Under the InfluenceSample

Day 3: The Holy Spirit Isn’t Weird; People Are:

On day 3, we’re talking about weird people!

The enemy desperately wants to sow confusion concerning the Holy Spirit. He wants Christians to believe that salvation is the same as receiving the Holy Spirit. This effectively cancels the power of the Christian life. The devil will make that deal all day long.

On day 1, we talked about how onlookers thought those baptized by the Holy Spirit were full of wine. They didn’t understand how the Holy Spirit operated. And they didn’t wait to learn.

If the disciples had done that, there would be no church today. The church was born in the power of the Holy Spirit on the day Jesus baptized His followers with the Holy Spirit in Jerusalem. There, they spoke in tongues for the first time as the Spirit gave them the flow of words. There, the Spirit drew onlookers and piqued their curiosity over what was happening. There, the Spirit emboldened Peter to preach an amazing message of repentance to a potentially hard-hearted crowd. The Spirit convicted those hearts there and brought three thousand people to repentance.

What if the disciples had said after Jesus ascended, “We’re not sure what Jesus was talking about with that Holy Spirit stuff. It doesn’t make sense to us. We saw the risen Christ and the empty tomb. We remember the gospel message and His teachings. Let’s skip this other experience and start evangelizing to the world.”

The truth is, some did that. Of the five hundred Jesus told to wait, three hundred eighty failed to obey. Some may have faded because they wanted Jesus to immediately restore the kingdom of Israel, as we see in Acts 1. But that wasn’t the plan. Others probably went to the upper room but gave up waiting for the promise because they got impatient, disgruntled, or bored— who knows? Maybe conflicts broke out among some of them. Maybe others had business or family obligations they sneaked away to take care of. Whatever the reasons, only one hundred and twenty remained to wait on the day of Pentecost. Like many in churches today, the great majority didn’t wait for the power. They just went ahead with what they had. They went to chop trees with a butter knife.

To have any power in our “GO,” we must “WAIT” to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. A gospel without power is hardly a gospel at all. Jesus taught that it’s not enough to receive salvation and be water-baptized. We need salvation, the Bible, and all these foundations of the Christian life—but we also need Spirit baptism to have power in life and ministry. This is the clear and plain teaching of the Bible.