Can you imagine going into a car yard and buying a brand new
car, not a real flash car just the basic model without all those fancy optional
extras, leather seats, mag wheels, pumping stereo system, with mp3 docking and
Bluetooth so you can play music from your phone, although as the father of
teenagers I am told that last one isn’t really an optional extra it’s an essential…
you’d told them you don’t want those optional extras. You jump in, inhale that nice new car smell,
settle yourself in, they may not be leather but its more comfortable than the
beaten up seat in your old car, you put the key in the ignition and turn it
and… well nothing… nothing happens… you try it again and nothing happens just
the click sound….What’s going on here?
You pop the bonnet go
round to the front, open it up… … but there is no motor in the front. It’s you
didn’t think you’d bought a VW Beetle but just to make sure you open up the
boot as well no no motor there either. You go back to the dealer who is standing
there smiling at you and ‘ask what’s going on?’ and he says “Oh with this model
the motor is an optional extra”? crazy right… totally and utterly ridiculous, A
bit like trying to be followers of Jesus without the Holy Spirit.
We are working our way through the book of Acts as a way of
better understanding the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the early
church and hopefully in our lives today. The passage we had read out to us
today in Acts 19 has I believe a lot to teach us and tell us about the spirit,
about mission and about witnessing to Jesus Christ.
The passage we had read out to us today is the story of
Paul’s ministry in the city of Ephesus.
It’s a challenging passage, for the first time we see the Christian
faith go head to head with the worldview of pagan religious practise… What you
might call magic or occult practises. It’s a story that shows the way in which
the new believers moved from a synchronistic understanding of the Christian
faith, standing with a foot in both camps if you were, to abandoning their
pagan religious practises and embracing the Christian faith fully. It’s a passage that because of the setting
focuses on what we might call the move of the Spirit in power, through signs
and wonders, in the face of the overt spirituality of the people of Ephesus God
moves in power to reveal the truth about Jesus. That the Christian faith is
different you can’t just use it like another magic formula.
But the passage starts with Paul’s encounter with a group
identified as disciples who did not know about the Holy Spirit, who had not
received the spirit. This isolated incident has been used as I Howard Marshall
says to emphasise that the receiving of the Holy Spirit is a secondary
experience separate from salvation. It’s contributed to the idea that there are
two classes of believers the haves and the have not’s… those who are supposedly
filled with the spirit and the others. I’m
going to focus on this first section and then round up with some comments on
the rest of the passage.
Paul’s coming to Ephesus follows on from the story of
Apollo’s a good preacher and bible teacher who seems to have gone about telling
people about Jesus but only had half the story. His focus was on the baptism of
John the Baptist simply for repentance with no understanding of new life in
Christ. We are told that Pricilla and Aquilla spent time sharing the rest of
the gospel with him. The implication is that the group at Ephesus had come to a
sort of version of faith through Apollos’ teaching. Paul has to correct their
understanding as well. For Paul the fact
that the believers hadn’t received the spirit was a sign that they hadn’t fully
understood and responded to the reality of who Jesus was, his death and
resurrection. They were not Christians more disciples of John the Baptist. When they believe because of Paul’s message
he baptises them in Jesus name, they are the only people who it is mentioned
are re baptised in the new testament, he lays hands on them and they receive
the Holy Spirit, as a sign of that they prophecy, which is to speak forth God’s
word and speak in tongues. The problem
we have is what are we to make of this rather interesting and anything but
common occurrence? What does it have to do with us to day?
Some as I mentioned before say that it means that people can
believe in Jesus and still need to be baptised in the Holy Spirit as a second
experience, and it needs to be accompanied by signs like speaking in tongues. People often point to things like John Wesley
taking of his heart being strangely warmed or the azura street revival which is
the birth of the modern Pentecostal movement as examples of this happening. This
often has more to do with coming into a fuller awareness of the spirits
presence and power in our lives because when we come to put our trust in Jesus
Christ as Lord and Saviour that God sends his spirit to dwell in us, to be with
us. The Holy Spirit is the means by which we experience the rejuvenation that
comes in Christ.
I think a lot of people are like these disciples in Ephesus
because we can say “o we didn’t even know about the Holy Spirit’ we think it’s
like an optional extra for the super spirituals rather than the abiding
presence of God in our lives. To use the analogy I started off with its kind of
like we don’t realise that it is the Spirit that energises and enables our
faith to go somewhere like the engine does on a car. Did you receive the holy
Spirit when you believed?... yes… are you allowing your life to be filled by
the Spirit? That perhaps is the more pertinent question.
The resting image in our service today contains a verse that
is from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians where he invites his listeners to be
filled with the spirit, in English this seems to be referring to a one off
event, but it is in a Greek tense that we have trouble translating into English
, it has the sense of be filed and keep on being filled with the spirit, of an
ongoing relationship. Paul had contradicted it with Don’t get drunk on wine and
there is a sense that being drunk is being under the influence of more and more
alcohol, to be filled with the spirit is to allow ourselves on an ongoing basis
to be filled up with the very presence of God.
The challenge is that
often don’t cultivate that in our lives. We forget to ask God to send his
spirit more and more into our lives, our call to worship this morning came from
Luke’s gospel where Jesus invites us to ask and to seek and to find and that
God who knows how to give good gifts to his children will give the Holy Spirit
to those who ask, we ask to know more of God’s presence in our lives. Again in his letter to the Ephesians Paul
invites his follower as they live by the Spirit, as they have experienced the
new life in Christ by the Spirit, then they are to walk in step with the
Spirit. Allowing God to speak into our lives as we open ourselves up the
scriptures and prayer regularly as we respond to what we have heard and allow
our lives to change, in the way we treat each other and care for others. You
only have to watch TV police reality shows to see what people who are under the
influence of alcohol walk like and act like, right. To walk with the spirit is
to be made more and more like Christ; its fruit is love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness goodness faithfulness gentleness and self-control.
Ok let’s look at the rest of reading this morning. As I said
before Paul is ministering in a very different spiritual environment than many
of us are used to. We might relate to Paul arguing on a cognitive level with
the Jews in the synagogue and for two years preaching and wrestling with the
gentiles, it’s interesting to note that Paul strategically chose Ephesus because
it was the central city for the whole province of Asia minor and the church
spread throughout the region. We see that in that environment God chose to
reveal himself through a series of what even Luke calls extraordinary miracles.
When people are held captive by overt occult practises then God’s presence and
the gospel can have some very powerful and profound effects. At church last night we had a fundraiser for the 'One on One Medical Mission' to East Timor, and we were addressed by Annie Chen, a GP from Christchurch who has been doing mission work in Cambodia and East Timor, Annie shared about the amazing miracles God was going, but not so much miraculous healings, more miracles of the way people suddenly were turning up to be involved in caring for the poorest of the poor, and the way God lead her to the neediest. She shared about sensing that God was saying that their was a girl waiting in Cambodia to be sponsored to train to be a medical doctor, she went to Cambodia and the Spirit lead her to one girl whom she asked and who aid she was wanted to train to be a doctor but couldn't get a sponsor. We are not told that Paul actually sanctioned
the practise of taking handkerchiefs and sweat bands of his to other people and
them being healed, I’m not sure that it is suggesting such things are normative
in the church today. In fact I wonder if its wasn’t part of the people of
Ephesus seeing this new faith as being like the old occult ways, simply a magic
formula to make everything alright. In the ruins of Ephesus they have found
amulets that contain the scripts in the name of the God of Abraham and Jacob
and in the name of Jesus. A bit like the
seven sons of Sceva thought they could use Jesus name without knowing him. In
this passage we are supposed to see that the demonic is real, and that it
recognises Jesus name and power but that you don’t just use it like a vampire
hunter might use the cross, if you know what I mean. There is a reality about
who God is what Christ has done for us and the presence of God with his people
through the Holy Spirit that is different.
While people may look at speaking in tongues and prophecy as
signs of the Spirits presence, which they can be, because God does show up like
that sometimes but as I look at this passage the thing that shows me the Spirit
of God was at work is the way the believers grow in their faith. AS a result of
what they see of the power of God, they give up their occult practises and
occult books and scrolls which probably refers to charms they would have worn round their necks
as protection or as ways of getting prosperity and burn them and choose to live a more Christian
life style. Up to then it seems like is often the case that they were very much
living in two worlds in the kingdom of God but still very much hedging their
bets, in fact we know by the debate in 1 Corinthians about eating food
sacrificed to idols that they were stuck between their culture and their new
faith. But here we see them making a
very costly choice, and the amount of money mentioned here for these occult
items is vaste. They chose to live in a new way and it has a profound impact on
the city they are in, which is both positive and negative, if you read on you
see it causes riots and Paul is imprisoned.
A couple of quick summary points. If you are caught up or
dabbling in occult stuff, horoscopes, spiritualists, Tarot cards etc your Christian faith will struggle to
grow and you need to renounce it and get rid of that stuff. I was up on a hill out
at Piha one night and I felt the spirit say repent of involvement with
horoscopes as I’d never read one seriously in my life I felt that was strange,
but I asked God to forgive me, a long time after that I was again on a hill out
Piha way and I felt the spirit remind of that prayer and took my mind back to
when I was a young fella I used to wear an Aquarius sign round my neck all the
time and I used to hang it up in pride of place in my room when I wasn’t
wearing it. Obviously God wanted to deal with that and any negative effects it
was having on my faith.
In other ways we might find ourselves compromising our
faith, and western materialism is one that we don’t often see, we are caught up
in viewing life and our goals and our success and joys in what we have and our
standard of living and I can see that stopping us from fully experiencing life
in Christ.
Lastly we need to look at the question Did we receive the
Holy Spirit when we believed? The answer is yes but often I think we kind of
forget it whereas we need to be asking God for more of his presence in our
lives all the time and opening our lives up receive more of that presence, in
prayer and the scriptures in fellowship in service. I’m always happy to pray
for people to be filled with the spirit because I am aware we all need to know
God more and more in our lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment