Sermon Tone Analysis

If you have your Bible, go ahead and grab it.

We are going to be in Acts 2 today.

I want to ask you guys a question, what do you think one of the biggest turning points in history is?

What Luke has recorded for us in this chapter is a turning point of human history.

Here in Acts 2 we are going to see the coming of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost.

There are about 40 verses that we could be looking at tonight but I don’t think that we will have the time to go through that so we will break them up into 5 distinct headings that I think we can get through today: The meaning behind the Spirit’s coming, the outgoing work of God, God’s promises fulfilled, Peter’s Christ-centric sermon, and the demand for a response.

Let’s go ahead and read verses 1-11.

Luke writes,

The Meaning Behind the Spirit’s Coming

Let’s talk about the meaning behind the coming of the Holy Spirit so let’s zone in ono those first 4 verses.

If you were here last week, you’ll remember that Jesus told the Apostles to stay in Jerusalem until they were baptized with the Holy Spirit and Luke refers to the Holy Spirit as that which is promised by God the Father.

If you go back further and look at the Gospel of John, you will see that Christ made a promise to His followers that they would not be left as orphans.

He says in John 14:16-17 “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him.

You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.”

I believe that nothing satisfies and comforts the heart of man than the truth of the Christian faith.

Notice what Christ says in these verses.

The Holy Spirit will be our helper, or as some translations put it, our comforter.

What do we need a comforter for?

Because the Lord knows that walking the Christian walk is not always easy.

As we are going to see later on in the book of Acts, it is through many tribulations that Christians enter into the Kingdom of God.

If we were left on our own to live out our faith, none of us would be able to stand.

The reason that Christians all over the world from the time of the Apostles to now have been able to go to their deaths rejoicing is becuase of the fulfillment of the promise of John 14. Christians are able to march into the fiery furnace of affliction because they have the Holy Spirit of God Himself as their helper.

Notice the next thing that Christ promises us: the Holy Spirit is not just with us for a moment.

The Holy Spirit is eternal just as God the Father and Christ the Son are eternal so the Spirit has always existed but the Spirit did not dwell with men in the Old Testament like He does now.

The Holy Spirit is with the people of God forever!

This means that no matter where you go in your Christian walk, the Spirit is always with you.

But He isn’t just floating around you, He’s inside of you, dwelling within you!

When we have the Comforter dwelling inside of us, our outlook on life drastically changes because we are reminded that we aren’t alone in this world that seems to becoming even more chaotic by the minute.

A good sense of comfort pushes people through incredibly uncomfortable moments.

I’ll give you a few examples that I think you might be familiar with, have you ever noticed how the presence of a parent or someone that you love completely changes the outlook that you might have on a situation.

What do I mean?

Think thunderstorms.

Benji loves the rain but he isn’t crazy over storms, especially at night when he’s in bed.

What does Benji do when it’s storming outside, it’s dark inside, and he’s trying to go to sleep?

He comes to Lora and I and he either gets in bed with us or one of us goes into his bed with him and what happens every time that he does this?

He goes right back to sleep.

Why?

Because he’s in the presence of those that comfort him.

Did the storm change at all?

No it didn’t but his outlook on it changed because he was in a place where he felt truly safe and that is where we as Christians are as we experience the never-leaving presence of the Holy Spirit.

Are we taken out of the world or do the storms of life change?

Not at all but our outlook has changed dramatically.

One other quick example is this: how many of you like watching scary movies?

Isn’t there a big difference between watching a scary movie alone in the dark and watching one with the lights on?

Why is it so different?

The movie is the same but we have the comfort of the lights on.

Right now we are in the dark but we as Christians have the comfort of the Light of the World.

The Holy Spirit truly changes us and comforts us.

The Holy Spirit makes us a distinguishable people.

Notice that Jesus says that the Spirit of Truth, the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him.

We are distinct from the rest of the world because we are marked by something that is totally foreign to the world and the world is incapable of understanding it.

The next thing I want you to notice is that it is the Holy Spirit that comes to us and this is what we see in Acts 2. The Holy Spirit meets us where we are but He does not leave us as we are.

For the Holy Spirit to come into our lives and not change us is a total impossibility because when the Holy Spirit comes to dwell in our hearts we are not the same as we were the moment before.

We are caught up in such religious affections that it would be impossible for us to stay the same!

One last thing that I want you to notice about the Holy Spirit is how He comes in Acts 2. We read that the apostles heard the sound of a mighty rushing wind and that tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them.

This is what is known in theology as a theophany.

This is a visible manifestation of God Himself.

In Ezekiel 37, in the vision of the dry bones coming to life, we read that a mighty wind comes so that the dry bones would live again.

Throughout the Old Testament we see the physical manifestation of God in fire: we see it in the covenant that God makes with Abraham, we see it in the burning bush, and we see it in the pillar of fire that leads the people of Israel out of Egypt.

What we see here at the beginning of Acts 2 is the promise fulfilled that God Himself is coming to dwell with His people.

This isn’t just a spark that will burn out.

This is a fire that will continue to burn in the hearts of the People of God because God is dwelling with His people.

As God Himself comes to dwell with His people, we see that He does not come to do nothing.

He comes to accomplish a work both inside of us and around us and this leads us to our next point that I will run through fairly quickly and that is the outgoing work of God.

The Outgoing Work of God

In verses 5-11 we noticed how at that time, there were a large number of Jewish people that had returned to Jerusalem from nations of practically the entire known world for Pentacost.

The time was ripe for God to move because the whole world in a sense was present for this day.

In God’s perfect sovereignty and timing, He sent the Spirit on the perfect day because it was the one time where all of these people from all of these nations would be present to hear the Gospel.

The Holy Spirit not only draws people in, He sends them out and that is exactly what God was doing on the Day of Pentecost.

He had all of these people from all of these places here at this time so that they might take the Gospel home with them.

This is a reminder for all of us as Christians that God does not save us for us to go take a seat on the bench.

No professional quarterback is content with being 4th string.

He wants to go out and make a difference and if you have the Holy Spirit inside of you, you are going to want to make a difference in the world around you with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Now understand that while we are not all called to preach, we are all called to point.

We are all called to point to that which has made us truly different from the world, we are all called to point outwards to the God who is there and the God who loves us.

We are not to keep our salvation in a box at home.

When you go to school, when you go to Walmart, when you go to your grandparents house, you should be someone that causes the world to stop and think, “What does this mean?”

God is always in the business of working outwards and we too are called to this work.

But remember we don’t do God’s work alone.

R.C. Sproul said, “The Holy Spirit is sent to empower the church to bear witness to Christ, to apply the work of Christ on the cross in terms of its redemptive significance to all who believe.

The Father sends, the Son accomplishes, and the Spirit applies the work of Christ.”

With the last half of our time together, I want to look at Peter’s sermon in verses 14-36 and for time’s sake, I’ll just summarize a good portion of the elements that are present in his sermon.

God’s Promises Fulfilled

The first element that we see in Peter’s sermon to the crowd is that it is based on Scripture and emphasizes the promises of God being fulfilled.

Out of the 22 verses that make up Peter’s recorded sermon, take a guess of how many of those are references to the Old Testament?

13 of the 22 verses that comprise Peter’s sermons are references to the Old Testament.

Peter is preaching an expository sermon and he is using the Old Testament to prove that Jesus is the Christ.

Peter references David, the Psalms, and a prophecy by the prophet Joel.

Peter tells the crowd that they are witnessing what is told by the Prophet Joel in Acts 2:16-21 and he says

Peter is basically saying, “You shouldn’t be surprised by what you are seeing because it is exactly what God has said would happen!”

The world shouldn’t be surprised when it sees the Spirit of God move within the hearts and actions of those within the Church because this is exactly what God said would happen.

The Spirit of God has been poured out on all sorts of people and as we will see by the end of the book of Acts, it really is all peoples.

The young and the old, male and female, slave and free, they are all taking part in what the Lord is doing.

They are all active participants in the Spirit’s work.

In verses 25-29, Peter references the Psalms and David and he cites Psalm 16:8-11 to testify to the Lordship and deity of Christ.

Acts 2:25-28 “For David says concerning him, “ ‘I saw the Lord always before me, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken; therefore my heart was glad, and my tongue rejoiced; my flesh also will dwell in hope.

For you will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption.

You have made known to me the paths of life; you will make me full of gladness with your presence.’”

What is happening in this day of the Apostles?

Guys, what is God doing here?