Tongues of Fire

So, we had spent 50 days, because it's Pentecost, since Easter Sunday, talking about the resurrection and then the ascension of Jesus Christ. And with that, it has led from that to Jesus going to heaven, and now the Holy Spirit being poured out that Jesus promised, that John the Baptist promised, that the disciples were in great expectation for. Will you stand as you are able? We are looking at Acts 2, verses 1 through 12.

When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues of fire appeared to them, and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we, each of us, hear his own native language, Parthenians and Medes, and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and other parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians? We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.

And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, What does this mean? The word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Amen.

You may be seated. John prophesied, as Earl let us know, that the Messiah would come, and even though John baptized with water, Jesus would baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. And this fire is something that Luke talks about here.

So for the next few weeks, we're going to see what Luke says about fire related to the Holy Spirit, see what Paul says about fire related to the Holy Spirit, and to see what Peter says about fire related to the Holy Spirit. It looks like you have a question. Okay.

With the fire that comes down, it's quite an amazing scene. Now since we've spent the last six weeks on Luke 24, finishing up Luke with the resurrection and Acts 1, we have a lot of context. If you've seen the sermons or been a part of the worship service, you know you've heard a lot of context, and a lot of it was pointing to this.

Remember, the disciples kept asking questions like, Are you ready to restore the kingdom? And Jesus said, That's only for the Father to know, but here's what you need to know. When I ascend, then I will send you the Holy Spirit with power. And there was a specific purpose for that power.

He said, So you could witness for me to all the nations, everywhere, you could be a witness. Now one of the most important things in here is in Acts 2. It says, When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. Now so many versions of this don't do that justice, but the word altogether in the Greek is Hamathimodon.

And I share that word with you every year because I think it's the most, one of the most important Greek words we have. Hamathimodon, now a couple of weeks ago, Hamathimodon is what we talked about too. If you look back in Acts 1, verse 14, all these with one accord were devoting themselves to prayer.

Same word, same Hamathimodon. Now Hamathimodon means one accord, one mind, one spirit, one purpose, one hope, whatever you could think of. It is a drawing together by the Holy Spirit, bringing the church together in unity.

And when they had this unity of purpose and of mind, and that met with the unity with the Father's purpose for us, Jesus does amazing things through that with the church. And when they were praying, excuse me, there were ten days before Pentecost, and here we see right up to the moment of Pentecost, they were praying with that one accord, all together, all with the single-minded purpose of calling in the Holy Spirit and asking the Lord to do what the Lord promised to do with each one of them. That verse one is understated in the book of Acts in English, but it can't be understated for the importance of Pentecost, that when the church comes together as one.

Now we often think of in our lives that religion is private. What happens to me between me and God stays between me and God, that it's personal. But John Wesley said there is no holiness but social holiness, not meaning like the social gospel you hear about today, but talking specifically about social holiness, what we do in our small groups, how we grow and we come closer to God and we come more like Jesus in those groups together, that we have people who can speak encouragement into our lives to help us grow.

Without that, without being a part of a church, we do what I think of as we stunt our growth. It is harder to grow without people of like-mindedness, people who seek Jesus, people who seek God's will, people who seek the Holy Spirit to empower us and to lead us and to encourage us and guide us. And each one of us has a role in that.

As we look at Acts 2 verse 2, Luke is trying to explain this. Now if you picture that Luke had gone back and he had interviewed people, because I don't think Luke was there at that time, he came along later with Paul when Paul had his ministry. But he says, and suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.

So he's not saying it was a wind, but it was like a wind and when you see it like that, the word spirit in Greek, do you guys know this, pneuma, does that sound familiar? Pneuma, ruach is Hebrew, we'll get to that. In pneuma means wind or spirit, ruach in Hebrew, you got to kind of cough something up to get that word out, ruach means wind, spirit or breath. You know like in Ezekiel, when he said, breathe on these bones and they can come back to life.

Many people look at that as a prophecy of the Holy Spirit pouring out, that God's breath is there. John said it in this way, that Jesus breathed on the disciples and they were filled with the Holy Spirit. So, when Luke is saying it's like a mighty rushing wind, he's hinting at the fact that this is God, this is the presence of God all the way through the Old Testament to when you see the word ruach, you see the wind of the spirit moving in.

And so he's saying the first thing that happened was that this wind came and it was like a rushing wind, that sound, has anybody from the Midwest area ever been out on a windy day? And that sound, not just a breeze through the trees and you just hear the leaves whispering, but when it's strong, sometimes when it's blowing, I remember when we went to see our parsonage in Plainville, Kansas and that day the wind, you know, it was almost like Pentecost, that wind was blowing so hard and the front door, the storm door was rattling and whistling and it was like, oh, I remember leaning over to Holly and saying, well, I guess we're in western Kansas now. And they, when you could hear the door doing that, one of the staff parish said, it's not always this windy. But that wind came, if you can picture the sound of wind coming in, it came in and then it says divided tongues as of fire in verse 3. Divided tongues as of fire came and lit on each one and then in verse 4 it says, and then they were filled with the Holy Spirit.

So if we can just work through each one of these, we can see this cool thing God is doing, that the pneuma, the wind or the spirit, blew into the room and He filled the room they were in first. Then, either out of that wind or accompanying the wind were these divided tongues of fire. Now if you can picture fire like a flame and then tongues are what shoots off of that and another fire starts in another place and it lit on each one in the room.

Every single man and woman in that room, the tongues of fire lit on and they each had their own tongue. Isn't it cool to think we all have our own tongue of fire? And they had this tongue of fire and then after that it said, after the tongue lit it said and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. So the cool part of that is, if you look at the book of Acts, it shows many different ways in which the Holy Spirit poured out.

One time when Peter was preaching it just poured out on everyone and he goes, whoa, I guess we better baptize everyone if the Holy Spirit's already poured out. And then there were different ways. There were other times where they heard the gospel, they didn't know anything about the and Peter and John would have to come along later and say, hey, what about the Holy Spirit? And so they would offer them the Holy Spirit and then the Holy Spirit would come.

But in Acts the Holy Spirit came in chunks. It didn't just come on one person all by themselves in their room, it came in chunks because the church was growing in multitudes. It would say things like, and 3,000 came to the Lord that day.

It was through the Holy Spirit that the church was formed and the church was developed. I remember hearing a pastor tell the story and he thought it was the greatest thing of another pastor who, on the day of Pentecost while he was preaching, he released like a hundred doves and the doves all flew up and everybody saw it and they were in awe. But sometimes when I think of that, I think we don't know what to expect on Pentecost Sunday because how many of you, how many Pentecosts have you been in in your whole life and how many were just like this? Where the rushing wind came in and filled the room, tongues of fire separated and you go, you got a little flame right here, you might want to watch that.

And then everybody was filled with the Holy Spirit. The book of Acts is kind of cool because it shows us the Holy Spirit comes in many different ways but we cannot forget the impact of the Holy Spirit and the power that comes when the Holy Spirit comes to the church and to a group of people. This morning before we prayed, Lisa mentioned, well, where two or three are gathered, Jesus promised to be there, where two or three are gathered, the Holy Spirit will pour out when we are Hamath and Adon, when we trust in God's will, when we are all seeking the Holy Spirit.

And some of you may be thinking, yeah, but when it happened to them, they had to go preach to the whole world, what are we going to do with it? Probably the same thing. We are called to do things above and beyond ourselves, more than what we can do our own and we are called to realize that the church is not just right here in this little spot in Overland Park, but the church is global, that it is a worldwide miracle. And no matter what happens, this says, the gift they received, and there is debate about the gift they received, with people who had come in for the festival of weeks for Pentecost into Jerusalem because they would travel for the high holy festivals and the holidays in Jerusalem, that people were there from so many different countries, and they heard the disciples who were all Galileans, and Galileans were a lot like Americans.

They normally knew how many languages? One language, like us, but somehow, while they were praising God, and whatever they were saying, different people could hear it in different languages. Now, there might have been some people who didn't understand what they were saying because they were going, I think they're drunk. We're here to watch a bunch of drunk people act like idiots.

Have you ever been in that situation? And Peter got up and he would go on and explain to them why they couldn't be drunk. First thing was, it's only nine in the morning, the party hasn't started yet. But the second thing was, he talked about Jesus, and how important Jesus was to this whole thing, and how important it was that all these believers trusted and believed, and their minds were opened to what Scripture said and prophesied toward Jesus Christ being the Messiah and the Savior.

And when that came, amazing things happened. Now, some people say that the gift that they were given that day is the gift of tongues like heavenly tongues that people just don't naturally understand. Well, a lot of people just understood it.

And so, I was taught, and I've read some of this in some of my commentary too, that it was really cool because what the gift really was that day was a gift of listening. That you could hear this Galilean talking, but you could hear it in your creedal language. Whether you're a creedan, whether you're from Mesopotamia, in Persian or whatever they were speaking there, that's how you heard it.

So they said, hey, it's a gift of ears. But Luke doesn't say it's a gift of ears. And then, you would have the theological difficulty of saying, well, how do people who don't know Jesus have these gifts? But it was a gift of them being able to speak like the different disciples probably just spoke in different earthly languages so people could understand.

So if you got Bartholomew over here speaking in Persian, but you only understand an Asian language, then you're going to think he's drunk. And so some of them, they could hear. And what's really cool about this is they say, we hear them praising God.

They were praising God in their own language. That there is something about when you praise God, even today, you don't have to understand the language so much, but you have the same spirit. That the praising of God makes it so amazing that no matter what the language is, the power of the Holy Spirit speaks through all of that.

I love how they ended this before Peter got up and started talking and they said, what does this mean? What does it mean? What does the Holy Spirit mean? What does it mean to us? What does Pentecost mean to you? And how can Pentecost empower you? How can the Holy Spirit empower us to share the Gospel with whomever God has called us to share the Gospel? We think of so many other, you know, there's the gifts and the fruit of the Spirit. And Wesley usually said the marks of a Christian are connected to the fruit of the Spirit. How you act, how you love, how you have joy, how you have peace in everything here.

And with that, the question is, how does the Holy Spirit impact you and your ministry? How does the Holy Spirit impact us as a church? What does it mean to us? What are we afraid of? What do we not want to release? What do we not trust? How is the Holy Spirit going to get in the way of what I really want to happen today? Or how am I going to say, whatever you want God, I am here to give it to you. May the Spirit give you words of life. So, people of every background, of every nation, of every place, people who have experienced every hardship, every doubt, everything that could have blocked the Gospel from them before, pray that the Holy Spirit gives you the power and the courage to testify, to share about Jesus, to share about God's love, to share about the power.

It's not just about some wishy-washy, lovey-dovey, warm, fuzzy thing. It's about power with the Holy Spirit. Power to love like Jesus.

Power to sacrifice. Power to give. Power that God gives us, every one of us, for the benefit of the body, so the world can know Jesus.

Will you accept my blessing? God, as we go from this place, we pray that we would go by the power of the Holy Spirit, that you would light on each one of us like a tongue of fire, that we would experience the wind of the Holy Spirit, that we would hear your still small voice in the breeze, and that you would give us the words to say in the moment that you have called us to. For whomever needs your grace and your love and needs the gospel of Jesus Christ, through our words and our actions and our lives, may the world know Jesus. And all God's people said, Amen.

Go in peace.