Bonus Content from Acts 2:1-4

 
 

Acts 2:1-4 Bonus Content

Here are a few notes I had to cut from the June 5th sermon.

Two Clarifications on Acts 2:1

  1. We have the one they were waiting on! If you’ve put your faith in Jesus, you do already have the Holy Spirit! Jesus’ Acts 1 blanket mandate to “wait” no longer applies to us. His Spirit lives in us, and so sometimes (even often!) charging ahead in faith is entirely appropriate, even if we don’t have all the details figured out!

  2. There is a place for planning and strategy. If we had time, we’d peek ahead to the rest of Acts 2, where Peter’s sermon is a great example of this.

    When he preaches, it’s clearly not a sermon he has pre-written – it just wells up within him as the Spirit stirs him up to speak. YET he is only able to preach this way because it’s abundantly clear he has spent time in the Word: chewing on it, internalizing it, reflecting on how it all points to Jesus. So when the Holy Spirit does spontaneously move within Him, the Spirit makes use of that preparatory work.

    I think we should expect it to be the same for us. The analogy you’ve often heard me use is that even though we can’t coerce or control or force the wind of God’s Spirit to blow, we want to set the sails so that if the wind of God’s Spirit should choose to blow, we’re ready to catch that wind and go with it! In other words, it would be a mistake to act as though we didn’t need the wind of the Spirit, as though we could make the boat go on our own! But it would also be a mistake to be content to lay around on the deck next to a pile of tattered sails!

    No, we do the work of faithfully setting the sails in preparation while we wait.

 

More on the Charismatic/Reformed Distinction

I favorably cited this quote from Paul Washer (I’ve slightly tweaked the language):

“Charismatics are sometimes guilty of believing what God has not promised. The reformed are sometimes guilty of failing to believe what He has promised.”

The call, then, was to seek to avoid both of those errors.

On the one side, let’s not get silly by believing that:

  • all cancer will be cured if we just believe God will cure it – he never promised that!

  • or that we can claim certain prosperity next year if we give a certain amount of our income this year – God never promised that!

  • or that we can all speak in tongues if we have the Holy Spirit – God never promised that!

BUT. Woe to us if we don’t believe what He has promised, namely:

  • that God’s Spirit CAN and still DOES miraculously heal – He promised it, and I’ve seen it!

  • or that God’s Spirit CAN and still DOES work through members of the congregation sharing words with one another in a church gathering – He promised it, and I’ve seen it!

  • or that God’s Spirit CAN and still DOES turn hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, including some of the people most stubbornly opposed to faith in Christ – He promised it, and I’ve seen it!