What does this mean? That's the question we're going
to be responding to here today. What does it mean?
That's the question that was asked there on Pentecost Now
today. Is it Pentecost Sunday, Next
Sunday's Pentecost Sunday. I'm going to be out of town next
Sunday. Rick's preaching next week.
And Rick, if I stole Pentecost from you, feel free to preach
another one on Pentecost. There's plenty to preach there,
So, but got something else. Awesome.
All right, All right, because I really, I really wanted to talk
about this passage. I'll be visiting our son James
next weekend. Looking forward to seeing him.
I haven't seen him since Christmas, so very eager to see
him again. And I'm very grateful for Rick
for filling in. But this question that they
asked, what does this mean that that these folks who are all
Judeans, not just Judeans, they're all Galileans and
they're talking and all of us folks who are from all over
different parts of the world are hearing everything they say,
each one of us in our own language.
How is that possible? And it's, it's the men, it's the
women, it's the old, it's the young, it's the educated, it's
the uneducated. And they're all doing this.
And we don't understand what this means.
Well, what this means is what we're talking about today.
And I'm going to kind of take a, a roundabout way to get there.
And I'm going to begin with a clip from one of my favorite
movies, a movie called Chariots of Fire.
It's an old movie. If you haven't seen it yet,
watch it. It's free on YouTube.
If you don't want to, you know, rent it on Amazon, you can get
it there. And it's true story of Eric
Little. And I'm going to show 2 races
that Eric Little ran. Eric Little was a missionary to
China and he was also a very accomplished athlete.
He played rugby and he ran. And at the point where we're
seeing him in the first clip, he's he's running a quarter mile
race. And and this again, this is a
true story. Both clips are of things that
actually happened, even though they're quite surprising.
And he's he's he's preparing for the Olympics, which will be
coming up in 1924. So this is way back in the in
the 20s. And Eric Little running a
quarter mile race, you'll know him.
He's the one that they get gets most of the camera time.
But let's watch this race together.
At this point, I showed a clip from the movie Chariots of Fire.
The scene is of 1/4 mile race in which Eric Little is not down
early in the race but comes back to win.
I didn't include the audio here because the clip is mostly
visual and the audio alone wouldn't have added anything.
Now back to the sermon. What does it mean?
You might be asking that? What does that have to do with
Pentecost? What does it have to do with the
Holy Spirit? Well, Eric Little talk
specifically about that. And we're going to get a little
bit more of that later, but I want us to have that in the back
of our minds this race run. There's not a track coach in the
world. And again, Eric Little
ultimately, spoiler alert, ultimately ends up winning a
gold medal at the Olympics. There's not a track coach in the
world that will tell one of their athletes to imitate Eric
Little's running style. When he really got going, he put
his head back, he closed his eyes and he flailed his arms.
You're track. You're in track, aren't you,
Paige? Try that next time.
See what your coach says. Maybe not, maybe not.
And yet what he did was extraordinary.
What does it mean? That's what we're talking about
because this our last Sunday on, on living the Easter life and,
and the Easter life, not only is it life in a world turned upside
down, a life of service, a life of faith, a life of love.
The Easter life is a life empowered and it's a life
empowered by the Holy Spirit. Jesus said to his disciples, for
you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you.
And we need to be careful that when we talk about the this
notion that we're going to receive power because we live in
a day in an 8. Well, and I hate to do this
again to you, but Star Wars, we live in a post Star Wars culture
and, and power means something very different in the minds, in
our cultural context that it meant when Jesus was talking
about it. Because our tendency, the modern
tendency is to think of power like the force in the Star Wars
universe. But the Holy Spirit is not the
force. Now I love, I love Star Wars
universe. Well, I like the first 6-7
movies. The last three not so much.
But the Holy Spirit is not the Force.
The Force in those movies, the Jedi's control the Force and
they use it to do what they want to do.
The Sith as well, the Force is this, this big thing, this Force
that, that exists out in the universe that some people have
the talent and the ability to learn to use.
And they take hold of the Force and they control the Force and
they use the Force to do things that they want to do.
And, and, and they can do extraordinary things with the
Force, and some of those things are good and some of those
things are bad. But the whole notion is that the
Jedi use the Force to do the things that they see need to be
done in the world around them. That is not the kind of power
Jesus was talking about. Jesus was talking about a very
different kind of power. The Holy Spirit empowers us to
do what God wants. The Force let's Jedi do what
they want to do. It gives them the power to
accomplish what they want to accomplish.
And the Sith as well, the power to accomplish what they want to
accomplish. But the power that Jesus
promised us, the power that Jesus promised the church, is
the power to do what God wants, not what we want.
The Holy Spirit was not given to us so we could live our best
lives now. The Holy Spirit was not given to
us so that we could walk out into the world with our sense of
justice and self righteousness and make people behave the way
they ought to behave and make the world into what we think it
ought to be. The Holy Spirit was given to us
to accomplish God's purposes and God's plan in the world.
And that's exactly what the Holy Spirit empowers us to do.
The Holy Spirit empowers us to do what God wants us to do as
individuals and as a church. Let's take a look at Jesus the
all the things leading up to all the things, a few of the things
leading up to Pentecost here and this business of the Holy Spirit
empowering us to do what God wants to do.
Jesus all the way back on the day of resurrection started
talking to his disciples. And this isn't just the 12.
By the time of Pentecost, there were 120, both men and women
followers of Jesus, disciples gathered.
And when the Holy Spirit descended upon them, and there
on the day of resurrection, Jesus had gone to Emmaus.
Then he went back to Jerusalem, met with again men and women in
the upper room, his followers, his disciples, and was telling
them what God was going to do through them.
And this is what Jesus said there on the day of
resurrection. Repentance for forgiveness of
sins, Jesus says, will be proclaimed in his name.
He's talking about himself to all the nations beginning in
Jerusalem. So there in Jerusalem, Jesus
said, here's what's going to happen now.
Repentance for the forgiveness of sins will be proclaimed in
the name of Jesus. And my name, Jesus says
beginning in Jerusalem, it's going to be proclaimed to all
the nations few weeks after that on the day that Jesus ascended
into the heavens, Jesus once again, he's not in the
Jerusalem. They're out of Jerusalem now out
in the countryside and and the disciples are gathered around
him. And Jesus before he ascends into
the heaven says this, you will receive power when the Holy
Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses in
Jerusalem and to the ends of the earth.
Now he adds in this point to spot to two locations between
that Judea and Samaria, but now to the ends of the earth,
starting in Jerusalem, going to all the nations, going to the
ends of the earth. This is what Jesus is telling
his disciples is going to happen through them.
Now remember who his disciples were.
His disciples were not highly educated people.
His disciples that that had learned lots of languages.
His disciples were not wealthy people who could afford to
travel to the ends of the earth. His disciples were not
respected, powerful people who would be able to enter other
countries and just start doing things that they were going to
be doing. His disciples were just regular
folks. These were working class folks
that had a limited education. The women almost certainly had
even less education than the men because of the way their culture
was constructed then. But Jesus is saying to these
hundred 120 people, I mean, that's not bad for, you know,
for I love 120 people in here on Sunday.
I think, man, that's a lot of folks.
But you know, 8 billion people in the world now, 100 and 20s
tiny fraction to the ends of the earth.
Now we don't hear that the Bible does not report these
conversations happening. But I, I have to believe the
disciples from that day of resurrection up to this point of
ascension, we're going how, how is this going to be possible?
They were aware of how big the world was not, I mean not
completely, they didn't know about what we now call North and
South America or Australia, but they were aware that the world
was a lot bigger than Jerusalem and Israel.
They lived at the crossroads of great civilizations.
People travel. That's why that area of land
kept getting conquered by 1 empire after another, because
that area of land was strategically important.
It was accessed between Asia and and Africa and Europe and
Africa, and they would have encountered people from all of
those different areas. They would have encountered
people from India, maybe people from China.
They would have encountered people from the great
civilizations of Africa like Egypt and Ethiopia.
They would have encountered people from Europe and Rome and
the Roman Empire. All of these folks traveling
through that area, they would have known, have this tremendous
number of different languages, different cultures, all of this
diversity that was out there, all of these places that wealthy
people traveled to. And it took them weeks and
months to get there. And they would have said how,
how can this happen? And then Pentecost, then the
Holy Spirit descends upon them and they are empowered and God
through the Holy Spirit helps them see that God can and will
empower them to do whatever God calls them to do.
Because right there in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost,
Pentecost was a Jewish celebration before it was a
Christian celebration. And, and on that day there were,
there were Jewish folks from all over, different parts of the
world, different ethnicities, different languages, different
cultures, different backgrounds. We're gathering there in
Jerusalem. Right there on that day was a
sampling, a small sampling of all the nations of the ends of
the earth. Earth.
And right there these regular, ordinary folks experienced this
extraordinary thing. All of them, men, the women, the
young, the old, the educated, the uneducated, all of them were
filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues
as the Spirit enabled them. Now they were staying in
Jerusalem, God fearing Jews from every nation under the under
heaven, when the when they heard this sound, a crowd came
together in bewilderment because each one heard their own
language being spoken. So we hear about them speaking
different languages and each people hearing in a different
language. And so, so, yeah, you got to
imagine this crowd of folks. There's 120 disciples plus all
of these other folks here. The disciples filled with the
Holy Spirit are telling the good news of Jesus Christ.
And everyone there was in all of this chaos, hearing the gospel
in their own language, in their own ears.
And the disciples can say, if God can do this, we've got
nothing to worry about. Ends of the earth, other
languages. We've got the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit didn't empower them to go out and force other
people to convert to Christianity except Jesus or
die. The Holy Spirit didn't empower
them to, to, to build up their lives and their personal net
worths and and the Holy Spirit didn't empower them to establish
their own personal empires in one form or another.
The Holy Spirit wasn't there to help them become great.
The Holy Spirit empowered them to do the work that Jesus had
given them to do to fulfill the prophecy that Jesus made about
them. That is the power of the Holy
Spirit. The Holy Spirit empowers us to
do what God wants us to do, not whatever we want to do.
Now, in all of that, it's important to remember that the
Holy Spirit does not empower everyone to do the same thing.
We're part of a body, right? And the hand doesn't do what the
heart does, and the heart doesn't do what the lungs do,
And the lungs don't do what the feet do.
And the feet don't do what the kidneys do, and the kidneys
don't do what the knees do. Each of us gets empowered by the
Holy Spirit to do what God calls each of us as individuals to do.
And we're going to come down back to this ordinary,
extraordinary example of Eric Little because I, I, I believe
he's a, a, a wonderful illustration of this, partly
because what he does is extraordinary.
And he explicitly tributes what he does to the power of God,
working in his life through the Holy Spirit that way.
It's extraordinary what he does. It's ordinary in the sense that
this promises for all of us as individuals.
It's like, you know, you're, you're, you've heard that
before. You're a unique individual.
And the history of the world, there has never been anyone
exactly like you. You are absolutely unique, just
like everyone else in the world. It's both extraordinary and
ordinary, and Eric Little is extraordinary and ordinary.
We're going to watch his race in the Olympics.
He trained ultimately in Olympics and qualified for the
100 meters. Watch the movie, you'll find out
why he didn't run the 100 meters.
He ended up not running the 100 meters.
Instead, he's running the 400 meters, trained for 100 meters,
running the 400 meters and we're going to see his race in the
Olympics. The, the medal, this is the
medal round. He's run 2 heats in this day and
age. And it wasn't like we'll come
back day after they, they had already run 2 heats that day.
And now he's running the third heat competing for the medals.
It's the medal round and, and we're going to watch that race.
You're going to hear Eric Little's voice in the background
as he's running and and he's saying things that he had said
earlier in the movie, but we're only getting part of it at this
point. And I'm going to fill those
things out. But let's watch the race. 400
meters. Don't expect the seats after the
race to deal with this guy. Little coach, your problem.
No problem. He's a flier.
He's had two races today already.
He'll die. Just swing along, you guys, and
wait. After 300 meters, rigor mortis
sets in. You'll pull him in on a rope.
Good luck. Watch out for a little coach.
There's no problem. He's got something to prove,
something personal, something guys like Coach will never
understand in the meeting use. Says in the old book, He that
honours me, I will honour good luck, Jackson shows.
So where does the power come from to see the race to its end
from within? Jenny, I believe God made me for
a purpose, but he also made me fast and when I run I feel his
pleasure. As he's thinking there and he's
running, we hear his voice echoes from earlier in the movie
where he's he's teaching and talking about God and and
comparing as Paul did the Christian life to a race.
And where does the power come from?
Here we just hear him say it comes from within.
Earlier in the movie. He says it comes clearly.
He says it explicitly. It comes from God within us,
from the Holy Spirit within us is where the power comes.
And there's a place where he's saying there that that I know
God made me for a purpose. The full statement, he was
talking to his sister. His sister thought he was
wasting his time that this running stuff, this sports
stuff, the rugby, it was all silly.
It was all distracting him from the real important work that he
needed to do as a missionary, A missionary to China.
And he eventually went back to China where he had a very
effective ministry for many years.
But he said, I know God made me for a purpose, God made me for
China, but God also made me fast.
And when I run, I feel his pleasure.
So my question for you is, what do you do that lets you feel
God's pleasure? Because it's going to be
different things for different folks.
For some, it might be sports, some kind of academics, maybe
it's teaching, maybe it's building things, maybe it's
growing things, maybe it's making things.
Who paint? Who knows?
Working with children, healing all of these different things.
But what is it that you do in your life?
And when you do that, you can say in your heart and your soul
and your bones, When I do this, I feel God's pleasure.
Do that. Whatever that is, do that.
Whatever else anyone thinks about it, do that.
That thing where you feel God's pleasure in your life because
that's the Holy Spirit, that's the power that God is giving you
to do a thing. And God brings that power to
you. And it's not easy.
You see him, he was exhausted at after that first race where he
has to come from behind and win. It cost him everything he could
to win that race, to run and to do this thing that he feels
God's pleasure. It cost him, but He did it, and
there's joy in that. And it's not going to be the
same for everyone. God has different callings and
gives different gifts to each of us according to His purpose in
our lives. But whatever, whatever that
thing is that you can do that gives you a sense of God's
pleasure, keep doing that thing. Now, there is that
individuality, but there's also this ordinariness part of it.
And there are some things that the Holy Spirit empowers all of
God's followers to, something that the Holy Spirit does in
everyone who is a follower of Jesus.
God calls us different people to do different things, but the
Holy Spirit will empower you to do whatever God calls you to do.
But there are common things also that the Holy Spirit will
empower and in produce in all who receive him.
Let's look at what Paul said in Galatians.
But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives.
Lovejoy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness,
faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
There is no law against these things.
This is the fruit of the Holy Spirit that is for everyone, for
everyone. I think you can make a real
strong argument that when you see this in the life of anyone,
that's evidence of the Holy Spirit in that person's life.
Whatever specific individual thing, again, whether it's
sports or arts or construction or building or farming or
teaching or doctoring or nursing or driving, whatever it is,
whatever it is the specific thing that gives you that joy of
God in your life. The Holy Spirit allows us to do
that and empowers us to do that with love, with that joy, with
peace, with patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness and self-control. Those are the marks that that's
God working in us. That's what Eric was able to see
and experience and feel in his own life.
That's what he was pointing to when he said when I run, I feel
God's pleasure. When he ran, he felt that joy of
God working in him. And this is not easy and it
requires letting go of a lot of things too.
Paul says right after this, let's not be.
Let us not be conceited or provoke one another or be
jealous of one another. Conceit, pride, jealousy,
obvious marks of not the Holy Spirit, but the spirit of this
world, the spirit of the devil in our lives and that provoking
one another. My goodness, you spend 5 minutes
on the Internet and you find people trolling and that's their
what they've devoted their life to is provoking other people,
click baiting and rage baiting and all of the things that
happened online and in real life.
And I confess this was one of the things I used to love.
One of my greatest sources of pleasure as a young man was to
say things that shocked and offended people.
I would get such a kick out of it.
I would say all sorts of things. Believe you said that.
And then I found out later, Well, realized later, yeah, that
was not a good way to do things, Blevins.
Not a good way to do things. I've grown a little bit.
Little bit we're not here to provoke each other.
And since we're living by the Spirit, let us follow the
spirits leading in every part of our lives everywhere.
We can live by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit with
Lovejoy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, goodness,
self-control, all of these things.
I want to give you a personal example here as we wrap up.
I'm running late again. We'll have to wait for me over
at New Beginnings because I I, you know what?
Yeah. I'm going to tell this.
I just have to abbreviate it. One of the things Amy and I have
done in our lives was in the hardest things, probably the
hardest thing each of us has ever done is, is Amy's mom lived
with us for three years while she had Alzheimer's.
And then then the final year of her life, it was beyond our
capacity to care for her. And, and she was in an, an
assisted living center. And I'm going to tell you a
little bit about Phyllis, and Phyllis won't mind.
Phyllis is Amy's mom. She won't mind that.
I've told this. Phyllis was a too much
information kind of person. After 15 minutes of knowing
Phyllis, you would know things about her that only your doctor
knows about you. That's just who Phyllis was.
She was happy to share everything.
So on Phyllis's behalf, I'm going to share more than you
know. She'll be all right with us.
Phyllis was not an easy person to get along with in in, in her
good years before Alzheimer's kicked in.
She was tough. She was tough.
And there reached a point we were living not too far from her
after her second husband had passed and our interactions with
her and her with us and with our kids.
And there was a point where Amy and I, after one particular
conversation with her, looked at each other and said she will
never live with us. Whatever happens to her,
wherever she ends up going, she will never live with us.
And we meant it. She was tough.
And then we both also, we were just talking about this
yesterday, had a very clear memory of when we were having
conversation with her and we saw clearly and unequivocally the
evidence of the Alzheimer's. And we looked at each other and
said she needs to move in with us.
And, and we meant it. And it was hard.
It was hard. It was particularly hard on Amy
and, and, and the cleaning and the serving and the caring and
the arguing and the, if you've had to care for someone with
Alzheimer's, you know, is hard. And she stayed with us for three
years. Amy and I both working full
time. COVID was a blessing for us
because Amy's job went remote and she was able to be at home
full time as well as working full time.
And that helped us care. And I was home a lot more than
two helped us care for Phyllis. And it was it was not only the
hardest four years of our life, but also, and Amy will tell you
the exact same thing. We had this sense all the way
through of this is what God wants us to be doing.
This is exactly what God has called us to do right now.
And we felt through the struggle, through the challenge,
through the tears, we felt God's pleasure and we felt that joy.
And we saw God doing things to make it possible for us to care
for her. That we don't have time to tell
them to you all. I got a lot of stories.
There's some amazing ones of things we could never have
worked out on our own that just worked out all by the power of
the Holy Spirit so that we could do this thing that God was
calling us to do. And I can guarantee that gum to
you that our capacity to care for Phyllis was not our
willpower and our determination. It was a gift of the Holy
Spirit. And we got to give him all that
credit and all that glory because he deserves it, because
he called us to do that, to care for her.
She was his daughter. He knew she was tough, right?
I went to a couple times to monastery in New York for some
spiritual retreats, talking to one of the monks there, and I
was belly aching about something.
I can't remember what it was about how hard it was and how
much it hurt and how challenging and difficult it was.
And he just looked at me and said, yeah, I said, I wonder,
you think it was hard for Jesus to be crucified?
Was that uncomfortable for him? I was like, shut up.
It's hard. What God calls us to do is hard.
It is uncomfortable. It is at times extraordinarily
painful. But the Holy Spirit will always
empower us to do whatever God calls us to do, whatever that
is, and to do it with love and joy and peace and patience and
kindness and goodness. And also a lot of tears.
A lot of tears too, but that's the Spirit empowered life.
That's the Easter life filled with, empowered by the Holy
Spirit to do whatever God is calling us to do in Jesus name,
Amen. Amen.