The Promise of the Power

Text: Acts1:6-11

Focus: Pentecost

Function: To get people enthused (increase their faith about) the promise of help by God.

Form: Bible study/story

Intro:

I suppose in one way or another, at times, all of us are amazed at the stupidity of others. And, I suppose as well, others are amazed at my own stupidity. It is human nature. It isn't good human nature to be so proud of oneself. But sometimes people do some pretty dumb things and we wonder why they don't get it.

I am not going to call the apostles stupid, I probably would have reacted the same way as them. But in this passage, they seem to be deliberately ignorant.

Time after time, during Jesus' three years, He told the apostles that He would die for everyone's sins. He told them He was going away and would send the Holy Spirit to them. He told them that He would rise from the dead. He told them that God's Kingdom was not a human kingdom. He told them that God loved the entire world, not just the Jewish nation. He told them that God's Kingdom was spiritual and that it would live right inside of them, changing them into people who react differently to problems.

And yet, after the apostles have seen almost all of this take place, they come up with the same old question. They ask Jesus, “Is this the time for you to restore the Kingdom of Israel?”

They still didn't get it, or they refused to get it.

These men were still looking for power, for the benefit of being administrators, diplomats, officials in the new Kingdom that they thought Jesus was going to set up with military power.

Even though Jesus has been clear about what is happening, right before Jesus ascends from earth to heaven, they ask Him again.

And Jesus patiently corrects them.

The first point of the message.

The Future is in the God's hands, not ours.

Next week we celebrate the 1983^rd birthday of the Church, Pentecost. That is the day that the Holy Spirit came in power and the Church proper began.

The future of the Church is in God's hands, not ours.

The Church is the work of God, not man.

Jesus says: “It is not for you to know the times and seasons appointed by God...”

That is God's job.

They wanted political power, but Jesus gives them much, much more. He gives to them the Promise of Power. Not political, but power to change the world for the good.

He gives them the promise of a power that will indeed give them the power to act, and react, like Jesus.

He hasn't abandoned them even though they still don't get it. The problem is, they were limiting God to something small, something that only dealt with regional politics, one single nation. And God has them in mind to change the entire world.

The promise of this power is world changing power.

And we too, possess this promise.

Jesus tells them to wait for it.

He implies that they are not going to be successful without the Holy Spirit's power at work in their own lives.

Jesus is preparing them for the day of Pentecost.

It is all about the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit has caused some confusion and even some division within the Church over the last two centuries.

Again, let me explain the difference between receiving the Holy Spirit and the filling of the Holy Spirit.

In John 20, after Jesus rises from the dead, He breathes on the believers and tells them that they have received the Holy Spirit. He tells them that they now have the power to forgive.

This is what is spoken of in Romans 8. It is the seal of our salvation. God's Spirit dwells in us.

When that happens, it changes who we are.

Every Christian has a measure of the Holy Spirit inside of them.

And it is a relationship that we learn to trust in.

It is only through the power of the Holy Spirit that we can love our enemy. It is only through the power of the Holy Spirit that we can forgive those who wrong us. It is only through the power of the Spirit that we can overcome our own warlike ways.

For example, a relative of mine recently who had an huge amount of money stolen from them. They were defrauded of the money and they have no civil recourse through the courts.

They were tempted to hope that in the end, God will get that person for stealing from them.

But God, by the power of the Spirit lead that person to forgive.

Their preacher said to them: “It is only money. Would you exchange your soul for money? Would you give up your eternal reward for temporary riches?” Many people would.

But the Holy Spirit gives us a different value system.

This morning, in my morning devotions, I read these words from Psalm 49. These are words that talk about our relationship to money and God. The Psalmist says:

⁵Why should I be afraid
in times of trouble,
when I am surrounded
by vicious enemies?
⁶They trust in their riches
and brag about
all of their wealth.
⁷You cannot buy back your life
or pay off God!
⁸It costs far too much
to buy back your life.
You can never pay God enough
⁹to stay alive forever
and safe from death.

And:

¹⁶Don’t let it bother you
when others get rich
and live in luxury.
¹⁷Soon they will die
and all of their wealthwill be left behind.¹⁸Even if someone is satisfied with this life
and is praised because he is successful, ¹⁹he will join all his ancestors in death,
where the darkness lasts forever. ²⁰Our greatness cannot keep us from death;
we will still die like the animals.

It is important to put money in the perspective of eternity!

The whole thing changes when we become Christians. The Holy Spirit is inside everyone who believes.

Romans 8 calls that difference in our mindset as a seal of the Holy Spirit. It is proof to every believer that they are trusting in Christ.

Every believer has Him inside of them.

I couldn't sleep last night. So I did my morning devotions at about 2:00 this morning. I read this passage and again I was shocked at how other worldly minded the Scriptures call us to be.

It is impossible to do in our own strength. That is why Jesus breathed on them and gave them the Holy Spirit. He gave them the power to forgive. He gave them the power to live by a different, a Christ-like, set of values.

That is the power of the Holy Spirit to change the individual.

And that is not the promise of the power that Jesus is speaking of here.

I believe it is necessary to separate the two.

In this passage, he is talking about extraordinary things accomplished by faith. He is talking about a multiplying factor to our own efforts. He is talking about things happening miraculously, God's way, and not ours.

Verse 8 is one of the first verses I had to memorize in Bible College. “You shall receive power...”

The word POWER in the Greek is Dunamis. It is the same word that we get dynamite from.

So, a measure of the Holy Spirit is given to everyone who believes. The disciples already have this. But they are told to wait for a second blessing that comes at times that gives us power to build the Church.

Notice from the text. The promise of this power comes when the disciples are looking for an human solution, a political solution, to their problems.

Jesus is telling them them to stop limiting God and God's vision.

He tells them that there is more of the Spirit of God to come. And he tells them that going forward is going to be in God's power, not ours.

That leads us to the second point of the message this morning:

The Focus of the Church is on changing hearts, not politics.

Again, the disciples are asking Jesus, “are you going to set the world back to the rights at this time?”

And Jesus' answer is for them to stop worrying about how all of God's judgments and blessings are going to be played out in the world. Instead, he wants them to focus on the hearts of people, not the politics of power.

God knows that no laws, no police force, no threats of punishment or no promises of reward are going to help people do the right thing.

The entire Old Testament is proof that law does not change hearts. Only God can do that, by the power of His Holy Spirit.

So Jesus corrects the focus of the disciples.

Jesus spoke of this earlier in His parables. Matthew 13:33: Jesus tells the disciples that the Kingdom of God will spread like yeast rising in a loaf of bread. It spreads on a molecular level, cell to cell. One cell is transformed and that cell transforms the next one to it and so on.

And again, they are slow on the uptake. Look at verses 10, 11.

They are sort of doing the “what do we do now?” routine.

And instead of Jesus reappearing to them, He sends two angels who chide them.

“Why are you looking up?” They say. “Look out” (point up, then out).

They remind them that Jesus will return, and Jesus will set the world to the right, but not now. Right now, it is their job to get busy working on the transformation, person to person, by the Holy Spirit as people learn to trust Jesus.

The focus of the church is on the transformation of hearts, not governments.

The only real path to peace in this world is not through violent conquering, but by the peace of Christ changing the hearts of individuals.

We could fault the disciples for their desire to have a political solution to their problem, but we should put ourselves in their shoes.

The Roman government had a pretty big boot pressing down on their necks. They were all slaves to a foreign nation that lived in incredible luxury because it extracted huge tributes from the nations it had conquered.

Remember, this whole thing started with Joseph and Mary being forced to leave their home and relocate to Bethlehem just so the Romans could do a better job of collecting their taxes from every single person.

I think of the victims in the Holocaust. They had to be asking themselves, “why doesn't God see what is happening to us and stop it?”

You would think that this would the time for some sort of earth shattering divine intervention.

Thinking that the God of love will indeed act on behalf of the helpless to protect them and deliver them from those who are acting wickedly toward them can bring some comfort and hope.

And the Romans mistreated the Jewish nation.

From history, we know that in 37 more years, they will destroy the city and torture most of its inhabitants to death.

The disciples knew of the threat and would have wanted to prevent it.

Instead, God told them to look out, to the entire world and to see what can happen, through them, by the power of God's Spirit inside of them.

He changed the focus of their lives from things that were merely human to things that mattered throughout eternity.

First, the disciples are looking for an human solution to their problems, Jesus tells them that the Holy Spirit will do more than they can imagine.

So, the Future is in God's hands, in God's way.

The Focus is on spiritual things, not earthly things.

And we also see the Formation of the Church.

We have alluded to this already.

The formation of the Church is not by human power, but by the power of the Holy Spirit.

This point was important for Jesus to emphasize.

I heard of a church consultant who was selling fog machines, stage lighting, expensive video production equipment, sound systems that produced enough volume to reach heaven saying: “with all this technology, glitz and glimmer, we don't need an old fashioned move of the Holy Spirit anymore. We can create all that excitement with all this technology.”

I am not bashing technological advances. Anything that helps us communicate the gospel more clearly is great.

But the power, the formation, of the church is not in man-made devices. It isn't in the cleverness of the preacher, or the ability of the leadership to understand whatever market share is available to them in their community.

The formation of the Church, the thing that Jesus told the disciples to wait for, is in the Holy Spirit.

What does all that mean for us?

It means that success, growth and discipleship is in the hands of God. It means that we have faith in God's unfailing promise to us to build His church.

But the results are in the hand of God.

So, what do we do about it?

We have faith.

We trust.

We look at our own relationship with God.

The Holy Spirit dwells inside of us. We can either let Him lead us, or we can shut him out.

I am impressed with one of the first big miracles that happened after the day of Pentecost.

The text, in Acts 3: 1-10, there is this story of a great miracle where Peter and John heal a man who had been born crippled. And the text sets the scene for the miracle. Peter and John were on the way to pray.

They were seeking God, and God sought out them to do a big thing in the lives of all of His people.

I don't use shame, or guilt to motivate people. And I am certainly not going to blame people and say that if you all prayed more, this Church would be growing.

But this great Church building miracle happened when Peter and John were on the way to pray.

Prayer is important!

I happen to believe that we are right where God wants us to be. I believe in the future of the Church.

But, I do believe that this is a call for us to pray. This passage, and the significance of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer is a call for us to be in right relationship with God and with each other.

Forgiveness can be hard. It was very hard for the person I mentioned who was cheated out of an huge amount of money.

Those kinds of things really put our faith to the test.

When Jesus tells them to wait for God to do His work, He is telling them to live by faith.

The writer of Psalm 49 understood living by faith in relationship to money.

Jesus taught it when the Holy Spirit was first given and we were given the power to forgive.

But God called them, and us, to walk with Him, loving, forgiving and trusting Him to do His will both in us and in our Church.

Jesus said that God provides for the little sparrows, He will provide for us.

We purify ourselves and live a life of faith and then great things happen.