Sermon for HCBC (5 July 2020). To listen use the audio player below or click here. Also available on your favorite podcast app (“Hunting Creek Baptist Church”).
Introduction
In the mid-1600s, American churches loosened church membership requirements. One person from the period described the effects: “Religion was in a very low state, [those professing Christianity] generally dead and lifeless, and the body of our people careless, carnal, and secure.”
In New England, a small church pastored by a man named Jonathan Edwards prayed for God to move. Edwards began a series preaching the gospel of justification by faith alone. Several people converted—one of whose life was so radically changed that everyone was talking about it. In the next six months God would bring revival with over 25% of the population converting. Edwards would later write: “The town seemed to be full of the presence of God.”
In his valuable book on revival in local churches, church historian Richard Lovelace describes Edwards’s understanding of revival. Revival is not mere religious excitement.
Rather it is an outpouring of the Holy Spirit which restores the people of God to normal spiritual life after a period of corporate [decline]. Periods of spiritual decline occur in history because the gravity of indwelling sin keeps pulling believers first into formal religion and then into open apostasy … Every major advance of the kingdom of God on earth is signaled and brought about by a general outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
I submit you this morning that we at HCBC need a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We need a renewed expectation of the work of the Holy Spirit.
The Text: Acts 1:1–8
Acts is volume two of Luke’s work. The opening verses tell us about Jesus’s time with his disciples after his resurrection. He spends forty days with them. And he gives them this instruction in v. 4: “Do not leave Jerusalem but wait on the promise of the Father which your heard from me.” What is the promise? Verse 5: “John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.” Something new is about to happen.
But they don’t understand what this means. Look at v. 6. “So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’” Notice they don’t understand what Jesus is about. They think it’s about restoring their country. Jesus says that’s not what it’s about.
Verse 7: “He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority.’” Look how their agenda and how their expectations confuse them. Jesus explains to them that what he is up to is not about their agenda. We need this word. We need to be reminded that Jesus isn’t about our agenda. I worry about this because many Christians in America seem to think that God exists to serve our national interests. This also affects churches when they grow apathetic about God’s Word, when they lose sight of the gospel. As a church, Jesus isn’t pleased when we hold onto what we want. He doesn’t consider us courageous. He considers us confused.
So he tells them what he’s about. Verse 8: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” There’s an alternative to our agenda. There is God’s agenda. “You will receive power.” Christianity is not a struggle in our own strength. It is empowered by God. “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” God will put his own Spirit in you to do something new. He will empower you. He will recreate you. He will bring renewal.
For what purpose? “You will be my witnesses.” The Spirit’s principle role is to point to Jesus. John 15:26: “When the helper whom I will send to you from the Father comes, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me.” John 16:14: “He will glorify me.” The Spirit empowers Christians to do this as well. “You will be my witnesses.” And notice the witness is an ever-expanding circle. “In Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
So in Acts 1:8, the Church is told to wait on the Holy Spirit, and when the Spirit comes they will be empowered.
Why We Are Skeptical
In our circles, talk about the Spirit gets neglected. Consider that popular funeral song “Go Rest High.” It’s a fine song, but have you ever noticed that the Spirit gets left out? “Go to heaven a shoutin’//Love for the Father and the Son.” There’s literally no love for the Spirit.
If we are honest, we are probably a little uncomfortable or skeptical with talk of the Spirit. Why? One answer is that we try to domesticate and manage God. It’s Acts 1:6 all over again. Lord, are you going to be about our agenda now? Talking about the Spirit means we aren’t in control. Jesus teaches Nicodemus this in John 3. He says, “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” We do not get to control the Spirit, and moreover, the Christian life, being born-again, is not something we initiate. Once we realize that, it changes everything. We are required to give up our agenda.
Then there’s just plain skepticism. We probably all have a story about some abuse of charismatic gifts that just seems downright weird: fits of so-called “holy laughter,” rolling on the floor, etc. No doubt some who say they rely on the Spirit jettison truth for some sort of crazed frenzy. They neglect God’s Word for personal experience.
Or, in our modern world we are just skeptical that God does anything. Science explains it all anyway doesn’t it? It’s 2020, why would we talk about spirits?
The Promise of the Spirit
But if we are going to embrace the Bible as God’s Word, we simply cannot ignore the Spirit. The Spirit is central to what Christ accomplishes on the cross.
Let me sketch the story of the Bible through seven points.
1. We are created in the image of God.
2. Humans rebel and the image is distorted. Separation between God and humans occurs.
3. Proximity to God requires cleansing and holiness.
4. But humans cannot remain holy. In fact, they continue to rebel.
5. God promises to do something new, something that will make them both holy and obedient.
6. He will close the gap by purifying them and putting his Spirit in them.
7. Jesus’s death is the perfect sacrifice which allows the Spirit to indwell humans.
Just consider a few promises in Scripture. From the OT, we have Jeremiah 31:31–34:
Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
God promises to do something new—specifically, a new covenant. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” “They shall all know me.” “I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
How will these things come to pass? The prophets clarify this. There’s Joel 2:28: “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh.” Ezekiel 36:26–27: “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”
So the prophets anticipate this time when God is going to do something new by pouring out his Spirit on his people. When does that happen? Fast forward to the NT. In Mark 1, we meet John the Baptizer. Here’s what he says, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
Now if we don’t know the promises of the OT, we might miss that. But we’ve just heard them. God is going to do something new. This new thing will cause his people to be purified and obedient. And he’s going to do that by putting his own Spirit into them.
What we are talking about is an empowerment from heaven. Listen to how Luke talks about this in 24:49. Jesus says to his disciples, “And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” The promise means the promise of the OT.
And this brings us back full circle to Acts 1. They remain in the city until the Spirit empowers them. That is precisely what happens in Acts 2:1–4. The Spirit descends upon them empowering them for witness. We’ll talk more about that specific empowerment in the upcoming weeks, but for now let’s just focus on the general promise we have in Christ.
The Work of Christ and the Gift of the Spirit
In Christ, we are made righteous and the Spirit of God comes to dwell in us. Every true Christian is indwelt by the Spirit. Romans 8:9: “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.”
So the indwelling Spirit empowers all believers in Christ. Do you believe it? Do you believe that this is what God has done for us?
NT scholar Gordon Fee was asked shortly before his death what the church needs. “We need a new renewal … We don’t run the program … The work of the Spirit in the life of the church.” That’s what we need.
We need a renewed expectation of the work of the Holy Spirit here at HCBC.
A cold belief in the existence of God is not evidence of Christianity. In fact, it is evidence of no Christianity. The visible evidence of the Spirit’s empowerment is the evidence of Christianity.
How dependent on the Spirit are we? How are we seeing the Spirit move? Are we expecting that to happen? This isn’t some sort of heebie-jeeby spirituality. This is simply biblical Christianity.
As one writer says, “The ultimate goal of all of life is to know and love God, make him known, and thereby glorify him. This goal is accomplished primarily through the work of the Holy Spirit. Reading the Bible, going to church, Christian fellowship, spiritual disciplines, service, and worship are merely playing at religion if all of these activities are not empowered, guided, and filled by the Spirit.”
Next Steps
It is true that this is the promise to us. But according to Scripture, we can walk out of step with the Spirit. We can live lives that are not dependent on the Spirit. So I am convinced that the exhortation to us here at HCBC is to “walk by the Spirit.” How do we do that?
Kenneth Boa offers some practical steps that I think are worth repeating.
1. We must admit our weakness. We are powerless against the world, the flesh, and the devil. We cannot please God apart from the Spirit. We must be ruthlessly honest with ourselves about this. We must be ruthlessly honest with each other about this. And we must be ruthlessly honest in prayer before God about this. We must embrace Christ.
2. We surrender our will. Not my will but yours. The opposite of living by the Spirit is living by the flesh (Gal 5:17). Living by the flesh is being self-willed. The self must be denied and mortified.
3. We confess our disobedience. We will never experience the power of the Spirit as long as we live under the delusion that we have not been disobedient. We need to learn to see the absolute horror and depth of our sin before a holy God. Then we confess that in prayer.
4. We ask God to sanctify our desires. We ask God to change our hearts. To empower us to walk by the Spirit.
5. We trust God’s promise to fill us. We believe that it really is so, and we lay claim to the secure promises in Christ. The beauty of the gospel is that Christ is entirely able, and the promises are entirely secure in his work. Such is the magnitude of what he has done.
Lovelace gives this practical advice:
We should make a deliberate effort at the outset of every day to recognize the person of the Holy Spirit, to move into the light concerning his presence in our consciousness and to open up our minds and to share all our thoughts and plans as we gaze by faith into the face of God. We should continue to walk throughout the day in a relationship of communication and communion with the Spirit mediated through our knowledge of the Word, relying upon every office of the Holy Spirit’s role as counselor mentioned in Scripture.
Every day, we need to make a deliberate effort to depend on the Spirit.
Conclusion
When I first started preaching, I spoke at a youth event. There was absolutely no dependence on the Spirit. It was an absolute flop. It was easily one of the worst experiences of my life.
For some bizarre reason, they asked me back the next year. There wasn’t a lot of competition. Fortunately, God had been working in amazing ways in my life over that year. Before the event, a couple of my friends and I went into the sanctuary to pray and ask God to move. I remember very little about that prayer except for one phrase we prayed. We prayed that “God’s Spirit would cause the walls to expand and pour out his Spirit on everyone present.”
I did very little that evening. But God answered our prayers. At the end of the night, the entire room was filled with God’s presence. We spent close to an hour praying with people as they responded to the gospel of Jesus.
In our practical world, we can forget how worthless our efforts are apart from the work of God’s Spirit. God save us from such a mistake. Jesus promises that God will give his Holy Spirit to those who ask (Luke 11:13). We need a renewed expectation of the work of the Holy Spirit.