God wants you filled Acts 2:1-13
Happy Birthday!
It’s the churches Birthday, that’s a good way to think about Pentecost. The Birth of the church. How did this birth come about? It came about by the coming of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit filled the lives of the early believers and they were never the same again.
God wants you filled with the Holy Spirit.
It is GOD who wants you filled! I want us to concentrate on the truth of that statement.
When the Holy Spirit fills you it’s going to show!
Cartoons – someone would swallow an anvil and it would show protruding front and back!!
Holy Spirit will manifest himself with supernatural gifts. It’s like the Holy Spirit has lots and lots of presents to give us! There are lists of gifts in the NT and I don’t believe these lists are exhaustive. His character will be seen in us as the fruit of the Spirit will be seen in us. ‘Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Faithfulness, Gentleness, and Self Control.’ They are the result of the spirits constant work in us and should be in evidence in everyone of us, all of them!
It’s not my purpose to itemise the gifts this morning or to explore how far the fruits are in evidence in your life. I just want to encourage you to be filled with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit will then take care of fruit and the gifts; Holy Spirit will equip you. You will know real change.
You do know don’t you that it is God who wants you filled it is actually a command – Eph 5:18b ‘Be filled with the Spirit.’
Think of the Potential:
– Holy Spirit turned Peter into a strong preacher. A few weeks earlier Peter was hiding in the dark corners and swearing that he didn’t even know who Jesus was. Now after having been filled with the Holy Spirit, he preaches an impromptu sermon to thousands of people. And it was effective! 3000 responded. 14-41
– A movement of small communities began breaking out all over the place
– Holy Spirit inspired a new way of living characterised not by just a toleration of one another’s fault’s but a devotion to one another. Holy Spirit was at work amongst them in amazing and awesome demonstrations of power and drew from their hearts a continuous praise as every day more people gave their lives to Jesus 42-47
– Holy Spirit enabled those early believers to see just what was possible and allowed them to know what was on God’s heart to do, enabling Peter and John to see that though they couldn’t financially provide for a crippled beggar, they could offer him a brand new start and opportunity with new legs! 3:1-10
– Holy Spirit continued to urge them to take every opportunity to share Jesus and how much he had done for them persuading men and women that he could do the same for them. 11-26
– Holy Spirit enabled them to do this; even when they were up against it; even when they were thrown in prison for doing it; even when their lives were threatened 4:1-22. Holy Spirit enabled them in their weakness.
Does being filled with the Holy Spirit sound like a remedy for all? Well it does sound to me like a cure for the church in our day. Does it sound like the answer to the needs of believers today? Make no mistake it is. Does it sound like what your heart longs for? Then listen as He prompts you.
There is not one of you that this does not effect today. v4 tells us that all of them were filled, not a select few. Jesus sent His Holy Spirit amongst them because he wanted this to happen.
Eph 5:17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. v18b Be filled with the Spirit.
A little Greek lesson – present continuous tense –
be filled and go on being filled with the Spirit.
Therefore if you are not filled with the Spirit it is a sin! It’s that strong Jesus is desperate for us to know the transforming work of the Spirit. As you read through Acts you cannot help but be struck by the power of the Spirit. Just as God breathed life into mankind in the beginning of time (Gen 2:7), He also breathed life into his church in the beginning of a new age. The church is alive; she is organic. This is ‘The Church in the Power of the Spirit’. The church today, the people of God, followers of Jesus must be full of the Holy Spirit.
If you’ve been around the church long enough you will have heard talk of the Lordship of Jesus, that He wants to be Lord of your life. How is it done? Not by any amount of effort on our part. But by the power and control of the Holy Spirit. If you allow the Holy Spirit to do this He will establish Jesus as Lord of your lives. It is a submission to His will and activity.
How is he going to come into our lives then?
Let’s look at the startling facts of the text.
v2 Sound – blowing of a violent wind.
v3 Tongues of fire – fire that did not consume.
v4 filling resulted in the speaking in different tongues.
v6 A crowd came together – all of the above acted like a heavenly alarm clock – Have you ever tried to attract a crowd? Hard work.
v11 In tongues they declared the wonders of God – languages that they had never learnt. I’m not sure they understood themselves what they were saying, but the result seemed pretty good, it blessed them, it pleased God and it was a witness of the power of God to those in the crowd.
v14 Peter is supernaturally empowered to proclaim what God had done in Christ.
v41 3000 came to know Jesus as their Lord and Saviour that day.
When people wonder they are not far from Worship
The verse I wrote on Christmas cards this year was – ‘His name is Wonderful’ Wonder-Full
These events are wonderful, they are extra-ordinary. They cannot be classed within the natural order of things. They are therefore Super-natural. We worship a Supernatural God. Of course he works through His own ordered creation, but also supernaturally. When the Holy Spirit has control over your life you become a supernatural person. This is a promise John 14:12 “I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father”.
It ought not to surprise us then that something supernatural happens when we are filled with the Holy Spirit. When the same Holy Spirit that filled Jesus’ life fills our lives it’s got to make a difference hasn’t it? It will have an effect.
When the Holy Spirit is at work in your life it should show. – In all sorts of ways. With accompanying Signs and Wonders
Of course there are many times in the life of the church when the Holy Spirit works softly and secretly, quietly transforming people’s lives and situations without any big noise or fuss. But let’s not pretend that that is always happening in the quiet and lets not fall into the trap of the ‘either / or’. It has to be a ‘both / and’.
In the description of the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2), Luke uses the language of a heavy tropical rainstorm. It is a picture of the power of the Spirit flooding their beings. There were physical manifestations. They heard a gale (v2) which was not a real gale, but it resembled one. It was the mighty invisible power for the ‘ruach’ of God; the same word as we have seen for wind, breath and spirit in the Old Testament. Sometimes, when people are filled, they shake like a leaf in the wind. Others find themselves breathing deeply as if almost physically breathing in the Spirit.
They also saw something that resembled fire (v3). Physical heat sometimes accompanies the filling of the Spirit and people experience it in their hands or some other part of their bodies. One person described a feeling of ‘glowing all over’. Another said she experienced ‘liquid heat’. Still another described ‘burning in my arms when I was not hot’. Fire perhaps symbolises the power, passion and purity which the Spirit of God brings to our lives.
They were accused of being drunk v13. I’m not absolutely sure what that meant, but I do know there have been times when the Holy Spirit has been so much upon me I have found it difficult to stand! I know that scripture is clear that when we know the presence of the Lord it is accompanied by fullness of Joy!!! – Laughter!
For others, the experience of the Spirit may be an overwhelming experience of the love of God. Paul prays for the Christians at Ephesus that they might have ‘power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ’ (Eph 3:18). The love of Christ is wide enough to reach every person in the world. It reaches across every continent to people of every race, colour, tribe and background. It is long enough to last throughout a lifetime and into eternity. It is deep enough to reach us however far we have fallen. It is high enough to lift us into the heavenly places. We see this love supremely in the cross of Christ. We know Christ’s love for us because he was willing to die for us. Paul prayed that we would ‘grasp’ the extent of this love.
People should be amazed at what goes on amongst God’s people. The local church is the place where the Holy Spirit should be manifest. Where healing takes place, where lives are transformed, where people become more than they ever would have been without Him.
It is clear that the will of God is that we should be filled with the Spirit. That means if I only ask God to fill me with His Holy Spirit He will.
1 John 5:15 “And if we know that he hears us–whatever we ask–we know that we have what we asked of him.”
Being filled with the Holy Spirit is not just for us!!!
It’s not the thrill of the fill!
Rather it is power to glorify Jesus and to make Jesus known
In this week that many of us have joined in the prayer initiative ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ we mind ourselves the world is not as it should be but we long to see God’s Kingdom break into the here and now.
‘stop dreaming of making a difference in the world and start dreaming of making the world different’ (leonard sweet)
The answer is in Jesus and in more and more people turning to Jesus and having their lives transformed to become more like Jesus and this is the work of the Holy Spirit.
After Peter spoke about Jesus the people responded What shall we do
Repent and be baptised. 3,000 DID THAT DAY!!!
One thing that has troubled me so much is the time and energy that goes into making the sacred hour on Sunday more attractive to people who already know Jesus, rather than equipping people who know Jesus to take the church to the world.
In order for the church to fulfil its mission to make Jesus known we need a fresh wave of creativity and imagination.
If we say Yes to this, the Holy Spirit will be only to delighted to respond and fill us and inspire us and equip us and empower us.
Come Holy Spirit
Song – Spirit of the Living God fall afresh on me