Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church

For many years, we would sing the prayer for illumination using the song that we’re going to use today. So it may bring back some memories to the second generation at RCC of when they were little. And we sing it today, of course, because of the work of the Holy Spirit that’s recorded for us in the sermon text, Acts chapter 2. Please stand for the reading of Acts chapter 2. We’ll read the entire chapter.

When the day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave the utterance.

And there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And when this sound occurred, the multitude came together and were confused, because everyone heard them speak in his own language. Then they were all amazed and marveled, saying to one another, “Look, are not all these who speak Galileans? And how is it that we hear each in our own language in which we were born? Parthians and Medes and Elamites those dwelling in Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus in Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt in the parts of Libya joining Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs.

We hear them speaking in our own tongues the wonderful works of God. So they were all amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “Whatever could this mean?” Others mocking said, “They are full of new wine.” But Peter standing up with the eleven raised his voice and said to them, “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and heed my words. For these are not drunk as you suppose since it’s only the third hour of the day.

But this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel. And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your young men shall see visions. Your old men shall dream dreams. And on my male servants and my female servants I will pour out my spirit in those days and they shall prophesy. I will show wonders in heaven above and signs in the earth beneath, blood and fire and vapor of smoke.

The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord. And it shall come to pass that Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs which God did through him in your midst. As you yourselves also know, him being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified and put to death, whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that he should be held by it.

For David says concerning him, “I foresaw the Lord always before my face, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken. Therefore, my heart rejoiced and my tongue was glad. Moreover, my flesh also will rest in hope. For you will not leave my soul in Hades, nor will you allow your holy one to see corruption. You have made known to me the ways of life. You will make me full of joy in your presence.

Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn an oath to him, that of the fruit of his body according to the flesh, he would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, he foreseeing this spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ that his soul was not left in Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption.

This Jesus God has raised up of which we are all witnesses. Therefore, being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he poured out this which you now see and hear. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he says himself, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool. Therefore, let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ.

Now, when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” And then Peter said to them, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promises to you and to your children and to all who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God will call.” And with many other words, he testified and exhorted them, saying, “Be saved from this perverse generation.” Then those who gladly received his word were baptized, and that day about 3,000 souls were added to them, and they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine, in fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers.

And then fear came upon every soul. And many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. Now all who believed were together and had all things in common and sold their possessions and goods and divided them among all as anyone had need. So continuing daily with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved.

Let’s pray. Lord God, we thank you for the wonderful gift of the Holy Spirit. And we pray that he would indeed take this law, write it upon our hearts, transform us by bringing us things of the Lord Jesus Christ. In his name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

Oh, we didn’t sing the prayer, did we? Let’s sing the prayer for illumination. I heard, do we have a pianist?

Sorry about that.

Shine thou upon us, Lord, true light of men today, and through the written word, thy very self display, that so from hearts which burn with gazing on thy face, thy whole ones may learn the wonders of thy grace. Breathe thou upon us, Lord, thy spirit’s living flame, that so with one accord our lips may tell thy name. Give thou the hearing ear, fix thou the wandering thought. That thy dear church may hear the great things thou hast wrought.

—

Well, we just celebrated Memorial Day. I always get Memorial Day and Labor Day confused. I never miss the Fourth of July. We mark time in our country by these holidays. Holidays, of course, is a contraction of the old holy days. The church throughout the last two millennia has marked time a different way than these cultural holidays, which are not necessarily bad. But the church has used the life of the Lord Jesus Christ to measure time.

The church calendar has two six-month periods to it. And today, Pentecost Sunday is the beginning of the second six-month period. And if you think about it just a little bit, the first six months begins the celebration of Advent, the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. It moves through Lent, preparation for the death, burial, and resurrection. There then is a celebration on Easter or Resurrection Sunday.

That’s followed by six weeks of Easter, 40 days that our Savior in his resurrected body taught his disciples before his ascension. And then we celebrate Ascension Day. So we move from the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ to Ascension, the full life of Jesus for six months. Pentecost is kind of the transition point to the life of the church. So now we have the period of the church year that really focuses more on the life of the church, working out the life of Jesus.

If I was to ask you what day was Good Friday, that’d be pretty easy, right? If I was to ask you what day Ascension was on, would you know? Well, we were in Europe, first time we went to Poland. We were in Vienna on Ascension Day and didn’t know it. We got up, had one full day there and part of another day. And so we were ready to see Vienna and we couldn’t see any of it. The entire city basically was closed. Couldn’t even get water because it was Ascension Day, and it wasn’t Sunday. Couldn’t be, of course. Ascension is 40 days after the resurrection. Ascension is on Thursday.

Young people, I kind of fooled you on this one because I didn’t give you quite enough space to spell out Thursday, but Ascension is on Thursday. And it’s really a sad thing that we don’t have that holiday known to us, that particular day, a remembrance of the Ascension of Christ 40 days after the resurrection. It’s too bad that we know Memorial Day, Labor Day, Fourth of July more than those things.

I mean, it’s okay, but you know, wouldn’t you want—how do you think about it when you hear that they’re trying to replace anachronistically the year of the Lord and BC, before Christ, with the common era and before the common era? You don’t like it, right? Big controversy in the Midwest. Some school district was trying to do this and everybody’s all up in arms. But somehow it was okay when our holidays of Ascension and the other holidays of the church calendar became misty parts of our memory, and instead we replace them with things like Memorial Day and Labor Day and Fourth of July.

So, you know, it’s a good thing, I think, to commemorate the church here, and that’s what we’ve done here for several years at the Reformation Covenant. And this is the commemoration of Pentecost Sunday. Now, Pentecost actually did occur on a Sunday, being 50 days after Passover, and the best reckoning of that in terms of the year that our Savior was crucified and raised up is that this occurred on a Sunday. So Pentecost Sunday actually is the right terminology. Ascension Sunday is fine too—it’s just the Sunday immediately following the Ascension Day, which is Thursday.

So we have this before us here: this discussion, this historical account, the beginning, the transition. We’re going from Gospels to Acts. We’re going from the life of Jesus Christ in terms of his incarnation and his body here on earth to now the life of Jesus Christ lived out in his body, the church, Acts, and then the epistles. You see? So we’re at that transition point that we’re at. We’re moving now to the life of the church. But the life of the church is not distinct from the life of the Savior. It’s just the life of the Savior is lived out in the context of the life of the church. So we are the body of Jesus Christ. The scriptures tell us quite clearly. And so this body of the Lord Jesus Christ is celebrated in the last six months of the year.

Now this account has way too much material to do a detailed treatment of it. And I know that every Pentecost Sunday for the last few years, we focused on world missions as we have today, and some of the things that are happening. That’s a great and obvious emphasis for Pentecost Sunday. I really want to kind of focus in a little closer to home with this sermon, though. And you’ll see what I mean as we go on with this. It’s amazing to me how much you miss of what’s happening in this account if you don’t know your Bibles.

The other thing we don’t know is the church calendar, and we really don’t know our Old Testament very well. There are various refrains that have sounded forth in what we call the Old Testament that are completed here. There’s one Bible. There’s one word. There are series of new covenants as God renews his covenant leading up to the great renewal of it with the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, so great and distinct as to be called a new creation.

But you know, it’s continuous with what happened before this in the rest of the Bible. If you don’t remember the creation account with the spirit moving in terms of a decreed world, a world that was formless, void, dark, then you’re probably going to miss some of the allusions here to the new creation of the spirit coming and transforming that situation that had happened because of the fall of the first Adam.

And if you don’t remember in the creation account the mighty sound of God’s voice in wind—Genesis 3:8—that Adam and Eve experienced on that Lord’s day, then you’re going to miss the reference here to the spirit coming as a voice, a mighty voice and sound and as wind. So we’re brought, you know, to a remembrance here of those elements of the creation account. And of course, another very important element of that is that in the creation account, man, after he fell, was kicked out of the garden, and man was governed, learned by angels.

We had a graduation ceremony here Friday night—commencement, right? What, you move on, you go up another grade and you commence another period of your life. Well, there’s a sense in which Pentecost is graduation day and it’s commencement. It’s the commencement in terms of the liturgical year of the celebration of the church and Christ’s life through his body, the church. It’s the commencement historically on that first Pentecost when Pentecost had fully come. You saw that in the text, right? When it was fulfilled—this is like with the last of the Sabbaths before the resurrection of Jesus. And now Pentecost is fulfilled. No longer, you know—to this is its culmination.

When that happens, the church is filled with the Holy Spirit and the church now has tongues of flame on their heads. It says, you know, divided tongues—it just means the tongues were dispersed or distributed so that everybody got a tongue of flame on their heads. And so this is a reference back to when man is flunked and get kicked out of the garden. He’s under the tutelage of angels. Galatians tells us during the Old Covenant period. And the place that’s dramatically set forth is that man cannot come back into the garden. And instead of Adam guarding the garden, he’s replaced by an angel, right, with a fiery sword. And so we have fire being utilized by the angel to rule over man.

And this was a replacement of Adam’s guarding responsibility. Well, in Pentecost, man becomes garden guard again. They become guards of the garden. The fire is returned to man, and the tongues of fire can be seen correlative to the swords of fire that the angels have. In Psalm 57:4, the psalmist says, “My soul, my soul is among lions. I lie among the sons of men who are set on fire whose teeth are spears and arrows and their tongue a sharp sword.” So sharp sword, fiery tongue. The psalm sets us up for an understanding of this imagery here. And the imagery is that we have been given back—we’ve matriculated; we’ve entered into now this new phase of taking on the responsibilities that the angels had been given. Why? Because mankind has evolved? No, because Jesus Christ has come and brought new humanity to fruition, and he’s brought humanity into the throne room of God. And so man now graduates to his new task on the earth.

And that’s what Pentecost is in a very large respect.

We also would miss some of the significance of this if we, you know—they’re in a house. What house? Well, we don’t know. But the scriptures, this text wants us to know that they’re in a house of some sort. And the house is filled, and the house is filled with them, and then the house is filled with the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is fire residing on each of them.

In 2 Chronicles 7, after Solomon dedicated the temple, we read that fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple, and the priests could not enter into the house of the Lord because the glory of the Lord had filled the Lord’s house. So you know, at the dedication of the temple, the spirit of God comes and fire from heaven burns things up.

Now, burnt offerings we know in this church, most of us, should be ascension offerings. The emphasis is not destruction. The emphasis is transformation to live in the presence of God. Ascension offerings and the sacrifices are the meals. So it’s the peace offering that’s being spoken of. So when the temple is dedicated, the spirit of God in fire comes and transforms the temple, so to speak, the offerings that represent the offerers.

Well, we’re the temple of God, right? That’s what the New Testament says. We’re the temple. So once more, we have the temple of God convened together. We’re in this transition point. The temple will be gone, done away with—the physical temple in AD 70. And the temple of the church is now replacing it. And what do we see? All the people who constitute that temple—the spirit of God comes down, the fire transforms them into men who are now able to rule in the context of the earth and who are at peace with God.

So another allusion from the Old Testament in this text that’s quite stirring to us if we think about it—seeing that we are part of this church. We have imageries of creation. We have imageries of the temple. We have, of course, imageries of Babel and the reversal of the tower of Babel, where the division of the nations happens, and here they’re all united in hearing the wondrous works that the Lord God has done.

And so all these Old Testament tensions that were set up all come to completion in a joyous series of actions here that remind us that this is the culmination of all of the results of what all of the Old Testament promises and pictures and symbols—what would happen when Jesus comes. They’re all coming to pass now. It’s a wondrous thing.

One final association from the Old Testament is that this is the day of Pentecost that we’re talking about, right? So we’ve talked about some allusions based on what happens, but this is specifically said to be the fulfillment of Pentecost. What was Pentecost? Pentecost had an agricultural significance as well as a redemptive historical significance. Pentecost happens 50 days after Passover. And Pentecost is a celebration of the agricultural movement from Passover and then the first sheaf that was waved, and now we have a couple of loaves that were represented or presented to God 50 days later as firstfruits. And this has significance for the Lord Jesus Christ and the church, which we’ll talk about at the Lord’s supper just a little bit. These loaves have that significance to it, but of course it also refers back to the redemption from Egypt. They come out of Egypt, and 50 days later they’re at Mount Sinai, and Moses goes up to receive the law of God.

That Pentecost was a celebration in Jewish history of the reception of Torah, that the law of God had been given to them. And in the account of the giving of the law in the Old Testament by Philo, the Jewish historian, Philo says this: that when Moses had been summoned up alone, he gave forth the prophetic commands of God, and a voice sounded forth from out of the midst of the fire which had flowed from heaven, a most marvelous and awful voice, the flame being endowed with articulate speech in a language familiar to the hearers, which expressed its words with such clarity and distinctness that the people seemed rather to be seeing than hearing the word of God.

Philo describes the lightning, the thunders, the peals of thunder, the mighty rushing winds, and then he describes the voice of God sounding forth out of the midst of the fire that had come down from heaven on the top of the mountain. So Pentecost is the celebration of the gift of Torah. And because of that, we see here as well that the law—now this way of living that God has for his people—is brought to fulfillment. We’re able, as we were not able in the Old Testament, to live in the context of God’s law. We’re empowered by the spirit.

You know, all the Old Testament reference to the New Covenant is when God would take the law and write it upon our hearts. Remember that those prophecies were really first about when God’s people were restored back from exile into Canaan prior to the coming of Jesus. But ultimately, they prophesy about the New Covenant times. And those New Covenant times are times in which the law is written upon our heart. So all these wonderful pictures from the Old Testament and its fulfillment are brought to us here.

And so there’s many things we could spend, you know, a couple hundred years preaching on Acts 2 every Pentecost Sunday to great effect, and we’d never run out of material. I don’t think the depth of this material is so rich and beautiful. I want to focus on unity today, and I want to focus upon the unity that’s described to us in this text. And what I’ve given you is a fairly simple outline of the text. You know, so you’ve got them all together, and it ends with them being all together, right? So there’s unity at the beginning and unity at the end. And then there’s a description of the effect of what happens when they’re all together upon the Jews that had gathered. And then after Peter’s sermon, there’s reaction by them to it—what do we do? So you’ve got the church before and after. You’ve got the Jews, before and after, who had gathered together. And then at the very middle—it’s kind of a five-part outline, you know—at the very middle section, the third section, is the sermon by Peter. And so it’s pretty easy to look at it that way.

And we’re going to step through it, just say a few things about each of these parts. And if you’ve got the outline, you’ll see that I’ve taken Peter’s sermon and divided it up into three parts. And you’ll notice when I read the text, you might have noticed that there are these addresses by Peter to the men of Judah, to the men of Israel, to men and brothers. So it seems like the text is marked off for us fairly easily by these three sections, all that begin with a statement by Peter.

And as we look at it that way, we’ll see that each of these sections sort of ends in an interesting way. Just so you understand what’s happening here—this sermon of Peter’s begins with a discussion of course of the spirit event, and he quotes from Joel. And then the matching third section of Peter’s sermon is about the Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ. And at the heart of Peter’s sermon is a description of the facts of Jesus’s advent, his incarnation, the fact that he was a man, and Jesus’s death and his resurrection.

So we have the incarnation and the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ at the very heart of Peter’s sermon. And around that heart is a discussion of the Ascension of Christ being connected up by way of the carefully constructed narrative here to the coming of the Holy Spirit that had been prophesied by Joel. And so it’s the Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ that releases the Holy Spirit, just as Jesus had spoken about in the Gospel of John.

The writer of the Gospel also tells us that Jesus said that out of our midst, out of our being, would come rivers of water, which he spoke of the spirit, which had not yet been given because Jesus had not yet been glorified. So the full glorification of Jesus in his Ascension to the right hand of the Father results in the spirit being sent by Father and Son to us. And so the Ascension and that empowerment—the matriculation, the commencement, the graduation of man in the context of that—is linked together textually here.

So that’s what we’ll do: we’ll look through this a little bit and just make some brief comments, and then draw some application at the end.

So first of all, there’s the unity of the spirit and commencement. So again, this is the commencement exercise, we could say, if you look at it that way. This is that ceremony where mankind comes of age. And if you look at this, a couple of things I wanted to point out in the text.

So you look at verse 1: “the day of Pentecost had fully come.” And I made reference to that, but just so you’ll understand, this word “fully come” could be translated “was fulfilled” just as easily. So the day of Pentecost was fulfilled. It is fully come. This is what the day of Pentecost was always about when it was started back in the liturgical calendar of the Jews. It was started to this end. So whatever we know about Pentecost—you see, and this is why we can bring Torah into this, the writing upon the hearts, all these things—can be brought into the events that are described. This is the fulfillment of the day of Pentecost.

And we find at the very beginning of this account an emphasis on unity, don’t we? It says that on that day when Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all with one accord in one place. Now they’re going to come to an increased unity with increased numbers by the end of the text as a result of the spirit’s work. But they begin with emphasizing the unity of the church too. The very first thing we’re told about in this fulfillment of Pentecost is unity—the unity of the church. And it’s a double unity. They’re of one accord, and they’re in one place.

Well, one accord—they’re one-minded. They have, you know, an understanding, a common life together. And that, you know, we can sort of understand that. I want to make some application about that toward the end of the sermon. The one accord is not in all the implications, not all the application of basic truths, but the heart of this sermon, I think, gives us the basic truths of the scriptures that produce our unity. Unity is not in a lockstep method of courtship or education or vocational training or liturgical details or any of that stuff. Those are all good things. There’s a diversity of application. But the unity is essentially that they have this life in common in an attempt to honor the Lord Jesus Christ and the power of the spirit living Torah the way that he has enabled us by the power of that spirit to live.

So they’re of one accord, but notice they’re in one place. Now, I, you know, I mean the idea here is that as Pastor Wilson preached last week, they’re gathered together waiting—and a wonderful sermon, and that is so important for us to wait.

I might just say here, by the way, that Pentecost is a liturgical event on the Lord’s day, and there is a sense in which Pentecost is tied to Lord’s day by its placement here. And I think that when we pray that prayer of illumination that we sang today, or one like it, we’re asking for Pentecost to happen in a small sense again—for the spirit to come to empower the speaker of God’s word the way Peter was empowered, to open the ears of the hearers the way their ears were opened, to transform lives, all that stuff. So there’s a sense in which the liturgical actions of the church in Lord’s day worship are tied to Pentecost, but there’s a sense in which it isn’t.

There have been people in different communes that have written at great length over, you know, the last few centuries about how the Christian life has an element of ritual to it. The liturgical actions of the church are used by God to mature us. But there are times at which the spirit of God comes upon us in a fuller sense—whatever that means—even though we’re indwelt by the spirit at all times.

You know, the people of the Old Testament were indwelt by the spirit just like we are. Maybe not just like we are, but they were indwelt by the spirit. And yet, the spirit of God came upon certain artisans and craftsmen for particular tasks to do stuff on the temple. Well, you know, if you’re an athlete, you know, or if you watch athletic events, you can sort of think about this, right? You drill, you practice, you train, you run plays—if you’re doing basketball, all this stuff. And all that’s great, and that’s how the spirit normally works in order for you to win basketball games or to do well. But there are times at which you get in the zone, right? People talk about being in the zone.

Musicians can have the same sense of rapture at times. It’s interesting the term “rock and roll” in reference to music. The term “rock” was originally a spiritual term used by black gospel singers. They’d be rocking when they got into a kind of a rapturous singing of praises to God. Now it became a different term later on, but that’s the origin of the term “rock and roll.” There’s a rapture. There’s a sense of the zone you get into.

And I do believe that there are times in our lives when the spirit of God comes upon us and quickens us for a particular task. I believe a lot of young people go through this. They grow up in the church, they’re indwelt by the spirit, they’re Christians. They may go off to college. Something happens—a critical event in their lives—and they’re sort of quickened, and there’s a movement of the spirit, and they’re tempted to think, “I’m a Christian now.” That’s not it. It’s a movement of the spirit. We should, I believe, anticipate, pray for, and understand that the normal life of the Christian is informed both by the renewal aspect of Lord’s day worship, but also by the revival aspect of the spirit of God coming upon us, sometimes frequently apart from Lord’s day worship, empowerment for particular tasks.

They’re all together. And if we’re going to have unity in the context of the church, we got to get together. Kind of obvious application, but an important one, isn’t it? You know, if you don’t get together with God’s people, your unity and sense of accord with them will be diminished. I know, you know, it’s hard if you got young kids to come out to showers or graduations or whatever it is. But you know, if you were here at graduation—I’m not trying to make anybody feel guilty. That’s up the Holy Spirit in you. But if you were here Friday night because you wanted to be in one place with the people that you’re trying to move in terms of one accord with and have unity with, you would have heard interesting things about the lives of these families. Very interesting. I won’t get into it more than that. But you would have things to talk with them about, for instance, because you’d know a little bit better who they are.

Church is getting bigger. I may not even recognize people. But you maybe recognize them. You don’t know who they are, what’s going on in their life. One of the reasons we try to get together for showers or celebrations of weddings, births, graduations, parties, celebrations, this open house, the Eucharist, family camp, whatever it is—the point or birthdays, let’s say the birthday announcement after church at the end of the day—you get to know a little about people, and that gives you something to converse with them about, and that builds this unity that I think is the beginning emphasis and the concluding emphasis of the day of Pentecost as well.

See, I want to bring the focus great—all the nations of the world are going to be evangelized. It’s a wonderful theme in this book, this story rather—tremendously excellent emphasis. But we also want to understand that Pentecost is a day that begins and ends with the local church having unity, being of one accord in one place, living their lives with a degree of communion and fellowship that I think we all would want to have in an increasing fashion. And one way to do that is to just be in one place with other people. It builds one accord. You have to get together.

All right. So that’s how this starts.

Let me just mention, by the way, there was a question last week after the sermon about the operation of the Holy Spirit prior to the day of Pentecost. For those of you who are interested, there’s an excellent article on John Piper’s website on the place of the Holy Spirit in the life of the Old Testament saint. And he says much what I told those of you that were here during the John series—was a little bit scandalous to you, I think, when I quoted Rob Rayburn, saying the same thing: that you know, as dispensationalists in terms of the evangelicals that we have been in the past, many of us, we tend to get this all kind of mixed up.

The Holy Spirit, and Piper goes through ten ways that the Holy Spirit was present in saints in the Old Testament. And I’m not going to go through that article. Maybe I could make copies if you’re interested. But you know, there’s very obvious lots of verses that say that the Old Testament believer was indwelt by the spirit. He understood that life itself was the gift of the spirit. The spirit came upon them in different times to do particular tasks. The spirit was how the Lord God brought the word to them and how they understood the word.

You know, there’s no—like, you know, the modalist think that there’s not three persons. You have these God operating in three modes. So God goes away with Jesus, and now the mode he works in is the mode of the Holy Spirit. So it’s but it’s one person. Well, that’s ridiculous. And you can see all three persons throughout the scriptures. Now you can see it in an intensified way in the New Testament, but understand that is not the way it works. The Old Testament saint was filled with the Holy Spirit.

And many of the great texts we look at in the Old Testament to talk about the filling of the spirit and writing the law upon our hearts and all that and the valley of the dry bones and the spirit of God comes upon that was about Israel in the restoration period first and foremost. That was about when they came back from Babylon and from Persia. That’s what that was about in the first application. Yeah, it pointed to the greater fulfillment with Pentecost. But don’t get it mixed up.

The Holy Spirit—now, that’s the continuity. The discontinuity that Piper uses the illustration of was, you know, when he was younger, they did the Aswan Dam in Egypt. And so there was always a river in Egypt. There were people—there was a small trickle of water, and that was always part of their lives. But once the dam went up, now there was a tremendous torrent of water, you see. Well, that’s the way it is. What they had—okay, maybe we could say they had a—what’s the—I can’t even remember anymore now what the telephone modems used to work at. I’ve had 1200 baud. Okay, so they had a 1200 baud rate of flow of the spirit of God, okay. And we got broadband now; we got DSL; we got better than DSL. It is really moving now—the data. And those of you who have computers, which is nearly all of you, you know that allows you to do a whole bunch more than you could have at that slower speed.

So there’s discontinuity—radical discontinuity in the amount, the empowerment. As I say, we can think of it as commencement. Man is now done being servant to the angels. Now Psalm 8 says God places him over the angels, okay? So now man has come of age in Jesus Christ. He’s been given new power. There’s a greater unity. Now the point of that paper draws is that if those great saints could do such great things in the Old Testament with a 1200 baud modem, what should you be doing, you know, with DSL? You know, we have more things—greater things, you see—than they have. Greater power and access of the Holy Spirit. We live now much more directly in the presence of God. The spirit connects us with God, okay.

So we have unity, and we have an intensified unity that happens as a result of Pentecost.

Then we have the shaking of the world in verses 5 to 13. And here, of course, the emphasis is that there are men from every nation. They’re all gathered together. It’s Pentecost. And so people—it’s one of the three required festivals when you had to go to Jerusalem. They’re all there. And so all these different people are represented. In terms of the basic theme that I want to stress here is two things. First of all, there is unity—there’s a unity of the nations of the earth that are represented here.

Now, the spirit of God works to bridge fracture, to bridge disunity, okay? And to intensify unity. And so what we have represented here, and we can see this in our day and age, is different nations, different races even, are pictured, are described for us here. And the spirit of God is manifest, and they each receive in their own tongues—their nation, their tongue, their race. They hear the word of God being preached to them.

Oh, that’s one other thing about the Old Testament, of course. You know, if you know who spoke in tongues in the Old Testament, Daniel. He wrote in Aramaic most of his book, which was a foreign language, you see. So the foreign language of the tongues—if we understand Old Testament—is the picture that the gospel now is going to penetrate Babylon, Persia, all the nations of the world, you see. Will now become the kingdoms of our God and of his Christ.

And so that’s exciting stuff. And this ability to hear the preaching of God’s word and his mighty actions in your own tongue—this is a fuller manifestation of what was going on with Daniel in the restoration period. And this is important because what it tells us is that Pentecost tells us that the church now has been kind of put in captivity, right? It’s in the midst of the Roman Empire. But it’s not because we’re going to stay small. It’s because we’re going to be like the poison pill of Nebuchadnezzar. We’re going to transform it. The nations are going to become the kingdoms of Christ.

So this happens. And so there’s a unity here in hearing the wonderful works of God. That’s the content that’s preached to them in verse 11: “the wonderful works of God.” This is what’s said. And there’s unity, but there’s also—this is the one place in the text where there’s disunity.

Each of these little sections ends with an important saying, and in verse 13, we read that others mocking said, “They are full of new wine.” Now the Joel citation that Peter is going to bring here is a reminder of judgment, and there is a division. Well, I want to stress that unity is a result of the coming of the spirit—that unity is amongst those who receive the word with gladness, who are amazed and astonished and saying, “What’s going on?”—and not those who mock.

The only lack of unity is between those that hear the word and receive it and then want to know more, and those who mock the word, okay? And so this is the manifestation of the shaking of the world. So some will be shaken out; others will be shaken into the kingdom. And those ones that are in the kingdom will hear of the wondrous works of God.

God, we were at John and Jonathan and Joanna’s apartment yesterday, and they had gone to a garage sale, bought a beautiful couch and loveseat or a couch and a wingback chair, which is really good quality. I guess they bought it for $100. Wonderful deal. And Debbie Shaw was there, and she said, “Boy, the Lord was really kind to you. God was really gracious to you, wasn’t he?” That’s the wonderful work of God. That’s what we can do in the same way that these men were speaking with the coming of the Holy Spirit to them. Our words can be filled with sayings about the wondrous works of God.

Now, it wasn’t just luck. It wasn’t just the way things shook out. It wasn’t diligence ultimately on the part of Jonathan and Joanna looking for it, even if they had done that. At the end of the day, it’s the grace of God. The Lord did a great thing for them. And that’s what’s talked about here in this second section.

In the third section, we have Peter’s sermon itself. And there’s different ways to outline this. Let me let’s just take a minute. Look at your text. And I’ve given you a way to look at this text in terms of three sections by looking at these headers of Peter’s statements. But there’s another way to look at this, and I want to spend just a minute on that with you.

Now, if you have the handout, if you look at the middle section in verses 22 to 24, Peter proclaims the gospel, right? And so he says that the announcement—him being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, you’ve crucified, put to death, whom God has raised up. So the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is kind of where Peter starts, and it’s where it’s where he can be seen as ending as well. So that may mark off a section.

And if you look at it that way, he then goes on to give citations from a Psalm of David, okay, in the very next few verses. And he gives proof from the scripture of this death and resurrection of Christ in verses 25 to 28. And after this section, down in verses 34b and 35, he cites from the Psalms again. He cites from two different Psalms—Psalm 16 and Psalm 110.

So another way to look at this sermon, this part of the sermon, is that first you got the Joel thing, and the second half of the sermon has these bookends of citations from two different Psalms. And before those bookends is this declaration of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—the gospel is preached. After he gives these citations from the Psalms, he interprets the Psalms—Psalm 16 in verses 29-31, and then he interprets them again in verse 34.

At the very beginning of verse 34, again an interpretation of the verse is given. Verse 34 begins by saying, “For David did not ascend into the heaven.” So he describes—he interprets the scriptures that he’s quoted on either end of this thing. And that takes us to the middle. And the middle speaks of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the witnesses to the resurrection in verse 32 and the exaltation of Jesus Christ and the mediation of the Holy Spirit and the witnesses to that in verse 33.

So no matter which way you take it—the way I’ve outlined it or if you take this other structure where you look at the Psalms on the second half as buttressing something at the middle of that—what you have is the death, resurrection, and then Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s the facts, and that’s what Peter gives them in his sermon on that first day of Pentecost. That’s what transforms things, okay? The spirit of God comes to bring us things, aspects of the Lord Jesus Christ. So Peter’s sermon is the empowerment of the spirit to preach not about the spirit. He does that by telling what’s going on in Joel. He relates it to Christ, but the sermon’s content is the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, first he addresses the men of Judah. He talks about a spirit of judgment and a need for salvation. That’s the first section if you look at it by terms of address: verse 14, “Men of Judah, all who dwell in Jerusalem.” And if you look at the end of that in verse 21, “it shall come to pass that Whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

Now, at the center, he’s going to get to a really good conclusion. But here in the first of the three parts that I’ve outlined for you on the handout today, the section from Joel means that the coming of the Holy Spirit—it is a wonderful thing, but it’s also a thing that means that men need to be saved. And what he’s saying is the same thing that Paul will say in his travels: that in the past there wasn’t as much judgment as there is now. Now the Lord God has come. What Joel has prophesied has come to pass. Now times are really bad for you if you don’t repent and turn to the Lord Jesus Christ.

So part of our Pentecostal message by which the world will be brought to conversion is a preaching of damnation to those who refuse to repent of their sins and turn to the Lord Jesus Christ. Part of the message of the church must be that the spirit of God, while a wondrous, cleansing, renewing sort of thing, is also a spirit of judgment. And men must understand—we’re so, you know, we have a hard time doing this—but the Pentecostal message that will bring unity to the church is that declaration that apart from bowing the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ, there is only damnation, death and destruction. You must call on the name of the Lord and be saved.

So this is how Peter starts. He starts by calling them to call upon the name of the Lord. There’s something to be saved from, and it’s the judgment of God that now is manifest through the Holy Spirit and the proclamation of the gospel.

Then in the next section—the center section verses 22 and following—where now a new address is given: “Men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man…” So he talks about the humanity of the Lord Jesus Christ, his incarnation. And he talks about the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he concludes this section. He talks about the death and resurrection of Christ, and he concludes it in verse 28 by saying, “You have made known to me the path, the ways of life. You will make me full of joy in your presence.”

So calling men to be saved is then followed by Peter with the declaration that you won’t just be saved and get out of problems, but he cites David’s Psalm—Psalm 16—that indeed the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ is to the end that men might walk in the paths of delight and of great joy. So he brings the gospel message: first, the need for salvation, but secondly, that the great promise of redemption is not just an escape from the judgment of God. It is having fullness of joy in the immediate as well.

The third section begins in verse 29, “Men and brethren.” And here it’s a little more comprehensive in terms of what he’s saying. And he describes here the Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Verse 33: “Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he poured out this which you now see and hear.” Here, by the way, is the source of the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Son. Jesus has been exalted to the right hand of God, and Jesus now—this Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son, and that’s what happened here. So the Lord Jesus Christ in relationship to his promise now pours out the Holy Spirit upon mankind.

“David did not ascend into the heavens, but he says himself, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.’ Therefore, let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ.”

So on either side of the central section of Peter’s sermon are the description of Joel’s prophecy and the need to be saved and the Ascension of the Lord Jesus Christ. And again, the idea is that this one whom you’ve crucified is Lord and Christ. You need to be saved. So at the heart of his message is the picture of the death and resurrection of Jesus, and the effect of this upon those who do come to salvation, who do acknowledge him as Lord and Christ, is that we walk in the paths of joy forever.

The very heart of Pentecost—the heart of the new world, the heart of the fulfillment of everything that the Old Testament told us about Pentecost—is the walking in the paths of joy at the conclusion of that middle section of Peter’s sermon. Now, it’s bounded by calls to repentance—it’s bounded to turn away from our own ways of looking at things, to acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ and to bend the knee to him. But at the very heart of the Pentecost message is a picture of delight and joy and blessing.

All right. And then he concludes. This narrative then goes back. After the sermon is done, we have a description of the conviction of the world. They cry out, “What are we going to do? You know, what do we have to do here?” And he says to call on the name of the Lord. And they—we have here then the unity of the nations and of all flesh.

They’re cut to the heart in verse 37. They cry out, “What shall we do?” And Peter says, “Be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins. This is where the phrase from the Nicene Creed comes from: that we’re baptized for the remission of sins.

And notice in verse 39, “for the promise is unto you and to your children and to all who are afar off.” What does that mean? Well, “you and your children” doesn’t mean it’s not focusing on family there. It’s focusing on the nation of Israel. And those that are afar off are outside of Israel. And so what’s being talked about again is unity—that both Jew and Gentile are now being called by God into this one body through the work of the spirit.

And so the great work of the spirit that’s also described in Pentecost is the elimination of the Jew-Gentile distinction. Israel and her children, the Gentiles who are afar off, all brought together in one now in this unifying work of the Holy Spirit. So there’s a unified church comprised of these Jews and of those who are afar off.

The conviction of the world is described in the unity of nations, places, generations, and Jew and Gentiles. This is then given to us in this section.

And then finally, at the end of the day of Pentecost description in verses 41 and following, is increased unity. There’s adding to the numbers of them. That’s part of the increase of unity—there’s more people. But then the unity of the author is described in a way in terms of they’re holding all things together. They’re listening. They’re being unified in the doctrine of the apostles, in fellowship, the breaking of bread, and in prayers.

They hold all things in common. They have one accord. Verse 46: “continuing daily with one accord in the temple.” That same phrase we saw earlier—”one accord in one place, altogether.” Here they’re in one accord in the temple. The unity described at the beginning of the text now comes to fulfillment at the end of the text.

So Pentecost has this wonderful description of the coming of the Holy Spirit to bring unity—increased unity. It’s a unity that, if we look at the entire text, bridges nations, right? It brings nations together. It bridges races. It brings races together, acknowledging the lordship of Jesus Christ. Peter had said that, quoting Joel, that God would send his spirit to the old and to the young. The generational gap is bridged in the unity of the day of Pentecost, right? And sexual fragmentation is also healed now and brought to unity.

The Holy Spirit comes upon both sons and daughters, men and women, unified together in the work of the Holy Spirit, and Jew and Gentile unified together as well. So the Pentecost event is about unity. It’s about a unity that comes from worshiping the Lord God, from confessing the lordship of Jesus Christ, and God then brings unity through the Holy Spirit.

Augustine said that the Trinity is God the Father who loves the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ who is the loved one, and the Holy Spirit that is the love that flows from the Father to the Son. And the Holy Spirit brings us into that loving relationship with the Triune God. The Holy Spirit unites mankind with God in its proper relationship now through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And so the spirit brings unity.

The day of Pentecost, the spirit entered a fragmented world. And our world today is fragmented in the same way. You know, Dennis Peacock years ago was at our church, and he said, “If you want to know where to plant seed, look where God is plowing up the ground.” Where is God plowing the ground? And you do that by reading the Oregonian. Look at the headlines. What’s happening? Well, what’s happening? Nations are warring against nations. There’s a disunity happening. There’s more wars that are going on. There’s a problem we’ve got with the nation to the south of us. And that’s resulting in an increased resurgence, I think, of racist sort of language in the context of our culture. Now, I’m not saying who’s doing what and who’s doing what’s right and who’s doing what’s wrong, but today we have a fragmented world. We have nations that are fragmented. We have races that are fragmented. We have families in this country that are fragmented. Divorce rates have never been so high. We have parents and children who are fragmented, right? Generation gap has never been so big.

So fragmentation exists. And into this world comes the message of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost Sunday. That’s the thing that will unite nations—not democracy. Democracy is a false savior. The only thing that will bring nations, races, generations, ages, men and women to true unity is what we see described on the day of Pentecost: the power of the Holy Spirit bringing men to conviction for their sins and a desire to exalt and proclaim the Lord Jesus Christ. Yeah, it’s about the salvation of the world. It’s about missions, but it’s about bringing unity to our nation as well.

But that unity will not be achieved apart from an acknowledgment that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit is the source of that unity. We could bring it closer to home, bring the focus in from the world to our country and the difficulties we’ve talked about here. We’ve never had such fragmentation, I don’t think, in the political process. Why? Why is it worse in families, in our nation, in the political process? Why? Because our country continues to move away from the source of true unity: the gospel, the death, burial, resurrection—the facts, ma’am, just the facts. The facts of the Lord Jesus Christ that are at the heart of the Christian gospel.

The Christian faith is not a philosophy. It’s not ultimately a worldview. It’s a relationship with Jesus Christ through a declaration of those facts, historically rooted, that the Lord Jesus Christ came and redeemed humanity 2,000 years ago on the cross. That’s the source of unity. And any culture that moves away from the centrality of what Peter’s sermon was focused upon—at the heart of it is the work of the Lord Jesus Christ. And when we become a Christian nation apart from the heart of the gospel, we move away from unity.

When we move in terms of worldview, and then transcending away to some of the implications of Christianity—democracy—and when we make that now the source of unity, we move toward disunity and fragmentation because the spirit of God is here, and the spirit of God brings conviction.

We could focus closer in on our church. What are potential sources of a failure of unity in the context of our church? Well, we sort of know what they are, right? I mean, a couple issues I thought of immediately: Kings Academy is a potential source of disunity. I thought it was really interesting that Laura W.’s talk Friday night talked about the different ways in which she was homeschooled or schooled rather—several, I think she went into three different ways of being schooled in one year. She described there are many different ways of education, and if we start focusing on this way or that way and saying it’s—if you don’t have your kids at King’s Academy, you’re missing the mark, or if you don’t have your kids being homeschooled, you’re missing the mark, or if you’re not making use of tutorial ways of education, you’re missing the mark—you see, if we do any of those things, we’ve replaced the center of the unity that we have in Jesus Christ, which is the gospel, which is the Savior himself, with the fruit that comes from that Savior.

I don’t know anybody doing either homeschool, private school, tutorial, community college, whatever it is. I don’t know any parent in this church who isn’t doing it because they want to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ and they want their children to have a deeper relationship with him. Music—it’s interesting. You know, they used to say, well, doctrine divides, but music unites. Well, now you know, the fact is that music divides people today. And we have the potential for that in this church.

You know, let’s all remember that the source of our unity is the person and work of Jesus Christ. That’s at the heart of this text, okay? It’s the gospel of Jesus Christ. Apart from the big issues that have the potential of bringing division to the church, probably the bigger issue is not all that stuff. That’s pretty easily dealt with, and everybody knows what I just said. I think everybody agrees with it.

The bigger issue is that we may drift apart from being in one place. We may drift apart from a statement of the wondrous works of God being the basis for our relationship with each other. There may just be a natural sort of drifting apart in the context of this church as it matures and gets older. There probably will be—already has been. God says that the day of Pentecost is a reminder that the Holy Spirit has come to bring us unified through the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, through having lives that interlace and interact with one another.

Yeah, there were particular situations on the day of Pentecost—that’s why they held all things in common, et cetera. But our lives should have some degree of interaction with each other because that’s what the Holy Spirit does. The Holy Spirit links us together, binds us together with a common confession of the Lord Jesus Christ and an encouragement one to the other to serve, to have lives of further commitment and consistent following of him in our Torah.

Let’s take it even a little closer in focus. There are marriages where, you know, the unity needs to be restored. We need to be praying in our marriages that God would strike that original match, right? The Holy Spirit that draws us together. The spirit is a matchmaker. He’s bringing the bride of Christ to Jesus on the day of Pentecost. And he brings husband and wife together as well.

How do we do it? How do we create a unified church? How do we create a unified family? How do we create a unified nation? How do we create a unified world? Well, it’s all the action of the Holy Spirit. From one sense, we don’t have to do any of it. That’s the job of the Holy Spirit. That’s what the Holy Spirit accomplishes. You know, the men on Pentecost didn’t say, “Gee, I hope I get filled with the spirit.” It’s not like that. The spirit of God overpowers them to accomplish this work, you see. They’re willing to be used and moved by the Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work.

I guess what I’m saying is our job is to not grieve that spirit. That spirit is a spirit of unity in our families, in the church, in the nation and world. That’s what it is. That’s a spirit of unity bridging generations, bridging male-female relationships, bridging nationalities and races. But we can—the scriptures tell us—grieve the Holy Spirit.

We read in Ephesians 4: “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby you are sealed into the day of redemption. And right after that, let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, evil speaking be put away from you with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven you.”

We’re told here how we disrupt the unity of the church—the unity of the Holy Spirit is working. We’re told here how we grieve the Holy Spirit. It is through bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor. It’s through sin. The spirit of God is a spirit that calls men—at the beginning, you know, at the bookends of that center section, where we’re to walk in the paths of delight—are calls to repentance. And that’s what we need to do. We need to call our nation to repentance for trusting in democracy instead of the Lord Jesus Christ.

We have to call our church to repentance when we do these kind of things—have wrath or clamor, anger, dissension, evil speaking against one another. We got to repent of those things. And when we see that in our families, we’re to call on each other to come to repentance for these things. And repentance means doing what verse 32 of that text said: to be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another.

The wonderful thing is that the spirit of God is here bringing about a newness of life. That is a newness found in unity. It’s a unity reflected by drawing us into relationship with God through the Holy Spirit, through the work of Christ. It’s a relationship that’s reflected in our marriages, in our friendships, in our church, and in this world. And it’s a relationship of unity that can be hindered. But really, it’s not our job to build that unity. The Holy Spirit accomplishes that for us. Our job is to not grieve the Holy Spirit by letting unresolved sin abide in our hearts or on our tongues, one for the other, and to claim the name of the Lord Jesus Christ in all that we do and say.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for today. We thank you for the coming of the Holy Spirit. We pray, Lord God, that the spirit would manifest the Lord Jesus Christ in our lives. Forgive us for making things other than the Lord Jesus Christ central in our lives or central in our relationships. Help us, each Father, in our homes, in this church, and in our broader relationships, to honor the Lord Jesus Christ, speaking of his wondrous works and ways.

Lord God, we want to walk in those delights and paths that in many ways we’re not right now. We want to see the Holy Spirit work to bring further delight in our paths. We pray that to that end you would grant us, Father, a fullness and a revival and renewal of the Holy Spirit to the end that we would focus upon the person and work of Jesus, that we would put off sins of division and discontent and put on hearts of kindness and tenderness and grace one to the other.

Lord God, we pray that as we come forward now to offer ourselves afresh to you, that you indeed would receive us, Lord God, and grant us the grace of the Holy Spirit and the characteristics and virtues of Christ, that we would be united in him.

In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.