At the end of Acts 2, we see that 3,000 broken people were restored and gained New Life in Christ? How did that happen?
The Holy Spirit empowered the disciples like wind and fire! God showed up and worked powerfully like wind and fire through the lives of the disciples. Think about those two images.
Fire.
Would people who know you say you are on fire for God? Fire purifies and energizes. So does the Holy Spirit.
“I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matthew 3:11).
In ancient days, precious metals like gold and silver were put in a container and heated with fire. The impurities in the metals came to the top. The Holy Spirit works to refine us as gold or silver is refined in a fire (Malachi 3:2, I Peter 1:7). The Spirit of God removes our sin and character flaws by cleansing and refining us. What needs to be purified from your life?
But fire not only purifies, it also energizes. Here in Acts 2:3, He chose to appear as “tongues of fire” resting on each of the believers. It’s biblical to speak of someone influenced by the Holy Spirit as being “on fire” for God.
What is the clearly identifiable evidence that the Holy Spirit is working in your life like fire?
Ok. That’s fire, now…
Wind.
When Jesus talked about the initial work of the Holy Spirit in our salvation, He said that the Spirit is like the wind.
“The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8).
We can’t see wind, but we can see its effects. When the wind blows, you can see it in the trees: you can feel it on your face; you can hear it. Sometimes, the wind blows with hurricane force. If wind is harnessed, it creates energy or moves a ship across the ocean.
It’s the same with the Holy Spirit. Although we can’t see Him, but we can see the changes He makes in our lives. We can see His power and influence.
In Acts 2, the Holy Spirit empowered the believers who were waiting with expectation. “And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting” (Acts 2:2). The Holy Spirit is sovereign, dynamic, irresistible, and unstoppable. Like wind, He is powerful, active, and cannot be controlled.
What is the unmistakable evidence the wind of the Holy Spirit has blown across the landscape of your life?
We need more fire and more wind, don’t we? “Lord, send Your fire and send Your wind. Send Your Spirit to change us and to use us!”
Now, we have to ask a question: Why did the Holy Spirit come upon these early believers? Why the wind and the fire?
God knew that people from all around the world were present in Jerusalem that day. And most of them did not know Jesus. They were broken people. They weren’t right with God. They weren’t forgiven. They weren’t dressed in the righteousness of Christ. They weren’t headed to heaven.
So, God sent His Spirit to fill the believers so that they could communicate the gospel, so they could share the good news – the message that messed-up, broken, rejected people could be made new – in a way that the people could understand. The Spirit came to empower and to embolden the people of God so they could reach new people for Christ cross culturally.
See, the men and women who followed Jesus from Galilee were considered outsiders. The disciples were thought of as “hicks from the sticks.” But they were able to speak to people from at least 15 other cultures and backgrounds and give them a message that radically changed the trajectory and destiny of their lives. All these diverse people were able to hear the good news of Jesus in understandable ways.
The first followers of Jesus didn’t just influence people who were like them. They had a message that went cross-cultural that day, that went viral that day.
And as you look at the entire book of Acts, whenever God reached new people with the gospel, it was because a group of disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit.
Are you filled with the Spirit? You need to be. To experience the excitement and the adventure of the Christian life – to be fueled by the Spirit’s wind and fire, you need to be filled with the Spirit.
The task of reaching Northeast Ohio is not yet complete. You have family members, neighbors, friends, classmates, teachers, and coaches who do not yet know Christ. And there are teens in our school districts who don’t know Christ. They are confused, rejected, and broken.
The task of world evangelization is not yet complete. There are over 6,000 Unreached People Groups (UPGs) in the world. We’ve been called to reach the SOLI people on Pearl Island in Indonesia – a people group of 3,000,000 with only a few hundred believers. Around the world, billions of people are lost – without Christ and without hope.
The vastness of lostness is why we need to cry out for fresh wind and fresh fire – for fresh power from the Holy Spirit!
Big-time breakthroughs for the gospel come because of extraordinary outpourings of the Spirit of God. Jonathan Edwards, the leader of the Great Awakening 260 years ago in our country put it like this:
From the fall of man to our day, the work of redemption… has mainly been carried on by remarkable (i.e. extraordinary) communications of the Spirit of God. Though there [is] a more constant influence of God’s Spirit always in some degree… yet the way in which the greatest things have been done… always have been by remarkable effusions (i.e. outpourings), at special seasons of mercy (A History of Redemption, Works, Vol 1, p 539).
From time to time in the history of the church, God has moved in extraordinary ways. Sometimes, it’s not just business as usual at church. God has sometimes poured out His Spirit in fresh, dramatic ways. These times have been called times of revival or awakening or reformation.
Pentecost – Acts 2 – was the first of these great outpourings on the church. And until the peoples of the world are reached – until the peoples of NE Ohio are reached, we must long for fresh experiences of the extraordinary outpouring of God’s Spirit to awaken us and to empower us to go to heaven and take as many people with us as we can.
Is the Holy Spirit showing up in your life like wind and fire?
Ask God, “Lord, help me to live each day empowered by Your Holy Spirit. Show up in my life like fresh wind and fresh fire. In Jesus’ name, Amen!”
