We have been walking through the book of Acts in recent weeks, wanting both to understand and experience what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ on mission. And right in the first chapter we came upon Jesus’ commission to his followers in chapter 1:8 – And you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. That verse provides the literary framework of the whole book: chapters 2-7 describe their mission in Jerusalem…. chapters 8-12 in Judea and Samaria… and 13-28 to the end of the earth, represented by Rome.
And it begins in chapter 2, when the Holy Spirit comes upon them at Pentecost, manifested in wind and fire and strange speech. When the Holy Spirit comes upon them in power, the church is born and the mission is launched.
When we came to that passage, it raised some questions in our Bible study group concerning, for example, speaking in tongues, or what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit. So I thought it might be a good idea to spend a Sunday morning teaching about the Holy Spirit. In fact, we’ll have to spend two. Because his presence and power thread through the book, and having some understanding of the Holy Spirit provides some necessary context for the whole book.
Who is the Holy Spirit? Two things to notice Biblically:
First, the Holy Spirit is a person. The Holy Spirit is not a force, or a power. He is a Person. When Jesus spoke about the Holy Spirit in John 16, Jesus used the pronouns ‘he’, ‘him’ and ‘his’ 11x. Jesus never talked about the Holy Spirit as ‘it’. Beyond that, from a host of Biblical references, we know that the Holy Spirit has knowledge (1 Cor 2:11), has a will (Heb 2:4), he chooses and acts, he has a mind (Rom 8:27), he can be lied to (Acts 5:3), he has emotions and can be grieved (Eph 4:30), he can be insulted (Heb 12), he speaks (Rev 2:7), he intercedes (Rom 8)…
So the Holy Spirit is indisputably personal.
Secondly, the Holy Spirit is divine. That is, he is God. He is not acting on behalf of God, he is not God’s errand boy or employee. The Holy Spirit is God. His deity is assumed in Scripture.
We have the occasions where the Father, Son and Spirit are mentioned together, and where they act together. For example, at Jesus’ baptism, where the Father speaks of Jesus’ divine Sonship, and the Spirit descends upon Jesus.
We see them in Creation: God created the heavens and the earth, the Spirit of God was brooding over the face of the waters, and the testimony of Colossians that all things were created by Christ and for Christ.
We see them together in God’s work of saving people from sin for relationship to himself: We were chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying Holy Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood. (1 Peter 1:2).
The three are mentioned together by Jesus in Matthew 28: Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Or the blessing at the end of 2 Corinthians: The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
The most explicit declaration of the Deity of the Holy Spirit comes in Acts 5, where the apostle Peter says to deceitful Ananias: Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit?… You have not lied to men, but to God.
So the Holy Spirit is a person, distinct from the Father and the Son, but in an essential oneness with them. Hence the Biblical doctrine of the Trinity: one God in three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Now, what does that have to do with anything? Actually, a great deal. The personality and deity of the Holy Spirit has everything to do with your life today.
The Holy Spirit is God’s actual, personal and constant presence in the life of every Christian.
God has given himself to you. There are all kinds of implications of that.
There are implications of love: imagine God’s love for you that he would make you his home.
There are implications of strength: that the supremely powerful God lives within you.
There are implications of presence: That means wherever you are, God is. Consider his love, presence and power: When you are up in the middle of the night – in pain or worry or with a child – God is there. He is in the moment. When you go to work, God goes there with you. What is it you are going to face this week? What pressures in the office? God steps into it with you. What physical issues have you concerned today? God is in the middle of it with you.
What situation are you in that you think, ‘I just can’t do this any more?’ You lack strength. You lack wisdom. You lack hope. God’s presence within you by his Spirit means that the one who is the perfection of all strength, wisdom and sovereignty is in you, and his strength is for you, his wisdom for you. God has given us everything we need for life and godliness, the Bible says. I can do all things through him who gives me strength.
Have you felt like God is far away?… that because you have not prayed well or read the Bible much that God has moved out… and the reconnection with God requires a long and arduous journey back? Have you ever thought you needed to get ‘back to God’? God never leaves nor forsakes, and if you find yourself hungering for God again, Be still, learn to listen again and see that he is there in your heart, still speaking his words of love and wisdom.
That reality is what moves Christianity from the level of religion to the deeper level of relationship. The Holy Spirit is not just a moral compass or some kind of new personality software that gets installed upon conversion. He is the reality of God in your life. God has taken up residence in your life, when you are a follower of Jesus.
There are physical implications as well, when we recognize that God lives within us. It makes our bodies sacred. What we do to and with our bodies no longer has to do simply with taking care of ourselves, but with our relationship with God. The Bible says explicitly: Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. Did you know that? Doesn’t that make us re-think some of our practices!
How are you treating your temple? I know that if I don’t sleep well, or if my eating is undisciplined for any length of time, that has spiritual implications: it is easier to sleep than to talk to God. My mind does not focus well on my work or relationships.
That’s why the Bible says, Whether you eat or drink, do it all for the glory of God.
We are in a good season to think about that. Often during Lent, the season leading up to Easter, people give up something. Have you ever wondered why? This ‘giving up’ for Lent is a form of fasting. Fasting is not a way of making a sacrifice to score religious points. Fasting is a way of saying that we will not let ourselves be controlled by something. And fasting quickly reveals if something does control us or not.
One example: Every morning I have a cup of coffee. I seldom have more than one cup in a day. And yet, if I do not have a coffee, by late afternoon I often feel light-headed, have a headache. Now that might not seem like anything. But I’m giving up coffee for this week, because I want to see what kind of a hold coffee has on me physically. I don’t want anything to have a hold on me. My body has one Lord only. And the surest way to see if something else has a hold on you is to surrender it for a time. Might be coffee. Might be TV. Might be sports or sex or food or a certain kind of food, or whatever indulgence. Try it and see if you start justifying things. For example, I might give up coffee but start drinking black tea or Coke… I’m still a slave to caffeine and haven’t dealt with anything.
So what we eat and drink is a spiritual issue. So is health and fitness. So is sex. In fact, the passage where the Bible talks about the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit is a passage about sexual purity.
You see that the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit, which means the personal presence of God within each Christ-follower, has everything to do with the stuff of day-to-day living: our circumstances, trials, our bodies… So that’s who he is and why it matters.
What does he do?
The New Testament after the Gospels is the Holy Spirit in action: convicting and saving, empowering, transforming, working in people individually and corporately, revealing and applying the truth of God’s saving the world through Jesus. The great redemption of God, effected through Jesus Christ, is now carried on through the Church, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the life and power of the church. He is its air, its lifeblood as we see in Acts.
Chapter 1 is the transition between the age of the gospels and the age of the church. Jesus spends forty days with his disciples and teaches them of the kingdom of God. But before he leaves them and ascends into heaven, he tells them: Go back to Jerusalem and wait for the gift my Father promised… You will be baptized with the Holy Spirit…. You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
So, in obedience, they waited.
Then in ten days, Acts 2 happens: they are gathered in one house, when suddenly there is a sound. It was the sound of wind, a violent wind. And it was a sound ‘from heaven’. Somehow they understood that this was God at work. They heard wind. They also saw fire, fire that separated into tongues and rested on each one. And they began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them. This was the fulfillment of Jesus’ word, that the Spirit would come to them, and they would receive power to be Jesus’ witnesses.
The presence and activity of the Holy Spirit holds the book of Acts together. And since the book of Acts is the history of the church, the Holy Spirit is not just a theme that holds the book of Acts together, he holds the church together. He is the life and power of the church. He is the creative genius behind the whole enterprise called the ‘Church’, then and now. The Church is his creation, as it were.
It is as we read the book of Acts that we understand the ministry of the Holy Spirit. What does he do? Five things, very quickly:
First, he created the church, the idea of a Christ-centred faith community, united. In the ten days between Jesus’ ascension and Pentecost, Jesus’ followers were together. But when the Spirit came, he bound them together. There was a fundamental unity. And among Christians there is a fundamental unity. We don’t act like it sometimes, as our history attests. But the Church of Christ throughout the centuries and across the globe is nonetheless one church, one body, to use the Biblical metaphor. And when we became a Christian we became part of this one body. 1 Corinthians 12 says, You were all baptized by one Spirit into one body. The church, the body of Christ, the community of faith is the creation of the Holy Spirit.
What else does he do? Second, he empowers people to speak effectively about Jesus. Notice the pattern in Acts: In Acts 2, the Spirit falls upon the Christians, and they begin speaking. The crowd says, We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God. Then Peter preaches and three thousand are saved.
In Acts 4, Peter is filled with the Holy Spirit gives his defense to the religious leaders and says to them about Jesus, Their is salvation in no one else… And they leaders are astonished by his boldness.
Later in chapter the Christians pray for boldness, and the room in which they meet to pray is shaken, and they are filled with the Holy Spirit and continue to speak the word of God with boldness.
Chapter 6: Stephen, a man full of grace and of the Holy Spirit…. When people tried to dispute with him, They could not withstand the wisdom or the Spirit with which he was speaking.
Chapter 8, the Spirit tells Philip to preach to the Ethiopian official, and he becomes a believer.
Chapter 9, Saul of Tarsus is filled with the Spirit and immediately begins proclaiming in the synagogue that Jesus is the Son of God, and Saul grows more and more powerful.
Chapter 13 & 14: The disciples were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit. Now at Iconium they entered the synagogue and spoke in such a way that that a great number of both Jews and Greeks believed.
That’s how you know the Holy Spirit is present and active in Christians: when they speak effectively about Jesus, in such a way as to see people come to faith in him. Jesus had said of the Holy Spirit that he would testify about Jesus. And the sure sign that the Holy Spirit is in a church is that people aren’t talking much about the Holy Spirit, but about Jesus. Because the Holy Spirit gives power to proclaim effectively – in preaching and in conversation – the truth of Jesus Christ.
Third, the Spirit changes people’s hearts: Lydia in Acts 16 had her heart opened so that she could believe the gospel of Jesus… the centurion Cornelius and his household in chapter 10…. the three thousand at Pentecost: they responded and were changed because the Spirit of God was at work in them.
No one becomes a Christian unless the Holy Spirit has acted upon them in such a way that they are enabled to believe the truth about Jesus and respond to it. This is the reality of grace at work: I am only a Christian because God’s Spirit has made me one. Not because I understood the gospel and made a decision, but because God changed my heart. I am not the actor, but the receiver of God’s action. And if you are a Christian at all, that is the affirmation of God’s love for you in intervening in your life to bring you to himself. It’s all grace.
The Spirit creates the church… he empowers to speak of Jesus…. he changes hearts…
Fourth, he gives direction. In chapter 13, as I said, he directs the praying community in Antioch to commission Saul and Barnabas as apostles to the Gentiles. In chapter 16:6-7 it is the Spirit who very specifically says to Saul (now Paul), ‘Do not go to this place…. No, don’t go there either… But go to Macedonia.’ The Holy Spirit guides.
Then fifth, he gives wisdom. In Acts 15 there is a serious theological question: Jesus is the Messiah and the fulfillment of Judaism, but what are the implications of the Gospel for the Gentiles? What is the relationship of Gentiles to Judaism? The leaders of the church talk it through at length, and in their drafted decision, they write: It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…. They knew that God himself had given them wisdom to come to an understanding. And their decision, as you read that chapter, ushered in the reality of one church, Jew and Gentile together.
Those things the Holy Spirit does: he empowers to speak effectively about Jesus… he changes hearts… he guides and he gives wisdom. How would you like to see those things in your life and in the life of our church?
How, then, can we ‘make’ the Holy Spirit present and active in our church?
In reading in Acts, I have been struck by the fact that the Holy Spirit was never asked for. To my knowledge, there is no occasion in Acts or anywhere else in the New Testament where Christians asked for the Holy Spirit to come.
This is significant. It does not mean we should not ask, certainly. But sometimes I hear it expressed that we would see God act here in great ways if only we would be asking for the Holy Spirit to come. It’s implied that the fact that we aren’t specifically and regularly asking for the Holy Spirit is evidence that we are not really New Testament Christians, or we’re doing things on our own strength, or whatever.
Often in prayer, or in conferences, or in church services, you will hear someone pray something like: ‘Lord, send your Spirit to us’ or ‘Let your Spirit fill this place’, or something like that. Again, nothing wrong with praying that, but… Peter, James, Paul, the saints and apostles did not ask for the Holy Spirit. Yet he was so very obviously present and active in them.
So what’s the deal? If what we need as a church is for the Holy Spirit to come again in power here, today, among us… What do we need to do for that to happen?
If the Holy Spirit can’t be summoned, and Biblically he’s never asked for, then it’s good for us to ask: in the book of Acts, when does the Holy Spirit come?
The Holy Spirit comes when believers are giving themselves fully to the Mission of Jesus Christ. When Christians are committed to being witnesses for Jesus Christ to a lost and often hostile world, when we humbly surrender our lives in the service of Christ because we take seriously his commands to be his witnesses, then it’s not necessary to ask for the Holy Spirit because he just comes.
So if you want the Holy Spirit to come and fill us here at our church, the key word for us is not ‘prayer’, or ‘repentance’ or ‘revival’. The key word is ‘obedience’. The Holy Spirit is not interested in anything else here, frankly.
Jesus told his disciples: Don’t leave Jerusalem, but wait. It took ten days. But it was as they were waiting in the upper room, in obedience to Jesus’ command, that the Holy Spirit rushed in with wind and fire and history has never been the same.
Acts chapters 3 & 4…
Peter filled with the Holy Spirit when facing the Sanhedrin…. The others praying, not for the Holy Spirit, but for boldness…
When does the Holy Spirit come? When followers of Jesus are committed to being his witnesses, and when we live in obedience to that call.
‘If only the Holy Spirit would come here, then we’d be able to do God’s will.’
That’s backwards. ‘If we step out and do God’s will, then the Holy Spirit would sweep in with power. Then we would see effectiveness beyond what we can imagine. We’d see power, lives transformed, miracles…’
When we seek the lost, and when we surrender to God’s Lordship, the Spirit comes.
Let me ask you this: Do you long for the Holy Spirit to be visibly active and present here? Me, too. In fact, I am convinced that revival is beginning to happen again here precisely because the evidence I see of some of the things we’ve talked about: I see more people now active in ministry to people far from God than I have in the previous eight years I’ve been here. We’re going to hear about some of these ministries next week. Someone said just the other day, ‘I see God at work in more people’s lives right now than I’ve ever seen at Thornhill.’
If it is the Holy Spirit we want to see, then let us pursue with everything we are and have, the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the demonstration of his love.
Amen.