ENGAGE
A man died, and the attorney said to his wife, "He did not leave a will. So we need to know the last words he ever said to you." She said, "I don't want to tell you." He said, "Look, he did not leave a will. We need to know the last words he ever said to you." She said, "I don't want to tell you. It was something between the two of us." He said, "May I beg you one more time?" She said, "Okay, I'll tell you. The last thing he ever said to me was, 'You don't scare me. You couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with that old gun.' "
One of the lessons we learn from that story is that last words are important. And it seems to me that is especially true when it comes to the last words of Jesus. So this morning, we’ll spend some time looking at the final words that He spoke to His disciples right before He left this earth and ascended to His Father.
TENSION
Those words are really important to us because they provide us with some needed insight into an area of our walk with Jesus that tends to be one of the most scary and difficult aspects of our life as disciples of Jesus.
TRUTH
So let’s look at those last words of Jesus, which we’ll find in the first chapter of the book of Acts. You’ll find the book of Acts right after the gospel accounts written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.
We’re going to be spending the next 9 weeks in the book of Acts. Since that book contains 28 chapters, we obviously won’t be covering the entire book. We will spend our time focusing on some key passages that will help us to learn what it means to be a church that is gathered together not just to enjoy the kingdom of God for ourselves but in order to go and bring that kingdom near to others.
We’ll start this morning at the beginning of the book.
[Read Acts 1:1]
We see right off the bat that the book of Acts is the second of a two-part work authored by Luke. Both books are addressed to Theophilus, whose name literally means “friend of God”. There has been a lot of conjecture about who he was but frankly we just don’t have much information on him.
Most of your Bibles probably title this book “The Acts of the Apostles”, but Luke’s opening words here suggest that a more accurate title would be “The Acts of Jesus Through the Apostles”. The word “began” in verse 1 suggests that Jesus didn’t quit working when He ascended to the Father, but rather that He merely changed His method of working at that time. Up until then, He had worked in His fleshly body. From that point forward, he would work through His body, the church. This is an important concept because it reminds us that we are not doing God’s work on our own, but rather Jesus is doing His work through us.
[Read Acts 1:2-5]
I want to encourage you to read the last part of Luke’s gospel later and if you do that you will note that there is an overlap between the last section of chapter 24 his gospel account and the opening verses here in the Book of Acts. In both accounts we see that after His resurrection, Jesus spent 40 days with His disciples, teaching them about the kingdom of God. He also commanded them to stay there in Jerusalem and wait for what He had promised to them on many earlier occasions – the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
We’re going to talk a lot more about exactly what that means in just a bit, but for now, I just want to remind us that the verb “baptized” has been transliterated rather than translated into English. The Greek verb “baptizo” literally means “to immerse”. But rather than translate that into English as “immerse” almost all our English Bibles just transliterate it and render it “baptize”. A lot of the confusion that arises around the idea of the baptism of the Holy Spirit would go away if our English Bibles translated that verb rather than transliterated it. If that was done, the last part of verse 5 would read more like this:
…but you will be immersed in the Holy Spirit not many days from now.
[Read Acts 1:6-8]
The question that the disciples asked Jesus actually made a lot of sense in light of the fact that Jesus had been teaching them about the kingdom of God. Even now, after His resurrection, the disciples still failed to understand fully the nature of the kingdom that Jesus had ushered in when He brought that kingdom near to them when He came to this earth. No doubt, they were still hoping for an earthly kingdom in which Jesus would overthrow the Roman government and put all of them in positions of power.
Jesus does not deny that the kind of kingdom they are looking for is coming. But He tells them that they shouldn’t be focused on the timing of that kingdom because what they needed to focus on was what Jesus wanted them to do in the present – which was to take the kingdom as it already existed and bring it near to others. They were indeed going to receive power – not the kind of political power they were seeking, but rather a different kind of power that they were going to need to fulfill these last words of Jesus.
Most of us are probably pretty familiar with verse 8. It is a crucial verse that serves as the mission statement and as an outline for the rest of the book of Acts:
• Chapters 1-7 describe the first two years of the church in Jerusalem.
• Turn for a moment to the beginning of Acts chapter 8. In verse 1 we see that because of persecution, the disciples of Jesus were scattered throughout Judea and Samaria. That section continues through chapter 12 and covers a period of roughly 7 more years.
• Now skip ahead to the beginning of chapter 13. There you will see that the church laid hands on Barnabas and Paul and sent them off to “the ends of the earth”. That section continues through the end of Acts, where in chapter 28 the book ends rather abruptly with Paul living in Rome in a rented house awaiting his trial before Caesar. That seems like a rather strange ending to the book since there is no sense of closure there. I am convinced that is because the process that began in Chapter 13 to take the gospel to the ends of the earth didn’t end with Paul in Rome – it still continues today, nearly 2,000 years later.
So with that big picture in mind, let’s return to our passage in Acts 1 and see if we can identify the main theme there.
Look at verse 8 again. There are three verbs in that verse that are going to be the key to understanding what Jesus means with these last words that He spoke. Can you find those three verbs?
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
I’m going to begin with the last verb, because it is the one which leads to the main idea we’re going to develop today, and then we’ll come back to the other two which both provide us with crucial principles that will help us to apply the main idea in our daily lives.
I am convinced that Jesus chose His words very carefully here. He could have expressed the idea of His disciples being witnesses for Him in one of two ways:
• You will witness about me…
• You will be my witnesses
Although those two ideas are really close, there is actually a significant difference between the two. In the first case, witness is the verb and therefore witnessing would be something that we do. But that is not what Jesus said, is it? He said that we are to be witnesses. So here is the main idea that I want us to take away from this passage today:
Being a witness for Jesus is not something I do;
It is someone I become
I know that for some of you this might seem like splitting hairs, but I’m convinced that if we really understood this and lived our lives accordingly, we would be far more effective in bringing the kingdom of God near to others.
If witnessing is only something that I do, it’s much easier to make excuses for why I don’t do that – “That’s not my gift.” “I don’t know enough.” “I don’t have time.” “Somebody else will do it.” But if Jesus has commanded me to become a witness, then that is a lot harder to ignore.
As I was working on the message this week, one of the things that God showed me is that I’ve been guilty of perpetuating the idea that witnessing is something that we are to do. So my approach to trying to get you to share your faith with others has usually been to encourage you to go and engage in the activity of witnessing. And not surprisingly, that hasn’t been very effective.
So this morning what I’d like to do is to focus on how we can become witnesses rather than just do the work of witnessing.
APPLICATION
WHAT IS A “WITNESS”?
The first thing we probably need to do is to define the term “witness”. The underlying Greek word simply means “someone who sees an event and reports what happens.” So it’s very similar to the way we use that word today to describe someone who would do that in a courtroom, for instance. It is also the very same word from which we get our English word “martyr”, which is appropriate since so many in the early church lost their lives as a result of testifying about Jesus.
But that definition only helps us a little. If we really want to understand what it means to be a witness, we need to let God define it for us in His Word:
“You are my witnesses,” declares the LORD,
“and my servant whom I have chosen,
that you may know and believe me
and understand that I am he.
Before me no god was formed,
nor shall there be any after me.
I, I am the LORD,
and besides me there is no savior.
I declared and saved and proclaimed,
when there was no strange god among you;
and you are my witnesses,” declares the LORD, “and I am God.
(Isaiah 43:10–12 ESV)
When God says “You are my witnesses” twice in this passage, it sounds so much like what Jesus said that I wonder if Jesus didn’t have this passage in mind as He spoke to His disciples.
• According to God, a witness is somebody who knows, believes and understands God and who He is.
Let’s keep that in mind as we proceed to the second question we’re going to answer:
HOW DO I BECOME A WITNESS?
In order to answer that question, that we have to go back to another one of the verbs in verse 8 - “will receive”.
This is a future tense verb so it indicates that it is something that will occur in the future for these disciples. It is the same future event that Jesus had spoken about in verse 5 when He promised that they would be immersed in the Holy Spirit just a few days from then.
And what were they going to receive? Power.
So how do I become a witness?
• I receive power
The word translated “power” there is the word from which we get our English word “dynamite”. So Jesus promised His disciples that He was going to give them the dynamite power that they needed to become witnesses for Him. All they would need to do is to receive it. And guess what, the same thing is still true today. Jesus wants to pour His dynamite power into our lives so that we can become His witnesses. And all we have to do is to receive that power. So would you like to know how to do that? I sure would.
HOW DO I RECEIVE POWER?
This question is really the key one this morning and it’s going to take a bit longer to answer. We’ll begin by looking at the third verb in verse 8 – “has come”.
In order to deal with that verb, we’re going to have to get into the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives. And let’s face it, that makes some of us a bit uneasy. One of the commentators that I read this week compared the Holy Spirit to that crazy uncle that we love but who is kind of out of control and unpredictable and who therefore makes us nervous. And that unease is exacerbated by the fact that there are a lot of wildly different ideas out there about how the Holy Spirit operates in the life of a disciple, especially when it comes to the idea of being baptized, or immersed, in the Holy Spirit.
The key here is to try and figure out what Jesus meant when He talked about the Holy Spirit “coming upon us”.
Let’s begin by going back to the end of Luke. Remember earlier that I said that there is an overlap between the end of Luke and the beginning of Acts. At the end of Luke, Jesus said this:
And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”
(Luke 24:49 ESV)
Doesn’t that sound a lot like what Jesus said in verse 8? Here in Luke, He also speaks of something that would “come upon” the disciples. The only difference is that here in Luke He calls the Holy Spirit “the promise of my Father” – undoubtedly a reference to the many times He had promised to send the Holy Spirit once He left the earth to return to His Father. Here Jesus says that the disciples will be “clothed with power” when is essentially the same as “receiving power”.
Back in Acts 1, verse 5 also provides some additional insight. There Jesus promises that in just a few days they will be baptized, or more accurately, immersed in the Holy Spirit.
Given the context and the similarities between all three of these passages, I’m convinced they are all referring to the same event and each of them add to our understanding of what it means for the Holy Spirit to come upon Jesus’ disciples.
So the simple answer to our question about how to receive power is:
• By being immersed in the Holy Spirit
But it turns out that idea is not quite as simple as it seems on the surface.
Although there is not universal agreement on this, I am convinced that as disciples who had previously placed their faith in Jesus, these disciples already had the Holy Spirit dwelling in them. There are a lot of passages, including Ephesians 1:13-14, that seem to indicate that we receive the Holy Spirit into our lives the very moment that we put our faith in Jesus and receive His salvation. And in John chapter 20, we read that when Jesus appeared to His disciples after His resurrection, He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit”.
None of the passages that we’ve looked at this morning deal with salvation or putting one’s faith in Jesus. In each case, Jesus is speaking to those who are already His disciples because they have placed their faith in Him. So if Jesus is not speaking here of the role of the Holy Spirit in conversion, what is he saying? I really like how Pastor John Piper explains what is going on here, so I am going to quote him:
I think the essence of being baptized with the Holy Spirit is when a person, who is already a believer, receives extraordinary spiritual power for Christ-exalting ministry.
John Piper
If that is true, and I believe it is, then Jesus is saying that there is a difference between common Christian living, in which the Holy Spirit dwells within every disciple of Jesus, and what happens when the Holy Spirit comes upon a person with extraordinary and unusual power to enable us to become witnesses for Jesus.
In Martyn Lloyd-Jones’ book, Joy Unspeakable, he uses an illustration to describe the difference between common Christian living and what happens when the Holy Spirit comes upon a person like this. Normally I would never read a quote this long, but I think you need to hear the whole thing in order to understand what it means for the Holy Spirit to come upon us with power.
It is like a child walking along holding his father’s hand. All is well. The child is happy. He feels secure. His father loves him. He believes that his father loves him but there is no unusual urge to talk about this or sing about it. It is true and it is pleasant.
Then suddenly the father startles the child by reaching down and sweeping him up into his arms and hugging him tightly and kissing him on the neck and whispering, “I love you so much!” And then holding the stunned child back so that he can look into his face and saying with all his heart, “I am so glad you are mine.” Then hugging him once more with unspeakable warmth and affection. Then he puts the child down and they continue their walk.
This is what happens when a person is baptized with the Holy Spirit. A pleasant and happy walk with God is swept up into an unspeakable new level of joy and love and assurance and reality that leaves the Christian so utterly certain of the immediate reality of Jesus that he is overflowing in praise and more free and bold in witness than he ever imagined he could be.
The child is simply stunned. He doesn’t know whether to cry or shout or fall down or run, he is so happy. The fuses of love are so overloaded they almost blow out. The subconscious doubts—that he wasn’t thinking about at the time, but that pop up every now and then—are gone! And in their place is utter and indestructible assurance, so that you know that you know that you know that God is real and that Jesus lives and that you are loved, and that to be saved is the greatest thing in the world. And as you walk on down the street you can scarcely contain yourself, and you want to cry out, “My father loves me! My father loves me! O, what a great father I have! What a father! What a father!”
First, let me just reassure you that if you’ve never had an experience like that, it doesn’t mean that you’re not saved or that the Holy Spirit is not dwelling in your life. It does not mean that you’re a “second class” Christian or that the Holy Spirit is not completely adequate to enable you to live as a disciple of Jesus. But at the same time, I think all of us would love to experience that kind of supernatural empowering that enabled Jesus’ disciples to be the kind of witnesses who would keep on testifying about Jesus even if it cost them their lives. So the last question we want to answer this morning is…
HOW DO I EXPERIENCE THE IMMERSION OF THE HOLY SPIRIT?
I think the answer is so simple that it’s going to surprise a lot of us:
• Ask for it
Why do I say that? Let’s go back to Acts chapter 1 and read beginning in verse 12.
[Read Acts 1:12-14]
After Jesus ascended into heaven, the disciples did as Jesus had commanded. They returned to Jerusalem to wait for this tremendous outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But as they gathered in the upper room, they didn’t just sit there twiddling their thumbs, did they? What did they do? They devoted themselves to prayer.
And I have to believe that at least one of the things they were praying about was that Jesus would fulfill this promise that He had just given them to fill them with power through the Holy Spirit coming upon them.
I’ll be real honest with you. We’re getting into an area here that makes me a bit uncomfortable for a couple of reasons. First, this message ended up taking me in a completely different direction than I expected when I first began to work on it a couple weeks ago. So I feel like I’ve been on a roller coaster ride that has been really exhilarating and a bit scary at the same time.
Second, our journey has taken us right to the outskirts of some widespread teaching about the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” that is just not Biblical in my view. Unfortunately, some have essentially divided the church into two classes – a superior class of Christians who have experienced what is often referred to as a “second baptism” and the inferior class of “normal” Christians who have not. One of the main problems with that teaching is that the so called “second baptism” is usually considered to be something that man can achieve through his own efforts. And the other problem is that the usual test to prove whether someone has achieved that status is whether he or she speaks in tongues.
But I don’t think that is what Jesus is teaching here at all. He is promising His disciples, and us, that when the Holy Spirit comes on them with power, they will no longer merely be advocates who can prove that Jesus rose from the dead like a good lawyer. But under the influence of the Holy Spirit they will speak with the unwavering assurance of those who truly know, believe and understand who Jesus is, just as Isaiah prophesied. And that kind of power is available to every single Christian, not just a chosen few.
We might put it like this in today’s terms. When the Holy Spirit comes on us with power, we will no longer merely be experts in the Four Spiritual Laws, Evangelism Explosion, the Romans Road, or any other evangelism method. Instead, we will be so in love with and enthralled by Jesus that out of the overflow of the joy of our relationship with Him, we won’t be able to stop telling others about Jesus.
Throughout the book of Acts, we’re going to see evidence of the Holy Spirit coming on Jesus’ disciples like that time after time and the result is that the church didn’t just grow, it multiplied.
The power that Jesus promised here – that extraordinary experience of the Holy Spirit coming upon us – was not just available for the disciples who heard Jesus speak that day. It is still available for us today. So if we love the glory of God and desire to see His kingdom and advance and to be used in bringing that kingdom near to others, and if we have compassion on the lost and hurting people all around us, then how can we not seek that power by constantly crying out to God for it? That is the only way we can ever become the kind of witnesses that literally change the world.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t just want a second baptism of the Holy Spirit. I want to be immersed in Him in the way that Jesus is speaking about here not just once or twice, but a third and fourth and fifth and a one hundredth time. So I’m going to keep asking God for that.
Being a witness for Jesus is not something I do;
It is someone I become
INSPIRATION
I think that perhaps we need to rethink our entire idea of what it means to be a witness for Jesus. It really has almost nothing at all to do with just transferring information to others in an attempt to get them into heaven. It’s really not about the other person at all – it’s about me. It’s about the Holy Spirit coming upon me with power so that I will be so completely enthralled with Jesus that it will overflow into every single area of my life. And when that happens, no one is going to have to convince me that I need to go tell others about Jesus.
ACTION
I know some of you have heard the new Natalie Grant song titled “More Than Anything”. I think that the lyrics of the chorus are essentially a prayer for the Holy Spirt come upon us in the way we’ve been learning about this morning. So I’ll leave the words up on the screen for a few minutes so you can use them as a guide as you pray.
Help me want the Healer more than the healing
Help me want the Savior more than the saving
Help me want the Giver more than the giving
Help me want you Jesus more than anything
