Pastor Allan H. Kircher
Shell Point Baptist Church
27 February 2011
Powerpoints available for each sermon, email at shellpntbapt@embarqmail.com. they are mostly visual and apply great support to touch the visual learner.
Acts 2:12 “Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”
“What happened at Pentecost?”
Pentecost is the greatest event in the history of the Christian church.
But, in spite of this, I am persuaded that for many earnest people it has little or no meaning.
Some have become so mystified by it that in passing they miss out of what it essentially means in our lives today.
Therefore, instead of fixing our minds upon the events of this story that we confessedly do not understand,
let us think of things we can understand.
Let us forget for the moment the fiery tongues and the rushing wind and think of the change that this experience,
Whatever its nature, brought in the disciples themselves.
What did Pentecost do for the Disciples?
It bonded them into a brotherhood.
Close reading of the Gospels will reveal the fact that one chief purpose of Jesus was to build a brotherhood.
“By this,” He said, “shall all men know that they are my disciples, if you love one another” (John 13:35).
Do we genuinely love one another in our fellowship?
1 John 3:16….”this is how we know what love is….
Do you go through the day thinking of Peggy S. or Betty D. or Steve or Rhonda and many others feeling the pain and the suffering they must be going through?
Do you yearn through prayer for God to comfort them?
Do you feel the pain and suffering for their souls as if it were you?
Just as if they were in your inner circle of the divine brotherhood through Jesus Christ.
The Holy Spirit melts us together in this fashion.
The disciples clung to each other because there were no others who they could turn to for support and understanding.
Jesus recognized there were two types of personalities in the world
One made for hate, the other for love.
One works toward the dividing the men, the other toward uniting of them.
Jesus claimed that He Himself was a united force.
He claimed further that all who were engaged with Him in the building of men into a brotherhood were His friends and that all others were His enemies.
He said, “He that is not with me is against me; and he who does not gather with me scatters” (Matt. 12:30).
There is no in between in the kingdom of God.
The precursor of the Pentecost.
But, in spite of the fact that Jesus gave His energies wholeheartedly to this high task, at the time of His death He seems to have made but little progress.
He had gathered about Him an inner circle of twelve men.
While these were outwardly one, inwardly they were far from being united.
It is distressing and depressing to realize they went into their last meal with their Master spitting hot words at each other as they wrangled over the old question:
Who should be the greatest in the kingdom?
It was the Master Himself who had to assume the role of a slave and wash His disciples’ feet.
Not one of them would humble themselves enough to undertake this lowly task.
But Pentecost came and changed the lives of these men forever.
Just as it has done to all who genuine faith in the risen Lord as their Savior.
But after this experience in the Upper Room, Dr. Luke could say,
“The multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul” (Acts 4:32).
Now the oneness of these men and women is eternal.
And it brought it orthodox Jews, despised Samaritans and Gentiles, men and women of different races and nationalities, different social standings
All brought into the common brotherhood of Jesus Christ.
So close are the ties of this brotherhood that those who had once been far apart
now worship and take communion together.
So close were they in brotherhood that they shared their material substance:
Acts 4:32, “All the believers were one in heart and mind, No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had.”
This is the nearest approach to Christian communism that we find in the New Testament.
It was a communism of spending and not earning.
It was this devotion of one Christian to another, this spirit of brotherliness that was one of them most impressive characteristics of the early church.
The pagan world looked on these little “colonies of heaven” with wistful wonder.
“How these Christians love each other!” they say!
They said it in amazement.
And because they wanted to love and be loved, they were drawn into these little groups.
1 Corinthians 14:24-25
To this day there is nothing more impressive as a church that is a brotherhood.
It is equally true that there is nothing that more grossly misrepresents our Lord than a church that is torn by strife and discord.
Let the membership of this church get to fighting among ourselves and the Devil may take a holiday so far as Shell Point is concerned.
Pentecost yielded the friends of Jesus into a brotherhood.
Can you see and feel that happening to this fellowship?
Then, through this experience,
The disciples became literally obsessed by a passion for witnessing.
They had an irresistible urge to share their experience with their fellows.
No sooner had the multitude come together on that day and ask, “What does this mean?”
Simon Peter stood ready to answer.
He stood up with the Eleven, Luke tells us.
There was one spokesman, but every member of the group bore his testimony by standing up with Simon Peter.
One weakness of our modern witnessing is that so often the present-day Simon must stand up without the eleven. Without the fellowship.
Those that should be there to back his testimony, to give it pungency and power, are not present.
Simon Peter, with the backing of his fellow saints, testified that men were cut to the heart,
and some three thousand were brought into the church.
It is no different today. A powerful soul in our fellowship may single handedly bring in a sinner to our presence.
If we have this genuine unity of brotherhood and love for Jesus that sinner will feel that bond and remain in the fellowship.
This experience also:
Gave the disciples an incredible joy and hopefulness and courage that fill us with wistful wonder to this very hour.
The very first impression they made upon outsiders was that theirs was the joy of the intoxicated.
Acts 2:13, says “Some, however, made fun of them and said, They have had too much wine.”
Most of us know how a mild form of intoxication banishes the gloom, changes sadness into gladness, timidity into courage, and want into wealth.
So it is so with the Holy Spirit.
This absurd joyousness of the Holy Spirit was born.
The disciples now knew that the kingdoms of this world were actually going to become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ.
In this mad faith, they faced stark impossibilities with holy laughter.
Now they could encounter the most deadly dangers unafraid.
They were opposed, arrested, publicly whipped, but found no discouragement.
Fifty day prior they were not like this…
But now they rejoiced that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for the sake of their victorious Lord.
Thus, they lived in joyous expectancy.
They were possessed by boundless optimism and a fearless courage that were all but irresistible.
This experience also:
Brought to these disciples amazing power.
In fact, it enabled them to do what any sane man would have said was flatly impossible.
Suppose a spectator who saw that little prayer meeting crowd of 120 and said,
“There moves a group that is going to shake this entire city.
They are going to shake the whole Jewish nation.
They are going to shake the whole Roman world.
Age old abuses like slavery and infanticide are going to vanish before them.
Sickness and death have lost its sting.
They are going to breathe on all the subsequent centuries like a spiritual springtime.”
Any sane man would have said. Who would believe it? “Impossible.”
Yet, history declares that this actually did happen.
What if people begin to say this about Shell Point.
“There moves a group that is going to shake this entire city.”
They are all acting as if they are drunk on wine!
There is a group that shows compassion and love for his brothers and sisters.
There is a group that gives unconditionally.
There is a group that lives as Christ lives..
We’ve heard of those Christians over at Shell Point
We are climbing to the mountain top, may the Glory of God’s face shine upon us in our lives.
What did Pentecost do for the church?
This, then, is the effect of Pentecost on the church:
A brotherly church, a church with a passion for witnessing,
a church with a joyous optimism and a fearless courage, a church with amazing power.
What was the cause? How did this group of believers come to be this kind of church?
Perhaps we listen to the testimony of those who were present and who participated in this great event.
They explain the change that had been brought in themselves in terms of the Divine.
They used a variety of words to express this conviction, but it all adds up to this:
They have not simply come upon new evidences of God or of His resurrection.
They have, rather, come to a new and compelling awareness of God Himself.
They have come to realize beyond doubt the Christ who was crucified is really alive.
Not only so, but He is both with and within them, individually.
He is also among them as a group.
They know that in giving the Holy Spirit, God has given Himself.
So they tell us that the change in them has been brought in them by God and God alone.
It is my conviction that their testimony is true.
I have seen it in many lives as well as my own.
I believe this because no other explanation will satisfy.
We cannot account for what these ordinary men and women became and what they did in any other way.
They became the kind of men and women, and did the kind of work, that I would expect God-possessed men and women to become and to do.
The same as God expects us to do here.
After this experience they ceased to imitate Christ painstakingly and came to reproduce Him spontaneously.
They sing with Paul, “For to me to live is Christ” (Phil. 1:21).
And “I am crucified with Christ; nevertheless, I live; yet not I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).
Should I say, “Sinatra lives in me,” you would expect me to sing in some fashion as Sinatra sang.
These people, claiming to be indwelled of Christ, went out to live just as He lived.
Look, for instance, at this picture.
Here is a man, brilliant, gifted, possessed by that love of life that belongs to young manhood at its best.
Yet, this young man, Stephen by name, meets an untimely death.
Because he dares to speak his deepest convictions, he is dragged through the city streets and cruelly mobbed.
But he dies without bitterness, and there is a light upon his face that was never seen on land or sea.
As he falls asleep, he prays this prayer: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60).
Now that marks him as a true and close kinsman to Jesus who hung on the cross, praying for His enemies;
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).
We cannot account for such lives except in terms of God.
Just as we cannot account for what these men became apart from God, no more can we account for what they accomplished.
They were without social standing.
They were without wealth.
They did not have enough influence to avoid the whipping post and the jail, the arena and the stake.
Yet they turned the world upside down.
Today, we don’t have that threat of the whipping post or the possibility of being crucified on a stake.
Are we turning Beaufort upside down in testimony, life, and love of Christ who dwells in us?
If you’re living in flesh you’re not turning Beaufort upside down.
If you’re living in Christ, your motivated, excited, compassionate, faithful, yearning more and more to filled with the power of God,
Yearning to release the Pentecostal power dwelling in you.
The disciples never thought this mighty change was brought by themselves.
“Do not look on us,” Simon Peter warns, “as if it is by our own power or holiness we had done this.
God has thus glorified His servant Jesus (Acts 3:12-13 paraphrased).
And always, when Paul reports the results of his missionary efforts,
it is not what he and his fellows have accomplished but what God has done through them.
They could no more have accomplished what they did accomplish apart from this experience of God
than a drop of water could change the Sahara Desert into a flower garden.
This is the only explanation that really explains.
What Does Pentecost Mean for Us?
It means that this same transforming and empowering experience of God is for you and me.
This is the testimony of Simon Peter as he spoke on that distant day:
“The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call” (Acts 2:39).
This is to be the experience not of the exceptional Christian but of all Christians.
Our Lord never intended that you and I should carry on in the energy of the flesh.
Through our very failures, He is saying to us what He said in the long ago:
“Without me you can do nothing” (John 15:5).
It is only in and through Him that we can become and do our best.
Let us abide in Him in total and glorious self-abandonment.
We have in Simon Peter a standard whereby to measure ourselves.
When the Holy Spirit falls upon us we shall go to the Bible with a new reading power,
And we shall see wonders where before we saw nothing because of our spiritual blindness.
There may be portions of the Bible we are very familiar, but do we know of its inner meanings,
Of the minor prophets?, the out-of-the-way histories?,
The deep things of God?
Under the enlightenment of the Spirit we will see that everything grand in thought, thrilling in poetry,
Tragic in experience, noble in heroism, is in the Bible.
This is the book in which all other books are made.
Let nothing move us from our rootage of Jesus Christ.
Let us “pray without ceasing,” and let our consecration be so complete and confident that there may be presented to the world a church “alive unto God”;
A church abounding in signs of vitality as the azalea’s are in springtime.
A church quickened in moral vision, in intellectual perception,
In emotional discernment; a church that is sound in doctrine, compassionate and daring
Moving amid the changing circumstances of men in the very spirit of her Lord
Presenting everywhere the arresting ministry of our risen Lord,
A covert from the storms, being the rivers of water in a dry place,
And the shadow of a great rock in a weary land!
Climbing the mountain top to the Glory of God.
Certainly there was never a greater need for a God to guide us in this discovery.
who is able to do abundantly above all that we can ask or think of doing today.
Only God can enable us to save a civilization that threatens to collapse into an abysm of blood and tears through unbrotherly hate.
If there is not a power that can remake us and equip us for the task of building the kingdom of God,
then I see no hope for our world.
If, then, this experience is available for us, how can we enter upon it?
How do we avail ourselves of that mighty power called electricity?
We do so by discovering the laws of electricity and being obedient to them.
It is thus that we avail ourselves of the power of God.
“We are witnesses of these things and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey Him” (Acts 5:32).
As the room is flooded with sunshine when the blinds are lifted,
so our lives are flooded by His presence when we open the door for His incoming.
His is not merchandise to be bought.
He is a gift to be received:
“Of his fullness have all we received”(John 1:16).
I pray that we have an unbroken communion in the mind and will of God.
It is the “Christ in us” which is “the hope of glory,” both individually and as a brotherhood of believers.
That we stand today in victory and say “the horse is ready for battle, but the victory belongs to the Lord.”
Our times today are disturbed by vast and stupendous problems.
On every side the latch is lifting, and the door of opportunity stands ajar.
But we shall fail in our day, as other men have failed in their day,
Unless by faith and experience we enter into “the fellowship of his sufferings,”
And become clothed with “the power of his resurrection.”
It is such receiving that makes the finest of giving possible for us.
John 7:37-38 says, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.
