Pentecost Sunday: The Spirit Lives Within
Us
John 14:25–26; John 16:7–15; Acts 2:1–4
1.
THE PROMISE GIVEN BY THE SON
For weeks now we
have been leading up to the day of Pentecost, hearing from Jesus that
something, someone was going to come, another Helper, Comforter of the same
kind that He Jesus was, Someone who would be even better than being with Jesus
Himself.
On the night before
His crucifixion, Jesus tells His disciples: “The Helper, the Holy Spirit…
will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to
you.”
This is a Messianic promise that God Himself will
dwell within His people.
In Luke 24:49,
Jesus said, “Behold, I send the Promise of My Father upon you; but
tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from on high.”
In Acts 1:4, Luke
wrote, And being assembled together with them, He commanded them
not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of
the Father, “which,” He said, “you have heard from Me; 5 for
John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit
not many days from now.”
Three times in
Hebrews, it says Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says: “Today, if you will
hear His voice, Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
In the day of trial in the wilderness,” Hebrews 3:7-8
And again in Heb. 3:15,
“Today, if you will hear His voice, Do not harden your hearts as in the
rebellion.”
And finally in
chapter 4 of Hebrews, God says, 1 Therefore, since a
promise remains of entering His rest, let us fear lest any of you
seem to have come short of it. 2 For indeed the
gospel was preached to us as well as to them; but the word which they heard did
not profit them, not being mixed with faith in those who heard it. 3 For
we who have believed do enter that rest, … 7 again
He designates a certain day, saying in David, “Today,” after such a
long time, as it has been said: “Today, if you will hear His voice, Do
not harden your hearts.”
THREE TIMES The
Bible said “TODAY,” , what day is today? Is today yesterday, yes
or no? Is today tomorrow? Yesterday, today was tomorrow. Tomorrow today will be
yesterday. But if today is today will you say AMEN?
THREE TIMES, The
Bible says, “IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE,”
Is this the word of
God? Can you hear me Reading the Word of God.
Then will you obey
what the Bible says today, if you
hear His VOICE DO NOT HARDEN YOUR HEARTS.
Read
Hebrews 4:1-2
Three times in
Hebrews God said do not harden your hearts
Three times in
John, chapters 14, 15, 16, Jesus promised the Holy Spirit.
John 14 — 16 And I will
pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with
you forever — 17 the Spirit of truth,
whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but
you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you. 18 I
will not leave you orphans; I will come to you... 26 But the
Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach
you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to
you.
John 15 — 26 “But when
the Helper comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of
truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify of Me.
John 16 — 13 However,
when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into
all truth; for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever
He hears He will speak; and He will tell you things to come. 14 He
will glorify Me, for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to
you.
The Apostle John wrote in 1 John 4:6, Will you turn with me there?
1 John 4:6 — We are of God.
He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. By this we
know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error .
How many of you
know there was a spirit of error? There are false prophets, false Christs, and
false Spirits of error. But look up a few verses earlier in 1 John 4 as he
talks about the false spirit .
1 Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the
spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out
into the world. 2 By this you know the Spirit of God:
Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, 3 and
every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is
not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which
you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world.
Did you catch that? The Spirit of the Antichrist was
already in the world during John’s day. People thought that Nero or Domitian
were the AntiChrist in personal form, but He couldn’t be because the Holy
Spirit was restraining the embodiment of the Spirit of the AntiChrist. THE
Antichrist will be the physical embodiment of the many spirits of AntiChrist. John
has mentioned the antiChrists in chapter 2, and he will again in his second
epistle in 2 John 1:7. But let’s keep reading in 1 John 4, verse 4.
4 You are of
God, little children, and have overcome them, (who? the false
spirits. How? Keep reading:) because He who is in you is greater
than he who is in the world. 5 They are of the world.
Therefore they speak as of the world, and the world hears them. 6 We
are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us.
By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
(play-Nay)
Play-Nay means
wandering, or error
1 Timothy 4 — 1 Now
the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the
faith, giving heed to deceiving (planos) spirits
and doctrines of demons, 2 speaking lies in hypocrisy,
having their own conscience seared with a hot iron, 3 forbidding
to marry, and commanding to abstain from foods which God created to
be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. 4 For
every creature of God is good, and nothing is to be refused if it is
received with thanksgiving; 5 for it is sanctified by the
word of God and prayer.
2 Timothy 3 — 1 But
know this, that in the last days perilous times will come. And Paul lists
25 different characteristics over the next 12 verses, ending in verse 13: 13 But
evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being
deceived.
And then Paul
gives a wonderful and marvelous antidote to the deception in verse 14
14 But you must continue in the things which you have
learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, 15 and
that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make
you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus. 16 All
Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable
for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, 17 that
the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.
The coming of the
Holy Spirit is the continuation of a story God began writing long before Acts 2
— a story woven through the feasts of Israel, the giving of the Law, the
resurrection of Jesus, and the birth of the church.
In the Jewish
calendar, Firstfruits and Pentecost (Shavuot) were connected by fifty days. Firstfruits
celebrated the first sheaf of the harvest.
Pentecost celebrated the full harvest. And in the Messianic story: Jesus rises
from the dead on the Firstfruits of the resurrection and the Spirit is poured
out on Pentecost, the firstfruits of the new
covenant, the New
Testament.
GracePointe 1 – Pentecost fulfills Jesus’ promise:
the Spirit of TRUTH in us, guarding us from every spirit of deception.
Who
saw that the USS Gerald R. Ford returned this week after 326 days at
sea? I thought about the families who waited nearly a year for reunion. It
reminded me of being at FBC Killeen near Fort Hood. More than half of the
50,000 soldiers were deployed. Connection was everything.
A
letter from overseas carried a soldier’s voice. A satellite call carried his
reassurance. A video chat carried his face. But none of those were the soldier
himself. They were promises pointing toward the day he would finally
walk off the plane and come home. And that’s what Jesus is saying in John 14-16.
Jesus
promised: “I will not leave you orphans… I will come to you.” Another Helper,
the Spirit of Truth would bring Jesus near, dwell in US, the first installment,
the seal of HIS presence we will one day know in Heaven.
Those letters, calls and Face Chats were real, but not like
the reunion, the Spirit is real, and
He is the foretaste of the reunion. Pentecost is the promise that will
become presence. The Spirit is the firstfruits of the New Covenant. The down
payment of glory. The guarantee that the One who ascended will return.
Secondly,
Pentecost is not just a promise. Pentecost is a promise fulfilled.
Pentecost is Christ in you the hope of all glory, Promise made, Promise kept.
2.
THE POWER GIVEN TO BELIEVERS
Turn to Acts 1:4–8
1 The
former account I made, O Theophilus, of all that Jesus began both to do and
teach, 2 until the day in which He was taken up, after He
through the Holy Spirit had given commandments to the apostles
whom He had chosen, 3 to whom He also presented Himself
alive after His suffering by many infallible proofs, being seen by them during
forty days and speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God.
4 And
being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from
Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, “which,” He
said, “you have heard from Me; 5 for John truly
baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many
days from now.” 6 Therefore, when they had come together,
they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to
Israel?” 7 And He said to them, “It is not for you to
know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority. 8 But
you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has
come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea
and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
Ten days before Pentecost,
Jesus didn’t tell His disciples to wait for a plan or to get ready with
a program, He told them to wait for a Person. The Powerful
Person of the Holy Spirit. They were not waiting on a strategy, not self-effort
or inner strength, but for the Spirit. And when He comes, He
brings God’s Strength, God’s SOURCE. God’s own SELF in
God’s own SPIRIT.
Jesus didn’t tell
them to wait for instructions!
He didn’t say wait for INSIGHTS. God didn’t want them to get more information, to clean up their act
with more SELF IMPROVEMENT. NO. He wanted them to get the spirit’s infilling,
indwelling, igniting, imparting, invigorating, illuminating,
interceding, inhabiting, inspiring, inscribing, increasing
God inside of you. “You will receive POWER when the Holy Spirit comes upon
you.” Pentecost is when the moment Defeat, Doubt, and DISCOURAGEMENT meets
divine DUNAMIS DYNAMIC, DYNOMIGHT POWER.
But there’s more. Jewish
tradition teaches that the Law was given on Mount Sinai on Pentecost. So, on
the same day the Law once written on stone, NOW the Spirit came to write God’s
life on hearts. Jewish tradition holds that the Law was given on Pentecost, or fifty
days after the Exodus.
At Sinai: At
Pentecost:
The mountain shook The upper Room was shaken
God descended in
fire The Spirit descended
in tongues of Fire
The laws were written
on stone The Law of the Spirit was
written in hearts
3,000 died
because of sin 3,000 were
saved because of salvation
Paul told the
Romans, “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has
made me free from the law of sin and death.” Rom. 8:2
Paul also told
them, “And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive
words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and
of power. 1 Cor. 2:4
Paul told the
Corinthians, “You are our epistle of Christ, written not with ink but by
the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of
flesh, that is, of the heart.” 2 Cor. 3:3
This was not a coincidence!
It’s a God-incidence. Hundreds of years before Pentecost,
Jeremiah wrote about what would one day happen when the Holy Spirit would replace
the Law of Moses. The moment when the promise
would bring the power and the
power would be the very presence
of God through His Spirit. The Letter of the Law which once sealed our fate
because we could not keep it, On Pentecost it becomes our life and the church
becomes the harvest. Let’s look at one more story.
Jeremiah 31 — 31 “Behold,
the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of
Judah— 32 not according to the covenant that I made with
their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to lead them
out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, though I was a husband
to them, says the LORD. 33 But this is the
covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the
LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I
will be their God, and they shall be My people. 34 No more
shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know
the LORD,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest
of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will
remember no more.”
GracePointe 2 The Old Covenant revealed God’s Demands.
The New Covenant releases God’s DUNAMIS POWER. The Law told us what to do BUT Pentecost
gives us the POWER to do it.
The other day, I
came to church with my laptop, with more technology in it than was in the
entire room that launched the Apollo moon missions. You remember that right?
July 20, 1969, an entire room of cigarette smoking, tie wearing, short-hair
cutted scientists and a computer called the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) which
ran at 1 MHz, and 64 KB of memory!
A basic modern
laptop runs at: 2–4 GHz (that’s 2,000 to 4,000 MHz) and has 8 to 32
GB of RAM (that’s millions of times more memory)
My laptop literally
as 1 to 3 million times more ability than the Apollo Guidance Computer. But
I had forgotten to charge my laptop the night before. And I had forgotten to
bring the charge cord.
The Spirit is the
charge that activates every believer’s calling. Our churches don’t need more
programs; WE need more OF THE POWER OF GOD.
The promise came with POWER…And the POWER became
the very PRESENCE of God.
3.
THE PRESENCE GIVEN TO THE CHURCH
Acts 2:1–7
1 When the Day
of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. 2 And
suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it
filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 Then there
appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each
of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit
and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. 5 And
there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men, from every nation under
heaven. 6 And when this sound occurred, the multitude came
together, and were confused, because everyone heard them speak in his own language. 7 Then
they were all amazed and marveled, saying to one another, “Look, are not all
these who speak Galileans? 8 And how is it
that we hear, each in our own language in which we were
born? …
…
38 Then Peter said to
them, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ
for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39
“For the promise is to you and to your children, and to all
who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call.” 40 And
with many other words he testified and exhorted them, saying, “Be saved from
this perverse generation.” 41 Then those who gladly received
his word were baptized; and that day about three thousand souls
were added to them.
The next chapter,
Peter preached again and 5,000 were added.
Peter again said, “Repent
therefore and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, so that times of
refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that He may
send Jesus Christ, who was preached to you before.”
GracePointe Church
I ask you this morning, why is it that churches today do not have the Pentecost
Promise, Power, and Presence of the Holy Spirit? Where is the fiery tongues
to be witnesses to the world.
John the Baptist
said someone was coming that was mightier than he was who would baptize in fire
and the Holy Spirit. Could it be that you were baptized with Water but do not
have the fiery Holy Spirit inside of you?
When was the last
time that the spark of the Spirit of Jesus ignited and illuminated your life.
You can fool me,
your parents, your kids, your wife, your husband, the pastor, and the church
but you cannot fool God. And you cannot fool yourself. And if you are fooling yourself, then you are
a fool.
The Bible says the
fool has said in his heart there is no God. And yet, you may not say it with
your mouth but in your heart you are saying it every moment of every day of
your life and one day your life will be over and you will say too late, “How
could I have been a fool?” When Christ says I NEVER KNEW YOU.
Did
you know God calls people a fool who are rich in this world but in poverty
toward God. Luke 12 says that Jesus 16 … spoke a parable to
them, saying: “The ground of a certain rich man yielded plentifully. 17 And
he thought within himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no room to
store my crops?’ 18 So he said, ‘I will do this: I will
pull down my barns and build greater, and there I will store all my crops and
my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have
many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be
merry.” ’ 20 But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your
soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be which you have
provided?’ 21 “So is he who lays up treasure for
himself, and is not rich toward God.”
It wasn’t the
riches that made him a fool. It was his spiritual poverty.
Today is today. / Can
you hear God’s Voice / Don’t harden your heart. Ask yourself, Am I
truly truly saved? The Bible says “The
spirit bears witness with our Spirit that we are children of God.”
Isn’t it fitting
that Pentecost marks a harvest? Pentecost was the Feast of the Harvest. On that
day, God harvested 3,000 souls. We saw three baptized today. Jesus, the
Firstfruits of the dead, rose from the grave. The Spirit, the firstfruits of
the new covenant pours out in our lives.
