The Holy Spirit: Still on the Job!

[Below, you'll find the message presented at both worship services with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church, Centerville, Ohio, and live stream video of both services. Today is the Day of Pentecost, the third great festival of the Church Year.]

Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost already was a festival on the Jewish calendar long before the events described in today’s second lesson. That’s why there were Jews, both those born Jews and converts, from every part of the known world gathered in Jerusalem. It was a day of obligation, if you will, which every Jew would have expected to participate in at least once in their lives.

Pentecost had its roots as an agricultural celebration, celebrating the spring harvest. But for God’s people, the Jews, it was also a festival celebrating the giving of God’s Law at Mount Sinai.

God’s people loved God’s Law. “Oh, how I love your law!,” Psalm 119 says,  “I meditate on it all day long. Your commands are always with me and make me wiser than my enemies.” (Psalm 119:97-98)

But for all the love God’s people had for the Law, they were no more successful at obeying it than you and I are. Paul, the Jewish Christian apostle, speaks not only for himself but also for God’s ancient people and for you and me (and the whole world) when he writes, “...in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.” (Romans 7:22-23) Whenever we resolve to love God with our whole being and love our neighbors as we love ourselves, we fail. Such love is foreign to our sinful nature. If we are to love God and love others as God commands us to do, that love must come from outside of ourselves.

The people gathered in Jerusalem had no idea what they were in for on that Pentecost Day! They were just there to be outwardly obedient to God’s Law.

The Jews gathered in Jerusalem didn’t know it even though nine hundred years before, God had foretold it through the prophet Joel. God said that when Jesus, the sinless Savior, paid for our sin with His life, the sun would “be turned to darkness and the moon to blood…” (Joel 2:31) (Sounds like Good Friday to me.) But at this, God would pour out His Holy Spirit in ways not seen since the Spirit moved over the waters to create the universe in Genesis. “Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions.” (Joel 2:28) This describes what happened to the fearful disciples of Jesus in that upper room on the first Christian Pentecost. The Holy Spirit was poured on them, just as He is poured on you and me in the waters of Holy Baptism.

The 120 disciples of Jesus also didn’t know what they were in for as they gathered in the upper room either. This was true even though Jesus had told them what was going to happen. Just before He was arrested, He had said, “...it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate [the Holy Spirit] will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” (John 16:7) And He also told them why this was so. “When [the Holy Spirit] comes, he’ll expose the error of the godless world’s view of sin, righteousness, and judgment: He’ll show them that their refusal to believe in me is their basic sin; that righteousness comes from above, where I am with the Father, out of their sight and control; that judgment takes place as the ruler of this godless world [the devil] is brought to trial and convicted.” (John 16:8-11, The Message]

Jesus had told the disciples He would send the Holy Spirit so that they could share the Gospel, the good news, with all the world. The Holy Spirit would give Christ’s Church the power to tell and to share the message that “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God’s wrath remains on them.” (John 3:36) By the power of the Holy Spirit, the Church would be given the ability to tell the world that, “In Jesus Christ, all your sins are forgiven and you are free to trust in that truth!”

Because of this Holy Spirit, Jesus says elsewhere, “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:12)

Think of that, friends! Jesus says that with Him back in heaven at the right hand of God, after He has sent His Church the Holy Spirit, His Church–you and I–will do greater things than He had done in an earthly ministry in which He proclaimed good news to the poor, freedom for the captives, sight for the blind, (Luke 4:18), and everlasting life for all who are turned from sin and trust in Him. (John 3:16; Mark 1:15)

On the first Christian Pentecost, we see this happen. The Holy Spirit descended on those 120 disciples, giving them the power to speak plainly about the mighty works of God, including the mightiest of all, when God the Son took on human life, died on the cross to set sinners free from death and condemnation, and rose again to open eternity to all who trust in Him.

The Jerusalem crowd is stunned! They hear the sound of a violent wind from heaven, then hear these Galieans speaking to them in their own native languages about Jesus. It’s bewildering!

But Peter–of all people, Peter, impulsive, foot-in-the-mouth, brave-talking-but-not-always-so-brave-living Peter–explains everything. (If that doesn’t prove the power of the Holy Spirit, nothing does!) Peter recalls what Joel had said and realized that, despite his imperfection and sin, the Holy Spirit had come to him and the other disciples so that they could proclaim new life for all who turn to Jesus.

By the power of the Spirit, Peter knew what he needed to say next: “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Acts 2:21)

Later, speaking in the passive voice about something only God could do to people who hear God’s Word coming from a preacher’s mouth, Peter would tell the crowd, “Be repented and baptized,” that is, “By, the Word of promise from God, be turned to Christ and receive new life in His name.” (Acts 2:38)

On that first Christian Pentecost, God used the disciples of Jesus speaking His Gospel Word to do greater things than Jesus had ever done: 3000 people were baptized into the Kingdom of God!

So, what about today? Is the Holy Spirit still open for business today?

Well, Christianity is the fastest growing religion by conversions in the world today. In places like Ethiopia and South Sudan, in underground churches in China and North Korea, and other places where people haven’t grown self-satisfied or self-righteous or jaded, as we see among people in North America and Europe, the Church is growing at a Pentecost Sunday-rate.

But it’s not just in places like these that the Holy Spirit is at work today. This past Thursday night, I was honored and happy to accompany Jim Lopez and Warren Mansfield to one of the monthly dinners of Whole Truth Ministries. Whole Truth helps those recovering from addictions to get new starts in life. If you ever want confirmation that the Holy Spirit is active and bringing people to new life in Christ, go to one of these dinners. The hunger of those people for Jesus is at least as big as their hunger for the great food Jim prepares each month.

And even here, even today, we know it is the Holy Spirit Who proclaims Jesus in God’s Word and in the Sacraments, the Holy Spirit Who claimed us in Holy Baptism and gives us the ability to call on the name of the Lord Jesus, Who saves us, Who gives us new and everlasting life with God!

Pentecost is still happening! The Holy Spirit is still on the march in our world, in our lives, and in the Church, in this church! May He give us the power and the confidence that He gave the first disciples to march in time with Him and share the good news of Jesus with a world still in desperate need of Him. Amen

[The painting is Pentecost by Titian (1488-1576)

More Power to Share

Five mornings a week, I try to begin my days with a Quiet Time in which God speaks to me through His Word and I ask Him to help me to respond. Here are what God seemed to be telling me today.

Look: “Yet Saul grew more and more powerful and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah.” (Acts 9:22, NIV)

Saul, once the persecutor of the Church, encountered the risen and ascended Jesus on the road to Damascus. He was heading to that city with papers from the temple authorities in Jerusalem authorizing him to move toward the excommunication of any his fellow Jews who confessed faith in Jesus as the Messiah/Christ. But rendered blind and helpless by his meeting with Jesus, Saul came to be a believer in Christ. Under the nurturing hand of Ananias and other church leaders in Damascus, Saul began receiving what amounted to catechetical training and, in no time, was preaching of the Gospel of new life through faith in Jesus Christ.

He meets with skepticism at the synagogue. “Isn’t he the man who raised havoc in Jerusalem among those who call on this name? And hasn’t he come here to take them as prisoners to the chief priests?” people ask (Acts 9:21). This reminds me of the skepticism Jesus was met with at His hometown synagogue in Nazareth in Luke 4:22: “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?” Skeptics always want to cut the things of God--whether it’s God enfleshed like Jesus or Saul, a former enemy of Christ who proclaims Christ, like Saul. People do this in order to elude the lordship of Jesus.

But in verse 22, we’re told that in the face of skepticism, “Saul grew more and more powerful.” This rendering is OK, but it hardly does justice to how Luke, in the Greek in which he wrote Acts, expresses things. A more literal rendering is: “Saul however, was all the more empowered.” Σαῦλος δὲ μᾶλλον ἐνεδυναμοῦτο. That last word, transliterated into English as enedunamouto, carries the meaning of was empowered. The danger of the NIV translation is that it makes it seem that as Paul spoke, he gained greater confidence in himself and became more powerful.

But that’s not what that verb implies at all! What Luke is saying is that Saul was being filled with power from an outside source. Saul had nothing to do with the power that was enabling him to prove that Jesus is the Messiah. That was and to this day, is the work of the Holy Spirit in believers willing to share Christ and His Gospel with others.

We see how the power of a Christian’s witness grows as they make themselves available to share Christ in two separate incidents recounted in the Gospel of John.

In John 4, Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman by a well outside the village of Sychar. After Jesus tells her everything about herself, she runs into the village and speaks to people she had earlier been avoiding. She starts simply by inviting these people who had been gossiping and ignoring her to come and see a man who told her everything about herself. She ends by broaching the possibility that Jesus may be Messiah.

In John 9, Jesus heals a man born blind. The religious authorities are in an uproar and ask the now-healed man to tell them what happened. As the veracity of his story is challenged and as his own fearful parents leave him to fend for himself, the blind man becomes increasingly bold in proclaiming Who the Man Who healed him must be.

In each instance, the two who dared to say a good word about Jesus in the face of skepticism and opposition, even threats in the case of the once-blind man, grew bolder in their proclamation. They became more powerful.

I think more is going on here than the growing certainty that comes to us when we repeatedly rehearse something. That verb, enedunamouto, tells me that the more we lean on the truth of God’s Word about Christ, the more we share it, the more the Holy Spirit empowers us to share that Gospel word.

In Acts 1, the risen Jesus, just before He ascends to heaven, tells the apostles to wait in Jerusalem for the promised Holy Spirit to to come to them before sharing the Gospel. They do, the Spirit descends at Pentecost, and they proclaim the Gospel. And the more they proclaim it, the more power--power to convince others, power to sustain the proclaimer, power to confound skeptics (Acts 9:23)--comes to those who proclaim or share the Gospel.

Listen: Here, Lord, I feel that You’re telling me not to give up on proclaiming the Gospel. I need to proclaim the Gospel, not myself. I need to do so boldly and lovingly and not give up on doing so. I need to encourage the Church to do the same thing. As we do, You will give our witness more power: more power to convict and convince (John 16:7-11), more clarity, more ability to confound those who are skeptical, critical, or even enemies of Your Gospel.

Respond: Today, I make myself available to share Your Gospel with others. Help me to do it with boldness and humility (Acts 4:29). In Jesus’ name.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Peace with God

[This was shared during worship with the people and friends of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

Luke 12:49-53
Among the hymns we sing at Christmas time each year is Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. The second line of the hymn, based on the song the angels sang on the night when God came to the world in the human flesh of Jesus, the Christ, says: “Peace on earth, and mercy mild.”

Jesus, the Prince of peace we confess in this hymn, brings God’s peace into this world.

The apostle Paul talks about the peace that Jesus brings in Romans 5:1. Paul writes: “Therefore, having been justified [that is, having been saved from sin and death by God’s grace] by faith [in Jesus], we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Ephesians 2:14, puts things more succinctly when it says of Jesus, “For He Himself is our peace...”

When we turn from sin and trust in Jesus Christ as our only Savior, God, and King, we have peace.

Knowing all of this may be why Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel lesson are so jarring to us. Take a look at the first few words that Jesus speaks in our lesson, Luke 12:49-53: “I came to send fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!”

Those hardly seem like the words of a “Prince of peace,” do they? More like the words of an arson! What is Jesus talking about?

Take a look, please, at another passage of Scripture, Acts 2:1-4. The words describe some of the scene on the Pentecost in Jerusalem fifty days after Jesus had been raised from the dead and ten days after He had ascended back to heaven. The disciples have been gathered for prayer, awaiting what God would do next and what God would have them do next. Then this:

When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. 

Now, when Jesus spoke the words that begin today’s Gospel lesson, He knew what lay ahead.

He knew what had to happen in order that you and I, here in Logan, Ohio in 2013, could hear and come to believe in the good news that God so loved the world He gave His only Son so that all who believe in Him will not perish--will not be lost to God forever--but have eternal life.

Jesus knew that before you and I could get the chance to hear, receive, and believe in that good news, He would first have to offer His own life on the cross as the perfect sacrifice for our sins.

He would have to rise from the dead in order to tear down the barriers of sin and everlasting death that otherwise will keep human beings from having peace and life with God.

He would have to send the Holy Spirit into the life of every believer so that every believer could make disciples by sharing the good news of new life for all who believe in Jesus.

In the first verse of our Gospel lesson, then, Jesus is saying that He came to the earth in order to unleash the fire of His Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit, the third Person of the one true God, is the fire that enlightens us about our sin, about our need of God’s grace in Christ, and about God’s love for us given to us on the cross.

After enlightening us, the Holy Spirit then fills the willing with the fire of saving faith in Jesus Christ.

The Holy Spirit is the fire Who, as we repent for sin and turn to Christ alone as our righteousness, burns away our sin, our excuses for sin, and all that is unholy in us.

And the Holy Spirit does this so that, one day, when we come face to face with Jesus, by God’s amazing grace, all that will remain of each of us is the child of God we were made to be. As we submit to Christ, the Holy Spirit unleashed by Christ works in us to make us worthy to stand in the presence of God the Father by the death and resurrection of God the Son, purged of sin and death, living once more in the innocence of Eden God will ultimately give to those who believe in Jesus.

“I can’t wait to get the ball rolling on Good Friday, and Easter, and Pentecost,” Jesus is saying as He sets His face for Jerusalem and all that He will accomplish there for our salvation.

Look now at verse 50. Jesus says: “But I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how distressed I am till it is accomplished.”

Jesus is here underscoring the fact that the fiery Holy Spirit will come to His followers because He has undergone His own baptism, the baptism of His death and resurrection.

You know, every time a person is baptized in the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Baptism of Jesus’ death on the cross and His resurrection from the tomb is reenacted. We’re submerged in the water and we emerge again made new by God’s grace.

Romans 6:4 says to baptized Christians: “...we were buried with [Christ] through baptism  into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we should walk in newness of life.”

By undergoing the baptism of death and rising from death, Jesus makes it possible for you and me to live.

Through His Baptism, Jesus makes it possible for us to drown our old sinful selves through daily repentance and sorrow for sin and to be raised again to live in His grace as we trust in Him alone as our only hope!

In verse 50 then, Jesus voices His desperate desire to accomplish His baptism so that we can be saved to live with God now and in eternity. If that doesn't make you feel good, nothing will make you feel good. God counts you worth all the suffering and dying that Jesus underwent in order to give you a life that only comes through Christ, and through faith in Christ and His grace and His Word, alone!

Then, in verse 51, we hit these words from Jesus:

“Do you suppose that I came to give peace on earth? I tell you, not at all, but rather division. For from now on five in one house will be divided: three against two, and two against three. Father will be divided against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law."

It’s jarring when Jesus says that He came to earth bring division.

Does this mean that the angels were lying when they sang of "peace on earth" on the night of Jesus’ birth?

Actually, when Jesus says that He came to bring division, He’s using a turn of phrase common in the language He used every day, Aramaic. His turn of phrase here is an Aramaism. He’s not saying that it’s His purpose to bring division. He’s saying that it’s inevitable that He will bring division.

And Jesus is right, isn't He?

Once Jesus shows up or when someone talks about Jesus, people will inevitably have an opinion about Him.

Either they will bow down to Him as God in human flesh--as God incarnate--or they won’t.

Either they will accept His claim to be the only Savior of the world--or they won’t.

And some who reject Jesus for Who He claims to be will do so with hostility, insults, persecution, even death.

Truly: When we confess that Jesus is Lord, we are set smack dab in the middle of a conflict with the same world that nailed Jesus to a cross two thousand years ago!

A wise Christian woman recently told me about a conflict that happened in her church a few years back. Someone had asked this woman, “How can Christians fight like that?” She said, “Because they’re Christians. And because some truths, the truths revealed by God in Scripture, are worth fighting for!"

For that woman, that meant that when the truth of the Gospel, the truth of the Bible, the truth of Jesus’ Lordship were at stake, Christians won’t attack, but they also won’t budge from their good confession. They will proclaim the grace of God given only in Jesus Christ. 

They will proclaim the truth about sin and the truth about the common human need for repentance and for the new life only Christ can give. 

And they will do that even if it makes others upset with them, father against son, mother against daughter, just as Jesus says. 

We might add that they'll do so even if it causes disagreement between church member and church member.

Those who believe in Jesus have peace with God. Yet not all people who hear the good news of new life for those who believe in Christ experience God's peace. They refuse to believe in Jesus. They refuse His peace.

So, peace isn’t yet a fully accomplished fact in this fallen, world. Our peace as believers in Jesus comes from the fact that one day, Jesus will return, closing the curtain on the life of this planet, judging the living and the dead--those who have turned from sin and trusted in Him as their God will live eternally with God, those who haven’t repented or trust in Christ will be condemned and separated from God.

Only then will the kingdom of God will be fully and finally perfected in what the book of Revelation calls “a new heaven and a new earth.” Only then will the peace Jesus came to bring be fully realized.

Until that time, even in the midst of the chaos, sin, and death of this world--in the midst of the chaos, sin, and death that roils inside each of us--and even in the face of opposition from all quarters, believers in Christ experience what the Bible calls a “peace that surpasses understanding,” a peace insusceptible to empirical proof, but a peace nonetheless experienced by anyone who knows that Jesus will never allow any who trust in Him to be taken from Him.

“Peace I leave with you,” Jesus once said to His first disciples--and went on: “My peace I give to you; not as the world gives do I give to you...”

We believe that Jesus Christ is the “Prince of peace,” the One Who has come to bring peace to us, even if violent, hateful people refuse His peace and even if others treat us with hostility, misunderstanding, or hatred. Even in these circumstances, even in the moment of death, we have peace with God because of Jesus.

We may find momentary peace and happiness in the sins this world offers. People may enjoy (and should enjoy) the beauties of this world.

But real peace, the peace of God, stays with us even when our lives are going crazy. The peace of God can belong to us even when, like Job, we endure multiple tragedies and our family and friends tell us that we must have done something wrong or that we’re naive to hold onto a God Who lets bad things happen to us in a bad world. The peace of God belongs to us even, when, like our sisters and brothers in Christ in places like Egypt, Ethiopia, and South Sudan, we face persecution, thuggery, and violence. Even then, we still have the peace of God as we hold on tightly to the God we know in Jesus Christ.

A sinful world today rejects Jesus and those who follow Him as much as a sinful world two thousand years ago once rejected Jesus and put Him on a cross. But whether being a Christian is in fashion as it once was or is out of fashion as it is in America today, doesn’t matter. Whether the world or unbelieving Christians--wolves in sheep’s clothing--will live in peace with God’s people who trust themselves, their sins, their pasts, their present, and their futures to Christ alone, the people who do trust in Christ alone will always have peace.

Life daily presents us with a stark choice between peace with the world or peace with God through Christ. Blessed, eternally blessed, are those who choose Christ’s peace. May that be our choice always! Amen