We’re going to look at the Holy Spirit. This will be quite simple. You’ll have heard much of it before. But sometimes it’s good to revisit old truths. The whole topic is confused in many Christians’ minds. Everyone has a different analysis.
The old Pentecostal teaching was that the Holy Spirit came as a separate experience. You got yourself saved, discovered you weren’t doing too well, and tried to get baptised in the Holy Spirit. Your Christian life seemed to be dull and ineffective and so you tried to get baptised in the Holy Spirit.
I was brought up in a church where I was taught that the Holy Spirit had gone back to heaven after Pentecost. The charismatic renewal of the 20th century changed people’s ideas. There were errors and excesses, but it changed ideas.
So far we’ve seen this propulsion of the Gospel. We’ve seen God didn’t intend it to stay in Jerusalem, and in each stage as it went out, there is a description of what happens in the lives of new believers.
I want to try to make this personal to you.
John 1:12
That’s one of my favourite verses. With whatever background, whatever right or wrong beliefs ... to those who will receive Him, He gives the power to become the sons of God.
Jesus said to the disciples, “I don’t call you servants any more but friends.” But that wasn’t the final status for His church. He doesn’t want us to be servants or friends, but sons. He gives the power which translates you form one kingdom to another and brings you into new birth.
In our study we are seeing with group after group that He gave the power to become the sons of God, to be different, to have a relationship with God and call God their Father, and express things in how they lived and related to other people.
Some very important basic principles ...
Exegesis is where we draw the meaning out of the Word. Isogesis is the opposite, and it is dangerous – it’s where I bring my interpretation and try to make it fit. There is a cardinal principle – you move from the general to the specific rather than the other way round. The other way is to use it as a proof text, and that will get you into trouble.
The Bible records the whole concept of salvation, as the gift of the Holy Spirit being transmitted to the early church.
The following is a prophetic word made in Old Testament times, looking forward to what was going to happen in the New Testament.
Ezekiel 36:24-27
John 14:15-17
Luke 24:49
Acts 1:4-5
The Holy Spirit is the promise of the Father. I’d never really picked that up before. When we look at anything in the Bible, we look beyond the actual words and to the nature of God. And when we bring the nature of God into our understanding, things become clearer. I know the promise flows from the God of love, who doesn’t change. It’s a promise which will be kept.
I wish someone had told me that the Holy Spirit is the promise of the Father in the early years when I was trying Old Testament methods be a Christian, to get to the place where I could be baptised in the Holy Spirit. I was aware of the problems in my life, that I didn’t match up, that I was ineffective. Struggling for the baptism, and I didn’t know He was the promise of the Father. It gives a tremendous security.
This is a word which can’t be broken or altered, and it’s for everyone. There is no two-tier system, where some people have some elevated experience which makes them better Christians than others. It’s not conditional, not something which is the privilege of an exclusive group. I can rely on the promise because it comes form a divine source. It’s not something I engender, attain to by living a perfect Christian life. It’s something which comes from a divine source, and it’s a promise.
In each of the major passages through Acts which refer to the baptism, that concept of a promise is very clear.
The first one was pre-Pentecost – Acts 1:4. We’ve looked at that.
Acts 2:32-33
Jesus has received the promise of the Father and sent it to us.
Now post-Pentecost.
Acts 2:38-39
We’re going from Jerusalem out to Samaria. This is the time when Simon the Sorcerer tries to buy the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Acts 8:20
Now to the Gentiles.
Acts 10:44-45
He is the promise of the Father and comes as a gift to every believer.
Now how does the promise come?
Acts 1:5
An active verb requires you to do the doing. A passive is when something is done to you. So here we have both passive verbs. This isn’t something you do to yourself – God does it to you. You can’t do it yourself. What I find incredible is that no one in all the events through Acts was excluded. There weren’t 60 of the 120 at Pentecost who didn’t receive. The same happened at Caesarea. The same with the 12 at Ephesus. They were all filled. It was inclusive, non-conditional, a promise, and a promise which God fulfilled. And that promise brought a power. And the power for mission is a lot of the emphasis we see, because of the nature of the book and its concern with the Gospel going out.
We are to be witnesses to Him. it’s not a power to be consumed on ourselves, to grow us, to elevate us above others. It’s a power to be witnesses to Him.
Bruenner: “To be baptised in the spirit is to become Christ’s. The power of the Holy Spirit is His ability to join men to the risen Christ so they are able to represent Him. There is no higher calling.”
“We are the message.” What we express is what we live. We become the message. We have the power to represent Him, to know His mind and will, to speak as He speaks, to represent Him not just in terms of a pulpit or a specific message, but every minute in the way we live. We need a power beyond us to do that. But the promise is there. Some people say that was just for the apostles. Does it apply to other people?
Despite the fact that the disciples lived with Jesus, saw His compassion, His authority, His signs and wonders ... despite this, it was only when the Holy Spirit came that they were joined with Him in understanding what it was all about, to represent Him and reach out and let Him work through them to touch people’s lives, with the Word, with healing power. It was the Holy Spirit which represented them.
I want to pick out the word wind. It’s used only in one other place – also in Acts, where it means breath. It refers to the breath of life. Man was made and God breathed into him and he became living soul. There’s a life which has come. These people are being enlifed with God. We have it also in Psalms 150 – let everything that has breath praise the Lord. What happened on the Day of Pentecost was that that breath of life came inside people and changed them.
Bruenner: “Wherever the Holy Spirit comes to a man, He comes to fill, not only to affect, to dwell not simply to visit. The Holy Spirit is a person, and therefore where He is, He is fully.” When He comes He comes in fullness, without partiality. He comes to give us the power to become the sons of God and to live as sons of God in the world.
They all spoke in tongues. They didn’t seek it as an experience, but it came.
Acts 5:32
People have suggested this is evidence that you have to be special. You have to have obedience or you won’t get baptised. But we have a difference in tenses here. The obedience isn’t the cause of the coming – it’s the result. The Holy Spirit whom God gave (past) to those who are obeying (present) Him. It’s the empowerment of the Holy Spirit which leads to the obedience, not the other way round.
Acts 8:14-17
That scripture has been used to argue that the coming of the Holy Spirit is a separate experience from new birth. There is a delay factor. The Samaritans were the natural enemies of the Jews. They were rejected by the Jews. And here what is happening within this group of despised people is exactly the same as had happened with the Gentiles at Jerusalem.
I think we have to see the significance of this event. The Gospel is going out from the Jewish enclave and it’s going to the Samaritans. It seems God wanted the Apostles to know the same was happening here as at Jerusalem. They were believing and receiving the Holy Spirit.
If we’d had the Apostles at Jerusalem and then a separate group with no Apostolic involvement, you might have had differences springing up. So there was apostolic involvement, but it was the same experience. They didn’t receive the Holy Spirit to start with, but then the Apostles came and prayed for them to receive the Holy Spirit. Same experience over a longer period of time.
Acts 10:44-45
The Gentiles are brought in in the same way. And to show there was no difference, there was the gift of tongues. They praised God in exactly the same way as the Jews had done. This is clearly a time of conversion. Peter came for a specific purpose.
Acts 11:14
When Peter tells the whole story to the Apostles at Jerusalem, he stresses the fact that it was the same for the Gentiles as for the Jews.
Acts 11:18
What are we saying? We’ve looked at Pentecost, we’ve looked in Samaria, in Caesarea. And we’ve seen that this is a promise. The Holy Spirit comes as a promise, and He comes at new birth. This isn’t a separate experience I have to struggle to get – it comes as a free gift when I am born again. And it comes completely by faith, by grace.
Let’s return to Simon the Sorcerer.
Acts 8:17-19
His motivation was wrong. He wanted something He didn’t have. He didn’t realise this was a gift of grace. He was seeking outside of faith for something which was only God’s to give. He goes down as the father of heresy. The problem was he through he could earn it. He didn’t see it was a gift of faith.
We have a similar problem in the Jerusalem conference. This was bound to happen. It was part of the reason that God made sure Peter was there when the Gentiles first received the Holy Spirit. We have certain people thinking that circumcision is a prerequisite for being a Christian.
Acts 15:1
Faith isn’t enough. Something else has to be involved. This was a tremendous conflict which the early church had to resolve.
Acts 15:7-11
The gift is by grace through faith. God is showing there is only one basis for salvation. It’s a gift which comes in the power of the Holy Spirit – nothing to be added, no conditions to be fulfilled, no need for anyone to be excluded.
Acts 15:11
Thankfully the decision of the Jerusalem council was to set at naught the notions of the people who wanted elements of Judaism brought into Christianity – it was all of faith.
Acts 18:24-26
This was a man who appeared to have so much. But there was a limit to what he knew. He had the Bible knowledge, the facts, but he only had the baptism of John. I can look back in my own life to a place where I had a lot of Bible knowledge, to a place where I took positions of leadership in Christian Unions and helped in the church. But I only had the baptism of John. This man could only take people so far. He couldn’t bring them into the reality of new birth, because he didn’t know the Holy Spirit. He was conscientious and thorough, but one thing was lacking – he hadn’t come to a new birth experience himself through the power of the Holy Spirit.
In my own experience there were times when I had so much and yet had nothing, because no one told me that I needed the promise of the Father, that there was a supernatural life I could live. I believed the teaching, and the teaching was good up to a point. But the only thing which changes you on the inside is when you are born by the spirit of God and you become not a servant, not a child, but a son of God. In this book, this is what we see the Holy Spirit doing – bringing people into relationship with God.
We have a similar problem in the next chapter. This is interesting ...
Acts 19:1-6
Paul took them back to basics. He taught faith in Jesus Christ, and when that faith became a reality they were baptised in the Holy Spirit. He didn’t go on to high things, but to the fundamental. It’s at the beginning that every believer receives the Holy Spirit. We are baptised by one spirit into one body.
I can see that very much when I look back. I knew I had to repent. I knew I needed a relationship with God. I was baptised in water. But there was something missing. And when true faith in Jesus Christ came, I was baptised in the Holy Spirit. The two went together. No one in the whole of the New Testament do we have any teaching of a two stage Christian experience. In Acts, there was no two-tier experience – just one experience.
There’s no such thing as baptism in the Holy Spirit. It’s not ever expressed like that in the Bible. It talks about baptising in the Holy Spirit, but not baptism. And there is a difference. In many places, when you talk about baptism in the Holy Spirit it sounds like an event. Baptising produces a different concept. The same type of understanding which sees baptism as an event also talks about the conditions needed to underpin it. Some people require you to have many different experiences before you’re ready. You have to do and be so many things before you attain to where you ought to be.
Bruenner: The whole teaching of a second experience involves a denial of grace. It says the Gospel is ok for the beginning but not for the continuation of the Christian life ...
The Holy Spirit comes when we first believe. He baptises us into one body, empowers us. He is there when we are born from above, and He doesn’t go away. That’s not to say there aren’t times in our lives when we need to know again.
In Acts 4 after they had encountered the Sanhedrin, the disciples needed to know God was with them, and it was almost as though they were baptised.
People like Whitfield saw that the Holy Spirit empowers us form the moment of new birth. But they also saw this as an ongoing experience. It isn’t just one event, but a continuous one. You are baptised – it’s continuous.
Sometimes we try to get all our doctrine in neat boxes. We try to understand everything. But we know only in part. God is an awful lot bigger than our understanding and doctrine. Why did a God who in a sense dismissed the Moabites, include Ruth? He reaches out beyond our concepts in ways we don’t understand.
We can’t lose the Holy Spirit. He doesn’t come to visit, but to remain. He will be with you, dwell with you, and shall be in you.
Looking at the whole of this book, we see that whenever new birth came to a different group of people, the Holy Spirit is there, moves, empowers them, gifts them. He is the promise of the Father. At new birth we are all made to drink of one spirit.
1 Corinthians 12:13
Don’t we see that in this book? Regardless of people’s background, all received faith in the same way, with the coming of the Holy Spirit.
How do you know the Holy Spirit as come? How do you know you’ve been born?
He brings us into relationship with God. He gives us the assurance that we actually do belong to God.
Romans 8:15-17
This was the assurance which came to person after person in place after place as the Gospel moved forward with power, the whole thing orchestrated by the Holy Spirit. And it’s a promise – to you and to your children. At new birth we are sealed with that Holy Spirit.
Ephesians 1:12
The Holy Spirit is the seal, Jesus the sealer. The seal denoted possession and protection.
Acts 1:8
We tend to think of that in terms of preaching, sharing the Gospel, evangelism. But there are other areas, other ways in which we are witnesses to Him. We are witnesses in the values we have, the books we read, the TV programmes we watch ... in every single area of our lives.
I was struck when Peter referred to the verse about the children in Nehemiah (Nehemiah 13). The children could not speak the Jews’ language. These were children of people who were no longer witnesses to God, children who had paid a price, who didn’t know who or where they were. They didn’t know their relationship with God, didn’t know the law, couldn’t speak the language. Where there is mixture there is always confusion.
We are called to be witnesses to Him in our families, in how we speak, in what we expect of our children, how we expect them to behave, in the values in their lives. We are called to transmit the faith to our children and we need the power of the Holy Spirit to do it.
To as many as received Him gave He power to become the sons of God. He gives us the power and we need it. He gives us the power to live a which is different, which pleases Him. And that power is in the person of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the one who strengthens us, seals us, empowers us. He is the one who comes when we are born into the kingdom of God and He never leaves.
Called to be witnesses unto Him. We don’t think of ourselves as anything special. We aren’t Peter or Paul or John or Philip. But our calling is to be witnesses to Him.
There are times when you know that power is there, times you know when you’re facing something you can’t handle on your own. There are times when you know God gives you wisdom, and afterwards you ask yourself where it came from. The reason we can do this is that the Comforter never leaves. He strengthens, equips, empowers. He is what we need every minute of every day.
Peter Linnecar: This takes the pressure off. The gift of tongues is totally valid. But when we reach the gates of heaven, we shan’t be asked “Do you speak in tongues?” God knows what we need, and He equips us accordingly. There are some who value that gift particularly. Brilliant. But what came over tonight was the whole aspect of the promise of the Father, and the Holy Spirit 100%.
