Waiting on the Edge of Miracle
Notes
Transcript
Today is the Day of Pentecost, the day in the Christian calendar we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church. Just like all the other major events in the life of Jesus, this day is about a promise made and a miracle delivered.
Isn’t it a great thing to know that God indeed does keep His promises to us?
Last week I spoke to you about waiting and praying. I challenged you to begin praying for a mighty revival. I said
We are living in a very unique time in history. God has opened all sorts of doors for us beyond the walls of the building. This building as wonderful as it is, is not the church. We are the church.
Won’t you join me in this waiting time, this time of waiting for Jesus to return to begin a new prayer movement with this church?
Won’t you join me in this waiting time to pray for a revival to sweep through our lives and out into the world around us?
We often think and I believe sometimes accuse God of not living up to His end of the bargain. Many of the promises in the Bible contain a requirement on our part before God keeps his portion of the promise. When you read through the Old Testament there is all sorts of promises that God made with the Children of Israel. Those promises required the Israelites to do something before God would keep his side of the bargain.
The coming of the Holy Spirit was a promise like the coming of Jesus as the Messiah. They weren’t conditioned upon man doing anything but rather those events were all about God’s timing.
We tend to get anxious and impatient with God when He doesn’t operate according to our time frame and our plans. The Apostle Peter dealt with that in his first letter. There apparently was a lot of discussion of when God was going to keep His promise that Jesus would return. Peter wrote:
9 The Lord isn’t slow to keep his promise, as some think of slowness, but he is patient toward you, not wanting anyone to perish but all to change their hearts and lives.
What a great reminder that is for us even today. It’s been a little over 2,000 years since Jesus ascended to Heaven and we might wonder when He is coming again. Peter reminds us that the Lord doesn’t want any to perish. There is still much work today.
Pentecost reminds us that God keeps His promises and he gives us everything we need in order to serve Him. What is that mission that God has given us? To go and make disciples, to baptize them, to teach them.
Paul wrote to the Roman church:
13 All who call on the Lord’s name will be saved. 14 So how can they call on someone they don’t have faith in? And how can they have faith in someone they haven’t heard of? And how can they hear without a preacher?
That’s our mission, but did Jesus leave us alone to accomplish it? No and in fact when he gave that great commission he told the Disciples that “surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
How is Jesus with us today? By the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
Pentecost, the event we celebrate was unlike anything anyone had ever witnessed. The disciples and others were gathered together in one place. They still didn’t have a complete understanding on what was going to happen to them. They had witnessed Jesus being crucified and buried, yet they had witnessed the resurrected Jesus who talked with them and ate with them. There had to be a million unanswered questions in their minds. They waited and they prayed.
Luke tells in Acts 1 “He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.” That had to have been an awesome time as Jesus spoke to the Disciples and opened their minds to the Kingdom of God. I think he began to change their hearts because now they understood what Jesus had taught them prior to his death and I think their eyes were opened to the mission that Jesus was sending them on. Yet they were still missing something and that something was a someone who was the Holy Spirit.
Luke says that:
When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
Can you just imagine what that was like? They knew the Holy Spirit was going to come, but they had no concept of what that would be like.
I do wonder about us today. What are our expectations of the Holy Spirit? I do wonder what you think about the Holy Spirit. Do you think “I just don’t know what to think about the Holy Spirit.”
I know for me I don’t want a religion. I want a relationship. I long for the power of the Holy Spirit. Religion is dull, it is boring. It does not transform peoples lives.
The Holy Spirit is God Himself. He comes to indwell our lives, filling us with the fullness of God. It is impossible to become a Christian and to live the Christian life without the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is the one who draws us to God so that we are open to hear the message of God.
It is the Holy Spirit that sanctifies us and fills us with the power of God.
I can only imagine what those gathered there in the upper room felt when the sound like wind started. Did it start like a soft breeze and build up to the sound of a violent wind like a tornado? The sound filled the entire house. They must have looked around and tried to figure out what was making the sound.
And if the sound wasn’t enough they see what appears to be fire enter the room that separated and came and rest on each one there. And then they began to talk, they began to speak in languages that they hadn’t every learned before.
Luke says all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.
The imagery here points back to some things that Jesus had said. Jesus spoke about the Holy Spirit when Jesus was speaking to Nicodemus in John 3 he said:
8 God’s Spirit blows wherever it wishes. You hear its sound, but you don’t know where it comes from or where it is going. It’s the same with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Even the story of the Dry Bones from Ezekiel uses the illustration of the wind when the Lord told Ezekiel to prophesy, God said to him:
9 He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, human one! Say to the breath, The Lord God proclaims: Come from the four winds, breath! Breathe into these dead bodies and let them live.” 10 I prophesied just as he commanded me. When the breath entered them, they came to life and stood on their feet, an extraordinarily large company.
John the Baptist prophesied concerning the fire when he said in Luke 3:
16 John replied to them all, “I baptize you with water, but the one who is more powerful than me is coming. I’m not worthy to loosen the strap of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 17 The shovel he uses to sift the wheat from the husks is in his hands. He will clean out his threshing area and bring the wheat into his barn. But he will burn the husks with a fire that can’t be put out.”
Do you recall the passage that contained the words of Jesus about fire that I read last week?
49 “I came to cast fire upon the earth. How I wish that it was already ablaze!
Oh that God would open the windows of heaven this morning and send His Holy Spirit a new and afresh on us. That the wind of the Holy Spirit would blow through our lives removing the obstacles. That the mighty fire of the Holy Spirit would burn anew in our lives, burning away anything that is hindering our walk with God and would refine us and make us pure.
Won’t you join me in praying for that? Church, that is what we need today. I can’t, you can’t, we can’t live on yesterday’s experience, we need an up-to-date experience with God, we need a fresh filling of the Holy Spirit of God in our lives today!
Do you remember the story of Moses and the burning bush in the Old Testament? What did Moses do when he saw it? Moses stopped what he was doing and he went to investigate and then had an encounter with God that changed his life.
John Wesley was once asked the question, “How do you gather a crowd?” He replied, “I set myself on fire and people come to watch me burn.”
Wesley wasn’t saying that in a literal sense. He was talking about being filled with the Holy Spirit, being set on fire by the Spirit of God. He was talking like what Moses experienced with the burning bush.
Why are we struggling as a church, as individuals? I believe it’s because we are lacking the power and the fire of the Holy Spirit here in our presence.
The Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus and said to them:
12 We aren’t fighting against human enemies but against rulers, authorities, forces of cosmic darkness, and spiritual powers of evil in the heavens.
Folks our fight today is the same as it was for the Ephesians. It’s not against flesh and blood, it is not against human enemies, but it is against rulers, and authorizes and powers of this dark world and against spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realm.
We need to put on the full armor of God so that we can take our stand. That comes by the power, but the fire of the Holy Spirit of God in our life.
There are people who are missing today from our service, who have stopped attending not because they don’t like the preacher, or they don’t like the music or a whole host of other things. They are missing because the authorities, and rulers and the powers of darkness and spiritual forces have over the course of their life hurt them so badly and have damaged the reputation of Christ’s Church that they can’t come back.
This stuff is real, the power of evil is real, the consequences of sin is damaging. It doesn’t just impact the person doing the sinning but impacts others as a consequence of the sin perpetrated on upon them even down several generations.
Jesus by his death on the cross and His resurrection has broken the power of sin and death. He has sent the Holy Spirit to blow away the nonsense in our lives to burn away the junk and garbage in our lives to refine us so that we can live Holy lives, empowered by the Holy Spirit.
Look quickly at the response and note this. When a person is truly filled and on fire by the Holy Spirit people are going to take notice. Look at verses 5-13. (READ)
5 There were pious Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6 When they heard this sound, a crowd gathered. They were mystified because everyone heard them speaking in their native languages. 7 They were surprised and amazed, saying, “Look, aren’t all the people who are speaking Galileans, every one of them? 8 How then can each of us hear them speaking in our native language? 9 Parthians, Medes, and Elamites; as well as residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10 Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the regions of Libya bordering Cyrene; and visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), 11 Cretans and Arabs—we hear them declaring the mighty works of God in our own languages!” 12 They were all surprised and bewildered. Some asked each other, “What does this mean?” 13 Others jeered at them, saying, “They’re full of new wine!”
What does this even mean? It was a miracle from God. One author put it this way:
The Preacher’s Commentary Series, Volume 28: Acts Waiting on the Edge of a Miracle
It is a miracle when a personality is transformed, or a person is able to think and act beyond the limitations of his or her capacities. A higher power, exercising a higher law, has multiplied the human potential. The word “impossible” no longer has its restricting confinement. The impossible happens. The miracle of a changed personality results with supernatural gifts of intellect, emotional freedom, and a conviction that all things are possible. That’s the miracle of Pentecost. One hundred and twenty frightened, impotent, self-centered, willful, and discouraged men and women were transformed into new creatures. They were infused with supernatural power—intellectually, emotionally, volitionally, and physically. In Greek, the words “miracle” and “power” come from the same root.
Those 120 people gathered in the upper room were filled with the Holy Spirit and they began speaking, they began talking in languages other than their normal language. A crowd gathered. Just like Moses and that burning bush, those 120 were on fire by the Holy Spirit and people stopped what they were doing to come and see what was happening and they heard them speaking in their own native languages.
Some in the crowd mocked what was happening. That happens all the time. When the Holy Spirit begins moving in people’s lives there will be someone there to try to toss cold water on them. Someone hollered out that they were drunk but Peter freshly empowered by the Holy Spirit gets up to preach his first sermon and probably one of his most powerful sermons.
Peter opens up and quotes from the Prophet Joel, in Joel chapter 2 and I would encourage you to go this afternoon and read that entire chapter. Peter says:
17 In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young will see visions. Your elders will dream dreams. 18 Even upon my servants, men and women, I will pour out my Spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. 19 I will cause wonders to occur in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and a cloud of smoke. 20 The sun will be changed into darkness, and the moon will be changed into blood, before the great and spectacular day of the Lord comes. 21 And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
That prophecy from Joel says Peter has now been fulfilled. Look who is included in the prophecy. All people, sons, daughters, young men, old men, servants, men and women. Everyone is included. In fact there in verses 21 Peter quoting still from Joel says that “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Everyone, salvation, the baptism with the Holy Spirit is for everyone. Jesus told Nicodemous that “whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.”
That whosoever included you and I.
That “I will pour out my Spirit on all people” includes you and I.
We need once again for our sons and daughters to prophesy, to proclaim the Good News of the gospel of Jesus Christ to a world that it lost and bound for Hell.
We need our young men and women to see visions of what God wants to do in and through them. To see visions of what this church could be if the Holy Spirit of God invaded this space and transformed each one of us.
We need our old men and women to dream dreams of what the church could be here in northern Somerset county.
God wants to move within the life of His people once again. The Day of Pentecost of the birthday of the church was a one time event, but it certainly wasn’t the last time that God’s people were filled with the Holy Spirit. There are numerous times in the book of Acts where it is recorded that the people were filled with the Holy Spirit. It’s not just a onetime event. We need to stay constantly filled. Some of the old-time preachers said we need to “stay under the spigot”.
The Preacher’s Commentary Series, Volume 28: Acts Waiting on the Edge of a Miracle
The greatest need in the church today is for contemporary Pentecost. When we listen to people intently, we can respond incisively. The need in people today matches the mood of Jesus’ followers waiting in the Upper Room.
Are you willing to pray to be like John Wesley, that God would set us on fire by the power of the Holy Spirit so that people will drop what they are doing to come and investigate?
When there is a problem you can only sit around and talk about it for so long before you have to make up your mind to do something about it. It’s time, God has kept His promise, He has sent the Holy Spirit, it’s time to allow the Holy Spirit to burn in our lives and allow him to win the victory of that which would defeat us.
Are you willing? Are you willing to allow the Holy Spirit to have full control? Are you willing to surrender yourself completely to God’s will? Don’t put it off, don’t wait, consecrate yourself completely to Him. Do it today.