Well, as I mentioned at the beginning last evening, our first perspective on the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost was from the fourteenth chapter of John's Gospel, the perspective of Jesus himself on the day of Pentecost. And now we are turning to the writing of Luke and to the actual event of the day of Pentecost. Perhaps it is helpful for us to join these two perspectives together, the Johannine perspective and the Lukan perspective, to underscore that they very much belong together as part and parcel of a glorious diamond that the New Testament presents to us as it shows us the significance of the coming of the Holy Spirit from a variety of perspectives. Right at the climax of John's gospel, which in some ways has a prologue and then an epilogue, and the climax of course comes in John 20 with the resurrection of Christ and the appearance of Christ. And then in His appearance to the apostles, that rather strange incident in which we are told that Jesus breathed on the apostles and said to them, receive the Holy Spirit. Whoever sins you forgive, they will be forgiven. Liberal scholars, of course, have suggested this is John's account of Pentecost, the so-called Johannine Pentecost. But it is in fact nothing of the kind, but it is profoundly related to Pentecost. In a sense, it is the Pentecost parallel. to the way in which the washing of the disciples' feet in John chapter 13 is the parabolic drama of all that Christ has done in His incarnation in our flesh and His death for us on the cross. He presents to the apostles the acted drama and tells them that they do not now understand what he was doing, but afterwards they would understand. And so, this whole picture of the incarnation and then the exaltation of Jesus Christ for our salvation is spread before the apostles in pictorial fashion. Before our Lord Jesus, Christ enters into the full reality of that which He has expressed in parabolic and dramatic form. And now, as we see throughout the Gospels, Jesus again gives a physical expression to a deep reality, which will soon take place in the experience of the apostles. He breathes on them the Holy Spirit, just as in reality He will breathe on them the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. The root and fruit of that will be that they will receive the Holy Spirit from the Lord Jesus Christ. The fruit of it will be that through the proclamation of the gospel they will open the kingdom of It is as though, to use other language, Jesus is enabling them with the gift of the Holy Spirit, particularly in the case of Simon Peter, to take the keys of the kingdom out of his pocket and to fling open the door. And so Luke tells us on the day when this symbolism became a reality, people are ushered into the kingdom of God with their sins forgiven. from all the nations of the world." So John 20 is the dramatic parable of Acts chapter 2, and in Acts chapter 2 that parable becomes a reality. And this is significant for, I think, a very obvious reason that in the subculture in which we live in American evangelicalism, as Christians have viewed the day of Pentecost, their focus of attention has been largely on the gifts that were poured out on that day upon the apostles. And, of course, there is an entire library of literature and a history of controversy about the significance of these tongues. Or, on the other hand, there has been an enormous focus of attention on what does this mean in my personal life, even to the extent of Christians saying, how can I experience my personal Pentecost? I think it is important for us to step back from all that as we read the second chapter of Acts and recognize that this is an event that is sui generis, as they say. It belongs to a category all of its own. It is as much a once and for all event in God's purposes in history as the creation and the incarnation and Gethsemane and Calvary. Yes, Christians may speak of their personal Gethsemane and their personal Calvary and their personal Pentecost, but they know not that of which they speak. because these are moments, not in my personal experience, but dramatic epoch-making moments in the experience of the Redeemer. They belong to a category of one. He alone tastes the reality of Gethsemane precisely in order that we do not need to taste it. He alone experiences Calvary precisely so that we do not need to go through it. And we need to see the day of Pentecost as the next staging post and the outworking of God's purposes. Yes, a reality in which by God's grace we will be caught up. But from the New Testament point of view, the final staging post in all of this will be the return of Jesus Christ. And we as Christians do not look forward to a personal return in that sense, but only to being caught up in the wake and implications and benedictions of Christ's personal return. So we are looking here at an event which, whatever its implications for the church and for us as individuals may be, is absolutely a once and for all event. And the reason for that is that Pentecost is fundamentally not an event about the Holy Spirit. Pentecost is fundamentally an event about the Lord Jesus Christ. The whole purpose of the coming of the Holy Spirit here, as Peter so marvelously makes clear in his exposition of its significance, where he says little about the Holy Spirit and much about the Lord Jesus Christ. is that when we say Pentecost, we are saying something about our Lord Jesus Christ. We miss that, and we miss the entire focus of Acts chapter 2. Let me link this again to John's Gospel. This is the event of which Jesus had spoken, you remember, on the last day of the Feast of Booths. that day when the great symbolism of the people drawing water from the Pool of Siloam and bringing it in a festal gathering to the altar and pouring the water out around the altar and singing as they did or chanting as they did, words like the Old Testament promise that they would draw well they would draw water out of the wells of salvation. And on the last day of the feast, Jesus, who does not lift up His voice in the streets, lifts up His voice in the Jerusalem temple and summons people to come to Him, those who are thirsty and to drink And there is, as you know, a real exegetical challenge in interpreting what Jesus says there and simply to state what my own view is. I believe that what Jesus is saying is this, let him who is thirsty come to me and drink, he who believes in me. for out of me there will flow these rivers of water." Because John's commentary is then to say he was speaking about the Holy Spirit who those who believed would receive. But he says literally, the Spirit was not yet Of course, our translations rightly to help us will say, the Spirit was not yet given. But John's language is much more dramatic than that. Of course, he knows the Spirit was. He has written about the Spirit in earlier chapters in the gospel. He knows his Old Testament Scriptures, but he is saying there is a sense in which the Spirit was not in the capacity that He would be, and the reason is because Jesus has not yet been glorified. And that is a key principle to understand the significance of the day of Pentecost. For John, already as he listens to the Lord Jesus and reflects on this years later, he understands that Jesus is giving the exegetical key to the significance of the day of Pentecost. And so he remembers, as he records the Lord's words in the farewell discourse, how the Lord had said, I am going to the Father, and I will ask the Father, and He will give you another counselor to be with you forever. And so, as Peter interprets the significance of Pentecost, as he answers the question in verse 12 of chapter 2, what does this mean? Here is the answer that he provides. Chapter 2, verse 32, this Jesus God raised up, and of that we are all witnesses. being therefore," I think this is probably the least noticed text in Acts chapter 2, being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit. He has now poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing. So if you say to Simon Peter, what does this mean? What do these events mean, these phenomena mean? Peter's answer is, they're telling us something about the Lord Jesus. They are telling us about a transaction in which the Lord Jesus has been involved with His heavenly Father in a world that is altogether invisible to us. These events are filling in the gap between His ascension and this very day, and they are explaining to us something about Jesus. And it is these things about Jesus. that I want us to try and focus on in the time that is available to us. Now to me one of the remarkable things about Acts chapter 2 is the transformation in Simon Peter. Not actually so much his transformation from being cowardly to being courageous, but the transformation in his understanding of the gospel. Those forty days with Jesus. that seminar that kept continuing as Jesus kept coming and going between his resurrection and ascension. I guess it focused on what he had begun to teach the two on the Emmaus Road and the apostles as they gathered together on the first Easter day. And he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and he showed them how all of the Scriptures were related to him, and their hearts burned within them. Forty days of heartburn with the sheer marvels of the Old Testament Scriptures being unraveled. Theological seminaries would pay millions of dollars to have a video of that seminar, don't you think? so many of the books that have been written would be placed aside. And what is so wonderful here is Simon Peter gets it. The truth of the matter is he does not get everything, does he? But he gets the Old Testament in large measure, and he gets the significance of the day of Pentecost. Now there is too much here to explore in the time that we have today, so let me suggest to you the five points of Pentecost. Okay? Those five points are simply masquerading really as 25 points reduced to five points. And so if you're sitting beside somebody who needs help, make sure your own oxygen mask is on first and then you can pay attention to your neighbor's moleskin textbook as he takes notes of what I'm about to say. Here is the answer to the question, Peter's answer to the question, what does this mean? First of all, the Scriptures concerning Christ are being fulfilled. The Scriptures concerning Christ are being fulfilled. Because behind this story there lies a whole gamut of Old Testament Scriptures that just as other Scriptures flow together in the meaning of the cross, so there are Scriptures that flow together to interpret the meaning of Pentecost. I think there is little doubt that the symbolism with which the whole event opens is an indication to us that this is so. Jesus has gone to the Father. He has received the promise from the Father. He is pouring out the Holy Spirit, and when the Holy Spirit comes, He comes in this dramatic form. that is clearly intended to be reminiscent of the drama of the opening chapter of the Bible. that just as God is about to bring about the first creation in its orderliness and beauty through the Word that He speaks, but there is a preamble to that in the way in which the mighty Spirit or wind of God is brooding over the darkness and the waters. as it were, holding all things together in order that the Word may be spoken into the darkness and the emptiness and bring forth light and orderliness. So, no less in the beginning of the new creation, the Spirit of God comes in this symbolism of the rushing mighty wind as a preamble to the Lord Jesus Christ, the living, crucified, risen, ascended, reigning Word of God, speaking out, breathing out the new creation in Him, so that Paul is able to say, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation, or more literally, if any in Christ, new creation. And this is what is happening here. This isn't to be thought of as some small isolated individual event, although yes, thank God, we participate in its significance and implications. But this is the beginning of a new creation altogether. And in that new creation there emerges a reworking of the old creation and a restoring of its disorder. Because here too there is the wonderful way in which the pattern of man's sin in the early chapters of Genesis that made him stretch up to God in the Tower of Babel in order to pull God down. Set within the context of what the scholars call a table of nations. And now what we have here is another table of nations. But whereas man goes up to bring God down, and God comes down to scatter the nations and to confuse their languages, the Lord Jesus Christ in His saving mercy, He has gone up to God. But now he brings down from God the Holy Spirit who brings together through the one gospel in the one Christ men and women, praise God, ultimately, but already in embryonic form here from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. And it is a most glorious reversal of what took place at the Tower of Babel. And it is the beginning of the fulfillment, isn't it, of the Abrahamic covenant and the promise to Abraham. that when God passed through the dismembered animals and said that He would die rather than fail to keep His covenant promise that in Abraham's seed the nations of the world would be blessed, Jesus has died upon the cross in the fulfillment of God's covenant promise. Even if it takes the death of His Son, He will keep that promise. And now that the Son has died upon the cross and borne God's judgment against our sin and been raised to the right hand of the Father and gone to the Father and said, you promised, now the blessing promised to Abraham is flowing out to the Gentile nations because Christ has become the covenant curse for us in order that the blessing promised to Abraham might flow to the Gentiles. And all of this because there is a fulfillment here too of the second Psalm, which of course the apostles saw so clearly fulfilled in how Jesus had been crucified, the nations raging the Jewish leaders and the Roman powers joining together against the Lord and His anointed, but the Lord would set His King on Zion, His holy hill, and to that King exalted to the throne on Zion, His holy hill, He would say, My son, ask of Me and I will give you the nations for your inheritance. And Peter is saying, we haven't seen it. It was not visible. He went to heaven in the cloud of glory that some of us saw on the mountain of transfiguration, and then he was hidden from our sight. And we do not expect to see him until he returns again in that same glory cloud to wind up history. But we know from the Scriptures that when he ascended to the throne of the heavenly Father, his heavenly Father said to him, remember my son, my promise. Ask of me and I will give you the nations for your inheritance. Father, what a moment. Don't you think the angels fell silent? who had pondered these years, I don't know what the difference between a man year and an angel year might be, but had pondered these thirty-plus years longing to look into the inner reason, the inner purpose, what would be the fruit. and then they see their King and Head returning. They have sung the twenty-fourth psalm, perhaps as the early fathers used to say, as the King approached the gates of glory. Who is this King of glory? And the response is, the Lord ascended. It is the Lord It is the king who is strong and mighty in battle. Open up the gates and let the king come in." And he goes to the throne, and he says what perhaps as a child you said to your father, having used every conceivable argument to get what you wanted, and he had said no. And then you said, but father, you promised. And here is no reluctant father, but a father full of devotion to his son. This is the son who has grown in favor with God, and he has never been so much in favor as that moment when he cried on the cross, My God, why have you forsaken me? As I sometimes say, at that moment, surely the Father in heaven was quietly singing, if ever I loved you, my Jesus, it is now, and now His Son in our humanity is coming to His throne. He has been in the far country. He has tasted the food of the swine, and He has borne our sin. and he's coming back and he's saying this, my son was dead and is alive again. He was for that moment lost and now he is found. Let us put the ring upon his finger. Let us rejoice the angels of heaven and he comes to the throne and all heaven goes silent and the son says to the father, You promised me the nations. May I send the Holy Spirit now, the Spirit you gave to me, the Spirit who came upon me, who sustained me. May I send the Holy Spirit to the nations." And then, of course, there is the fulfillment of Isaiah 52 and 53. that the servant who will suffer is the one who will sprinkle many nations. Kings will shut their mouths because of him. And there is a fulfillment of the great vision of the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man who having gone to the throne would share with the saints of the Most High. all that he would receive from the Ancient of Days. And then, as Peter says, at some length there is the fulfillment of Joel chapter 2, but the last days have come. And the result is, verse 27, it shall come to pass on that day that everyone from any tribe, any people, any nation, everyone who calls upon the name of the And this is the Lord Jesus, this is Jesus Yahweh, this is Jesus Kurios. All who call on the name of the Lord will be saved, and this is precisely what happens as the Spirit is poured out and the Scriptures are fulfilled, because the Lord Jesus has been exalted on high. A second thing here to notice, with which we are very familiar. that the sending of the Holy Spirit means that the new age inaugurated by Christ has now dawned. The Scriptures concerning Christ are fulfilled. The new age inaugurated by Christ has dawned. These men are not drunk with wine, he says, as you suppose, but this is the fulfillment of what was uttered through the prophet Joel. In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Now this is familiar territory I am sure to most of us, probably all of us, that what is taking place here is the proclamation that the last days have begun. This is the fulfillment of Joel's prophecy that helps us to interpret the significance of the times in which we are living, says Peter, and we know that the last days have begun. and that through the resurrection and the exaltation and the enthronement and heavenly reign of our Lord Jesus Christ, the new age has dawned. We are able to say with the Apostle Paul that we are those upon whom the end of the ages has dawned. And so because we are biblical Christians in a subculture where not everyone who has many Bibles knows their Bible very well, we love when people come to us and say, do you think we're living in the last days? To say, of course we're living in the last days. We may not be living in the final day of the last days. that we have been living in the last days since the exaltation of the Lord Jesus and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. That's why the New Testament is able to speak so frequently about the future the way it does, because it understands there is only one Christ event to take place that is left in all the purposes of God. It's the next thing to happen for Jesus, we might say. and we're living between these times in the last days. That revolutionizes the Christian life incidentally when we grasp it. If we question whether we are living in the last days and maybe there is going to be some time in the future and we are working out the crossword puzzle clues to see whether it is today or tomorrow or yesterday, we will not be capable of living the Christian life in a New Testament fashion. We will be looking at the present day as though it were a puzzle. Instead of understanding that we've been brought into this new day, this new creation, that we're living between the times. And that we find therefore in our personal experience the reality of the tension between the times being worked out in our lives. We understand that the great thing has already been accomplished. that the return of Christ is a matter of mopping up operations as far as He is concerned, because He has guaranteed the salvation of His people by His death upon the cross. And Peter is quoting Joel because he believes Joel, however he did not see the fulfillment of his prophecy, grasped under the inspiration of the Spirit what the marks of the last days would be. And of course, first of all, the internationality of the people of God. I mean, this was something that even Peter didn't really grasp the full measure of. There were these Jews and proselytes before him from all over the world, and so he saw there was a kind of internationality. He saw all that, but he struggled, didn't he? with the full implications of that, that God pouring out His Spirit on all flesh did not mean pouring out His Spirit on all Jews as they were spread throughout the earth. But this was a dramatic collapsing of the old covenant economy. And now the Spirit would be poured out on all flesh, and now those old covenant distinctions would also be broken down and all would prophesy. Now let me just step back a moment from this in order to explicate what I think is being meant here. We have become so focused on the idea of prophecy as being able to foretell the future that we have actually lost sight of most of biblical prophecy. Most of the Old Testament Scriptures that stand under the category prophecy are not foretelling of the future. They are minimally, significantly but minimally, foretelling of the future. They are maximally speaking forth the truth about God into the present. interpreting the present in the light of the truth of God. That, for example, is one of the reasons why historical books fall into the category of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible. So we take a misstep, we do not understand the Scriptures from out of themselves and interpret them within themselves when we limit the meaning of the term prophecy to foretelling the future. It is a part but by no means the whole of what prophecy is. Prophecy is so expansive a term that there are places where it obviously means proclaiming the Word of God as we sing or speak His praises. It's exactly the same as what Paul says about as you sing. And as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs and make melody to the Lord in your heart, you teach one another. This is singing as part of the prophetic ministry, and actually you can see that in the Scriptures. So when Joel says that all flesh will prophesy, either, let me put it this way, he is lying and is a false prophet. or by prophecy he means something far larger than the ability to tell the future. All prophesy. You prophesy. All the Lord's people are not only sharing in the priesthood of all believers and the reign of all believers, but he says now in the new economy all the Lord's people are prophets. And that means the old Mosaic distinctions have come to an end between prophet and people. It means that no longer do the people need a prophet to discover the secrets of the Lord. Remember the words of Amos, the Lord does nothing without disclosing His secrets to His servants, the prophets, but He has disclosed His secret to all of us. And now all of us prophesy. Now all of us know Christ, the one true prophet of God. Now all of us speak him forth. Now all of us sing his praises. The Holy Spirit poured out on all flesh and those old mosaic distinctions disappear. And that's what Moses prayed for. Do you remember in Numbers 11? The Spirit comes upon the elders and then there are these couple of young restless and reformed guys outside the camp and they're prophesying and they're saying, we can't have this. We can't have this. Shut their mouths. Remember what Moses' response is. This is one of the clearest indications that Moses understands that the Mosaic administration cannot deliver that reality to which the Mosaic administration points. One of the clearest indications, Moses knows that this administration of God's purposes is for a season, but then Jesus is going to come and He is going to fold it all away, put it under His arm, and He is going to walk away with it. Because when they come complaining to Moses about these men who are prophesying, Numbers chapter 11, Moses says, would that all the Lord's people were prophets. And what's taking place here in the fulfillment of the prophecy of Joel is that the deep longing of Moses for that to which the Mosaic administration pointed has now been fulfilled, just as at Calvary The reality to which the Mosaic administration of the sacrificial system that Moses himself understood could not be the real thing. Otherwise, why were they standing there day after day offering the same sacrifices? That is an argument in Hebrews, but it is an argument that believers in the old covenant day perfectly understood. And now that day has dawned. This was a monumental moment for those who were present as they understood that the old days had now been collapsed. The father had said to his son lying there on the tomb, rise, pick up the bed of the mosaic administration in which you have lived your life. and carry it away under your arm out of this tomb so that it is gone forever. And we'll never understand what the New Testament does in the epistles with Moses. how it can say in the same words almost, in a matter of sentences, this was an administration of death, and yet this administration was an administration with its own glory, unless we realize it was divinely intended for an interim period, and now Jesus has walked away with it. And do you notice the way in which Joel sees this? I mean it must have been staggering. It must have been unbelievable in his time because it was unbelievable in Peter's time. I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. I will pour out my Spirit even on my male servants and female servants. You lived under the old covenant administration and you were a female then. There was a little court for you and that was as far as you went. But now all those divisions, they've gone. And in this covenant, as you remember, Jeremiah says, we will no longer need someone to take hold of us and to say, know the Lord, because we will all know the Lord. And this is what he's talking about here. The prophet who stood as a mediator between the Lord and the people so that the people's knowledge of the secrets of the Lord was received, mediated through the prophets. Now he is saying, you've all received the anointing, and all of you know, as John puts it, so you no longer need a teacher. Now if you took that at the foot of the letter you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't have wasted money, many of you, large sums of money going to theological seminary. You wouldn't have Sunday school classes and you wouldn't bother preaching. Of course the Lord's people need teachers. That's not what John is saying. What John is saying is the Lord's people no longer need the mediators of the prophets who came to them and said, let me tell you the secrets of the Lord. Because I have been anointed with the Holy Spirit to stand in the Lord's presence and to listen to the unveiling of his secrets. But now the secret is open and out there in Jesus Christ. and all the people of God are gloriously ushered into the immediacy of His presence. So the Scriptures concerning Christ are fulfilled. The new age inaugurated by Christ has dawned. And the third thing, and this I think should be clear from what we've already said, that the coronation of the Lord Jesus Christ has taken place. And this is the emphasis of Peter, isn't it? You crucified Him. You demeaned Him. But God guarded His body. God raised Him up on the third day. God has granted Him ascension into heaven. God has received Him as the Father receiving His Son. The Father has said, ask of me and I will give you the nations for your inheritance." And now he says, God has said, notice the quotation from the Psalm in verse 34, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand. What Pentecost tells me is that Jesus has been crowned with glory. You would probably only feel this emotionally and instinctively if you came from a country that still had a monarchy, as one or two of us do. We're actually here to call you back to your lawfully constituted monarch, and Tom and I will be at the receipt of custom to take back taxes from your previous life and so on and so forth. But let me put the question this way. It's a trick question. When did Elizabeth II, or as we call her in Scotland, Elizabeth I? When did Elizabeth II become queen? If you're my generation in the United States, my experience has been, people's answer to that is 1953. I saw it on television. That's not the right answer. She became queen in 1952. On the death of her father, she ascended the throne. In 1953, she was crowned, and the whole nation, indeed the whole world, was able to watch it. And that's what's happening here. Jesus has ascended. All His work has ended. Jesus has ascended. Glory to our King. But now there is the period of these weeks that has passed, and now the Father wants His people to know, among other things, that Jesus has been crowned. Jesus has been enthroned. I was a little boy of five in 1953, and something very interesting happened. Of course, it produced controversy because Scottish people love to compare and contrast and to bring others down, but every child in the nation was given a gift. Every single child in the nation was given a gift. Not the same gift, and therein lay the trouble. In Inverness, which still had a taste of godliness about it, you were given a Bible. In Glasgow, the sweetest teeth and the most rotting teeth in all Christendom, you were given a little mug with the Queen's face on it that was full of candies. I ate the candies the first day. I think I broke the mug the second day, and I wish I'd kept it because it would have been worth money on eBay. But everyone received a gift. because Elizabeth had been crowned. The coronation had taken place, and so as it were from her bounty there was this outpouring of gifts upon the children of the nation. That's what's happening here. That's what the Holy Spirit is given to do. That's why it is so contrary to the fabric of the New Testament's teaching that if I have received a gift from the Lord Jesus through the Holy Spirit, that I imagine that that gift is about me, and I don't employ it in such a way that by God's grace I make it clear it's really all about Him. Pentecost is all about Him. And so, of course, that leads to the fourth thing here, which simply rehearses and advances what we've already noticed, that as a result of the coming of the Spirit, worldwide conversion to Christ has begun. Now, of course, there were glimpses of this in the old, just as there are glimpses of Christ in the old, but now it happens in a spectacular fashion. And the Spirit does exactly what Jesus said He would do in John 16, 8 to 11. Now do you see the outworking of what we were talking about last night when we said we need to take note of the fact that Jesus says when the Spirit comes, the conviction of sin will be related to the proclamation of Jesus. And this is precisely what happens. Jesus is proclaimed, and they are cut to the heart, and they ask the question, what shall we do? and they are brought into the repentance and faith of the gospel, the pardon and empowering of the gospel. And these representatives of the nations who come, of course at first they are Jews and proselytes, but they are representatives of the world of internationals who will be brought to Christ by the proclamation of the Word and the falling of the Holy Spirit. What's the connection between that and Pentecost? Some of you will know the lovely illustration Abraham Kuyper uses to try and help us grasp the relationship between the once-for-all event of Pentecost and the way in which we, as we come to Christ, are baptized with the Holy Spirit when He speaks about like an old town and by the wisdom of the town engineers, they have managed to build a waterworks. And the day comes when the mayor of the town steps forward and he says, I now declare these waterworks open. And he turns on a tap and every house in the town connected to the water system receives the fresh water for the first time flowing into their lives. But there are those who do not yet live in the town. There are those who will come and houses will be built, and they too will be connected to the waterworks. and share in the once-for-all moment when the waterworks were opened, but receive exactly the same water as those who were there on the day of its opening. And so it is with us. Pentecost is a once-and-for-all event. It is an event in the work of Jesus Christ. But it's an event into which each one of us is brought, as we are brought to conviction of sin and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, connected to the waterworks of the city of God, and the living waters flow still from the throne of God down, down through the ages. so that Paul is able to say to the Corinthians who were not there on the day of Pentecost any more than he was there, at least there among the converts on the day of Pentecost, that Christ has baptized all of us into the one body with one and the same Holy Spirit. I want to repeat again what stretches our soul's capacity and our minds beyond measure that the Spirit that the Lord Jesus pours out on the day of Pentecost is the Spirit who has been on his life these thirty-three years. And now the Father has said to him, my son, I have no better gift to you than to give you the fulfillment of my promise, your heart's desire, and the Spirit's aspiration. that He who has been on you should be poured out upon all flesh, and that down through the ages that one and the same Spirit of the Lord Jesus would come and be poured out upon us in the baptism with the Holy Spirit, bringing us into the one body of Jesus Christ and uniting us to Christ by the Spirit in order that we may have union and communion with the Father. This is what John says, isn't it, in his first letter? He says, stunned still by it all these years later, our fellowship by the Spirit is with the Father and with His Son. And, of course, the final point is this, and we shouldn't miss it, that the work of the Holy Spirit, the goal of the Holy Spirit is that the church of Christ should now begin to be built. I will build my church. The gates of Hades will not prevail against it." And here very deliberately, there's a pattern, isn't there, in the Acts of the Apostles where from time to time Luke stops and he gives us a kind of progress report. He presses the stop button and he gives us one frame and he says, now here is where the church was as a result of these divine providences in the life of the people. And because this is the longest of those single frame statements, I take it he is saying this is the model statement, that they were drawn into the kingdom of God. What was the fruit? This is the model for the church in every place and in every age. This is why we want to build with precious stones and not with wood and hay and stubble. This is the reason why, as my spiritual mentor William Still used to say about his ministry, I don't know whether we are heading for revival or for persecution, but my ministry is intended to build a church that will last through persecution. That's not the goal of every ministry in the United States or the United Kingdom, is it? You think of some of the things that we build with wood and hay and stubble and wonder what would happen if there was persecution. But Christ, by the Spirit, is building a church that will last through persecution. That's exactly the story of the first chapters, isn't it? The church that lasts through persecution. What characterizes it? What's the program? What's the answer? Well, it's the basics, isn't it? They were addicted to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship and to the means of grace, as we say, and to prayer. And these are the very things against which so much of contemporary church life has been altogether Ever since I came to the United States, I came in the early eighties first of all as a visitor and then in 1983. One of the things, one of the differences, there are many differences, I often say one of the differences is the teeth. Another one of the differences back in the early eighties was the church bulletin. non-existent. Our hymn books didn't have tunes in them. We made up our own tunes as we went along, and we actually thought we were getting on all right. And then I come to the United States, and you have the luxury of discovering that you've been singing the tune the wrong way. You've been going up when you should have been going down. And then there's the worship bulletin. And so for thirty years, more than thirty years, I've made a practice when I visit a church and I'm handed the worship bulletin, the first thing I look for is not whether we're singing a mighty fortress, which I rejoice to sing. I know we're probably going to sing Amazing Grace at some time in the weekend, but what I look for is the way in which this church says in its worship bulletin, we are addicted to prayer. And my dear friends, I have very rarely seen that on a worship bulletin. I rarely see the word, the congregation meets for prayer at such and such an hour. And it has made me wonder, all the years I have been here, it has made me wonder, how is it that so much that is visible can have been accomplished when a church has done very little about that addiction that is invisible. And these two things always go together, don't they? Where the people of God are humbled under the apostolic teaching, the people of God look to heaven in apostolic prayer. This is the kind of church that lasts through persecution. And this is the kind of church that our Lord Jesus Christ wanted to build. And it shouldn't surprise us that when men and women are filled with the Holy Spirit, this kind of church is always the fruit. And we need to see contemporary church life through those lenses, don't we, not to be minimized by those who rather demean and despise what so many of us are engaged in, and who either deny or are blind to the reality of our church life in our time. I am Scottish enough never to purchase, with one exception, any magazines that are supposed to help ministers, because I don't like having to buy them. But one of the things you discover either because you're the pastor of a larger rather than a smaller church or because you teach in a theological seminary, people send you these things free. And so I read them. And what I notice is this. We were reminded of this last night, that all the interviews are with the men who have the huge churches. They're always Dr. So-and-so. If there was a correspondence column I think I would write in and say, dear sir, Martin Luther once said that religion had never been so corrupted as it was by reverend doctors. But the thing I often notice is this, because I'm a shrewd and cynical Scot, hopefully in more of the first than the last. I noticed that I've read somewhere that Pastor So-and-so is the pastor of the 15,000 member such-and-such church. He's usually got the word first there, never the word 19th, okay? But I'm shrewd enough to read the small print at the end of the article that tells me that the Reverend Dr. So-and-so preaches to 7,500 people every Sunday. and I can still do the math, he's got 7,500 souls who can't be bothered hearing the Word of God from his lips. He has a mega church and a mega problem, and there's a lot of wood and hay and stubble, a lot of programs, but the thing that's missing is the Holy Ghost's program. Because the Holy Ghost program produces a people who are addicted to the Word of God, who are addicted to the fellowship, and who are addicted to prayer. And when that begins to happen in our churches, we know that something of the Pentecostal spirit has been breathed out upon us by God's grace. So what do we say when we think about Pentecost? we say, Jesus is King, Jesus is Lord, and He is Lord here too. Heavenly Father, we pray As we think of these things and our own consciences are touched by the way in which we ourselves have often envied others, and our vision has been dimmed by an aspiration for numbers and success and the praise of men, for we too are mortal and flesh. We thank you for the cleansing of your Word. We thank you for the exaltation of our Lord Jesus Christ. We pray that you would exalt Him in our hearts, that we may exalt Him in the power of the Holy Spirit in our ministries and not least in our preaching. We pray it may never be said of us that the people cannot see Jesus beyond us. but that by your Holy Spirit we may find ourselves in communities like this new community in Acts chapter 2, where the Galilean accent of Peter grew dim, and the heavenly accent of the Lord Jesus Christ was so marvelously and clearly heard. Oh, we pray that as our Lord Jesus Christ came and preached peace in Ephesus, wherein the incarnation He had never visited, He may come again in the power of the Spirit and preach peace in the towns and villages and cities and places in all the earth where He has exalted and enthroned in the ministry of his Word. We ask it for his sake.