Sermon Tone Analysis

Acts 2:38-47

American citizens should know the importance of celebrating patriotic holidays such as Memorial Day and the 4th of July.

Such holidays remind us of the price that was paid for our freedom, encouraging us to treasure the freedom that we enjoy, and to uphold the timeless principles upon which our nation was founded.

Our celebrations and songs even feature fireworks, which are celebratory and enjoyable today, but which remind us of the real fireworks which occurred on the field of battle so long ago.

As followers of Christ, we commemorate other significant historical events which continue to carry profound significance for us today.

We celebrate Christ’s birth at Christmas, for instance.

We also commemorate his resurrection at Easter.

While these key events deserve to be celebrated, we should also remember a crucial event that occurred 50 days after Christ’s resurrection.

During those 50 days, Christ remained on Earth 40 more days to teach his followers, who then waited on together in prayer for 10 more days.

That’s when the ministry of the Holy Spirit began in a new and special way, and so began the church – on Pentecost, accompanied with fire[works]!

This 50-day schedule actually corresponds with the Jewish holiday cycle, in which Easter coincided with feast of Passover and the sending of the Spirit and start of the church coincided with the feast of Pentecost.

Correlations like this demonstrate that these events were neither random nor capricious but were key moments in God’s overarching plan for revealing himself to the world.

Passover was a festival which commemorated how God had freed his people from slavery in Egypt.

In a similar but more profound way, Christ’s death and resurrection freed his people from bondage to sin and death.

Pentecost (a word that means fifty) was a festival celebrating God’s blessing to Israel in their new land through the first fruits of their harvest.

This was not the final harvest celebration in the annual farming cycle but the first, celebrating God’s initial faithfulness and anticipating more to come.

During this celebration, Christ sent us a new kind of blessing – the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within our lives.

As the nation of Israel gathered together the stalks of grain from the initial harvests of their fields, the Holy Spirit gathered together believers from many ethnic backgrounds as a new entity called “the church.”

Let’s take a closer look at the sending of the Spirit and the start of the church.

As we do, I pray we will gain a deeper appreciation for the role the Holy Spirit plays in our lives and a greater devotion to the role we should play in the church.

As a result, may we reflect our unity in the Spirit by increasing our participation together with one another as a church.

We should appreciate the gift of Pentecost – the Holy Spirit himself.

We give much attention to the coming of Christ into the world.

Perhaps you know that when Christ was born, that wasn’t his first appearance in the world.

He – God the Son, the second person of the Godhead – had made repeated appearances in the world throughout the Old Testament (OT), just not as a human being.

Yet his coming through the incarnation – being born as a human being and living as a human being, like you and I – was climactic and crucial because it enabled him to live the perfect life that we could not live and die the death for sins that we deserve to die – all in our place.

Similarly, the Holy Spirit, the 3rd person of the Godhead, also appears throughout the OT.

He participated in Creation - “the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the deep” (Gen 1:2).

He gave certain people unusual craftsmanship skills (like Bezaleel), unusual strength (like Samson), and divine sanction to rule as king (like David).

He enabled certain people to speak prophetic words from God (like David, 2 Sam 23:2, and Ezekiel, Ezk 36:27).

Despite these significant functions of the Holy Spirit before Pentecost, one significant difference remained between then and now.

Jesus explained this difference to his closest disciples in the days leading up to his crucifixion.

About the Holy Spirit, he said, “He dwells with you and will be in you” (John 14:17).

The key difference here is found in the two different words, with and in.

Though the Holy Spirit came upon certain people to enable them for some special and specific tasks or roles, is presence remained with or among his people as his presence rested in a special and concentrated way in the tabernacle and temple, where they would gather for worship.

Just as Christ taught his disciples before his crucifixion he continued to teach after his crucifixion and just before his ascension to heaven that the Holy Spirit would come to them in a new and special way.

He said, “You shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now” (Acts 1:5).

This “baptism with the Holy Spirit” meant that the Holy Spirit would no longer dwell with them in the temple at Jerusalem but within them individually and personally.

Paul later explained this with a question: “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own?” (1 Cor 6:19).

About this, I like what Vance Havner, a 20th century preacher, said about the indwelling of the Holy Spirit: “Paul speaks of being absent from the body and present with the Lord.

But being present in the body does not mean being absent from the Lord; for he lives in all who believe, and these bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit.”

Can you see why God placed small flames of fire above his followers’ heads at the moment the Spirit came to believers in this way?

In the OT, the Spirit had rested upon the tabernacle in the wilderness.

Since the Spirit is invisible to our eyes, the pillar of fire provided a visual marker that the Spirit was there.

Pentecost marked a decisive turning point in which the Spirit transferred his concentrated and personal presence from the Temple to believers themselves, so the flames provided a visual marker demonstrating that this invisible change had taken place as promised.

This is what God had promised to do all along – send the Holy Spirit to dwell within the lives of every person who believed on him.

In Peter’s sermon on Pentecost, Acts 2:33, he said, “Therefore, being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he poured out this which you now see and hear.”

Now that Christ had come, had lived perfectly, died sacrificially, resurrected triumphantly, and returned to heaven successfully, he had done all that was necessary to prepare his followers hearts to be indwelt by God himself, the Holy Spirit.

As a gift from the throne of God, he sent the Holy Spirit to indwell the hearts of his people.

This indwelling of the Holy Spirit is a permanent gift from God.

He will never withdraw his presence.

Therefore, his presence within us gives us tremendous assurance that we are in God’s family forever.

That’s why a believer should not grieve the Holy Spirit through corrupt and evil words, attitudes, and behavior (Eph 4:30-31).

When a believer persistently sins, the Spirit remains unable to depart.

Therefore, God must eventually destroy his or her temple instead, referring to discipline by God through a premature death (1 Cor 3:16-17).

This both a comforting and sobering truth for sure.

Some wonder what to make of the “speaking in tongues” which took place when the Spirit came into the hearts of believers at Pentecost.

We should be clear that these tongues refer to other actual foreign languages represented by the various non-Jewish people who were there.

God had given various believers the spontaneous ability to speak in other actual languages so that people would know that God had sent his Spirit to indwell not just Jewish believers but believers from any and every nation of the world.

About this, Paul later quoted from the OT prophet, Isaiah, and then explained, “In the law it is written: “with men of other tongues and other lips I will speak to this people; and yet, for all that, they will not hear me,” says the Lord.

“Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he poured out this which you now see and hear” (1 Cor 14:21-22).

So, the purpose of this talking in other languages was to give clear evidence that God had begun to shift his attention to a larger and new “people of God.”

He was shifting his attention from the nation of Israel to something called the church.

We should devote ourselves to the gathering of Pentecost – the church.

This gathering of people – like the gathering of early grains at harvest as a preview and foretaste of a greater harvest that is still to come – marked the beginning of what we know as the “church” today.

This “church” was the result of the new way that the Holy Spirit had been sent to dwell within believers.

For the Spirit doesn’t only dwell within individual believers alone – he dwells within all believers together as well, for the church at large is also the dwelling place of God.

Both Peter and Paul describe the church throughout the world as the dwelling place of God (Eph 2:22; 1 Pet 2:5).

They describe the church as an ongoing building project continuing to be built upon the poured and fixed foundation of Christ.

This building project does not refer to church buildings per se.

It refers to all of us as believers who form a spiritual house together for the presence of God in the world and who gather together and commit ourselves to one another through local gatherings which make up the whole.

As I stated before, when Christ sent the Spirit, he sent him to be placed within believers, but he also sent the Spirit so that believers would be all placed into him.

About this, Paul said, “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and have all been made to drink into one Spirit” (1 Cor 12:13).

So, not only has the Spirit been placed into us but we have been placed into him so that we are all connected equally and completely to Christ because we are unified by the one and the same Holy Spirit of God, the third person of the Godhead.

He is in us, and we are in him.

Such unity in the Spirit is based upon a shared belief and baptism and evidenced by a shared worship and life.

Our baptism in the Spirit is based upon a shared belief and baptism.

According to Acts 2:38, we see that only those who turned away from their sinfulness and false religious beliefs (“repent”) to follow Christ alone as God and Savior would receive forgiveness from sins and the “gift of the Holy Spirit.”

God doesn’t send his Spirit to indwell every person who is Jewish just because they are Jewish nor does the send his Spirit to indwell every person who wants to come to God on his or her own terms.

He only sends his Spirit to indwell those people who repent and turn to him alone on his terms.

Here we see that Peter closely associated the outward act of public baptism with the inward belief of personal faith in Christ.

Though we know that forgiveness of sins and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit occurs at the moment a person believes on Christ inwardly, the church from the earliest moments of its existence has required professing followers of Christ to take the outward step of baptism after conversion as the necessary evidence of genuine faith.

Baptism was required for a person to be recognized as a genuine member of the church, the body of Christ.

Acts 2:41 reemphasizes this truth.

Acts 2:39 makes clear that this promise of forgiveness of sins and the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit was available not only to first-century people but to the next generation and ever generation after them, “as many as the Lord our God will call.”

Have you repented of your sinfulness and false religious beliefs to turn to Christ alone as your God and Savior?

And if so, have you announced your faith through the outward, public act of baptism?

If no, is the Lord calling you to do so today?

Our baptism in the Spirit is evidenced by a shared worship and life.

Not only should we believe on Christ as God and Savior, but once we have done so, we should devote ourselves to the church through a shared worship and life.

Acts 2:42-47 explains to us that when we are placed into the Holy Spirit together, we enter something more than a shared invisible and mystical reality.

We should enter a shared worship and life together as well, for the church is both a spiritual gathering of people and a physical gathering of people, too.

We must banish from our minds all the vestiges of our autonomous, independent, and isolated theories of the Christian life which so many professing believers have imbibed, for we have not only been indwelt by the Holy Spirit as individuals but we have been gathered together into one Spirit, too, and this unity of the Spirit should draw us closer and closer together into actual physical gatherings of believers, which exhibit the kind of unity in the Spirit that we’ve been given by God.

(I will speak about this in more depth when I preach about principles of congregational worship from Ephesians 5:18-21 on an upcoming Sunday.)

How did the earliest church exhibit this spiritual unity?

Not by talking about it or theorizing about it – and certainly not by immersing themselves in their own individual private lives – but by actually gathering together as much as they could in more ways than one.

They shared their spiritual unity through worship and life together as a church.

First, there were four things which they “continued steadfastly,” a phrase that means the kept on doing something deliberately and frequently without stopping.

In other words, they frequently participated in these things.

What were these four things that they valued so highly that they gathered together frequently to do?