Good morning. Thanks for coming to church this morning. I'm glad to see all of you here. If you have a Bible, you'll want to turn with me to the Book of Acts, the Book of Acts, and chapter two. Acts, chapter two. And while you're turning there, let me just say I see a number of faces out there that I don't know. So that means we have visitors with us. Thank you so much for visiting with us today. God is doing great things at independent Presbyterian Church. And I hope you'll hang around enough to get to know what he's doing. It's a good thing. Acts, chapter two, beginning in verse one. Here now, the word of our God. When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly, a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each one of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem, God fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together and bewilderment because each one heard them speaking in his own language. Butterly amazed, they asked, are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? Parthians, Meads, Elamites, Residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Fridgia and Pamphilia, Egypt, and the parts of Libya near Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs. We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues amazed and perplexed. They ask one another, what does this mean? May God add his rich blessing to the reading of his word. Let's pray together. Lord Jesus, when we read these words in Scripture,
we are amazed and perplexed. And we want to know, what does this mean? So very strange, so far into us, so distant. What can this possibly mean for us today? We have confidence in you, Lord Jesus, as our teacher, that if you are willing and if you will send Holy Spirit to us now, if you will fill this room with Holy Spirit, that we can understand that he will open our eyes and our hearts, and that we will not be dismayed or perplexed anymore. And so we come to you, Lord Jesus, asking you, what does this mean? Tell us what this means for our lives, Amen.
We have now for a number of weeks, both in Sunday morning and we're beginning now on Sunday night as well to be looking at the book of Acts. This church, if you didn't know it, is going through a time of transition this summer as you're moving from me, the temporary, interim, not real pastor. I know that's what all those words mean, interim, temporary, not real. To your next senior pastor, Richie Sessions, who did the baptism this morning. As we go through this transition, we're looking at the book of Acts and asking this question, what does it mean to be a successful Christian? What does it mean to be a successful church? Success is an important word for most of us in this room, because we're always told from the crib, you're not going to be a success unless, and so we strive for it and we reach for it. In fact, this week, I googled to see how many book titles in English had the word success in them. You won't believe the number, 34,000. 34,000 books, talking about success. Some of my favorite titles were things like the secret code of success. The law of success, dress for success or my favorite success in 30 seconds or less. Can you believe that? It's on our brains to be thinking about success and it is on the brain of Luke as he wrote the book of Acts. You'll remember that we saw in the last verse of the book of Acts that Luke closes his entire history of the early church, saying that the apostle Paul preached about the kingdom of God and about the Lord Jesus boldly and without hindrance or with great success. The last word he uses in the whole book which he wants to leave us with is success. So it's a legitimate question to ask as we think about ourselves as individual people, as we think of ourselves as families, as a church, is important to ask what is success? We've already seen things like how to measure success and last week we even saw from the first chapter of Acts, the beginning of success. Today I want us to ask this question. How can you have success when it's impossible? When it just doesn't seem like it's possible at all? We enter the second chapter of the book of Acts with some things have already happened. They've already happened because Jesus has risen from the dead. He spent 40 days with his disciples talking to them and telling them about the great kingdom of God, which is the measure and the goal of the success of all people in the world who are followers of Jesus. We believe that success is only attained when we actually see this world, this entire world, transformed by the word of Jesus into the kingdom of God, where there is righteousness and justice and mercy, where there is no pain and no suffering, and where we live forever in the presence of God, in what the Bible calls the new creation. But what do we do when that goal seems impossible? How do we strive for success? How do we know what it is? How do we see it and experience it when that grand goal of the Christian life just seems to be out of this world? Well, as we approach Acts chapter two, we're going to notice some things, and the first thing we're going to notice is that hopes for the future are often dashed to pieces, just absolutely dashed to pieces. And that's what had happened to the disciples of Jesus. We all know that when Jesus died and was in the grave for three days, that the disciples were discouraged, and it felt as if their hopes had been dashed, but even after Jesus resurrected from the dead, and he spent 40 days talking with them about the kingdom of God, Luke says in chapter one, the disciples raised a question with Jesus, and it was this, okay, Jesus, the kingdom of God, and you're going to pour out the Holy Spirit on the earth, does that mean that this is now the time when you're going to restore the kingdom to Israel? This is what they say to Jesus after he teaches them for 40 days in Acts chapter one and verse six, and Jesus just shakes his head and says, you guys still don't get it. These are things that only God knows. This is not really to be your concern. And that statement from Jesus dashed their hopes once again. Now, why would a person say such a thing as that? That the disciples of Jesus had their hopes and their dreams of success in this world, so wrapped up in this one belief, this one hope that God would restore the kingdom to Israel and that it was shattered when Jesus looked at them and said those words, can't know those things. Why would a person say that? It's because the disciples, unlike you and me, they knew their Bibles. In fact, they had the Old Testament, you know, in their day, and they understood what the great hopes of Israel's prophets were. It's very plain over and over again that the prophets of the Old Testament said, when the king finally comes, when Messiah finally comes, and the disciples believe this was Jesus, when he finally comes, this is what he's going to do. The Jews have been scattered all around the world for hundreds of years, but what he's going to do is gather them all back to Jerusalem, back to Judah, and from there, they are going to rise up in the power of God, and they're going to spread the justice and righteousness of God to the ends of the earth. This is what the prophets of the Old Testament said God had promised. Daniel had the vision of a statue representing four great empires that would rule over Israel, and then he saw in his vision a stone coming out of a mountain, a stone not made with human hands, and it was the Messiah, and this stone smashed the idol, crushed the empires of the earth. Ezekiel had the vision of the great temple that would be built once Messiah came to the planet, and from there would flow rivers of life to the ends of the earth. Isaiah said that when Messiah comes, Zion, the city of Jerusalem, will be the tallest mountain in all the earth, and the nations will stream for life and for salvation to Jerusalem. And they'll wonder they said Jesus, is this the time? Is this the way it's going to happen? And he says it's not for you to know, not so fast guys, and their hopes were dashed. I want to ask you to ask yourself a question just about your own personal life. If I were to ask you, list the top ten disappointments you've had in your life. Could you do it? I think you're good. If you've lived more than 15 or 16 years, you've got a top ten of the big disappointments in life. In fact, you probably have a top 20. In fact, if I gave you enough time, you could probably come up with 100 or 200 or 300 of them, things that were so disappointing that they literally crushed you, crushed your spirit, and you wondered if you could ever stand up again. You know the kinds of things I'm talking about? Problems in your marriage? Problems in your career? I thought my life was going to be like this, and it's not. Problems with your children. I thought my children would grow up to be this way, but they're not that way. These are things that are expectations that we have of good things, of wholesome things, that often don't occur. And when those things happen, they smash you, and destroy you, and you wonder, how can I ever hope again? How can I ever have a positive outlook on my life again? And instead, what you do is tend to just sort of say, well, I'll hold on until I die, then I guess it'll be over. The misery will be over. How can you hope again when those kinds of personal and family disappointments occur? How can you hope again when disappointments occur in the body of Christ? How can you hope again when your whole idea of world history and where it's going is collapsing around you? You realize, don't you, that from the fourth century, from the days of Constantine, Christians have attached themselves to empires in the world, thinking that this is the way God is going to turn the world into his kingdom. It happened with the Roman Empire, and it fell. It happened in Western Europe, with all those decades and centuries of colonizing the world, thinking they were doing the world a favor, by spreading the gospel, as well as taking the resources of the rest of the world. It happened in America, from the beginning, our forebearers thought that they were coming to this new continent to build the kingdom of God. Jonathan Edwards said, this is a new continent, a fresh virgin continent, we will build the kingdom of God, even Benjamin Franklin was willing to work with the likes of George Whitfield on establishing a Christian culture in this continent. Can you imagine such a thing? And through the years, this belief that American Christianity is the hope of the world, grew and grew, especially, especially after World War II, when America came to the rescue of Europe and Asia. We all thought, oh, now we really know. We may be at the end of time, but we know who's going to be on top at the end of the times. It's Christian America. We know it's a good hope, just recently, the Pew Foundation and the University of Chicago have done some studies. And for the first time in American history, Protestant Christians, and by that I mean the full breadth of them, from the liberal to the conservative, including all the cults that are out there. Protestant Christians are now a minority in the United States. A minority in the United States of America. The dream has been smashed. The hope, what we all expected to be true for our children and for our grandchildren, has gone the way of all flesh. It's to the point now that in the world, we used to think that most Christians live in North America, aren't we special? We'll send out missionaries to help all those other poor people out there that don't know about Jesus. But now the reality is, the majority, and it's the vast majority of true believers in Jesus, are not in North America. They are in Asia and they are in Africa. Just like these disciples thought, it had to come through Israel and the smashing of that idol. It had to come through Israel, the return of all the Israelites to Jerusalem, and then we would wage war against the world, just as those disciples thought, we thought that we were safe, that we were in the Christian nation. Do you remember in some of you can? Do you remember when it used to be right here in Memphis that in order to be a respected businessman, you needed to belong to a church? Can you remember that? And you even needed to attend every once in a while, at least Christmas and Easter, to show that you were a good Christian man. Well, have you noticed that's not a requirement anymore? To be respected as a business person in this city, it's no longer required that you go to church. It's no longer required that you profess religion. You can be the most radical, unbeliever, and still be highly respected as a business and community leader right here in Memphis, Tennessee. How can you hope again when you have that kind of foundational structure, that basic belief that you were banking on, and counting on, pulled out from under you, just like the disciples did. Can we hope again? Well, how do we react? How do you react when you feel that rug pulled out from under you? And you look around yourself and say, wait a minute, this is not the way it's supposed to be. How do we react? Well, I want you to understand how the apostles reacted, because Luke knows what kind of crisis this is for the disciples. Sometimes we don't get it, but just as much as the collapse of America would be a crisis for us, this was a crisis for them. Now, all right, so you're not going to raise up Israel? What's going to happen then? All of history now is gone haywire. There's no hope anymore. We can't hope again. So what did they do in this situation? Jesus told them that they were to go and be together in Jerusalem, and gather, and to devote themselves to Him as they waited for ten days, waited ten days for the Holy Spirit to come to them. Now, it was the coming of the Holy Spirit that made them think, well, this is it! But Jesus said no, but they still had to go and wait for Him. So what did they do? Take a look with me, please, at chapter 1, verse 14. Listen to the kinds of things that these people did as they waited for something to happen. Chapter 1, verse 14, they all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and married the mother of Jesus and His brothers. A group of about 120 people met together constantly praying every day for those ten days. This was not ten days of licking your wounds. This was not ten days of saying, oh, woe is us. This is ten days of prayer, devotion to God Himself together. When you and I face crises like we face, and our personal lives, and our families, or even in our whole culture, you know what our natural tendency to do is. We know what we do. We tend to become afraid. I'm sure these men were afraid. We tend to become uncertain. I'm sure these men were uncertain. And we tend to give up all hope for anything good, anything wonderful, anything that might actually be greater than what we expected to be. But these men did not give up on that. The men and women who gathered together devoted themselves to constant prayer, and they had an expectation. Not knowing what would happen, but they had an expectation that something was going to happen to the point that they actually took in prayer and before God the practical step of finding a replacement for Judas. The disciple who betrayed Jesus. As they said in chapter 1 and verse 21 and 22, therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who had been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from John's baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us for one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection. They didn't know what was going to happen exactly or how God would do something, but they knew that they needed to be prepared for it. So what did they do during these ten days? They devoted themselves in one accord to prayer, to God, to seeking the help of God. They devoted themselves to preparing for what was about to come. If you and I living the way we normally do, if we had been the disciples, do you know what we would have done when Jesus pulled that rug out from under them? If he pulled that rug out from under us and said, look, everything you thought that was stable, everything you ever believed about the future, you can't count on that anymore because things are going crazy now. You know what we would do? If we had been the disciples, we would have gone back to fishing, which is exactly what many of them did when Jesus died on the cross. He found them fishing, but the time for that is over because the way of success for the church, the way for success in your family, the way for success in your personal life is not to go fishing, give up on the religion, give up on hope, just survive this thing called life. The way to seek these successful goals is by devoting ourselves, giving ourselves over to God Himself and preparing ourselves for what may be coming. When you lose your job that you've been working all of your life and you think to yourself, now what? Rather than scurrying about trying frantically to find a job, why not stop and say this? Perhaps God pulled this rug out from under me because He wants me now to devote myself to Him and to prepare myself for something new that's coming in my life. Maybe even something radical. I know a number of you are facing the possibility and many will do so in the future of the loss of job. What is God preparing you for? Are you getting yourself ready? When you face crises in your families, maybe you're going through a divorce or maybe your children are going through divorce. Whatever it may be, these are times when we don't normally do much other than just recoil and pull back, but the reality is this is the time when that rug is pulled out from under you that you are to go to God to ask God, what are you doing in my life? I'm open to you. I'm ready. I'm preparing myself for the next thing you have given me, just like the disciples. When a church has struggles, it's not time to give up and to retreat. It's time to seek what God is going to do next. Had the disciples gone back? Had they gone back to Galilee? Had they gone back to fishing? Pentecost would never have occurred. But thanks be to God. They didn't. As we look at our world around us today, I fear that many times we who believe in the Bible and we who believe in Christ are a lot like the pioneers who went from the east of this continent toward the west and their wagon trains. You've seen it on the movies if you haven't read about it. How they would have these long wagon trains and then when the Native Americans would attack them, you know what they would do with the wagons. They would circle them, right? Well, why would you do that? Because that provided you with a safe zone. It was a place where the children could still be. It was where people could be safe and everything's fine. This is what we tend to do in our changing world. Find a safe zone. Isolate ourselves. Take care of me. Take care of my immediate nuclear family. Keep my children safe. And everything will be okay. But the problem was, as wagon trains kept going, they would lose a wagon here and there. They'd lose another wagon and another wagon. The numbers would get fewer and fewer. And before you knew it, there were so few wagons you couldn't make a circle anymore. Circling the wagons as the church of Jesus Christ, playing it safe and being in the middle here in some fanciful safe zone, isn't safe at all. They were a way to see destruction. And so Luke tells us that what the disciples did was, they devoted themselves to the prayers and they devoted themselves to preparing for what God was going to do. So what did He do? What about all those hopes? About Israel being raised up? What about all those hopes of Israel being gathered back into Judah, being filled with the Holy Spirit and spreading the kingdom of God around the world? What about all those dreams we had, Jesus? We got them from the Bible. We got them from good hopes. They were well-intended hopes that we had. What happened to them? As the disciples waited, the wind began to blow. And just as the wind can reach destruction on what was once there, this wind also brought something absolutely astounding. Look at chapter 2, verse 1 again. When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. Do you remember that when Jesus spoke to Nicodemus? He said to Nicodemus, you must be born again by the water and by the spirit. And Nicodemus, you should understand this. You should already understand. And Nicodemus is saying, I don't understand. And Jesus said, it's like this Nicodemus. The Holy Spirit is like the wind. Now, you feel the wind would have hit you, but you never know where it's coming from and you never know where it's going to. Surprising things happen when the wind blows. Can't predict it, can't know exactly what it's going to do to you. And Jesus said, that's the way it is with the Holy Spirit. And this is one of those examples. The Holy Spirit of God, that Jesus gave to his people when he left this planet and went into heaven. The Holy Spirit of God, who was the power that would enable them to take his kingdom to the ends of the earth, blows into this house, like the wind. And who knows what's going to happen next? Because the most bizarre thing you could possibly imagine, the most unexpected thing, even to these people, that they could possibly have imagined occurred. They began to speak languages they did not know. Supernaturally, they were able to speak in languages that they had not learned, that they had not been taught. And they were talking about the wonders of God as they spoke these various languages. But when the wind of the Holy Spirit blew so violently, people there, near the temple, came and gathered around. And they were from everywhere. They were Jews and some Gentile converts. And they had come from all over the Mediterranean world, even as far as East Arabia. And they had come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish feast of the Passover. What a coincidence that Jews had been gathered from the four corners of the earth and had been brought to Jerusalem on this day. And suddenly, without any sort of expectation, a surprising thing occurs. The disciples speak their language and they proclaim the good news of Jesus to these Jews from all over the world in their own languages. And at the end of the story, three thousand of them believe in Jesus. And these three thousand don't remain in Jerusalem. They go back home. So when the disciples actually got out there and these various parts of the earth, they discovered there were already believers out there. Do you see what God did? God raised up the nation of Israel through these three thousand who believed in Jesus. And he spread the good news and spread his kingdom to the four corners of the earth by this powerful, unexpected, inexplicable miracle of the Holy Spirit. Now, usually when Christians talk about this passage, the thing that's on their minds is, should I speak in tongues? Exactly what that's like. Can you tell me how to do it? That's not the point that Luke is making. There are times in this book when people do speak in tongues. There are times when they don't when the Holy Spirit comes upon them and fills them. That's not the issue. The issue here is, God is doing something extraordinary that no one expected. He has taken these hopes that had been dashed to the ground and he has honored the devotion of his disciples and the Holy Spirit has now come and brought success to the church of Jesus Christ. The gospel has gone now to the ends of the earth, even in the days of the apostles. Unimaginable. Unimaginable. When God dashes your hopes, if you're a follower of Jesus and you devote yourself to Him, he will send Holy Spirit to you in fresh and wonderful ways to give you new vision, to give you new hope, to give you new dreams, and to give you the power to fulfill them. And the same happens in families and the same happens in churches. The Holy Spirit wind is blowing in this church. How's that true, Richard? I can tell you one obvious way. You are going to have a pastor who is less than 40 years old. That's as crazy as speaking in tongues in Acts chapter 2. God is doing something that no one in this room imagined would have happened prior to a year ago, and it's happened. God is doing extraordinary things in this church. In the past, this church used to be in sort of a denial that we have a problem in our church with alcoholism. Now there is a group that's actually beginning to meet, beginning to organize for addiction. There's such a thing as that, addiction recovery. Oh, in our church, we don't need a divorce recovery group. We don't have the vourses in our church. And now, there is movement of the Holy Spirit to minister to those who go through divorce, right here in the independent Presbyterian church. And I can't help but see the analogy that though Israel did not rise up and conquer the world as the disciples had expected from the Old Testament, what God did was he brought the world to the disciples. And here we are, living in a day that is certainly post-protestant in America, perhaps even post-Christian in America, but what has God done for independent Presbyterian church? Can you imagine 50 years ago anyone in this church even thinking it possible that just a mile or two away from here, you would have thousands and thousands of people who do not speak English? God is bringing the world to you. Can you imagine 50 years ago that if anyone had said it, you would have laughed them off the stage. That within two miles of independent Presbyterian church Memphis, that there would be an Islamic mosque, there is. You don't have to go to Arabia to find a Muslim. They're in your neighborhood. Their place of worship is in your neighborhood. God is bringing the world to you, just like he brought the world to the apostles that day. But the question of course is this, what will we do? What will we do with all of these new opportunities that are ours? Will we retreat inside the circled wagons, or will we seek the filling of the powerful Holy Spirit, who will send us out to effectively reach our neighborhood, our city, our world? All those visions that used to seem so secure, all those dreams of success that used to seem so sure, they are being crushed by God. But that's okay, because he has something even greater than we could possibly imagine in mind for this church. And we must be the kinds of people who are seeking the power of the Spirit to walk through the doors of opportunity. Yes, success is important to us, even success in 30 seconds or less. But we have got to be the kinds of people who can let go of the old dream and embrace the new one in the power of the Spirit. Let's pray together. Our Lord Jesus, how we adore you, how we honor you, that though you crushed your disciples' hopes, you gave them something much more astounding, much more invigorating, and that you do the same for us today. We bless you that though our hopes and dreams may be failing, yours do not.