THE COMING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

“Without the Holy Spirit, Christian discipleship would be inconceivable, even impossible. There can be no life without the life-giver, no understanding without the Spirit of truth, no fellowship without the unity of the Spirit, no Christlikeness of character apart from his fruit, and no effective witness without his power. As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.

Luke is well aware of this. Of the four evangelists it is he who lays the heaviest emphasis on the Spirit. Near the beginning of each part of his two-volume work he demonstrates the indispensability of the Holy Spirit’s enabling. Just as the Holy Spirit descended upon Jesus when John baptized him, so that he entered his public ministry ‘full of the Holy Spirit’, ‘led by the Spirit’, ‘in the power of the Spirit’ and ‘anointed’ by the Spirit (Lk.3:21-22; 4:1,14,18), so now the same Spirit cam upon the disciples of Jesus to equip them for their mission in the world (Acts 1:5,8; 2:33). In the early chapters of the Acts Luke refers to the promise, the gift, the baptism, the power and the fullness of the Spirit in the experience of God’s people. The terms are many and interchangeable; the reality is one, and there is no substitute for it.

Yet this reality is multi-faceted, and there are at least four ways in which we may think of the Day of Pentecost. First, it was the final act of the saving ministry of Jesus before the Parousia. He who was born into our humanity, lived our life, died for our sins, rose from the dead and ascended in heaven, now sent his Spirit to his people to constitute them his body and to work out in them what he had won for them. In this sense the Day of Pentecost is unrepeatable. Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Day, Ascension Day and Whit-Sunday are annual celebrations, but the birth, death, resurrection, ascension and Spirit-gift they commemorate happened once and for all. Secondly, Pentecost brought to the apostles the equipment they needed for their special role. Christ had appointed them to be his primary and authoritative witnesses, and had promised them the reminding and teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit (John 14-16). Pentecost was the fulfilment of that promise. Thirdly, Pentecost was the inauguration of the new era of the Spirit. Although his coming was a unique and unrepeatable historical event, all the people of God can now always and everywhere benefit from his ministry. Although he equipped the apostles to be the primary witnesses, he also equips us to be secondary witnesses. Although the inspiration of the Spirit was given to the apostles alone, the fullness of the Spirit is for us all. Fourthly, Pentecost has been called – and rightly – the first ‘revival’, using this word to denote one of those altogether unusual visitations of God, in which the whole community becomes vividly aware of his immediate, overpowering presence. It may be, therefore, that not only the physical phenomena (Acts 2:2ff.), but the deep conviction of sin (Acts 2:37), the 3,000 conversions (Acts 2:41) and the widespread sense of awe (Acts 2:43) were signs of ‘revival’. We must be careful, however, not to use this possibility as an excuse to power our expectations, or to relegate to the category of the exceptional what God may intend to be the church’s normal experience. The wind and fire were abnormal, and probably the languages too; the new life and joy, fellowship and worship, freedom, boldness and power were not.”

(John Stott, The Message of Acts, pp.60,61, Inter-Varsity Press, 1990)