Key Principle #3: SPIRIT-FILLED (part 1)
Acts 2:4
Ask yourself a painful
question…is your church spirit-filled? Want an even more painful question; are you Spirit-filled? I say it is a painful
question because it is to me and many of the churches I’ve seen. You may answer
that and say, yes, I am spirit-filled and so is my church. What does that mean
to you?
This is what it meant to
the early church and what it should mean to us today. A spirit-filled church is
a power-filled church and it is a witness-filled church. A spirit-filled Christian
is a power-filled Christian and a witness-filled Christian. It comes as a
result of waiting on the Promise of the Father, being obedient to Christ and
being saved and baptized by the Holy Spirit.
Reasons to be Spirit-filled
I’ve always had a difficult
time visualizing this scene. I’ve seen it dramatically depicted in movies, but
still, most difficult is how did a divided tongue of fire appear and how did it
rest on people. Have you ever wondered why a tongue?
Why not an ear? Suppose God
decided that the way to demonstrate the infilling of the Holy Spirit was to
have ears of fire rest on each person and then people could hear and understand
other languages or even hear the utterances of God. Or suppose God wanted to
manifest His infilling Holy Spirit with an eye of fire appearing on the people,
allowing them to see visions of heaven, of the future, of distant lands. I
think the answer of why He chose a tongue is as obvious as the nose on your
face (and I think we can all imagine why God did not choose a “nose of fire” to appear, but still He’s God and he
could have). He chose a tongue so as to show that we must go and tell others of
the wonderful works of God, and especially how great is His salvation.
In Genesis chapter 11, God
divided the tongues of people to scatter them abroad (11:8-9). When the people
had one language and one speech, they sought to make a tower to heaven, a pagan
tower to exalt themselves and to make a name for themselves. They wanted to
keep from being scattered and filling the earth, which was God’s first
commandment to humanity (Gen. 1:28) and repeated again to Noah and his family
(Gen. 9:1, 7).
The divided tongue brought
confusion and God is the one who divided the tongues and languages. Wait! Did
God author confusion? Did that contradict 1 Cor. 14:33, “For God is not the author of confusion but of peace, as in all the
churches of the saints.” No, humanity rejected God’s commandments and thus
was the cause of God coming in judgment to accomplish His will of filling the
earth. In Acts, the multitudes were confused, not because they didn’t
understand but because they did
understand, in their own language the wonderful works of God.
This particular type of
infilling was a unique, never before occurring and never to be again repeated
(at least not so far in human history) event. Pentecostal brothers and sisters
and other charismatic believers may indeed practice speaking in tongues, but
nothing like this. If it occurs at your church, please contact me because as I
mentioned I have a hard time visualizing this. People understood not only in
their language, but in their dialects.
Pentecost came seven weeks after
Passover. Passover was the first Jewish celebration of the year, marking the
deliverance of the children of Israel from the bondage of slavery in Egypt (see
Lev. 23:4). And of course, Passover was also the time in which Jesus died.
Seven is a holy number and
seven weeks of seven days is especially holy. Sometimes Pentecost is called the
Feast of Weeks, which is a celebration of the harvest of grain (Lev. 23:16).
Each celebration of the Jews foreshadows different events to be fulfilled in
the church, and Pentecost celebrates the first grain harvest for the Jews, but
for the church, it celebrates the first harvest of souls with the permanent
indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Notice that the indwelling
is permanent, but the infilling is not permanent. Christians must continually
and repeatedly seek the infilling of the Holy Spirit, and not being filled is
usually a result of not being obedient to God. An infilling of the Spirit
almost always accompanies a boldness to share the Word of God (see Acts 4:8, 31;
6:5 with 7:55; 5:18-19).
