The Divine Wind
Acts 8:25-26
Acts 8:25-26… After testifying and preaching the word of the Lord in Samaria, Peter and John returned to Jerusalem. And they stopped in many Samaritan villages along the way to preach the Good News to them, too. As for Philip, an angel of the Lord said to him, "Go south down the desert road that runs from Jerusalem to Gaza." NLT
The book of Acts opens with a dramatic presentation of three symbols that would characterize the ministry of the Holy Spirit throughout the age of the church. These three symbols are very prominent all through the book of Acts.
• Mighty rushing wind
• Tongues as of fire
• Proclamation of unknown languages, the gift of tongues
These indicate three elements, which we will find repeatedly throughout the book of Acts, and throughout the age of the church, wherever the Spirit is at work.
The gift of tongues is a symbol of the proclamation of the truth in unknown languages. It began on the Day of Pentecost with the Apostle Peter standing up and proclaiming Jesus Christ to a great crowd of people.
Fire is a symbol of the judging and purifying by the Holy Spirit at work within his church, to keep it a usable instrument, to keep it honest and available. We see the Spirit working as fire in the story of Ananias and Sapphira, when God judged the hypocrisy, the sham of an empty Christian life.
The mighty rushing wind represents the Spirit in his Sovereignty, in his right to direct the activity of the church.
Joke… “The Boy Who Believes in the Holy Spirit Isn’t Here”
A children’s Sunday School class was learning to say what they believe. Each child was assigned a sentence to repeat one after the other.
The first one said, “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”
The second child said, “I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son…”
When he had completed his sentence, there was an embarrassing silence.
Finally, one child piped up, “Teacher, the boy who believes in the Holy Spirit isn’t here.”
John 3:5-8 Jesus replied, "The truth is, no one can enter the Kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. Humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit gives new life from heaven. So don’t be surprised at my statement that you must be born again. Just as you can hear the wind but can’t tell where it comes from or where it is going, so you can’t explain how people are born of the Spirit." NLT
The wind is an apt symbol of the sovereign direction of the Holy Spirit. He goes wherever he wills; you cannot predict him.
In the text today Peter and John on their way back from Samaria to Jerusalem:
There are three words there that indicate the normal, usual activity of Christians.
Testifying = shared what they had experienced. That is what a testimony is. It is telling everyone else what happened to you. Peter and John shared what God had done with them through Jesus Christ.
Preaching The Word = they gave out truth. The truth that we now have incorporated in the Scriptures, they spoke to these new believers in Samaria.
Evangelized= stopped in many Samaritan villages
These three things, testifying, preaching, and evangelizing make up the normal activities of Christian witness. They are perfectly normal, and yet they are empowered by the Holy Spirit. There is nothing particularly unusual about them, but nevertheless they are empowered by the Spirit of God and directed by him.
What Dr. Luke is after in this passage is to set the next story in sharp contrast to the normal ordinary, expected things. However, in the next account we have an unusual, extraordinary, unpredictable activity of the Spirit of God.
Acts 8:26-27... As for Philip, an angel of the Lord said to him, "Go south down the desert road that runs from Jerusalem to Gaza." So he did, NLT
An angel suddenly appeared to Philip. I have never had an angel appear to me. I have never seen an angel, except for the one I married.
Heb 1:14… But angels are only servants. They are spirits sent from God to care for those who will receive salvation. NLT
An angel appears to Philip and gives him an unexplained command to go south and take the road that leads from Jerusalem to Gaza.
He could not have picked an emptier stretch of road. It is desert road, as the account tells us. There are no cities or villages, nothing.
The wonderful thing to me is the beautiful way in which Philip obeyed this command of the angel.
• He did not say, "Well, I’ll have to pray about this."
• He did not say to himself, "Well, I wonder if this is a call to a larger field of service," (which is another way of saying a church with a larger salary).
• He just went, that is all. He left the awakening that was going on at Samaria, with its demands for training and teaching. He arose and went down to a desert road.
This is a beautiful picture of "the wind of God," the sovereign blowing of the Holy Spirit. This type of adventure is always characteristic of someone directed by the Holy Spirit.
The point I wish to make is that Verse 25 and Verse 26 are both records of Spirit-filled activity. Peter and John were obeying the Holy Spirit when they testified, preached, and evangelized. However, Philip is also obeying the Holy Spirit by going out to a desert place. Both are part of the Spirit-filled life.
Because people tend to run in extremes, there are those who take the position, only when the dramatic happens or the unusual the Holy Spirit is leading you. Thank God, the Holy Spirit does lead in dramatic ways, and does present us with unusual circumstances. However, that is not the only way. He can be very effective as leads through the ordinary and the usual.
However the church is suffering because it has been so terribly predictable. You can always know what is going to happen.
There is a place for the ordinary, as Verse 25 teaches us. But there must also be made a place for that unpredictable character of God, the sovereign, vital, fresh ministry of the Holy Spirit which moves in ways that nobody can anticipate.
ILL… Christians tend to dig channels for the flowing of the river of God. We dig a channel, then we line it with concrete, and we say, "Come, O River of God and flow now through this channel that we have dug for you." To our dismay there is just a little trickle of water that comes down through, while the great flood of the Spirit’s power is moving out in the desert where we do not think he belongs at all.
The lesson that God is forever teaching us:
• is the creative strategy of the Holy Spirit,
• the freedom to interfere,
• the freedom to override a program
• to change it
• to make something new.
How do you schedule the Holy Spirit?
ILL… It would be like having all the weather men of the United States meet together to plan where the hurricanes are going to be next year, or the tornadoes. You cannot schedule a tornado, and you cannot schedule the Holy Spirit. He must be free to move in ways beyond our planning.
He oftentimes moves in line with what has become the norm, but the wonderful thing about the Christian life is the freedom that God has to break through and to change our schedule.
There must be a place for a creative, new approach, fresh and vital. This is the reason why so much of Christian education becomes dull, routine, and boring because it lacks this freshness of the Holy Spirit.
The glorious thing about the book of Acts is that repeatedly you find these early Christians so responsive to this, with God breaking through frequently in ways they could never anticipate.
The great need of the church of this hour is for us to break free, once again, from too much structure, and to be free again to respond to the leading of God in fresh and wonderful ways.
Elijah: Look at the incident in the life of Elijah. Remember the time after his tremendous battle and breakthrough on Mount Carmel against the priests of Baal. Queen Jezebel threatened him after he had her priests slain.
1 Kings 19:2…So Jezebel sent this message to Elijah: "May the gods also kill me if by this time tomorrow I have failed to take your life like those whom you killed." NLT
Elijah reacted very much as you and I would have; he ran. He really ran! He traveled more than a hundred miles before he stopped. He crawled under a juniper tree and there, in his despondency, he gave way to all the self-pity of his heart.
However, God dealt with him. It is interesting that God dealt with Elijah on a three-fold basis. Through the whole man; body, soul, and spirit:
• First, he gave him a good night’s sleep and two good meals. It is wonderfully encouraging to me to know that there are times when the most spiritual thing you can do is to have a bubble bath, a good meal, and a good night’s sleep.
• Second, he took him to a place of deep emotional attachment, Mount Sinai, with all its memories of the power and the presence of God.
• Third, he took him to a mountain where three things occurred:
o (1) A great wind swept through and broke the rocks in pieces, and the account says, "but God was not in the wind,"
o (2) Then an earthquake shook the ground, "but the Lord was not in the earthquake,"
o (3) "And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire;"
o (4) and after the fire a still small voice,"
It was God’s way of teaching the prophet that he did not intend to work through the might of the wind, nor an earthquake, nor a fire. That is what Elijah wanted him to do; that was his schedule for God’s activity.
However, God said, "No, I’m going to work through the still, small voice of an awakened conscience. A still small voice of an awakening of conscience in this land will change the whole land."
We must be prepared in our Christian life for this unpredictable activity of the Spirit of God.
Notice what happens with Philip. The rest of Acts 8 is a wonderful account of how adequate the Spirit of God is to handle the adventure, and to prepare it all in advance.
A prepared heart: Acts 8:27-28.. So he did, and he met the treasurer of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under the queen of Ethiopia. The eunuch had gone to Jerusalem to worship, 28 and he was now returning. Seated in his carriage, he was reading aloud from the book of the prophet Isaiah. NLT
There is a man prepared. He was obviously a searching man. He had come to Jerusalem to worship at the temple. He was looking for something. He was not a Jew.
He was a man of great authority, responsibility, and intelligence, and he was searching for truth. He had come to the temple to investigate the Jewish faith, and you cannot read this account without detecting a note of disillusionment. He is going home, but evidently is not satisfied. He is reading a copy of the book of the prophet Isaiah aloud.
The heart is prepared and the Spirit said to Philip, "Go up and join this chariot." So Philip ran to him, and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet, and asked, "Do you understand what you are reading?" And he said, "How can I, unless some one guides me?"
Now the passage of the scripture which he was reading was this:
"As a sheep led to the slaughter
or a lamb before it shearer is dumb,
so he opens not his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken up from the earth."
And the eunuch said to Philip, "About whom, pray, does the prophet say this, about himself or about some one else?" {Acts 8:29-34 RSV}
This whole situation is a tremendous manifestation of the preparation and timing of the Holy Spirit.
A guided conversation… Philip says to him, "Do you understand what you are reading?"
It is always a mistake to take the Bible and say, I don’t need anybody else to teach me. I will only act upon what God says to me and not others.
Quote… Charles Spurgeon, the great English preacher, used to say, "I never could understand why some men set such great value on what the Holy Spirit said to them, and so little value on what he said to anyone else."
God has provides the Scriptures, and he has also provided teachers who are gifted and helpful in understanding and explaining them. It takes both to enter into the full knowledge of truth.
Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this scripture he told him the good news of Jesus. He began with the Scripture the man was reading, but he did not stay there.
Philip must have told him what baptism means, how it is a symbol of the life that has been received from Jesus Christ, and that by being baptized an individual is saying, "I have asked Jesus to enter my life and to be my Lord. I have received a new life in him."
A prepared place -- right at the precise timing of the Spirit -- a place where there was some water at the side of the road, it was the eunuch who said, "See, here is water! What hinders me from being baptized?" So they went down and Philip baptized him
Acts 8:39-40… And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught up Philip; and the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. But Philip was found at Azotus, and passing on he preached the gospel to all the towns till he came to Caesarea. RSV
That is what can happen in the adventure of the Spirit-filled life. Both in the usual, and in the unusual, you have the Spirit of God at work.
There will be plenty of routine, plenty of the usual, plenty of the ordinary. However, that "ordinary" is all touched with the wind of heaven.
It will also have these wonderful moments when the extraordinary suddenly arrives.
Out of the ordinary circumstance, amazing things suddenly begin to develop. Being caught up on the wind of the Holy Spirit, carried along into events that only a divine hand could have prepared. You realize that God is at work in an amazing way.
This is the normal Christian life. It needs to be the experience for all of us.
Are we expecting him to intervene in this unusual way as well as to work through the ordinary?
Are you available to the Holy Spirit to work His way?
Prayer:
