The Gift - Acts 2:1-13

Last week we focused on Ascension Day when Jesus returned to claim the throne as King of kings and to send the promised gift of his Spirit. This morning, we remember and celebrate the giving of the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus has returned home and told his disciples to go wait for the coming of his Spirit. The disciples go from Galilee and head to Jerusalem. It’s Pentecost, the big harvest festival 50 days after Passover, which is why it’s called Pentecost, which means 50. The disciples go to Jerusalem as Jesus had told them, “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit…. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The coming of the Holy Spirit is connected to the harvest, reminding us of Jesus’ comment that the fields are white with harvest, just needing workers.

The Holy Spirit comes with the sound of a rushing wind. For Israel, the wind is a familiar symbol of the presence of the Holy Spirit. In Ezekiel 37 we read of the Valley of Dry Bones, “The Spirit of the Lord set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones…. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?” I said, “Sovereign Lord, you alone know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones…. So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the breath; … So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army….”

The Lord goes on, “you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.’” The Lord uses word play here as the word for wind, breath, and Spirit are all the same word. In John 20, when Jesus met his disciples in the upper room right after his resurrection, Jesus breaths on his disciples, “And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” The Holy Spirit is God, a gift and presence, bringing new life and new hope, a sign of forgiveness.

Luke writes, “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.” This is another play on words, the word for tongues and languages are the same, similar to English; an echo back to the Tower of Babel when the people’s languages are confused because they’re building a “tower that reaches the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” The Lord responds, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” The Holy Spirit now gives them the ability to communicate in order to gather all people together into the body of Jesus. The new church is equipped through the Holy Spirit to go to the nations to share the gospel news: the “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs.”

The Heidelberg Catechism talks about the work of the Holy Spirit in gathering together the church in Question and Answer 54, “I believe that the Son of God through his Spirit and Word, out of the entire human race, from the beginning of the world to its end, gathers, protects, and preserves for himself a community chosen for eternal life and united in true faith. And of this community I am and always will be a living member.” The wonderful thing is that the Holy Spirit uses and equips us to gathering God’s chosen community as we share our faith in Jesus with others and live out that chosen-ness in our day-to-day lives. This is all part of what God promised Abram back in Genesis 12 when he says he’ll make Abram a blessing to all the nations of the world. God does this through Jesus, and now through us, the body of Jesus in the world. What greater blessing is there today than to introduce people to Jesus and all that he’s done for us in washing our sin away on the cross, bringing us healing from our brokenness and pain. We often look to the things of the world to find hope, healing, and meaning, and yet through the gift of the Holy Spirit, we don’t need to look outside ourselves for healing or hope, the Spirit within us brings us what we need, a renewed relationship with God.

I love how Pentecost and the coming of the Holy Spirit points us to telling others about Jesus and building the kingdom of heaven. However, the coming of the Holy Spirit isn’t just about sharing the gospel; the Holy Spirit’s also given to strengthen the church and guide us into a closer relationship with Jesus. Derek Vreeland reminds us, “The church is not merely a gathering of the baptized to be scattered in the world. The church is a gathering of the baptized energized with the Spirit and then given to the world.” The church as the body of Jesus is a gift to the world, that gives the world a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven, of God’s shaping of a body that lives together, loves, forgives and offers grace, and invests in each other so we might become more and more who God calls us to be. 

Heidelberg Catechism Question and Answer 55 asks, “What do you understand by “the communion of saints?” The answer is, “First, that believers one and all, as members of this community, share in Christ and in all his treasures and gifts. Second, that each member should consider it a duty to use these gifts readily and joyfully for the service and enrichment of the other members.” To be a church that goes out into the world with the good news of Jesus, we need to be healthy together as we bring the healing hope-filled message of Jesus that brings new life. The Belgic Confession picks up on this in Article 24, “We believe that this true faith, produced in us by the hearing of God’s Word and by the work of the Holy Spirit, regenerates us and makes us new creatures, causing us to live a new life and freeing us from the slavery of sin.”

This is the heart of the good news of Jesus, it’s not that we’ll never face trouble or hard times, it’s that we’re freed from the slavery of sin; freed from the lie that we need to save ourselves, or that our value comes from what we do and offer; our value comes from being made new through Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for our sin, washing us clean from our sin, and being adopted into the family of God and body of Jesus. Paul writes in Galatians 3, “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.”

What does it mean to be a healthy church able to reach our neighbours with the good news of Jesus? The early church gives us some good insights into what a solid foundation looks like, “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer... praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” Learning together, hospitality and friendship, generosity and compassionate care for each other, worship of God, and generously sharing our faith are always at the heart of a strong church and this leads to a church well-equipped to build the kingdom of heaven through the gift and power of the Holy Spirit. 

 

 

Last Instructions Before Returning Home - Matthew 28:16-20

This past Thursday was Ascension Day when Jesus’ returns to his Father to take his place at his Father’s side. It’s forty days after Jesus’ resurrection from the dead and a lot has happened in those forty days. Jesus continued teaching his disciples, getting them ready to take over the work of making disciples, getting them ready for when he leaves them. Jesus restored Peter after Peter’s betrayal the night of Jesus’ trial and calls Peter to take care of his sheep.

Jesus tells them to meet him on a mountain, echoing back to Israel’s time at Mount Sinai after the exodus from Egypt where God meets them, giving them the law, teaching them how to be his people. Jesus tells his disciples after they worship him, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” He’s telling them that he’s not only Israel’s king, but King of kings, giving notice to the world, to Satan, and to his church. Jesus has been given the authority and power to carry out his plans and vision for the world and all creation.

Jesus leaves his disciples with these last instructions, starting with the command, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations.” This is an ongoing command and the disciples hear it as, “Go and keep on making disciples of all nation.” This is not just for the disciples, but for the church through all time. This is our mission statement, the basic foundation of who we are as the body of Jesus, the foundational reason for our being. This is what we’re supposed to be raised and trained to do; raising our children, new members, and believers to have this as our heart mission.

Our call to make disciples is rooted in loving God and loving our neighbours as ourselves; desiring that they’ll embrace Jesus as their Lord and Saviour and king and listen to his voice. All of the great commandments are intertwined together; loving God and our neighbour and making disciples all flow out of God’s love for them and us. Peter writes in his second letter, “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” Jesus is calling for this to be our great desire too.

We make disciples, as Jesus says, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Disciples are made as we make Jesus captivating to others through our lives; lives that give God the glory, helping them embrace Jesus as their king, committing themselves to Jesus and accepting his mark, his sign and seal by being baptized. We’re called to teach and train them to obey everything Jesus has taught as a sign of their commitment to Jesus, showing their love for Jesus and their willingness to join in being the body of Jesus in the world.

Jesus ends his instructions with telling the disciples, “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Jesus doesn’t give the disciples their marching orders and then leave them alone to figure out how to do what they’ve been told in their own strength, ability, and wisdom. All Jesus’ power and authority is with them, and us, as we follow his orders. We may not feel especially gifted or able to make disciples and share the good news. Jesus’ promise of his presence is also a promise that we’ll always have what we need to make disciples. It comes down to a matter of obedience, not of ability or competence. Jesus promises them the Holy Spirit just before his death, “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you” … “when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you.”

Jesus’ power and authority is with us through the presence of the Holy Spirit as we follow his orders. We may feel nervous about sharing the good news of Jesus’ coming, life, death and resurrection, yet Jesus’ promise of his presence is also a promise that we’ll always have what we need in order to make disciples. It comes down to a question of obedience and trust, not of ability; it’s about desire, not competence. I remember one teen girl from Allendale, Michigan who went to the public high school and wanted to share her faith in Jesus with a few of her friends. She came to my study one day after school to talk to me about how to have the right words to convince her friends to follow Jesus. We looked at the Scriptures and found that it wasn’t so much having the right words, but about having the right desire, about wanting to obey and please Jesus and trusting that he’ll give us what we need. She came to youth a few weeks later with two of her friends. She introduced them to me and kind of laughed and told me that she stumbled over her words, said a couple of dumb things, but her two friends were still interested in whatever it was that made her do something scary because she cared so much about them. We’ll explore this more next week.

We don’t often reflect much about how Jesus returns to heaven. In Acts 1, Luke shows us how Jesus leaves, “After Jesus said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

How Jesus returns to his Father emphasizes his divinity, giving weight to his command and promise to be with them always. The cloud echoes back to God’s meeting Israel at Mount Sinai. In Exodus 19, God calls Moses to enter the cloud in order to meet with him, “Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because the Lord descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, and the whole mountain trembled violently…. The Lord descended to the top of Mount Sinai and called Moses to the top of the mountain. So Moses went up and the Lord said to him, “Go down and warn the people so they do not force their way through to see the Lord and many of them perish. Even the priests, who approach the Lord, must consecrate themselves, or the Lord will break out against them.”

The cloud’s an image of divine presence, of God’s glory and presence. At Sinai, Israel is taught how to live for God, with each other, and the nations. Israel’s called to obedience and worship and is reminded of God’s presence and glory every time they look at the pillar of fire or cloud that guides them for 40 years in the wilderness; reassuring them of God’s power and providence. Paul points to these images in 1 Corinthians, “For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.” Paul also points ahead to Jesus’ return with all power and authority as our king in 1 Thessalonians 4, “After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.”

On Ascension Day, Jesus ascends to the throne of heaven as the divine king of the world, reminding the world that the chaos of sin and destruction is coming to an end. It may not always seem like it when we see what’s going on in Gaza, what’s happening in Ukraine, when we see the poverty, the brokenness in our inner cities, in the levels of domestic violence and brokenness in too many of our homes, it can feel hopeless, but Ascension Day reminds us that our king wins, especially during the darkest of times. We remember that this is why we’re here as his body, to move against the darkness and shine his light into the darkness by being salt and light, being Jesus’ blessing wherever he has placed us, making disciples. It’s not easy, but Jesus is with us as we go into our communities as disciple-makers, bringing him glory as we make new disciples.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Covenant of Works - Genesis 1:26-2:17

We’re beginning a new series based on covenants in the Bible and their importance in shaping our faith. We’ll take time out to reflect on Ascension Day and Pentecost over the next two weeks before returning to this series. Our denomination is a covenantal and confessional church. We have confessions which are summaries of Biblical teaching that help us understand who God is through Scripture, which is why we’re called confessional, but we are also covenantal, meaning we understand that the covenants build on each other and help us understand the God’s plan of redemption.

One Bible dictionary defines a covenant as, “A sacred kinship bond between two parties, ratified by swearing an oath… serving as a means to forge sociopolitical bonds between individuals or groups. God’s covenants are prominent in every period of salvation history. Divine covenants reveal the saving plan of God for establishing communion with Israel and the nations, ultimately fulfilled by the death and resurrection of Christ.” We hear more talk about covenant in the Old Testament than in the New, mostly because, as one writer says, covenants are “a story in search of an ending.” That ending is found in Jesus who turns covenant language into family terms with God as our Father and we’re his children; we’re part of God’s family.

Our passage this morning is the first covenant in the Bible. In all the covenants, God reaches out to us. In this covenant, called the covenant of works, God reaches out to Adam. This covenant is not called covenant of works because our call is to work, but because perfect obedience is its foundation. All the rest of the covenants point us to grace as their foundation.

The story this morning begins with God saying, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” We’re created to be God’s stewards of creation in relationship with him, to carry out the work of realizing and developing the potential God has placed within creation, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” God creates us to be his co-workers, co-creators, and co-caregivers of creation. God trusts us with creation, calling us to be fruitful in building the human race, and faithful in our work, in our character, and in imitating God. We’re created to be workers for God’s glory.  

In the covenant of works, we live into the image of our creator God. He creates beauty and wonder out of chaos; he creates humanity to carry on his work of creation and bring order out of chaos. Work’s a sacred calling, there’s no secular work versus sacred work; everything we do, we do for the Lord, whether its washing dishes, farming, working in business, working at home, caring for others, or anything or everything else; it’s all God’s work. Our world’s a place that needs keeping care of in order to realize its fruitfulness, it cannot develop its potential on its own, it needs us to be who God created us to be, his stewards of creation. As Paul writes to the Ephesians, “In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to put our hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory.” We need to remember that our identity doesn’t come from our work, it comes from following Jesus and the image of God in us.

We’re called to govern and care for creation, to help it realise its potential. This is why God created us in his image; to carry on his work. Yet God does place limits on us, we don’t claim creation for ourselves, we’re always under the rule of God, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” In the covenant, the terms are: God gives us the responsibility to care for creation, he provides us with all that we need to carry out our responsibilities, he places limits on us and calls us to obedience, and he lays out the consequences of not obeying him.

It doesn’t take long in the biblical story to see this covenant break down. Satan comes to Eve, with Adam right there, and tempts them to ignore the covenant, both its promises and relationship with God, and its punishments. Eve and Adam both eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and this leads to the need for God to rescue his people from their disobedience, leading to a series of covenants through Scripture with his people. God comes to his people again and again, making more covenants with them: all pointing ahead to the great victory of Jesus on the cross over Satan and the blessings of God in Jesus’ resurrection, return to heaven, and gift of the Holy Spirit. Adam and Eve were not obedient to the covenant, thankfully, Jesus, who is the Second Adam, perfectly lives out the covenant, obedient, as the Bible says, even to death. That’s obedience! The new covenants don’t replace this first covenant, but instead build on it. We’re still called to be stewards of creation, helping to develop the potential God’s placed in creation and caring for it. We’re still called to obedience; the big difference is that the punishment has been placed on Jesus in our place and we’re freed from fear and strengthened by hope, knowing that death is now a doorway to God’s presence.

This still leaves us with the call to work. Our work’s been impacted by sin and can be really hard at times, but it’s also been shaped by Jesus. Work’s not a burden, but as one writer says, “Our personal concept of vocation should be an adventurous undertaking as part of our life of obedience. A study of the biblical material can show us that life and work are integrated by God's design.” Paul tells the people in Colossians 3:23–24, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.” Jesus gives us an image of what work looks like in the kingdom of heaven in a parable in Matthew 25.

A master is going away and calls his servants together and gives them talents according to their abilities. He calls them to use their abilities and talents to carry on his work while he’s away. Two of the three servants take their talents and abilities and put them to work for their master’s sake. The master’s pleased when he returns and acknowledges their work on his behalf, “Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!” The third servant though, whether out of fear, laziness, or simply not caring, takes his talent and buries it rather than using his skills to the best of his abilities to carry on his master’s work. The master’s frustrated, “You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest. So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Jesus is telling us there’s accountability for our work, or lack of work, for the kingdom of heaven, but there’s also the adventure of discovering our own potential and being fruitful, in small or large ways. In obedience, we’re called to carry on the work Jesus began and handed over to us on Ascension Day to build his kingdom, using our talents for his purposes. Our work is part of our stewardly obedience to God and brings him joy. The covenant of works reminds us that our work flows out of our relationship with God who creates us in his image, calling us his children through Jesus. May you be faithful in all your work, remembering it all contributes to the kingdom of heaven.