All Together Now!
Have you ever had a ‘bad’ week? Someone once said, “You can
tell you’re going to have a bad week when a camera crew from 60-minutes is in
the office on Monday and would like to ask you some questions.” Here are some
other possible ways you can tell things are going to get hairy. The
orthodontist says your kid needs braces and then asks if you think the blue or
silver BMW is nicer. Your spouse gives you a ticket to Fiji for your
anniversary, but there is only one, and it is one-way.
Let me suggest that when God pours Himself into your life your
week is going to more than terrific, it is going to be spectacular. That is
precisely what happened on Pentecost in Jerusalem. What Jesus had promised happened. They had
waited, as Jesus told them, and the Paraclete, counselor, comforter, God’s
advocate was present with them, upon them, and within them.
Former Chaplain of the Senate and Pastor at Hollywood Pres., Lloyd
Ogilvie wrote, “The greatest need in the church today is for contemporary
Pentecost (Ogilvie 56).” That was his conclusion after taking a year to
discover the great need people had for a sense of power in their lives.
At 67 I find myself wishing I this or that ability I had when I
was 40. In transitioning from a home to assisted living I hear the pain caused
by losing control of their lives, their future. It is very obvious with
this pandemic how many of us want things to go back to being normal and we
chafe under the thought that things may never be ‘normal’ again. When
the world is shifting all around us it becomes difficult to find an anchor on
which we can depend.
As hard as it is to ‘trust God’ in such times, the answer to our
lack of control is found in Christ and his presence and power—in Pentecost. In
the matter of a few minutes, the lives of 120 people were uprooted by God. A
weird sound and a strange sight moved 120 people from a room into the streets.
It made fishermen apostles, it made shopkeepers into evangelists, it took women
and caused their voices to shout God’s praise to the street in languages they
may have never heard.
Together Before
A keyword used to describe those people is “together”. “When
the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place” v2. They
were together because that’s what Jesus had told them to do, back in 1:4-5 “he
ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the
Father, …but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days
from now.”
Together, describes these people, before and after the Holy
Spirit comes. Before, they were together waiting. After, they were together
as a force. Before, they were together but powerless. After, thousands
wanted to be together with them. This wasn’t mass hysteria but a God
thing. They ran into the street among the gathering crowd together but not the
same. In an instant, the Holy Spirit delivered them from “the limitations of
their Galilean speech (Peterson 134) so that those who had gathered at the
sound were hearing God being praised in their own languages. “It was not simply
a miracle of hearing: it was a miracle of speech (Peterson 134)” because they
were enabled “as the Spirit gave them utterance” v4. This is what the
Holy Spirit does with gifts, 1 Co 12:11 “All these are empowered by one and
the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he [Holy
Spirit] wills”.
Together After
After some 3,000 people respond to Peter’s sermon, ‘together’
is used three times.
“All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people.” Acts 2:44-47 NIV
The ESV uses ‘together’ twice. It describes their meeting in
the temple and breaking bread in v. 46. Either way, they were supporting and
caring for one another in a way that was unique, even in a culture that honored
hospitality. Read through Acts 2-6 and you’ll see successes and tensions to
this togetherness. Yet, God continually brings his people together. So much so,
the summary for chapter 2 that “the Lord continued to add to their number
daily those who were being saved” (v. 47).
Together Today
How can we live a together style life today? Above
everything else, it comes from, is powered by, and brings glory and honor to God
and God alone. Look back at verse 47, “The LORD continued to add…” their
cleverness didn’t work, nor does our nifty programs. “The LORD continued
to add…” it wasn’t their keeping the rules of the law, and it doesn’t
happen because we are polite and don’t wear a hat in worship. The rich guy in
Mark 10 asks what it takes to be saved and Jesus said you know the
commandments. His response was, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my
youth”. Yet he walks away unsaved. Why? Because it isn’t our good deeds
that brings about salvation, it is God and God alone.
To be together today demands a humble spirit, to see us as God
sees us. There is a story about Teddy Roosevelt that comes from a traveling
companion and friend, William Beebe. He wrote,
After an evening of talk...we would go out on the lawn, where we took turns at an amusing little astronomical rite. We searched until we found, with or without glasses, the faint heavenly spot of light-mist beyond the lower left-hand corner of the Great Square of Pegasus, when one or the other of us would recite:
· That is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda.
· It is as large as our Milky Way.
· It is one of a hundred million galaxies.
· It is 750,000 light-years away.
· It consists of one billion suns, each larger than our sun."
After an interval, Colonel Roosevelt would grin at me and say: "Now I think we are small enough! Let's go to bed (Beebe 234)."
Beebe concludes, “We must have repeated this salutary ceremony
forty of fifty times in the course of years, and it never palled (ibid.).” Their
simple recitation gave them a humble perspective on life.
Does it excite you that God, who created that spiral galaxy
some 750,000 light-years away, sent Jesus to die for us? Do we grasp that this
same God, who sent Jesus to die, insists we do the seemingly impossible? What
is so impossible about telling others about Jesus, healing the sick, feeding
the hungry, clothing the naked, and loving the unlovable?
Together today must be kindled by the Holy Spirit and cause a
growth in our spiritual vitality and power. Only then can the seemingly
impossible be accomplished. Forget about the source of this power; grow weak;
distant from others, or be forgetful about the things of God and we find
ourselves alone, with no means of support, or compassion.
I was in Hawthorne Nevada for six years, two election cycles.
In each of those years, one of the county commissioners made a Sunday appearance
at worship. He was a good person. I think his name was Lyberger but it doesn’t
matter because he was never together with the followers of Jesus. He was
a good county commissioner. He seemed to be a moral and good person. But the
proof he was not together with us came during a graveside service one
afternoon. Harry Kumler, the funeral
director in Hawthorne and a faithful member and deacon asked, what church he attended.
He told Harry, “I’m a Presbyterian.” To which Harry simply said, “Funny, I’ve
never seen you there.”
God’s love, God’s Holy Spirit will continue to challenge us to
be together with-others even as he moves us out into the streets and smack-dab-in-the-middle
of messy lives and messy situations. He will call on us to remain together even
as we stand apart from the world taking unpopular stands. The awe and wonder of
it all is that God actually likes using us to do this work. Let’s pray
Works Cited
Beebe, William. The Book of Naturalists. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1988. Print 234.
Lloyd J. Ogilvie Acts.
Volume 28 : The Preacher's Commentary series (Nashville, Tennessee:
Thomas Nelson Inc, 1983), 56.
Peterson, David G. The Acts of the Apostles. Grand Rapids,
MI; Nottingham, England: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009. Print.
The Pillar New Testament Commentary.
Bibliography
Batterson, Mark. Whisper. Portland: Multnomah, 2017. Print.
Beebe, William. The Book of Naturalists. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1988. Print 234.
Brown, David, A. R. Fausset, and Robert Jamieson. A
Commentary, Critical, Experimental, and Practical, on the Old and New
Testaments: Acts–Revelation. VI. London; Glasgow: William Collins, Sons, &
Company, Limited, Print.
Louw, Johannes P., and Eugene Albert Nida. Greek-English
lexicon of the New Testament: based on semantic domains 1996 : V 1, p 637
Print.
Marshall, ‘Significance’, 355. Cf. G. Delling, TDNT
6:128–31, 283–98; Turner, Power, 165–69.
Lloyd J. Ogilvie Acts.
Volume 28 : The Preacher's Commentary series (Nashville, Tennessee:
Thomas Nelson Inc, 1983), 56.
Peterson, David G. The Acts of the Apostles. Grand Rapids,
MI; Nottingham, England: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009. Print.
The Pillar New Testament Commentary.
Polhill, John B. Acts. Vol. 26. Nashville: Broadman &
Holman Publishers, 1992. Print. The New American Commentary.
Salmond, Roy and Mulder, Mike "Bear the Burden".
Stumbling Heavenward, 1979, LP
Wilson, Andrew. "Paul Says To ‘Be Filled with The
Spirit.’ How Do We Obey A Passive Verb?." ChristianityToday.com. 2019.
Web. 27 May 2020.
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