The Spirit and Mission | Acts 1-2
Brian Hedges | June 8, 2025
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture to the book of Acts. We’re going to be in Acts 1-2.
As I already mentioned, today is Pentecost Sunday. Pentecost, of course, was a Jewish festival that was held fifty days after Passover. It’s also known as the Feast of Weeks because it took place seven weeks after the Passover. Pentecost was a time of covenant renewal for the people of God, for Israel, as they looked back to their redemption from slavery in Egypt; and it was also associated with the covenant that God made with Israel on Mount Sinai, when God himself, in a mighty theophany, revealed himself to Moses and the Israelites, he gave them the law, he made the covenant.
It was during this feast, the feast of Pentecost, seven weeks after the crucifixion of Jesus and ten days after Jesus ascended, that the Spirit was given to the church in a new way. Pentecost marks one of the most important days in the Christian calendar, because it is one of the most important events in the history of God’s saving work.
Theologian Graham Cole says, “If there is one event in the scriptural narrative that more than any other is associated with the Holy Spirit, it is Pentecost.”
We could even say that Pentecost is a hinge event. It’s one of those turning-point events. In some ways, everything in the Scriptures either leads up to Pentecost or flows out of Pentecost. And in a very real sense today, all of us, regardless of our denominational background, are Pentecostal Christians, because we are people of the Spirit, people who belong to the age of the Spirit, the new covenant work that God has done that is marked by the gift of the Spirit to the church.
Today is the concluding message in our series “The Spirit and His Work.” Because today is also Mission Sunday, with our focus on the unreached peoples of the world, we want to focus on the Spirit and mission, or the Spirit’s relationship to the mission of the church.
To do that, we’re going to go to Acts 1-2. I’m going to read the nine verses of chapter 1, and then we’ll read just a couple of sections from Acts 2. Acts 1:1-9.
“In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. He presented himself alive to them after his suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God.
“And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, ‘you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.’
“So when they had come together, they asked him, ‘Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ He said to them, ‘It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. 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.’ And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”
Drop down to Acts 2:1-4.
“When the day of Pentecost arrived [this is ten days later], they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
Then what follows is a sermon from Peter, a sermon to the very people in Jerusalem who are responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. Peter preaches the crucifixion and the resurrection of Christ. He explains what has just taken place as the Spirit has come upon the disciples. At the conclusion of the sermon, we read this in Acts 2:37-41:
“Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brothers, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.’ And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, ‘Save yourselves from this crooked generation.’ So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.”
This is God’s word.
I want to ask three questions this morning:
1. What Is the Church’s Mission?
2. What Is the Spirit’s Role in Mission?
3. How Should We Respond?
1. What Is the Church’s Mission?
Question number one: what is the church’s mission? I think it’s important that we just kind of focus for a few minutes on the missional language that is found not only here in Acts 1 but also in the other Great Commission passages that we have in the Gospels. Jesus, four different times, gave a commission to his disciples, a commission that has abiding relevance for the church. We have those in the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, John, and Acts—and if you count the extended ending of Mark 16 (which many scholars don’t believe is in the original manuscript), that would be five.
But I want to look at four of these, and I want you to see the distinct language that’s used in each of these that kind of give us a full picture of the mission of the church. In John 20:21, Jesus said, “As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you,” and that gives us the pattern for mission. Jesus, the Son of God, was sent by his Father with a mission to come into the world. We read about that in John 3 this morning. He came to give his life for us so that those who believe in him would not perish but have eternal life. But Jesus says to his disciples, “As the Father sent me, I am now sending you into the world.” We are sent following the same pattern that God had in sending his Son.
The most familiar of these Great Commission passages, of course, is Matthew 28:19-20. It gives the command, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” So the commission there is to make disciples, and to make disciples in all the nations.
Then you have something about the content of the message we’re to preach in Luke 24:47: “repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations.”
Then finally, in Acts 1, Jesus says, “You shall be my witnesses.”
Now, we could sum all of that together and answer this first question like this: the mission of the church is to share Jesus in word and deed, both locally and globally. That’s just summarizing what the Scriptures teach in these passages and in many other passages. The mission, broadly considered, includes both the words that we say as we share the gospel with others, but also the deeds that validate and verify those words as we, through our good works, give glory to God and shine our light in the world—think of Matthew 5:16. But we are called to do this. This is the mission of the church.
In fact, we have it as one of our core values. It’s on one of the banners hanging on the wall. Some of you have never seen this banner even though you’ve been in here a dozen times, but it’s right over there. “Sharing Jesus in word and deed.” Many of you have forgotten that it was even there, but it’s one of the core values of our church. We are called to mission, and we embody that mission as we share Christ in word and deed with others. But it is to share Jesus in word indeed both locally and globally.
I want to focus for just a few minutes on the global aspect of this mission, and then we’ll talk more about the local aspect in our personal lives. Today is the International Day for Unreached Peoples. We’ve already heard something this morning about what an unreached people group is. It’s important for us to grasp this, because it’s really right at the forefront of what God has called the church to do in the world. It is to reach those who have never heard the gospel.
What is an unreached people group? Let me give you a definition that Marv Newell, our own deacon of missions, the chairman of our global outreach team, the definition that he gives in his book, A Third of Us. Marv has written a lot of books; he has a new book that’s out there in the lobby. You should take a look at it. But this was a book from a few years ago, a very helpful little book, A Third of Us. Marv says,
“Unreached people have little or no significant contact with three life-giving essentials that are common to followers of Christ. These essentials can be summed up as the three nos: no Bible, no church, and no known believers.”
That’s what an unreached people group is. An unreached people group is a group of people who do not have a Bible in their own language, they do not have an established church in their own language, and they do not know believers; or it’s a group that has a few believers, but they are so marginal compared to the whole population that the people group is essentially unreached.
Here is the amazing thing. In our world today, with the population of something like 8.1 billion people, 41 percent of those people are in unreached people groups. That means more than a third of humanity has no access to the gospel. They have no Bible in their language, they have no established church in their community, and they do not even know another Christian. They have no opportunity to hear about the good news of Jesus Christ…as opposed to us, who live in a very reached culture where you can buy a Bible at Barnes & Noble, where there are hundreds of churches in our area. We’re in a reached culture; but thousands—in fact, millions—of individuals in thousands of people groups have no access to the gospel whatsoever. So it’s important for us to grasp this, to carry this burden. This is part of the calling of the church, to take the gospel, to reach those who have never heard.
This is what the church is here for. I heard someone say years ago, “God leaves the church on earth to reach the lost.”
You say, “Well, what about worship? Aren’t we called to worship?”
Yes, of course we are. Worship is central, worship is important. But listen, we can worship God better in heaven, and we will worship God with more purity and more devotion and more energy and more joy and more reverence and fear and awe and all those things. We’ll worship God more fully in heaven than we ever will here. But the one thing we can’t do in heaven that we can do here is we can reach those who have not heard about Jesus. And the church is called to do that. This is our mission, to share Jesus in word and deed, both locally and globally.
That suggests a couple of applications.
(1) First of all, to make disciples, you must be a disciple. You must be a disciple if you’re to be a disciple-maker. So let me ask you this morning, are you a learner or an apprentice of Jesus? That’s what a disciple is. A disciple is not someone who just says, “Yeah, I’m a Christian; I go to church on Sunday.” A disciple is someone who is learning Jesus, who is following Jesus, who views themselves as an apprentice to Jesus while Jesus is the master. A disciple is someone who is learning how to live life by following in Jesus’ footsteps. Does that describe you? Are you a disciple of Jesus? Are you following him?
(2) And the second application is we need to understand that the Lord’s strategy is to start local and move global.
You see this in Acts 1:8, which in some ways is like an outline of the whole book. Acts 1:8 says, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” That happens in Acts 2 on the day of Pentecost. “And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria.” That’s Acts 2-12. “And you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.” That’s Acts 13-28. That’s essentially what happens in the book of Acts.
Notice here that there is this movement from local, eventually to global, the ends of the earth.
You can see this in a chart. This is adapted from Ralph Winter, a missiologist, also from Marv Newell and his book A Third of Us. You can see these three movements. Ralph Winter called these three kinds of evangelism. E1 evangelism is evangelism in one’s own culture. So for the original disciples, that was Jerusalem.
E2 evangelism is evangelism or mission in a neighboring culture, Judea and Samaria. The hated Samaritans were half breeds, half Jew, and hated by many Jewish people. They just avoided the Samaritans; but part of the calling was to go, to cross that culture, and to take the gospel to Samaria as Jesus, their Lord had done. Remember the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman in John 4? That’s E2 evangelism, where we have to cross a culture to some degree.
But then E3 evangelism is evangelism to the ends of the earth. This is global missions. This is evangelism to the unreached. This is where we cross a culture, where someone learns a new language, where someone plants a church where there never has been a church before, takes the gospel where it’s never been heard before, takes the Bible where it’s never been heard before. This is E3 evangelism. This is kind of the cutting edge, the front lines of what we’re called to do.
So the Lord’s strategy is to start local, move global. That suggests another application question.
(3) Let me ask you this morning, what are your local opportunities? Do you have a global mindset?
What are your local opportunities? I want you to do something for me right now. If you’re taking notes, I want you to write something in your notes. If you’re not taking notes, maybe write it in the margin of your Bible or take out your phone and put it in the notes app on your phone. I want you to think of at least one person in your life right now that you know who does not know Jesus Christ—someone who’s not a believer, someone who’s not a follower of Christ—one person that you know. Alright? Seriously, I want everybody to do it. Take it out, write it down. I want you to write down a name in your notes or on your phone.
This could be a coworker, it could be a family member, it could be a neighbor. It could be a fellow student at school, it could be the barista who prepares your coffee at Starbucks. I don’t know who it is—it’s somebody.
All of us, I think if we’re honest, this isn’t hard to think of. Probably six or seven or eight names come into our mind. Maybe there’s a dozen. But I want you to write down at least one. You take everybody in this room—maybe there’s a hundred, hundred twenty people in this room this morning, plus everybody that was in the first service. That means that there should be about two hundred fifty to three hundred names that are being written down or that we are thinking of this morning in church. That is our mission field. That’s your mission field.
We come to mission Sunday and you might think, “You know, I guess I’m kind of interested in mission Sunday, but I’m not really called to be a missionary.” Oh yes you are. Every single one of us who are called to follow Jesus are called to be missionaries; missionaries in our own culture, and then some of us are called to be missionaries in another culture. So think about your mission field right now and look for these local opportunities.
Then also, ask if you have a global mindset. A global mindset means a mindset that is concerned about the needs of the world. Now, not every single one of us is called to leave the comforts of our own community, of our own family, to learn another language, to raise support, to go to another country. We’re not all called to do this, but the whole church is called to care about it, to be involved in it, to support it, to pray for it, to give towards it, to encourage those who do go. Because once again, that’s the front line. That’s the cutting edge. That is what we are called to do as the church.
The mission of the church is to share Jesus in word and deed, both locally and globally, and that involves every single one of us. If this morning you are not a missionary, you are part of the mission field. We’re all called to be on the mission.
But this is not something we can do on our own. We need the Spirit.
2. What Is the Spirit’s Role in Mission?
So question number two: what is the Spirit’s role in mission? Once again, I want you to look at the Great Commission passages.
John 20: “‘As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.’ And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”
Sometimes this is looked at as the Pentecost in the Gospel of John. Probably, instead, we should view this as a symbolic act of Jesus with the twelve disciples that was demonstrating in a very dramatic way what the gift of the Spirit would entail, as Jesus himself would give the Spirit to the church. Then that is fulfilled on the day of Pentecost, when the Spirit is poured out on that whole believing community.
Luke 24. Jesus says, “Behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you.” Who’s the promise of the Father? What’s the promise of the Father? It’s very clear in Scripture: the promise of the Father is the Holy Spirit. Jesus says, “I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”
So this promise of the Father, the promise of the Spirit, is somehow connected to power, power from above.
Jesus says this explicitly in Acts 1:8: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses.”
So we can answer the question like this: the Spirit is the one who empowers us to share Jesus in word and deed. We see this demonstrated on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2. I want us to think about Acts 2 for just a minute. What does it teach us?
I’m not going to read this again, but in Acts 2:1-4 you have the day of Pentecost, you have the Spirit coming down, right? And what is really clear, when you read what happens, and then you read Peter’s explanation of what happened in the message that follows, is that this is a significant event. This is a world-changing event in the history of God’s saving purposes.
I want you to see several things here about the meaning of Pentecost.
(1) First of all, you have the promise and the gift of the Spirit. Jesus said that this is the promise of the Father. Jesus said, “You are going to be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” Jesus said, “Wait in Jerusalem until you are clothed with power from on high and the promise of the Father comes.” And he says, “You will receive power when the Spirit comes upon you.” All of that is fulfilled right here on the day of Pentecost. This is the gift of the Spirit to the church.
(2) The Spirit comes with signs, and so you have this strange phenomena in Acts 2. You have wind and fire and tongues.
The wind, of course, in Scripture represents the power of God, the pervasive power and the presence of God. We saw this even this morning in our assurance of pardon. Brad read this from John 3, where Jesus compares the Spirit to the wind, the mysterious wind. You don’t know where it comes from or where it goes. So is everyone who’s born of the Spirit of God. You go to the Old Testament—think of Ezekiel in the valley of dry bones and this wind that comes. The Spirit of God comes and brings these dry bones to life, this magnificent vision of restoration that is empowered by the Spirit.
So this is the pervasive power and presence of the Spirit, the wind. But it’s also the purifying presence of the Spirit, because there’s also fire. Fire in Scripture also represents the holy presence of God. Think of Moses at the burning bush. Think of the pillar of fire that led the children of Israel through the wilderness by night. Think of Elijah calling down fire from heaven on Mount Carmel. The fire of God—it shows us the holiness of God’s Spirit.
Then you have the gift of tongues. Now, the gift of tongues, of course, is controversial in the church. That’s not what this sermon is about. I’ve talked about that in the past; you can find it online. But let me just say this about the gift of tongues. It seems to me, and I think a strong argument can be built, to say that the gift of tongues in Acts 2 is the gift of speaking in other human languages. That becomes pretty clear when you read through the passage and you have all of these pilgrims in Jerusalem who are from other parts of the world, and they hear the gospel in their own language. They hear the gospel, and they hear it in their own language because of this gift of tongues.
So this gift has an evangelistic, a missional intention. It is so that people will hear about the mighty works of God—namely the gospel—the mighty works of God in and through Jesus Christ crucified and risen. That’s the reason why this gift is given. And this gift is a sign of the shift that has happened in redemptive history. This is the beginning of the last days; it’s the beginning of the age of the Spirit, as God’s people are united from many different languages. This gift of tongues authenticates the Spirit's work.
We know this because Peter quotes from the prophet Joel, who says, “In the last days, I will pour my Spirit out upon you.” We’ll talk more about that in a couple of weeks as we look at the prophet Joel together. But this is a significant thing that happens.
In many ways, it’s showing us the reversal of the curse that goes all the way back to the book of Genesis with the tower of Babel. Now God’s people are being reunited in the Spirit.
Listen to David Peterson, his commentary on Acts, speaking about the day of Pentecost. He says,
“The divisions in humanity expressed through language differences (Genesis 11) were overcome. These divisions are presented in Genesis as the judgment of God. What happened on the day of Pentecost suggests that God’s curse has been removed. God was expressing his ultimate intention to unite people from every tribe and language and people and nation under the rule of his Son, providing reconciliation through him and access to the Father by one Spirit.”
You can see how that then ties into the whole theme of missions, as we see here on the day of Pentecost the global church in Jerusalem as people are hearing the gospel in their own language because of the gift of tongues.
(3) So we have the gift and promise of the Spirit, the signs of the Spirit, and then I want you to think for just a minute about the power of the Spirit that was demonstrated on this day of Pentecost. You see it at the end of Acts 2, which I read a few minutes ago. When these people hear the gospel preached, when they find themselves confronted with their responsibility for the crucifixion of Christ, the text says they are “cut to the heart.” They’re cut to the heart; that means that they were convicted in their conscience. They’re cut to the heart, and they cry out, “What must we do?”
So Peter tells them, “Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” They respond, and three thousand people are added to the church.
You know what that is? That is a demonstration of the power of God through the Spirit working in and through the proclamation of the gospel.
Throughout church history, and especially the last several hundred years, it’s exactly things like this that happen on a broad scale that are associated with revival, when we think about the history of revival.
I love some of the stories of the Great Awakening. One of my favorites is the story of this Connecticut farmer named Nathan Cole. He was almost illiterate, but he found out that George Whitefield was to be preaching nearby. It was several miles away, but he heard Whitefield was going to be preaching. He could see a cloud of dust on the horizon that was caused by all of the people and the horses that were headed to this open field where Whitefield would be preaching. So Nathan Cole saddles up a horse and he with some of his family literally runs—one of them is on the horse and Nathan Cole is running beside the horse in order to get to this field several miles away where Whitefield would preach. They didn’t want to miss it. And Nathan Cole left behind a journal describing what had taken place. He said, “My hearing him preach gave me a heart wound. By God’s blessing, my old foundation was broken up, and I saw that my righteousness would not save me.”
He had a heart wound. He was cut to the heart, and he saw that he couldn’t save himself, that he needed Christ as Savior; and he became a Christian.
Another example of this power is Martyn Lloyd-Jones. I’ve talked about him recently because I’ve been reading books about Lloyd-Jones in the last month. Lloyd-Jones, while he longed for revival all his life, he never really saw the kind of revival that he wanted. But he did experience some measure of this in his first pastorate in Wales. He went there, he was preaching the gospel, and numbers of people came to Christ over the thirteen or so years that he was there, including his wife, Bethan. She thought she was a Christian, but she was really a nominal Christian. She was really just Christian in name only. It was when she began to hear the proclamation of the gospel that she recognized that she had never really been born again. She’d never really become a Christian. So under her own husband’s ministry, she came to Christ.
There’s also a story about a woman who was a medium. She was a spiritist. She was involved in the occult. She was doing seances and things like this. And out of curiosity, she comes to this church where she hears Lloyd-Jones preach. She’s convicted of her sin, she’s brought to faith in Christ. She becomes a member of the church, and as she reflected on what happened, this is what she said. She said, “When I came into the church, I was conscious of power. I was conscious of the same kind of spiritual power that I was used to dealing with, but with this one difference: this was clean power.”
The power of the Spirit—there’s something supernatural that happens when the Spirit of God indwells the church and works through the proclamation of the gospel. The Spirit is the one who empowers us to share Jesus in word and deed.
Brothers and sisters, that means we need to ask ourselves some questions. If the power and fullness of the Spirit are essential to living a missional life, we need to ask, am I living in this fullness? Are you living in this fullness? Do we know anything of this kind of power? Do we have the boldness to share Jesus with others in word and deed, when it’s difficult, when people are indifferent, when we’re even met with hostility? Most of us don’t. We’re lacking in that boldness. We find it difficult to share our faith. Why? We need power. We need power that will change something, that will get ahold of the motivations of our hearts and give us a desire to do this that’s stronger than the desire to stay comfortable.
Are we seeing people come to Christ? Not just transfers from other churches, but do we see people come out of the world, out of addiction, out of bondage, out of sin, and they’re saved and they’re brought into the kingdom of God? If not, we don’t know anything of this fullness, any of this power, we need to ask, what is obstructing the flow of the Spirit in our lives? It may be sin in our hearts that we’ve not dealt with. It may be indifference; we just don’t care that much. That’s also a sin. We just don’t care that people are lost and they’re going to hell. We don’t have enough compassion, enough love to share Christ with them.
Maybe it’s prayerlessness. Maybe we think we can do this on our own. We’re sufficient. We run a well-oiled machine around here. We can do worship, we can do programs, we can do outreach. We can do this on our own. We’re not praying like we should for the Spirit’s power.
All of these are reasons why perhaps we don’t see the measure of power and of blessing that we desire.
3. How Should We Respond?
So, how should we respond? I want to back into it by asking a question and then give a threefold call.
The question is this: Is Pentecost for today? I mean, we’re reading about something that happened in the Bible. Is this something that’s for us today? How do we relate to this? How do we think of this?
I think the answer is, first of all, that Pentecost was unique and unrepeatable in the history of God’s saving purposes. It was a unique, unrepeatable event in the same way that the crucifixion and the resurrection and the ascension were unique and unrepeatable events. In fact, it’s so significant in God’s purposes that the Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck said that after the creation and the incarnation, the outpouring of the Spirit is the third great work of God. Maybe that’s an overstatement, but that's quite a statement, showing the priority that he placed on Pentecost. The third great work of God.
I don’t think that Pentecost itself can be repeated. God did something on the day of Pentecost that was unique, unrepeatable, that would never happen again: he gave Spirit as the Spirit of Christ to the church, to abide in and with the church until the end of the age.
But each one of us needs to personally appropriate the reality of Pentecost by receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit. So there is a sense in which Pentecost is for us, in the same way that the cross is for us, the resurrection is for us. But you have to appropriate what Jesus did on the cross. Jesus died on the cross and he paid for our sins. He said, “It is finished.” He accomplished redemption. But your sins—personal sin—your sins are not forgiven until you confess faith in Jesus Christ. Until you trust in Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, you are not forgiven, you are not pardoned, you are not justified. You have to apply that to yourself.
Jesus rose in power from the dead, but you are not raised to walk in newness of life until you are born of the Spirit and united to Christ by faith.
The Holy Spirit was given to the church—Pentecost has come—but until you and I receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and live in the fullness of the Spirit, we don’t fully enter into the blessing of Pentecost.
You might think of the relationship between Pentecost and later, ongoing fillings of the Spirit—think of it like the analogy of a marriage. In any marriage, there is the wedding day. It’s a special day. It is that day when the bride and groom make their commitments to one another. They say their vows before God and man. They make a covenant. They enter into a new legal status, a new relationship that abides then from that day, right? There’s this new relationship.
But if that is the only day that they say “I love you” to one another, if that’s the only day that they kiss and embrace; if there’s nothing that follows the wedding day that characterizes this couple as a couple in love with one another, devoted to one another, close to one another, united to one another, something’s terribly missing. Fifty years later, a couple still needs to be saying, “I love you.”
In the same way in our lives, there is that initial receiving of the Holy Spirit when we are born again, when we are baptized into the body of Christ by God’s Spirit. But we need repeated, ongoing fillings of the Spirit, renewing that work in our lives. That is what personal renewal is. It is what revival in the church is. So yes, in a very real sense Pentecost is for us.
That leads to this final threefold call to the church today.
(1) Number one, pray for the Spirit. We need to pray for the Spirit.
You might say, “Well, if I’m a Christian, I already have a Spirit. Why do I need to pray for the Spirit?” Because this is what the Bible teaches us to do. Jesus in Luke 11 taught his disciples to pray for the Holy Spirit. You look in the book of Acts and, even after the day of Pentecost in Acts 2, you see the church praying in Acts 4. Then Peter is filled with the Spirit; they have boldness to once again proclaim the gospel.
Look in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. In the first fourteen verses he tells them that “you have been blessed with every spiritual blessing in Jesus Christ.” You have everything in Jesus Christ. You have been sealed with the Spirit; you have the Spirit as the guarantee of your redemption.
But then, in the second half of Ephesians 1, he starts praying, and he prays that they would be given the Spirit of wisdom and revelation so that they would know God more deeply, that they would know the hope to which he has called them, that they would know the riches of his inheritance in the saints, that they would know the exceeding great power of God working in them, the same power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead.
Go to Ephesians 3; read the prayer. He prays that they would be strengthened by the Spirit so that Christ would dwell their hearts by faith, so that they would know, comprehend the love of God, that they would know how high and how deep, how long, how wide is the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, and that they would be filled with all the fullness of God. He’s praying this for believers! There’s something more for us. There’s always more that we can receive from God as we place ourselves before him and ask him for the fullness of the Spirit.
One more story, this one from the century. Duncan Campbell was a great preacher involved in the Hebrides islands revival, off the coast of Scotland. One day, he was to be the keynote speaker of a conference in England, and he felt this irresistible compulsion to leave the conference and instead fly to Glasgow and then take a ferry to a very specific island off the coast of Scotland. He didn’t know why he felt that he must do this, but he felt this compulsion to do it. He did it. He got there at the end of the day.
He found a little boy there, shortly after he left the ferry. He said, “Young man, are there any pastors here?”
The boy said, “There are no pastors, but there are two churches and there’s an elder.”
He said, “Take me to the elder.”
He came to the elder, and the elder said, “Duncan Campbell, I’ve been expecting you.” They’d had zero communication with each other. But, “Mr. Campbell, I’ve been expecting you.”
Campbell found out later that the man had spent the entire day in his barn praying, and his wife overheard the elder praying, saying, “God, I don’t know where he is; you do. Please get him here.” He had arranged for there to be services that night. He said, “Mr. Campbell, I’ve been expecting you. There are services tonight; you’re to preach at 9 P.M.”
He preached in the service. Nothing really happened, but after the service, as the people in this little village were emerging from the church, scattering all over the village, Campbell and this elder were standing on the porch of the church, they were watching the people as they were scattering across the town, and one by one they started dropping to their knees in conviction and prayer, crying out to God. And the elder said, “Mr. Campbell, remove your hat. The Lord has arrived.”
Friends, that’s power. That's the power of the Holy Spirit. Now listen, the Spirit also works sometimes in very slow, imperceptible ways, and we cherish that, we value that. But we can also pray that God would do this great and mighty work, demonstrating his power in a way that can only be from God. We need to pray for the Spirit.
(2) Number two, be filled with the Spirit. I don’t have time to go through them, but there are a number of passages in the Scripture that use this language of being filled with the Spirit. You find it over and over again in the book of Acts after the day of Pentecost. It says they’re filled with the Spirit in Acts 2, but then over and over again—Acts 4, 9, 13—they are filled with the Spirit, and especially in moments of a proclamation or witness or sharing the gospel.
Then, of course, Paul gives us the command in Ephesians 5:18: “Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit,” in the present tense. It means to be continuously filled with the Spirit.
(3) Pray for the Spirit; be filled with the Spirit; and then, finally, in the Spirit’s power boldly share Jesus with others in word and deed, both locally and globally.
You can start with the name that you wrote down in your notes twenty minutes ago. This is our mission field. Who are the people we need to share Jesus Christ with? Start praying for opportunity. Start looking for opportunity. Start praying for that person. Pray that the Spirit would work to draw that person to Christ and look for an opportunity to share and pray for the Spirit’s courage and strength and power and the words to share the gospel, and pray for the work of God around the world.
Why should we do this? Why devote a whole Sunday to this? This is where I want to end. The deepest motive for mission, the reason why this is important, is because of God’s glory. The deepest motive for mission is a passion for the Lord Jesus Christ to be glorified. John Piper has famously said it: “Missions exist because worship doesn’t.” The reason we do missions is so that people will worship God, and the reason we want God to be worshiped is because he’s the greatest being in the universe. The name of Jesus Christ is to be lifted up. He’s worthy of this.
If we don’t feel his worthiness, we need to start there. We’ve lost sight of the most beautiful, glorious thing in the universe. We’ve lost sight of the glory of our God, of our Savior. We need to be recaptured again with the wonder and the joy of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord, so that it’s our passion to share him with others.
So I want us to focus in the last part of our service on the worthiness, the glory of Jesus Christ. He is worthy of our lives, of our obedience, of our worship, and of our sharing this message with others. Let’s be captured by that. Let’s worship him, and then share the gospel boldly, in the power of the Spirit, with others. Let’s pray.
Our gracious, merciful God, we thank you this morning for the gift of your Holy Spirit, that this is the promise given through the prophets of old, fulfilled ten days after your Son ascended to the heavens, when the Spirit was poured out in great measure on the church. Lord, we believe that this event was significant in your redemptive purposes in the world and that it has an abiding significance for us today on this Pentecost Sunday.
So we pray, both ingratitude that you have given the gift to the church and we pray, Lord, imploring you to give us a fresh filling of the Spirit in our hearts as individuals and a fresh filling of the Spirit for us as a church, as a community. We pray, Lord, for the power of your Spirit to rest upon us, so that when we share the gospel with others we would see that your Spirit is at work, and we would know the same conviction that the apostle Paul had when he said “our gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with much conviction.”
We pray, Lord, that we would see your Spirit work in such a way that many who do not currently know Christ would be brought into the kingdom of God through the collective witness of this church. We pray, Lord, that you would convict us this morning of any sins that we need to turn from, convict us of our indifference, our lack of love and compassion for those who are lost and going to hell. Give us a fresh burden for them and convict us, especially, for whatever degree to which we have lost our love and our passion for Jesus Christ and a desire for him to be glorified. We pray that in these moments you would rekindle that desire within our hearts.
We pray that you would work in the remainder of our service as we come to the Lord’s table together, as we sing, as we confess our faith together—that you would work in all of these elements of worship to kindle in our hearts a fire of love for Jesus Christ that would compel us to share the gospel with others. So Lord, work in us what is pleasing in your sight. Hear our prayers and work by your Spirit. We pray in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
