afraid to take a public stand for Jesus. Peter, who a
month before did not have the courage to admit he knew Jesus, now without a tinge of fear stands in
this great crowd and proclaims Jesus as Lord.
The success of Pentecost was due to the fact that the disciples were now under new
management. They were not self-centered and worried about power, possessions and position, but
they were Christ-centered, and His will alone is all that mattered. For 10 days they had patiently
waited with their focus on Jesus, and now they could be trusted with power because they were aimed
right. If they had followed their own wills for their own ends, God could not have given the power,
for this would be like pushing on the gas pedal when the car is aimed toward the ditch. Success
came because they were on the right path of obedience and submission to the will of God. They
were ready to come under the Spirit’s control. With such an attitude they overcame all fear.
Diognetius was brought before a heathen king, and the tyrant said, “Do you know what I can
do for you?” The saints said, “You cannot harm me my life is hid with Christ in God.” The king
said, “I will strip you of all your possessions. The saint replied, “You cannot reach them, my
treasure is in heaven.” The king said, “I will exile you to a barren island.” The saint replied,
“Nothing can separate me from the love of God in Christ Jesus my Lord.” The king said, “Then I
will kill you.” The saint responded, “You will but send me to be with Christ which is far better.”
With such a faith as this there is no room for fear.
It was with this kind of fearlessness that the early church witnessed and had such success. Peter
preached a sermon that day that exalted Jesus and bore more fruit than all the sermons that Jesus
himself had preached. Jesus said they would do greater things than he, and here at Pentecost that
saying was fulfilled. The power of the Holy Spirit was successfully applied because Jesus was made
central. Three thousand souls found him as their Savior, and that was the purpose for which the
power was given.
A Welsh miner who was converted in the 1959 revival said, “When I was a boy we dug coal
out with chisels. After that came dynamite, and with this we could mine a much bigger quantity of
coal. Till this week I have seen nothing but chisel work in religion, but now here is God’s dynamite
at work.” The Gospel is the dynamite of God said Paul. Why should we try to reach the world on
the chisel level when the promise of the Pentecostal power is available to all believers? If we make
the task of being witnesses to Jesus the primary goal of our lives, as did these first believers, we too
could make a great impact by the power of the Spirit.
