The Divine Wind

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: