Jump Starting the Church

Acts 2:1-13

Of the four gospels, it is Luke that pays most attention to the Holy Spirit. When John baptized Jesus in the Jordan River,
the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove.
When Jesus began his public ministry,
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the desert,
And at the end of that desert experience,
Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit,
When Jesus read from Isaiah to proclaim the opening of his public ministry he read
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

Now the same Spirit came upon the disciples of Jesus on the day of Pentecost.

The prophets spoke of a time when God would relate to his children in a more intimate and powerful way. Jeremiah prophesied:
“This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel
after that time,” declares the LORD.
“I will put my law in their minds
and write it on their hearts.
I will be their God,
and they will be my people.

The prophet Joel spoke of that day:
‘And afterward,
I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
your old men will dream dreams,
your young men will see visions.
29 Even on my servants, both men and women,
I will pour out my Spirit in those days.

There are certain most memorable days in the history of God’s interaction with his creation that stand out as turning points in our history: God’s revelation of himself to Abraham; Moses receiving the Law on Mt. Sinai; the birth of Jesus, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus; and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We await the last great event in history, the second coming of Jesus.

These are one-time historical events in the history of God’s interactions with us. God will not once again give the Law to us. God will not once again have a son born to save us. God will not once more die on the cross and be resurrected. And the Holy Spirit will not once more come as he did at Pentecost. Pentecost is like Christmas and Easter and in this sense, unrepeatable.

We in the church grow up hearing about Pentecost but may not realize that Pentecost was one of the three annual feasts in Jerusalem that Jews came to celebrate in the Temple. It was the middle of the three feasts and called the Feast of Harvest because it celebrated the end of the wheat harvest. It came to be called Pentecost because in the Greek, pent?kostos means fiftieth and the festival took place seven weeks or fifty days after Passover.

At Pentecost the church moved from the old era which was ruled by the law given to Moses to the new era which is ruled by grace. It is interesting to see the similarities of the giving of the law to Moses and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

In both cases unusual wind, fire and voices were present. In Hebrews 12:18-19 the writer is comparing Mt.Sinai where Moses received the law from God with the promised Mt. Zion which we will experience in heaven and in talking about the experience of Israel at Mt. Sinai he wrote:
You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm;  19 to a trumpet blast or to such a voice speaking words that those who heard it begged that no further word be spoken to them,

In Acts 2, Luke wrote about Pentecost where wind, fire and voices are again featured:
Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.  3 They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.  4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

In each case there were three supernatural events: sound, fire and speech. The symbolism is striking. At Mt. Sinai, God wanted to make sure Israel understood he was not a God who could be played with. He wanted Israel to have a holy awe and respect for him. So when the Israelites looked up at the mountain they were not permitted to touch, they saw darkness, gloom and a storm, complete with lighting and thunder. At Pentecost, the disciples and those around them heard a sound like the blowing of a violent wind. This sound was loud enough that those in the area came to the house where the disciples were sitting to see what was happening.

As in the case of Moses who saw a burning bush that was not consumed by the fire, those who came to the house heard a wind that was not blowing and destroying the house.

The coming of the Holy Spirit was announced with a loud noise to indicate the power of the Holy Spirit. As the writer of Hebrews pointed out, the difference between the noise Israel heard and the noise the people in Jerusalem heard was that at Mt. Sinai, God sent the message to stay away under threat of death. In Jerusalem, in anticipation of Mt. Zion, the message sent was to come and approach God through his Holy Spirit. But in both cases the message was sent that God is powerful.

The second supernatural sign was fire. When Moses saw the burning bush and turned off the path to see what it was, God told him to take off his shoes because he was on holy ground. When Isaiah received his call from God to be a prophet to Israel,
one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar.  7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

The fire of the bush and the fire of the red-hot coal spoke of the purity of God. When the disciples looked around at each other, they saw on the head of each person fire that like the burning bush was not consuming them. As with Isaiah, the fire served a purifying function.

When John the Baptist was preaching in the wilderness he announced the coming of Jesus.
“I baptize you with water. But one more powerful than I will come, the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.

In fulfillment of John’s proclamation, the coming of the Holy Spirit was announced with fire, sending the message that through the Holy Spirit, we would be made holy in what Paul taught as the second stage of salvation, the doctrine of sanctification. We are viewed by God as holy by the death of Jesus for our sins, but it is the work of the Holy Spirit that helps us become in actuality more holy.

The third supernatural sign at Pentecost was speaking in other tongues. There is a lot of discussion about speaking in tongues in the book of Acts and I do not intend to step overly long into that discussion this morning. But I bring you back to what I said at the beginning of this sermon, that Pentecost was the last major turning point in the history of God’s interactions with his human creation and in that sense, unrepeatable.

What happened at Pentecost was unique. Most of the disciples were Galileans who were viewed as being unsophisticated and uncultured and easily identified by their speech. When they spoke they had difficulty pronouncing guttural sounds that are spoken in the throat and they often swallowed syllables.

So imagine the surprise of the crowd when they heard these Galileans speaking words of praise to God in other languages. It was not just that these Galileans began speaking without an accent, but that they began speaking the language and accent of each person who was there. If you had been there, they would have spoken the Indian dialect you grew up with or the native language in your area of Nigeria or Ghana or Sierra Leone. They would have spoken with the dialect of German or Spanish you learned as a child. You would not have heard just English, but your Australian or British or American or South African accented English would come to your ears.

The coming of the Holy Spirit was announced with this third supernatural sign that indicated this would be a universal church. Although the disciples did not grasp the significance of this until later, Luke makes it quite clear that this would be a universal church. In his listing of the Jews who had come to Jerusalem for the feast, representatives of the whole known world were there.

Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.  6 When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language.  7 Utterly amazed, they asked: “Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans?  8 Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language?  9 Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia,

This first group came from the area of the Caspian Sea and westward. Countries today in that region are: Jordan and Iraq.

Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia,  10 Phrygia and Pamphylia,

This second group included the whole of Palestine and Syria and up into Asia Minor, what is today Turkey.

Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene;

This third group are the countries of North Africa.

visitors from Rome  11 (both Jews and converts to Judaism);

Luke now moves across the Mediterranean Sea to Rome.

Cretans and Arabs

Finally Luke competes his tour of the known world by including those from the island of Crete and the Arabs of the Arabian peninsula.

In all the languages of those present, the disciples, both men and women, were praising God.

This was the reversal of the story of the Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis. In that case, people had united to build a stairway to heaven and God frustrated their efforts by confusing their speech. God frustrated man’s efforts to build a bridge to himself but now that God himself had built a stairway to heaven by the death and resurrection of Jesus, the language barrier was supernaturally overcome as a sign that all ethnic groups would be gathered together in Christ as written in Revelation 7:9

After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb.

The coming of the Holy Spirit was announced with the wind of power, the fire of purity and the speech of a universal church that would be gathered to worship Jesus.

It is significant to me that both the Law and the coming of the Holy Spirit were accompanied by these very physical signs. Two other incidents came to my mind when God spoke in a very clear, physical, material way. One is in John 12 when Jesus was praying, at the Feast of Passover:
“Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.  28 Father, glorify your name!”
Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.”  29 The crowd that was there and heard it said it had thundered; others said an angel had spoken to him.

The second is in Acts 9 when God appeared to Saul on the road to Damascus:
suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him.  4 He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

7 The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone.

In each of these cases, why did God not simply speak in a silent way that was not observable to other people? In my experience, God does not speak audibly and directly. Elijah, when he fled from Jezebel, sat in a cave and heard the voice of God, not in a powerful wind or an earthquake or a fire but in a gentle whisper. But I don’t hear even a whisper.

Why doesn’t God speak to us more clearly? I have thoughts and sometimes it is clear to me that those thoughts come from God, but I have never heard from God in such a physical, material way. I had a friend in the first years of my relationship with Christ who had visions from God and who had angels appear and speak to him. If he was not my friend I would have thought he was crazy.

I know that other Christians have heard God speak to them in an audible voice but even John Wimber who began the Vineyard Churches wrote that this was a very infrequent experience for him.

Why doesn’t God make it more clear to us that he exists and more clear to us what he wants us to do? Why doesn’t God speak to us so we can hear him clearly?

Hold on to that question and I will come back to it.

What happened as a consequence of Pentecost? Jews from all over the known world heard and saw the power of God through the working of the Holy Spirit and they heard Peter explain to them what it was that had happened. As a result, 3,000 people came to believe that day that Jesus was the promised Messiah. And when they went back to their homes, they took this message with them and gatherings of Christians popped up all over the known world.

Let me present an analogy to help you understand what was unique about Pentecost.

One morning I went outside to my Renault 4 that had been parked outside on the street all night. I turned the key and nothing happened. I looked to see if I had left on any lights but I had not done that. The horn would not work. Nothing. So I decided I would push the car down the hill and try to jump start it. As I was about to do that, I decided to look under the hood (or bonnet) of the car and discovered that during the night, someone had come along and taken the battery.

Not knowing enough about cars, I thought I could still get it going, pop it into gear and take off. I tried that two or three times and finally parked the car and called the mechanic who came over with a new battery.

What I discovered is that to jump start a car you need at least a little electric juice in the battery. Without a battery you cannot start a car.

At Pentecost, it was necessary for God to put a battery in the church to get it going. There was a revival. A jump start was not enough at Pentecost, the church needed a battery. This is what makes Pentecost unique and unrepeatable.

Since that day, the church has often needed a jump start to get it going again. The work of the Holy Spirit did not cease with the apostles. Although the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was an historical and in that sense, unrepeatable event, the Holy Spirit has continued to come to the church to get it going once again.

The problem with the church is that it loses its electrical juice over time. Either lights are left on that should have been turned off or not enough water is kept in the battery or perhaps it is just a matter of age and the battery begins to wear down. So from time to time, the Holy Spirit comes and gives us a bit more juice to get the church running again.

I have read about revivals that have transformed whole cultures. I came to faith in 1971 during a revival in the US in which an estimated fourteen million people came to faith in the late 60s and early 70s. I was part of a church in Boston that had a college, graduate age ministry of 600 people and we saw people coming to faith in Christ every week.

I saw my daughters in their teenage years experience a sudden resurgence of faith. All of a sudden I noticed my daughter Elizabeth reading her Bible at night. Caitlin came back from summer camp one year a new person.

In my five years here at RPF I have noticed certain individuals who it seemed God took hold of and worked in a special way in their lives. It was almost as if I could see a glow from the faces of these people. It was a treat to preach to these people who were soaking in everything from God that came their way.

It is clear that God uses revival to get us going.

Let me conclude this sermon with a few comments about the revival we experience.

Revival comes suddenly. At Pentecost I imagine the 120 or so disciples, men and women, sitting in a room. Perhaps they were praying. Someone was blowing their nose. Another was swatting at a fly buzzing around. Someone was itching their leg. Perhaps some were taking a sip of water or looking out the window at a bird flying by.

And then suddenly there was the noise.

It is our responsibility to be ready for God to work in our lives because God will bring revival without warning. But we cannot cause God to do something he does not already intend to do. God brings revival when God chooses to bring revival. We pray for revival as we pray for healing as we pray for our friends and family to come to Christ but when God decides it is time to act, he acts and heals, draws men and women to faith and he brings revival.

There are some Christians who meet to pray and want to see God work so powerfully that they work themselves up into an emotional state and then claim that the Holy Spirit worked in a mighty way among them. I do not want to manufacture revival. I long for the real thing and I will not settle for our human manipulation of feelings.

God knows when you need a jump start and because he loves you and is faithful, he will bring revival when he knows you need it. God knows when the church needs revival. God knows when a culture needs revival and just at the right time, as Paul wrote in Romans, God will act. You need to trust him with your life and with the life of the church.

Why does God not bring revival more frequently in history? This brings me back to the question I raised earlier. Why does God not speak to us more clearly? We struggle to help the church grow. Wouldn’t it be simpler for God to work in an extraordinary way so that people would clearly see his power and then listen as we explained how he loves us and wants us to come into a relationship with him through Jesus? Wouldn’t it be great to have 3,000 come to faith this morning because they were drawn to the church to see what was happening?

I think that the reason God does not bring revival more frequently and that the reason he does not speak more clearly to us is because what God wants most is for us to grow in faith and I do not believe revival is the best medium for growing faith.

If you have listened to me preaching for a while you know that this is one of my themes. Faith does not grow in the midst of certainty, it grows in the midst of doubt. And if God speaks audibly, clearly and the Holy Spirit produces miracle after miracle to build the church, the church will grow in numbers but not in faith.

The Holy Spirit jump starts the church from time to time but then we are expected to do the hard work of being the church. We need to exercise spiritual disciplines. We need to pray and study and share our faith and care for the needy and fast and worship. We need to be the church, trusting in God, putting out hope in heavenly things, persevering in the midst of difficulty and discouragement.

If you are living for revival you will have a problem because revival is not something you can hold on to. Jonathan Edwards wrote about the revival that took place in the British colony of Massachusetts in what we now call the first Great Awakening in the mid 1700s. But by the time what he wrote was being read and celebrated in England and Scotland, the fervor had faded in the town where he was pastor.

The history of revival is that it comes and then goes. It does not last. The church does not live in a permanent state of revival.

God jump starts the church and individuals but then expects us to live Christian lives. We are not meant to live for revival. We are not meant to depend on revival. Pray for revival, long for revival, but do not live for revival. Revival is not the goal for us. Our goal is to love God and enjoy him forever. Revival is simply a tool God uses to that end.

I want you this morning to be encouraged that God watches over you. If you are experiencing a resurgence in your faith, rejoice in the work of the Holy Spirit in you. But if you seem to be plodding on, do not be discouraged. The Holy Spirit is still at work in you and this may be a time of more significant work being done in you than you realize.

Does the church need revival? If I were God, I would have brought revival to the church in Morocco a long time ago. I would bring revival to Europe and the US. I would bring revival in every corner of this globe. But fortunately for all of us, I am not God and I do not know his game plan.

What I do know is that he loves us. God loves his church and he will build his church, jump starting it when needed.

I thank God for Pentecost and getting the church going. I thank God that over the years he has constantly been at work to build his church. I thank God that 34 years ago he led me to himself and that over the last 34 years he has patiently been at work in me.

I believe we will see revival in Morocco. I believe God brought me to this country to have the joy of being present when he revives the church in this land. And I am committed to work in my Christian life to grow in my faith so that I will be ready when suddenly revival comes.

Pray for the Holy Spirit to be poured out but persevere in your Christian life and be ready for what God will bring.