A Crazy Birthday

Text: Acts 2:1-13
Focus: Pentecost
Function: To celebrate the POWER God has given the Church
Form: Storytelling

Intro:

The evolution of Birthday parties:
• Birthday Cake
• Bought cake not good enough so:
o Dairy Queen Ice Cream
• To “The Birthday experience”
• It is great to be able to indulge our children, but we have to be careful of over stimulating them.
• I was talking with Michael Riley about youth groups and he said: “half the problem is that churches give youth so much excitement, that they don’t prepare youth for the real world and kids find out that life is not always one thrill after another and connect it with Christianity.”
• There is something to be said for times when we are excited and times when we quietly reflect on God’s goodness.

Today is the great birthday party of the Church.

That is what happened here in the text.
And God certainly brings the occasion in with a bang.

This is much better than clowns, rodeos or ponies.

As we saw a few weeks ago, again on this day, the faithful are gathered to pray. Except today it is in the upper room.

I don’t think it is the same upper room where Jesus instituted the Love feast with the disciples.

It may have been, but it was a room large enough to hold 120 people.

They were gathered to pray.

Do you remember that so many things happened that weren’t planned, but when they met to pray, God had a habit of showing up in a powerful way?

They were praying and a sound like a mighty wind came from inside the room and was broadcast into the nearby streets of Jerusalem. The sound was a signal from God for people to come.

This must have been a loud sound, because a crowd heard it and came running to see what it was.

It was the sound of wind with no wind.

As the crowd gathers, a visible sign appears in the sky!

Split tongues of fire fell from heaven and settled on everyone in the room.

Can you imagine what that must have looked like as these people saw these tongues of fire coming down from heaven and settling on to of their heads?

Did you ever sit out in a snowstorm, pick out a particular snowflake and just watch it drop?

These tongues of fire descended like that. Would that be scary or awesome?

When the tongues of fire fell on the people, all 120 of them, they started speaking miraculous speech and every one in the crowd heard someone speaking in their own native language.

What did the tongues say?
(SHOW) The tongues messages were “describing God’s power.”

I never noticed that before. When God starts speaking through these men and women, God tells the people how powerful He is.

And He does it in an awesome way.

The disciples are speaking, but everyone is hearing them speak in their own language.
There were many people in the crowd and the question comes, did the men speak strange tongues without knowing what they were saying? Or did they know what they were saying, speaking in their own language and did the people supernaturally hear them speak their own language?

The scriptures give us many instances where people were filled with the Holy Spirit and started speaking in tongues. The indication is that they were using either a foreign human tongue or an angelic tongue.

I am not going to preach about the gift of tongues this morning, except to say that I believe in the gift and that I believe the gift is still real for today.

Oftentimes, when I am deep in prayer with a heavy burden about someone or some situation, I break into groans and mutterings that are too deep for words and as Romans 8 says, the Spirit of God fills me, and takes over my prayer so that both the burden of my heart and the will of God are brought together in prayer.

And that is scriptural:
(SHOW) Romans 8:26-27: And in the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words; and He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

It breaks my heart that this doctrine has been so divisive. That isn’t God’s intention. The fact is, not everyone has that gift, it is listed as the least of all spiritual gifts and yet it has been one that believers have used to test to see if someone is a real Christian or not.

This first birthday of the Church was exciting.

The Spiritual gifts are real and exciting as well. It was the spiritual gifting taking place here that marks the birthday of the Church.

God showed up in that upper room.

God showed up in power in that upper room.

God showed up in power and talked about His power to everyone who was listening.

Spiritual gifts are real, and are for today. But I want us to keep them in perspective. They are not the proof of our faith, they are a manifestation of God’s power that is intended to be used to build the Church.

(SHOW) The true test of salvation is two fold 1) Do you trust that Jesus died and rose again on your behalf? 2). Has that belief made you a person who now loves God and others as much as yourself?

Spiritual gifts don’t prove salvation, but Spiritual fruit does. The fruit of the Spirit is say it with me: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

One more point till I get back to the text. If you remember the story of Jesus’ trial, recorded in John’s gospel, the text tells us that Caiaphas the High Priest prophesied that someone would die for the nation that year. The Bible tells us that this was an Holy Spirit driven prophecy. But we have a pretty big suspicion that the man most directly responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion wasn’t a Christian.

Another time, God sent His Holy Spirit into a donkey once in order to get a message across.

The gifts of the Spirit are real, but God is trying to produce the peaceful fruit of Jesus Christ in the lives of believers.

However, the gifts, power, and faith are important.

Ultimately, the message about God’s power that He gives to the people listening is that God is able to care for them.

God is powerful, trust in Him. I imagine that is what the disciples were saying.

So how did this work?
If there were 120 of them, then they could have been speaking in tongues and God miraculously placed the right tongue in the right mouth next to the right person who understood that language. Or, God could have made everyone hear the message in their own language. The text clearly says they each heard in their own language.

But I believe that the miracle was more than that. I believe that what they heard was very specific for each one of them.

Like God was saying to the mother who just lost a son, “Maria, I know the name of your boy, and I am in control of his life, Trust me to know how to save your son.”

I imagine that the man who was about to lose his fortune because of bad crops heard something like: “Benjamin, I own the cattle on a thousand hills, I know your circumstance, I am changing your life because I have something much more wonderful for you to be involved in.”

Each person heard a message about God’s power. They heard that God was at work in their own lives. They heard an individual call to know Him and to trust in God’s plan for their lives instead of their own desire.

God was building the Church. This crowd who heard this and believed the message were going to be the same ones who were going to be persecuted, scattered abroad and become some of them great heroes through martyrdom and others to be great saints of the faith.

God called each and every one of them and God called them individually.

The key to the starting of the church is… (SHOW) the key to the Church’s beginning is: THE FILLING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

The Holy Spirit comes to each and everyone one of us.

I love the differences in the New Covenant and the Old Covenant. It seems as if the Old Covenant, or Old Testament dealt with the community of people who called themselves the nation Israel.

But the New Covenant deals with the individuals. It extends the covenant of salvation beyond the Jewish people to the whole world, to you and I.

(SHOW) The call of God, to become a believer is an individual and personal call.
I picture this miracle, and the way everyone heard a message that was custom made for him or her to be the way that God is reaching out between the gap of heaven and earth and calling people back into His family.

But the call is not automatically accepted.

The last verse of today’s text is this. (SHOW) Some who heard it said they were filled with cheap wine.

Now the fact was, it was early in the morning, and it was too early for too many people to be so drunk.

I have seen drunk people. When they get drunk their words slur and they are hard to understand.

But this crowd heard very distinct messages about how God cared for each and every one of them. They weren’t drunk, but some people refuse to accept what they heard.

CONCL:

(SHOW) In spite of all that God does to call us to Him, it is still up to us to make the choice to believe. Do you believe?