The Coming of the Spirit and the Birth of the Church

Today on Summit Life, Heart Talk with J.D.

Greer. There's something in your heart that is wrong, there's something in your heart that is dead, there's something in your heart that is dissatisfied, and what you need is not changes to your circumstances. What you need is a renewal of your heart. So you have to devote yourself to the apostles teaching because that word has got to get in your heart.

That is the only way that a dead heart becomes alive. It's the only way that a heart that doesn't understand what God wants from it begins to have wisdom. Welcome to Summit Life, the gospel-centered Bible teaching ministry of J.D. Greer, pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. Today, we're continuing in the book of Acts as we see the church at its very inception. We're learning what it takes to be a follower of Christ and what it looks like to be fully committed to His mission.

It's part of our teaching series called Scent, and you can catch up on previous messages at jdgreer.com. Today's message is titled The Coming of the Spirit and the Birth of the Church. A couple of weeks ago, I explained to you that the church started as a movement, but over the years we have degraded it into primarily a building and a place where you would go for a service. I explained that you can see that in the very word we use for church. Our English word church comes from the German word kirche, which in German meant literally a place that you went for a religious observance. But the original Greek word for church was the word ekklesia, which meant an assembly that was called out around a particular idea or around a mission. The early church was a movement around a mission.

It was a body of people who were moving together as not a building. Our small group pastor, Pastor Spence, with our small group leaders a couple of weeks ago did that thing. If you went in Sunday school, you remember this?

Remember this whole deal? This is the church, and this is the steeple, open the door, and there's all the right. He said that's a cute little heresy, a cute little heresy because this is a building, and this is a kind of outdated cultural symbol, and this is the church right here. This is a church. One day I told him I'm going to write a book called Heresies I Learned in Sunday School, and this will be one of the chapters. I have wondered, by the way, how would our kids do that in Sunday school? This is the warehouse, and here's some people here, some people down here in BC South, and there's some people here in the middle that speak a different language, and there's people in Chapel Hill and over here in North Row.

I don't know how we do it, so we just quit doing it. It's probably a good thing because the church essentially, at its core, is a movement that has gathered around the mission. In fact, here's your Bible trivia for the weekend. What came first in the book of Acts, the mission or the church? The mission.

That's right. Acts 1-8 is where the mission is given. The church doesn't show up until the end of Acts 2.

I've heard it said this way. God doesn't have a mission for His church. God formed a church for His mission. That was the point. God wasn't looking at this group of people in the church like, now I need something for them to do.

Oh, I know. Here's a mission. No, He formed the church for the purpose of the mission, which means that a church that is not on mission is not really a church, and believers who are not on mission are not really part of the church. Movements move, and if you're not moving, you're not part of the movement. So I showed you Acts 1 that there were two things that propelled this early movement. One is they were captured by the message, and then number two, they were yielded to the Spirit.

Those are two things I asked you to consider about yourself and two things to which I will return over and over and over throughout this series. Have you been captured by the message of the Gospel? Not do you assent to it. I know that most of you assent to it.

That's the reason you're here. But have you been captured by it? Are you consumed by it?

Have you been ravished by it? And are you yielded to the Spirit? Do you know what it means to walk in the power of the Spirit?

You even know what that phrase means. Do you know what it means to be moved by the Spirit, to move in His power, to fellowship with Him? Is Christianity for you, listen, be honest about this, is Christianity for you primarily a set of beliefs that you adhere to and a lifestyle you conform to?

Or is it a dynamic relationship with a living God who lives inside you that you live in, move in, walk in, speak under, live in His authority and fellowship with Him? One of my prayers, Summit, and one of my deepest hopes for this series, and one of the reasons I believe that the Holy Spirit of God gave this to me for us to study over the next several months, is that we during this series might become more of a Spirit-filled church. And you guys know, I mean you know me well, you know I don't mean a bunch of crazy stuff, all that. We're not going to get vans with flames painted down the side, you know, and change our name to the Holy Ghost Anointed Revival, the Third Way Pentecostal Holiness Movement, or the Apostles, or something like that. I'm not going to get a, you know, a charismatic haircut. We're not going to rename Veronica the First Lady, Bishop at Pastor, you know, Veronica.

We're not going to build running lanes around the auditoriums, give out tambourines with ribbons attached to them. We're not doing that, but I do believe that we are supposed to be a Spirit-filled church, much more than we are right now, where we are filled with people who are filled with the Spirit, who are living and moving in the power of the Spirit. I've told you, we like to call ourselves here, Charismatics with a Seat Belt. That's us, Charismatics with a Seat Belt, which means when you come to this church, I want you to have a wild roller coaster ride experience with the Holy Spirit, but I want you also to do things decently in order and to keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times, okay?

So we're Charismatics with a Seat Belt. Today, what I'm going to try to show you from Acts chapter 2 is what the coming of the Spirit was like, what the coming of the Spirit was like, and then number 2, what the believer's response was to the coming of the Spirit. So what it was like when he came, and then what their response to him was.

Acts 2, verse 1. Now in the day of Pentecost arrived, Pentecost, by the way, it was a Jewish holiday, Pentecost, it was a derivative of the number 50. You see, it's 50 days after Passover. Jesus died around Passover. He ascended on the 40th day after Passover, after his death, and then so Pentecost is another 10 days after that. Suddenly, there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind.

Now, to be honest, I don't think the English there translates what the author is trying to say. Well, it really means a tornado, a loud, disturbing, terrifying sense that something powerful was moving in the room. Have you ever been close to or in an area where a tornado came through? When I was in the 10th grade, there was one that came through Winston-Salem where I lived, and I remember how terrifying it was. I don't know exactly how close it got to where we were, but I know that a friend of mine went outside to try to get something back in the house that he thought was going to blow away, and I remember him trying to get back up on the porch as we were literally pulling him in.

It's like he was walking through cement to try to get him back in the house. It was terrifying. That was something like the experience that they had there is this mighty rushing wind came into this room, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting and then divided tongues as a fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. Now, that's an amazing picture because you see in the Old Testament, any time the presence of God showed up, it was almost always in fire, right? So God appeared to Moses in the burning bush. He led the children of Israel through the wilderness with a pillar of fire. When he descended on Mount Sinai to give the Ten Commandments, he consumed the mountain in fire. When he descended his presence on the Holy of Holies in the temple, it was in fire. The fire was terrifying, and it was often fatal. You couldn't look at it.

You couldn't touch it. You really couldn't be in its presence, and now, now it's on the heads of every believer, every believer. Every believer is a burning bush with the presence of God inside of them, and instead of dying, they're coming alive. Have you ever stopped to think about what it means that the Spirit of God lives in you?

I don't think we think about that much. This is something that would have boggled the believers in, the boggled the minds of believers in the Old Testament because this was the presence of a God. They couldn't get in the presence of him because it would kill them, and now he lives inside of the believers, something Peter says angels long to look into, something they wish they had the experience of, but they don't.

The Holy Spirit of God, the one who spoke the worlds into existence, if you're a believer, has fused himself with your soul. Paul would look at the Corinthians, who thought that they didn't have much ability in ministry and didn't think much of themselves, and he'd say, don't you understand the value of the treasure that you possess in an earthen vessel? When they treated sin casually, he would say, do you not understand that you are the temple of God, that the Spirit of God lives in you?

Do you not understand that the fire of his presence has now begun to dwell in you? Verse four, they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. And he said, well, what does that mean?

Great question. That's so he explains. Verse five, now there were dwelling in Jerusalem, you see 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.

That's an important phrase. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, are not these who are speaking all these different languages, are they not all Galileans? Aren't these, you know, all people from the same place? They're not world travelers.

They've all, in this whole backwards part of Israel, right? How is it that we hear each of us in his own native language? We hear them telling in our own tongues the megalela, the megalela, which translated the mighty works of God, in other words, the gospel. Now, you say, well, okay, speaking in tongues, that means Pentecostalism.

Yes, but no. These tongues were other human languages. They were unknown to the speaker, but what was happening as the speaker was saying things he did not understand, somebody else from another part of the world was like, hey, I understand what you're saying. You're speaking without an accent. You're speaking fluently in the tongue that I was raised in and you were telling me about Jesus.

Listen to this. The first time the gospel was preached, it was preached in all languages simultaneously. The first time the gospel was preached, it was preached in all languages simultaneously. Do you realize the significance of that? Do you realize the significance of that?

Let me try to explain to you. I'm listening to Tim Keller teaching this passage. He quoted from Lamin Sanneh, who is an African professor at Yale University. Sanneh said that Muslims, and Sanneh used to himself be a Muslim, he said that Muslims will quickly tell you that the Qur'an cannot be translated because the words of God are only in Arabic. When you translate it, you are changing it out of the word of God.

It's almost like a commentary. As far as Muslims are concerned, God speaks Arabic. So if you want to hear God's word, you got to learn Arabic. And when Islam comes into a place, it slowly replaces the culture with its own culture, and so places that become Islamic become very quickly Arabic. When the gospel was first preached, however, the first time it was preached, it was preached in all languages at once, showing that no culture was the right one.

No culture was the dominant one. And thus, when the gospel goes into a place, it doesn't erase the culture, it redeems the culture. It doesn't suppress the culture, it exalts and lifts up and brings out the culture, the true version of the culture. Sanneh, this Yale professor, said that no other religion really does that.

Other religions tend to erase the cultures. He said, listen to this, as a professor at Yale University, I see that it's not just other religions that do that, secularism does it too. Listen, for all of their talk of diversity, Harvard and Yale are interested in producing only different colored European liberals. He said they think of diversity in terms of food and dress, like, oh, isn't that cute, the way you dress and the whole food thing?

We want diversity, why don't you do that? He said, but as far as the mindset, the worldview go is, you got to convert to their worldview. For example, he said the average African sees a very spiritual side to the world, but when the African goes to Yale, he is told that the world has no spirits and miracles, and Yale guts him of his African-ness. Christianity, he says, helps Africans become renewed Africans, not remade Europeans. Christianity accepts the reality of the spirit world, but removes, he said, the tendency in African cultures toward superstition and violence, because it shows Christ as the victor over all evil spirits, and he overcame through love and service, not violence and manipulation. He said, so whereas other things would suppress the culture, Christianity redeems it. Yes, it purifies it, but it exalts it as something that God created different to bring glory to him. That's what Pentecost meant, is that no culture was the right or the dominant one. And for some, and for us, that means that no one culture's emphases or personality or worship styles are normative for everybody. You know, in the culture that I grew up in, if you wanted to show devotion to God, then you put a suit on on Sunday, because that was giving God your Sunday best. There's nothing wrong with that.

I mean, that's a very valid expression. And your preacher would stand up, and for 50 minutes, he would expound to you the nuances of Greek words, because if you really want to know the words of God, you've got to get down into the minutia of it. That's a perfectly valid way to show devotion to God.

But you know what? It's wrong when you start thinking that is the way that every culture is supposed to show devotion to God, and if they're devoted to God, they're going to listen to sermons like that too. God made other cultures differently, gave them different personalities. Some of them are much more emotional and expressive. And so we have to understand that when God chose to redeem the world, He did so not through one culture or one personality.

He did it through a multiplicity of them. And if we're a Spirit-filled church, that means there's going to be multiple ways and personalities and ways that people speak and ways that they worship God. And I think we've got to become much more open to that than we really are. And I think you've got to quit looking at people who don't do it like you, like, what's wrong with them? I've got to, you know, well, you know, you were loud today, and I, you were talking about, no, that's just how God, God gave them that as a way, it's bringing glory.

I don't want to suppress that. I want to rejoice in that because that's the glory of God. God said, first time, all languages at once, because there's an internal humility in a Spirit-filled Christian, because you understand that God chose the diversity of cultures as a way to bring glory to Himself and the church.

And we need more openness on that. Verse 12, and all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, what does this mean? But others mocking said, they are filled with new wine. But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed the men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you.

Give ear to my words. These people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it's only the third hour of the day. In other words, it's 9 a.m. because they counted it from 6. He's like, they're not drunk yet. Peter probably should have known that doesn't stop everybody.

You know who you are. He had your breakfast beer this morning. But he says, they're not drunk.

It's 9 o'clock. Verse 16, but this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel. In the last days, it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. And your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, your old men shall dream dreams. In the Old Testament, to be a prophet was a big deal. And what he's saying is, that which was reserved for heroes in the Old Testament has become the standard fare for every believer in the new.

Our sons and our daughters and us and old men, all ranges are going to speak the words of God, not in the sense that we're writing the Bible the way that Isaiah did or Ezekiel did, but it means that the Spirit of God that was on them to speak prophetically is now in every believer, and every believer is one who speaks in the power of the Spirit, the words of God, to others. Well, Peter goes on from there and he preaches a sermon about who Jesus is, which I'm going to preach to you next week. But at the end of his sermon, people call out, Peter, what should we do? And Peter says, repent and receive Jesus as your Savior and be baptized as a sign of that. And 3,000 people respond, which had to be a logistical nightmare. Danny Franks, who heads our baptism team next week, has been complaining faithfully for the last two weeks about how hard his job is, and I just open up Acts 2, and I'm like, right here, baby. Peter did not give them any advance warning. He's like, hey, there's 3,000 people waiting right there to be baptized.

You guys need to find a pool. And they didn't have black shorts or black shirts or any of that kind of stuff. 3,000 people at one time, the first sermon. By the way, the number 3,000 is very significant. You see, when the law was given, when the fire of God came on the outside and the law was given, 3,000 people died because they couldn't keep the law. So now when the Spirit of God is given and that fire comes, 3,000 people come alive.

Why? Because Jesus has already died in their place for the breaking of the law. Because the fire of God's wrath was absorbed into him, the fire of God's presence and the fire of God's love and the fire of a new life now becomes the ownership of the believer in Christ. It's a whole new day that God has started. It is a fire of redemption and a fire of power. All right, jump down to verse 42. So they devoted themselves, they devoted themselves to, and he's going to give you four things.

All right? The movement of that Spirit, listen, the movement of that Spirit, that mighty wind, manifested itself in four devotions in their lives. Devoted means they gave themselves to these things. In light of the Gospel and the Spirit, these things became obsessions to them.

They were devoted to them. And what I want to try to show you is that if you've really embraced the Gospel and if you've been filled with the Spirit, by the Spirit, these will be four devotions for you. They'll be four obsessions for you. Not because I tell you, not because you put them on a to-do list, they're just natural. In fact, if you are not naturally devoted to these things, I don't need you to make a list and go start doing them. They just reflect the fact that you've never really embraced the Gospel and you've never really been filled by the Spirit. Because people who have done those things naturally become devoted to these things.

It's natural to them, it's breathing. If you don't do these things, it's not a doing problem you've got, it's a Gospel problem and a Spirit problem. So we've got to make sure that we correct the right thing here, okay? So four things that Spirit-filled people devote themselves to without having to be told and without hearing sermons. Here we go, number one. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching.

That's the first thing he mentioned. They devoured what was being taught. You see, Christianity taught that salvation was a gift from heaven, that it came from outside of you. That's why the wind comes from the outside, not from within. The fire comes from outside of them and dwells on top of them.

It doesn't come from inside of them. So you have to get the teaching and the words of God that are coming from the outside, the apostles' teaching, you have to get them inside of you. Now our world says the opposite, does it not? It says that the problem with you is you've got too many bad things on the outside that have conformed you into a certain way, and you've got to get down to the inner beauty that is you. You've got to discover yourself, right?

You've got to figure out how to manage your problems so that the inner child or the inner beautiful part of you just comes out. There was a New York Times article recently written by a psychologist who was lamenting how fewer and fewer people are coming to therapy, at least certain kinds of therapy. And the psychologist who wrote the article said this, listen, fewer and fewer people today come in saying, I need to change. What I see is more and more people wanting someone or something else to change. So my pitch went from, I treat people with depression and anxiety to, are you having trouble with difficult people in your life? Maybe I can help.

And do you catch that change? Christianity says, nope, fundamental problems, you. You're the problem. Yeah, the reason you're unhappy, and I know this is going to offend some of you, but the reason you're unhappy has nothing to do with your marriage or your work situation. Those might be bad, but the reason you're unhappy has to do with a problem in your heart. There's something in your heart that is wrong. There's something in your heart that is dead. There's something in your heart that is dissatisfied, and what you need is not changes to your circumstances. What you need is a renewal of your heart. So you have to devote yourself to the apostles' teaching because that word has got to get in your heart. That is the only way that a dead heart becomes alive. It's the only way that a dysfunctional heart becomes normal. It's the only way that a heart that doesn't understand what God wants from it begins to have wisdom.

Over the years, I've used this example. It's like that scene in that movie called The Rock. Remember this movie? And so at the high point in the movie, Nicolas Cage, who is the hero, as of course he should be, takes one of these green balls of nerve gas, and he shoves it in the mouth of the bad guy, and he punches him in the face. And he gets up against this wall, and there's nowhere else to go, and here comes the green gas. And so he reaches in his backpack, and he pulls out this needle because the only way that you could survive in the presence of the green nerve gas was if you took this serum and got it into your heart immediately, but the needle that they used to put it in was like that long. And he takes the thing, and he shoves it in his heart. He shoves the antidote in, and then he's fine. Basically, the movie ends there.

Spoiler alert, by the way, in case you haven't seen the movie. But I think you see the picture I'm trying to give you with that is, you're in a world that is filled with death, and your heart is filled with death, and the only possible way that you can survive is you devote yourself to the apostles teaching you, get it on the inside. You know, there is no way around this.

There is no shortcut to this. If you are going to be a disciple of Christ, you are going to be an idiot. Well, as Pastor J.D. Greer just mentioned, if you're going to follow Christ, you have to be willing to learn. In fact, that's a large part of why you've joined us today.

So well done. We're thankful to be on this journey with you. You're listening to Summit Life and a message titled The Coming of the Spirit and the Birth of the Church. To listen again, visit us online at jdgreer.com. While you're on the website, you'll also have access to the archive of previous messages as well as the Summit Life blog. And J.D., we're really passionate about all these different resources because they're really just another way for our listeners to dive deeper into the gospel.

Yeah, you know, I mean, take the blog since you mentioned that. What we do is we take little insights from the teaching that we're going through, and a lot of times there's questions that we can go deeper in. And we can say, all right, here's something we didn't have time to deal with in the message, but here's an area of your life we want to apply it to. Sometimes it's follow-up resources. Sometimes it's just taking a concept that comes out of one of the messages and saying, let's put this in written form so that you can ponder it and maybe discuss it with somebody that you think it's relevant to. We would love for you to not only check out these blog posts, but share them on Facebook or join the discussion on Twitter. We believe that maturity comes through gospel saturation. And that doesn't happen sitting in church once a week.

It comes when you think and you breathe scripture. We try to make it easy for you. We hope you'll check it out.

Go to jdgrier.com. You can access everything we have there. Most of the stuff we have is free. We want to just give it to you. We'd love for you to be a part of our ministry and helping us to multiply these things so that we can reach others.

You can find out more about all of that if you just go to jdgrier.com. I'd love for some of you who've never been to go to that today. These daily messages and all of the online resources are made possible by friends like you who donate to support this ministry. And when you give today, we'll say thanks by sending you a new study from Pastor JD. This resource is titled Something Better, Something Greater, and it's a look at the lives of Elijah and Elisha. Today is the last day to request your copy.

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Or if it's easier, you can give and request the book online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Bidevich. Thanks for being with us this week. On Monday, Pastor JD Greer will teach us what it means to be part of a church family so you won't want to miss it. We'll see you again Monday here on Summit Life. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.