[AI translation] Of all our Christian celebrations, Pentecost is when I feel most how wrong, how inappropriate our celebration is. How different it is from the first Pentecost. For we talk about the Holy Spirit at this time, when we should not. Neither did the disciples, but what happened there was that they were moved by the inexpressible power of the Spirit of God. We are used to saying nice and clever things to people about the Holy Spirit, but there the Holy Spirit was saying powerful things through people about Christ! We want to grasp the mystery of the Holy Spirit, we want to take possession of who the Holy Spirit is in intellectual terms. And there the Holy Spirit took hold of people, took possession not only of their intellect, but of their whole being. We could speculate about what that rushing wind and that twofold tongue of fire were, but that does not bring us into the wind and the flame of that tongue of fire, as the disciples were, who became quite different men through Him. And indeed, the only tangible thing in the whole Pentecost story that can be concretely spoken of is the effect of that mysterious, inexplicable divine Spirit on people. So that when that roar arose, and when those tongues of fire flew towards them, in a few minutes everything changed: they became different people, very different from what they had been before. What was the change? Let's talk about that now!First of all, there was a decisive change in their relationship with Jesus. The same Jesus with whom they had walked, whose teachings they had heard personally, whose suffering and death they had seen with their own eyes, whom they had met and talked with after his resurrection, who had been invisible to them in the higher life of the heavenly world: the same Jesus now entered into them with his living spiritual reality; who had been with them before, now became real in them. They had been Jesus' disciples before, but now they became disciples in a very special way. Hitherto they had walked with him, but now Jesus Christ walked in them and they in Jesus Christ. This is the way the Pentecost proclamation tells us the mystery: 'They were all filled with the Holy Spirit'. Somewhat like a spring breeze blowing in through an open window fills the air of a room with the fragrance of flowers. Their miserable earthly, human nature became part of Jesus' divine, heavenly nature.
This is the greatest change imaginable in a person's life: to come into such a relationship with Jesus. This is what the Holy Spirit does. I could not tell you how, but in any case, Jesus Christ is now present in His spiritual reality, that is, through His Spirit, the Holy Spirit, on this earth, here among us. Thus, by His Spirit, He is fighting, struggling for the human soul, for you too, to win you to Himself. Jesus has already come to you by His Spirit, perhaps several times, but perhaps you didn't know for sure that it was Him! Have you ever felt as if some invisible spiritual light had made the sins of your life visible, the wickedness you had concealed from yourself, so much so that you thought, almost with horror, that you could not stand before God like that! Well, it was the light of the Spirit of Jesus! It was His Holy Spirit that rebuked you for your sins! Believe me: He really wants to convince you that you can't go on like this, you have to be different! And if you have ever stood in awe before the manger at Christmas, or the cross on Good Friday, or the open tomb at Easter, it was as if a mysterious voice had whispered to you: It was for your sake, for your sins, for your salvation! Believe him, it really happened for you!
It is often the case that we hardly dare to really believe what we believe! Well, dare to believe what you believe, because that belief is also from the Spirit of Jesus in you! It is the Spirit of God working in you to believe in Christ. He points you to the Crucified One, He says to you with all divine authority, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!" He opens your spiritual eyes to recognize in Jesus, your personal Saviour, the One who gave His blood for you. He tells you about the Jesus who is risen, who is alive, whose power can bring the dead and stony-hearted back to life. He says: "He who believes in me has eternal life!" Have you heard? Well, Jesus himself has spoken to you by his Spirit! God in Jesus has put His heart out for you. Have you heard anything of the beating of that precious, loving, divine heart? But He wants even more than that: that divine heart beating in you, that the heartbeat of God, the pulse of the life of Christ, beating in you! In your members, in your brain cells, in your blood, in your eyes, in your words, in your actions! No deeper, more intimate fellowship with the Lord God can be imagined than His indwelling a man by His Holy Spirit, as in a cleansed temple. "Filled with the Holy Spirit" means that Jesus Christ no longer speaks from without, but lives and reigns from within. That would be the real big change in our individual lives too! God is willing to do it today, because even through these human words, the spiritual reality of Jesus, God the Holy Spirit, is at our door knocking.
This great, inner change is immediately visible on the outside. In our Word there is only this short little report: 'They began to speak...'. But from this, and from a knowledge of the whole Pentecost story, it is clear what a tremendous change this was. For it means that the disciples, hitherto timidly withdrawn, locked in a secret hiding place, are now being sent out by the Spirit of Jesus working in them into the midst of thousands of unknown people, and there spoken to about things that could be dangerous for them. These same disciples, who had once fled when Jesus was arrested, who had denied Him when it was risky to confess openly, who had been idly wondering since the ascension, were suddenly resurrected as if from the dead, their whole past and future illuminated before them, they realised the meaning of their ministry, their lives given a new purpose and they set about it with determination. They begin to speak of Christ, of the gospel of forgiveness of sins and eternal life, of God's redeeming love, as the Spirit gave them to speak, as the Spirit led them, as the Spirit led them, where the Spirit alone led them. They became instruments of Jesus, through whose word and life Jesus himself continued his conquering journey among men everywhere.
Christ's purpose today, with every Christian life, with every believer in him, is still to present himself to the world through them. He wants to fill us with His Spirit so that He can use us, so that the witness of our lives and words can be a power that compels others to submit to Christ. Every Christian church and Christian man is committed to a task of power, but it is to this task that Jesus gives the power of His Spirit. To this and nothing else! Imagine what this world would become if every Christian man were a missionary of Jesus Christ in his place! Pentecost is also a celebration of mission. Let me just give you a very brief glimpse of the problems of mission today. The number of Christians is increasing, but it lags far behind the increase of the world's population. So the church is growing, but it is still getting smaller, i.e. in proportion to the growing non-Christian world. There have never been so many non-Christians, and their numbers have never increased as much as they are today. Never before has the gospel had to be preached to so many people as today. And what an urgent task it is! And what a fatal sin to fail to do it! How many unbelieving people perhaps cannot draw near to God because we are not in the power of the Spirit of Christ to minister, to speak authentically! How many people hate being a Christian, perhaps even in our immediate surroundings, because they see our lives without the Holy Spirit! It is true that without the Spirit of Jesus, we would be vain in our missionary efforts, in our witness, but we would not get anywhere. But it is also true that Jesus gives the fullness of His Spirit only to those who give themselves to Him for His service. God will not give fire from heaven on the altar until the sacrificial animal is on the altar. Till my life is there on the altar, burned, destined to die, given up to God, I wait in vain for the heavenly fire. Where there is sacrifice, there is fire! Where there is devotion, there is the power and fire of the Spirit!
There, on that first Pentecost, the disciples, by the Spirit, not only began to speak, but, so our Word says, they spoke in other tongues! There are many explanations for this miracle of tongues, but the point is that there were a lot of people there, from different countries, with different customs, different cultures, and the apostles spoke to them in a way that they all understood. That is the point of the Pentecostal miracle of tongues: to speak in a way that all kinds of people could understand! We are talking about a miraculous language that opened the hearts of other people, that brought people together, that not only deepened the distance between them, but bridged it, that brought them into communion with each other. Not only spiritual, but also material. For the Pentecost story ends: "And they sold their cattle and their herds, and distributed them to all, as every man had need." (Acts 2,45) It is in the mysterious depths of the soul that change begins, and can go as far as social behaviour, the elimination of social differences. What a different, new language it is when even wealth, which tends to cause the most serious divisions between people, speaks of Christ. When money does not divide but unites, when Mammon is at the service of love and lifts up people in need. This is the language the world needs most today! For it is precisely the greatest misery of humanity that we cannot understand each other's speech. One speaks peace and the other war. Our youth speak a language that the old cannot understand. The language of the child is so different from that of the parents, as if they had not learned to speak it in the parental home. It is as if the language confusion of Babel is being repeated in the history of mankind today. Then stories of things like a builder asking for a millstone and getting a stick on his back instead, of a child asking for bread and his father giving him a snake.
Now, it is the reverse of this very Babelian language confusion that is the Pentecostal language miracle. And you who celebrated Pentecost are called to start speaking a different language, to start bringing something different, something new, something beautiful, something pure into human coexistence. Where hatred rages, love; where sin reigns, forgiveness; where strife divides, peace; where doubt hesitates, faith; where falsehood snakes, truth; where hopelessness discourages, trust; where sadness suffocates, joy; where darkness terrifies, heavenly light! How different is this language from the language of the world, from the language we ourselves are wont to speak to ourselves? It is different because it is the language of the Holy Spirit, the language of Christ who lives in us. It is a language by which all kinds of people can understand the great things of God.
This would be the true blessing of Pentecost. But surely we experience bitterly little of all this. Is it possible for us poor, joyless, empty-souled Christians still to partake of the Holy Spirit's flow, the true blessing of Pentecost? Oh, that we might truly be grieved to know what we might be through the Spirit of Christ, and what we are without it! For then we might be able to cry out with a real, burning thirst for the water of life. The Holy Spirit of God cries out to us today what Jesus once cried out to the multitudes at a feast: "If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink!"
Amen
Date: 9 June 1957 Pentecost.
Lesson
ApCsel 2,1-13