The Holy Spirit’s Work

Published by Stanley Pouw in 2015 · 1 November 2015

“5 for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” 6 So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

“9 And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10 And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, 11 and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

Now we learned that the Lord’s work of redemption on the cross is completed. He has given the offering that sanctifies forever those who believe. He has provided sufficient atonement to satisfy the wrath of God. He has born in His body our sins in His death, and we have died and risen in Him. However, the work of gathering the redeemed goes on through the apostles, and then through the church as the apostles establish the church. This is indeed the history of the gospel in the world.

The responsibility for the proclamation of the gospel and the establishment of churches passes to these 12. They are actually 11 until a little later when a 12th is chosen to take the place of Judas, a man named Matthias. They are the first wave of evangelists and preachers that go out to gather the redeemed and to establish the church. Here we are two millennia later, and we are still engaged in the same work of gathering the redeemed into churches and taking the gospel to the ends of the earth.

So this history goes on until the last person in the plan of God is redeemed, and then the church is raptured out of the world, and that glorious era comes to its fulfillment. So we are seeing the Lord then pass the baton in those verses that we just read to His disciples. You can see there that Jesus is speaking, according to verse 2, to the apostles whom He had chosen.

Now from a human standpoint, to give them such a massive responsibility seems like a really bad idea. To think that these 11 plus one are going to be able to take the gospel to Jerusalem alone would be a stretch, and then to think they would fill Judea with the gospel and then expand into Samaria, and then would go to the ends of the earth is to many people totally impossible. It is such an unthinkable thing.

As many as seven of them have been fishermen. And not only are they the most unlikely people to do this task, they don’t seem well suited to it for a number of reasons. They have demonstrated weak faith, and it would take some very strong faith to get a grip on that kind of enterprise, and Jesus repeatedly says, “Oh, you have little faith.” Not only that, they have a track record of very sketchy obedience.

In fact, when the Lord has given them specific things to do, they have failed to do them. In the heat of that night that Jesus went into the garden to pray, He just asked them to stay awake and pray, but they fell asleep. And you can add to that that they are cowardly. When Jesus was arrested in the garden, they all forsook Him and fled. After His resurrection, He asked them to go to Galilee and wait for Him. They went to Galilee but they didn’t wait for Him. They went back to their old enterprise, fishing.

Somehow, if these men are going to change the course of human history, something has to happen to them. So the apostles then become the focus of our Lord in this opening section before He leaves. They are the ones He chose for the job, John 15-16, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you.” “The apostles whom he had chosen,” at the end of verse 2. These provisions from Jesus are laid out in these first eleven verses.

The whole letter is written to Theophilus, which could be translated ‘friend of God’. It is a Greek name, probably some noble gentile. There is some history that says he was a convert in Antioch of Paul and Barnabas. So Theophilus doesn’t need to be identified to the readers of Acts, because they would all know who he was. And in Luke 1:1 he is called, “most excellent Theophilus,” which is reserved for a very important person.

Luke is eager to find open doors with gentiles, and that is what begins to happen, with the ministry of Paul in Acts 13 all the way to the end of the book. The gentile world has no experience in the gospel, essentially not about the Old Testament. And the church in its early years is persecuted by the Jews and by the gentiles as well. So Luke is doing whatever he can do to make the gospel acceptable in a gentile world.

Remember, the gentiles thought this gospel was foolish. Some of them saw it as a threat, and some of them persecuted the believers. In many towns, Paul was persecuted, and ultimately he was executed. Well we are going to see that unfold. Occasionally Luke records an incident where the Romans are kind of to Paul. Luke is saying to the readers, “Hey, they were not afraid of him, they even were kind to him.”

Let us now see the tools that God gives them in this section. First of all, we told you they had to have the proper message. Acts 1:1, “Jesus began to do and teach.” We know that Jesus began and will continue this work through His apostles and through His church and His people until He comes again. We have to teach the truth. That is why the New Testament emphasizes sound doctrine. If anybody preaches any other Christ, don’t listen to him. Let him be an anathema, Paul says.

We are stewards of the gospel in our generation to make sure it gets spread correctly and passed to the next generation without defect. Jesus spent 40 days speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God. They were to make sure they had the right message. It’s all about the right words. Whenever God discloses Himself, He discloses Himself in words, and the words of divine revelation are written down.

The Bible claims for itself that every word of God is pure, every word, like silver refined seven times in a furnace. There is always an attack on the doctrine of inerrancy of Scripture, even right now this is happening in the evangelical world. But that is not surprising because Satan wants always to attack the word of God going back to Genesis, right? It doesn’t mean that the writers themselves understood the words necessarily. 1 Peter 1:10-12 says that the prophets of old looked at what they wrote to try to understand it.

Secondly, let us look at the proper confidence. And what is that confidence? It is that confidence that comes when they see Him alive. Acts 1:3, “He presented himself alive after his suffering by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over those 40 days and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God.” He probably talked about what it meant to have God as your savior, God as your king personally, not universally, but personally in the heart.

They also needed the right power. Let’s look at Acts 1:4, “Gathering them together, he commanded them not to leave Jerusalem.” “He ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father.” What was their response? Look at God’s promise in Ezekiel 36: 25-27, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your filthiness, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. 26 And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.”

The Father promised the coming of the Holy Spirit in Joel 2:28-29, “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. 29 Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit.”

So they knew that connected with the arrival of Messiah and the establishment of the kingdom would come the Holy Spirit. Jesus reiterated that promise. In John 1:32, John the Baptist said, “I have seen the spirit descending as a dove out of heaven, and he remained on Him.” When the ministry of Jesus began, the Holy Spirit comes on Him. In the city of Nazareth, Jesus says in Luke 4:18, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.”

So Jesus is the prototype of the filling of the Holy Spirit, the empowering of the Holy Spirit for ministry. Jesus Christ is the God man, but He is fully man and He is empowered by the Holy Spirit, and we know that His whole ministry was basically operating in the power of the Holy Spirit.

So Jesus promised to his disciples that the Holy Spirit would come upon them as well. In John 7:37-39 Jesus says, ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me as the scripture said from His innermost being will flow rivers of living water,’ but this He spoke of the Spirit whom those who believed in Him were to receive, for the Spirit was not yet given because Jesus was not yet glorified.”

Then Jesus goes on in Acts 1:5, “for John baptized you with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” Baptized is a word that means immersed. You’re going to be submerged with the Holy Spirit not many days from now, and He was talking about the day of Pentecost. This is not a request to the apostles to get baptized in the Holy Spirit. This is not telling them to seek it, to plead for it. This is a statement of fact for every believer.

Acts 1:8a, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.” The job is too great, too demanding to be done in human strength. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10:4, “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power.” Every believer following Pentecost receives the Holy Spirit, which takes up residence and is literally the dominating power of our lives. Paul prays in Ephesians 3:16, “that according to the riches of his glory He may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being.”

Fourthly, our Lord identifies what we will call the proper mystery. Verse 6, “When they had come together, they were asking Him saying, ‘Lord, is it at this time you are restoring the kingdom to Israel? He said to them in verse 7, ‘It’s not for you to know times, which the Father has fixed by his own authority.’” There is a necessary mystery. The part that excited them the most was that this was going to happen soon. They wanted to know.

They were expecting the kingdom promised to Abraham and David, with all the promises that were reiterated through the prophets. They were expecting that Israel would be restored, that the new covenant of Jeremiah 31 and Ezekiel 36 would be fulfilled, and that the throne of David would be elevated again. They would be the dominant nation in the world. In other words, they believed in a kingdom just for Israel.

Jesus said, “None of your business when that’s going to happen.” That’s very different than saying, “That’s not going to happen.” Because in Matthew 25 and in Luke 13, He told them the kingdom was going to come. He told them He was going to come. He described features of His coming, features of His kingdom. But what He does tell them here is, “You can’t know the time when it will happen.”

It is going to come at a time you least expect. It’s going to come like a thief in the night. He is going to come suddenly. Here we are a couple thousand years later, and we don’t have any more information on it than they did, but I have news for you. That’s a good thing not to know so that every generation lives as if He might come at any moment. The doctrine of imminence.

We should invest in every single day everything that you can for the sake of the kingdom of God. God revealed enough to excite our anticipation and kept enough secrets so we don’t know when it is, so every generation lived in the anticipation that He could come at any time. Now all that leads us to a conclusion tonight. Let us call it the proper mission. Verse 8b, “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

The word witnesses is martyres, plural. We get from that the English word martyr. The connection is that the word witness came to be the word martyr because so many witnesses to the gospel died. That word came to mean one who dies for his testimony because so many did. Jesus said in Luke 9:23, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up your cross.” You have to be willing to lose your own life.

The more distinctly Christian we are, the more we will be labeled as extremists, homophobic, intolerant and guilty of hate crimes. Cultural Christianity, with consensus coming from a Biblical understanding, is gone. The people who carry the elections want nothing to do with that. The gospel advances by personal testimony to Christ one soul at a time. The only question is are you a faithful one or an unfaithful one?

Well, there is a final word here, the proper motive. Proper motive is tied to the proper mystery. Acts 1: 9-11, “And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10 And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, 11 and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” The verb there is very strong. Why are you transfixed, gazing into the sky, as if you are losing Him?

Verse 11b, “This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven will come in just the same way as you’ve watched Him go into heaven.” He went in clouds and He will come back in the clouds. Is that a motive? Yes for sure, that should be the great motive. He is coming suddenly, unexpectedly, and that kind of splits into two realities, personal meeting and eternal reward. The personal meeting with Jesus where He says, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” And the eternal reward crown that He gives to all faithful servants.

We are living in the greatest revival of Biblical truth in the history of the world simply because of all the available electronic capabilities. We are also nearer to the second coming than we have ever been as the gospel is extending to the ends of the earth. Many verses in a New Testament encourage us to be faithful until He comes. My hope is that you will see that in a fresh light. We give you glory, oh God, make us more faithful, in our Savior’s name, Jesus Christ, Amen.