Acts 2: 41-47
Theme: Holy Spirit
YOU WILL RECEIVE POWER
The other night, I watched the latest Star Trek movie, Nemesis. One of the values of Star Trek is that we can improve ourselves. We can be better than we are and that we must seek to excel and to improve. I happen to think that is a good philosophy. I hope that I improve with age and that I understand the Word of God better or that my next sermon is better than the last. I would hope that I can be a better person as time goes on and that I can learn from my mistakes.
The problem with the Star Trek philosophy is that it is flawed. While we can change some things, we can’t change human nature. No matter how hard we try, we can’t change what we are. It is for the same reason that we cannot save ourselves. We can change the externals. We can make great achievements. We can improve our economic standing, but we cannot change our nature. We can go from poor and lost to rich and lost. We can dress well or poorly, we can change our vocabulary and our accent, but we cannot change our status before God.
All is not lost and we should not sink into despair. There is still hope. Our hope comes from God who has promised that all who obey him, he will save. And the great thing about this is God himself gives us the ability to obey him. In fact, without God’s work in our lives, we could never obey him no matter how hard we try. God carries out this work through the Holy Spirit who is the third person of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit convicts us of sin. This is not like a preacher making your feel bad. It is something much more profound, it is the act of regeneration in which God takes a dead soul and makes it alive. Only then can we really understand how sinful we are and how much our sin displeases God. In that same act, the Holy Spirit makes it possible for us to believe in Jesus and place our faith in him. Every Christian already knows something about the power of the Holy Spirit.
There is a lot of confusion about the work of the Holy Spirit today. There are two common teachings that I think confuses people about the Holy Spirit. The first places a strong emphasis on feelings. One is often lead to believe that if you don’t have deeply felt emotional experiences, then you are either second class or lost. It might surprise you to learn that this emphasis on feelings began as part of the 19th century liberal movement. Friedrich Schleiermacher and others had lost confidence in the Bible as the Word of God. They did not believe you could trust it to be truthful revelation. He believed that you could only trust the feelings you have about God as we experience God when we worship. Our feeling of dependance on God is expressed in deeply moving emotional experiences. The problem is, the Bible does not teach this. We know God through Scripture and the Holy Spirit enlightens us as we seek understanding. But the Holy Spirit does not bring new revelation about God. He helps us understand what has been revealed about God and recorded in Scripture.
The other thing that bothers me is the emphasis that some TV preachers put on power. Real Christians can do powerful things, but not as they suggest. They suggest that we can heal the sick, preform miracles, and even raise the dead if we have enough faith. While the Bible talks about these things, a careful examination will reveal that they are very rare, even in the Bible. I believe that God can heal the sick and preform miracles as he chooses, but not at my insistence or my demand because of my claim of faith. God does what he does according to his own sovereign will. When you start to examine what some call miracles, you will find that they have greatly exaggerated and in some cases, stretched the truth to become a lie.
But, Jesus said that you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you (Acts 1: 8). What does this mean? It means simply that when Holy Spirit comes, we will be able to do what we could never do before, we can live a righteous and pleasing life before God. The Holy Spirit will enable us to be obedient and faithful to Christ.
The Bible says that the Holy Spirit comes upon us when we believe in Christ. Paul said in 1 Corinthians that we are the Temple of God. The Holy Spirit resides in us. We cannot get any closer to God than we are now. You do not need a second or third experience to be filled with the Holy Spirit. What happened at Pentecost was the initial giving of the Holy Spirit to the Church. Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would come and empower believers to live the Christian life, particularly under difficult circumstances. The Holy Spirit was not given for show or for personal status, but to guide, protect, and comfort God’s church as it expands in the world.
The disciples were told to wait in Jerusalem for the coming of the Holy Spirit. They waited and we know the dramatic fashion in which the Holy Spirit came. The Holy Spirit immediately empowered them in three areas of the Christian life. The first was that they became witnesses. In fact, the primary purpose of the Holy Spirit is to empower us to be God’s witnesses. The first disciples became dramatic witnesses when God enabled them to speak in the languages of the people who were there. God enables all of us to be witnesses. Maybe we don’t need to speak in another language but we still need power as we talk about what Jesus has done. Our witness cannot be effective without the Holy Spirit. We cannot convict anyone of sin or convert them to Christ. Anytime we bear witness, it is a dramatic moment because God is at work so that we can witness in power. God uses our witness to raise the spiritually dead to new life. If that is not power, I don’t know what is. On that day alone 3000 people believed and were saved. That was probably more than the total who believed in Jesus in the three years that he taught the people. He said that we will do greater things than he did.
Secondly, God formed them into a Church. They experienced intense fellowship with God and with each other. Their fellowship with each other was part of their Trinitarian fellowship with God. It was fellowship with the Father, in the Son, through the power of the Holy Spirit. They were God’s family and their bonds of fellowship transcended their blood ties and their nationalities and their ethnic backgrounds.
Thirdly, they were transformed in the area of money. It is a normal human condition to hoard money and things. That is how we measure success. It is one of the hardest things for spiritual people to overcome because we don’t see how we deal with money as a spiritual thing. But it is, it may be one of the most spiritual things you do because it creates the framework from which we live our lives. Finances are like the skeleton on which we hang our spiritual muscles. After the Holy Spirit came, they took their resources and sold their property and gave it to each other as they needed it. Suddenly money was a means to ministry.
We understand that the general principle of the tithe, 10% of our income, is what God expects from us. When we allow the Holy Spirit to come upon us in power, he will reorient our lives. This requires us to be obedient and faithful to God. It is a radical reorientation. Instead of living on 100% we learn to live on 90%. We buy houses that can be justified on the 90%. We buy cars and other things based upon the 90%. It is a new and different lifestyle dictated by the Holy Spirit. And if God calls us to do so, we should be willing to give even more.
You are already empowered to do these and even greater things. You don’t have to wait for a special experience. In fact, if you are waiting for a deeply moving religious experience to make you change, you may be waiting for a long time. What is needed now is not an experience or a revival, but obedience and faithfulness. You are fully equipped right now.
But you are not puppets. God is not going to pull your strings to make you do the right thing. God empowers you so that you can obey him. You must be disciplined, you must be obedient and faithful. And we must hold each other accountable to live by the Spirit. These are not private matters. They are between you and God and your Church. The church is our accountability group. We are commanded to exhort and even admonish each other when we don’t live by the Spirit, including our financial dealings, our witness and our participation in the fellowship of the Church. That is why God gave us the church, to urge each other on in living a life in the power of the Holy Spirit.
You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. The Holy Spirit comes upon you when you become a Christian. You are empowered, go live the Christian life.