Sermon Tone Analysis

*Date:*      6th May 2007                                                                          (Sunday AM)                                                                       *Ref:* A0309

*Place:     Kambah P.S.*

*Title: You Shall Be Baptised*

*Text:        *& Acts 1:5

 

*Illust:     *Depending upon which statistic you look at, it appears that there is somewhere in the vicinity of 150 million Pentecostal Christian believers worldwide and David Barrett estimated in a Christianity Today article that the Pentecostal and charismatic church is growing by 19 million per year.

The Azusa Street Revival led by William J. Seymour is the watershed of the Pentecostal movement in the U.S. and worldwide.

It began on April 9, 1906, in Los Angeles, California, at the home of Edward Lee, who claimed the infilling of the Holy Spirit.

William J. Seymour claimed that he was overcome with the Holy Ghost on April 12, 1906.

On April 18, 1906, the Los Angeles Times ran a front page story on the revival, "/Weird Babel of Tongues, New Sect of fanatics is breaking loose, Wild scene last night on Azusa Street, gurgle of wordless talk by a sister"./

By the third week in April, 1906, the small but growing congregation rented an abandoned African Methodist Episcopal Church at 312 Azusa Street and subsequently became organized as the Apostolic Faith Mission.

- Almost all mainline Pentecostal denominations today trace their historical roots to the Azusa Street Revival.[1]

As the Potters House we trace our roots back to the events at Azusa Street.

Where a small group of believers contended for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues

!

I.                   The Holy Spirit

!! A.               He is a Person

i.

What is Spirit?

We live in a world of matter.

Many people live only by what they can see, touch, feel.

They deny the existence of a spiritual realm & existence.

~~ Essential that under the constant bombardment of our materialistic culture that we maintain an understanding of the reality of the realm of spirit.

Spirit is as real as matter but it is another mode of being than matter.

/A.W. Tozer/

ii.

Now we want to look at the 3rd person of the God Head that is the Holy Spirit.

– And I want to look firstly at why it is of the highest importance that we have a right view of the Holy Spirit from the perspective of worship, power & presence.

Think about this; it really is vitally important from the standpoint of worship that we decide:

       Is the Holy Spirit really God and therefore worthy to receive our adoration, our faith and our love, or is it simply an influence emanating from God, or a power that God imparts to us.

If the Holy Spirit is a Divine Person, truly God and we don’t know this, then we are robbing a Divine Being of the love and adoration which are his due.

Secondly, from a purely practical standpoint, we need to decide

       Is the Holy Spirit is a power that we in our weakness and ignorance are somehow to get hold of and use, something like ‘The Force” of the Star Wars movies or whether the Holy Spirit is a personal being infinitely wise, infinitely holy, infinitely tender, who is to get hold of and use us.

The one conception is heathenish, the other Christian.

The one conception leads to self-humiliation, self-emptying and self-renunciation; the other conception leads to self-exaltation.

Then there is the importance of His presence.

You can’t have a comforter who is an impersonal ‘force’ yet this is clearly one of the roles of the Holy Spirit

         John 15:26 But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father,/ even/ the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me: (KJV)

       Therefore you need to know the Holy Spirit as a person.

Real Christian joy and peace comes when you come to know the Holy Spirit not merely as a gracious influence, but as the comforter, an ever-present loving-friend and helper.

iii.

He is a Person; - Need to settle this in your heart.

Need to have this revelation; Following are just some of the aspects of the Holy Spirit’s Personality that Paul gives us.

*Intellect:* The Holy Spirit investigates the deep things of God & then teaches them to believers

         1 Corinthians 2:10 But God has revealed them to us through His Spirit.

For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God.

(NKJV)

         1 Corinthians 2:13 This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words.

(NIV)

       *Will:*  The Holy Spirit has a will in that He distributes gifts “just as He wills”

         1 Corinthians 12:11 It is the one and only Spirit who distributes all these gifts.

He alone decides which gift each person should have.

(NLT)

        *Emotion:* The Holy Spirit can be grieved

         Ephesians 4:30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption.

(NKJV)

!! B.               He is God

i.                 Want to zero in on the foundational aspect of the doctrine of the trinity:

ii.

Firstly it is clear from the earliest writing of the Christian church that the Holy Spirit was understood to be the eternal divine God

       Nicene Creed 381AD: “And in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceedeth from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified,”

       Chapter2, paragraph 3 of the Westminster Confession of Faith: In the unity of the Godhead there be three Persons of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.

/[1 John 5:7 For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one.

(NKJV)]/ The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.

iii.

What is important about these creeds & statements of faith is that they were the crystallised thoughts of men who sort to summarise the clear teachings of the Word of God.

~~  We see:

       He indwells the believer along with the Father and Son.

Romans 8:9-11 9 You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you.

And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. 10 But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.

11 And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.

(NIV)

       The benediction equates all three members of the godhead as equal

         2 Corinthians 13:14 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

Amen.

(NKJV)

       He is very clearly God & He is a person.

!

II.

The Baptism of the Holy Spirit

!! A.               What it is

i.

This brings us to the Pentecostal distinctive; The baptism of the Holy Spirit.

From the Statement of Faith of the Foursquare Church:

       We believe that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is the incoming of the promised Comforter in mighty and glorious fullness to endue the believer with power from on high; to glorify and exalt the Lord Jesus; to give inspired utterance in witnessing of Him; to foster the spirit of prayer, holiness, sobriety; to equip the individual and the Church for practical, efficient, joyous, Spirit-filled soul-winning in the fields of life; and that this being still the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, the believer may have every reason to expect His incoming to be after the same manner as that in which He came upon Jew and Gentile alike in Bible days, and as recorded in the Word, that it may be truly said of us as of the house of Cornelius: the Holy Ghost fell on them as on us at the beginning.

ii.

This is what Jesus promised in our text & ~~ Baptised:

       *Baptizo 1* to dip repeatedly, to immerse, to submerge (of vessels sunk).

*2* to cleanse by dipping or submerging, to wash, to make clean with water, to wash one’s self, bathe.

*3* to *overwhelm*.

An interesting example that clearly illustrates the biblical meaning of Baptism: Not to be confused with 911, bapto.

The clearest example that shows the meaning of baptizo is a text from the Greek poet and physician Nicander, who lived about 200 B.C.

It is a recipe for making pickles and is helpful because it uses both words.

Nicander says that in order to make a pickle, the vegetable should first be ‘dipped’ (bapto) into boiling water and then ‘baptised’ (baptizo) in the vinegar solution.

Both verbs concern the immersing of vegetables in a solution.

But the first is temporary.

The second, the act of baptising the vegetable, produces a permanent change.

… There must be a union with him, a real change, like the vegetable to the pickle!

/Bible Study Magazine, James Montgomery Boice, May 1989./

[2] 

iii.

Two ways to approach a swimming pool.

One you can walk up to the pool & dip your foot in, wave it around a little bit, test the water, think about what it means to get in the pool.

The other way is to take a running leap & do a big bomby & experience the pool.