Peace, I leave with you, my peace I give to you, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen, please be seated. In preparation for this morning, I came across a few quotes about inner peace. To enjoy good health, to bring true happiness to one's family, to bring peace to all. One must first discipline and control one's mind. If a man can control his mind, he can find the way to enlightenment and all wisdom and virtue will naturally come to him as the Buddha. Peace is the beauty of life, it is sunshine, it is the smile of a child, the love of a mother, the joy of a father, the togetherness of a family, it is the advancements of man, the victory of a just cause and the triumph of truth. It's Monachum Bagan. Listen to the inner light, it will guide you, listen to inner peace, it will feed you, listen to inner love, it will transform you, it will demonize you, it will immortalize you. Sri Chinnoi. Complete peace equally reigns between two mental ways, Swami Sivananda. Focus on what you like about yourself and that will bring you happiness and peace, the great Richard Simmons. And finally, my favorite, I get those fleeting, beautiful moments of peace and inner stillness. And then the other 23 hours and 45 minutes of the day I'm a human being trying to make it through in this world. That's Ellen's generous. Now, I'm not a huge fan of Ellen, but I think she's onto something here. I mean, most of us would probably admit that life is hard and in the end we're just trying to make it through.
Yet, like nails on a chalkboard, most of us remember that experience, not everybody in this room, but like nails on a chalkboard, we live with this constant dissonance, this inner awareness that something about life just isn't right. We cry out for so many things, we cry out for love and for acceptance and the needs of be heard, we cry for reason, for justice, for hope. We cry for a little bit of understanding, of the brokenness that exists in this world and in our own hearts. We try to drown out that dissonance with everything, but God, work, play, and a whole world of dark experiences. The world tries to help. It offers everything from self-help books, to medication, to counseling, and even the question, does this bring me joy? Thank you. We're told to trust ourselves, keep learning, lower our expectations, drive positive actions, and look for silver linings, and yet psychologists say that we are lonelier than ever, angrier than ever, and more desperate than ever. We need a way out all of this, represents a unified cry that comes from the depths of our soul, that the Bible represents as a heart crying out to God. Let me think of it, Saul's zeal for God before Pentecost, the people of Japa and their broken hearts at the death of Tabitha, Peter on the rooftop trying to hold on to the law, Cornelius longing for truth, and the disciples begging Jesus to restore Israel. It represents hearts crying out for answers, for order, for restoration, for an end to the dissonance, ringing in their ears that somehow this life isn't everything it is meant to be. Do you sometimes feel this way? If I do, what stands out in all of our scriptures this morning is humanity's crying out to God, and no matter what our hearts cry is, God's answer is somewhat surprising. Because rather than simply answering all of our cries, He gives us infinitely more. On this Pentecost day, He gives us Himself. So we're going to look at each one of our readings this morning. So please take out your scripture and insert. There's a lot of them there. We're going to look at them all. Let's set for Genesis, because we're supposed to skip over them. So join me. Our gospel reading opens up with Philip saying to Jesus, show us the Father. Now, one of my favorite seminary professors, Steve Brown, he used to say this. I've said a lot of things in my life, but I don't know that I would have said that. One of the world where they think, show us the Father, thinking, and you know that He drew the short straw, right? You know that everyone in the room was thinking the same thing, but here's poor Philip, a little man on the turd and pole, and he's the one that has to speak up and ask the question. Here's the thing, they knew the scriptures, they knew about Moses, they knew Mount Sinai, they knew about the cloud over the tabernacle, and so many other stories, no one saw God and survived. What were they thinking? Despite all the time that they spent with Jesus, they still cried out for an answer to the infinite. Jesus often talked to them about the Father, they wanted to see Him. Jesus is so gracious. He says to them twice, He says, if you've seen me, you've seen the Father. His answer to this question is to give them so much more than what they were longing for. What He gave them was this, He gave them the infinite Father wrapped up in a man who could relate to them like none other. He reminds them of all the things He said, all the things He did in the presence, He reminds them of a three-year-long relationship that they all shared. They cried out for the infinite, and the answer was in front of them the whole time. The answer to every human being's cry to know and see gone is a relationship with Jesus Christ. And then to sweeten the deal, He promises even more. He's going to return to the Father, He's going to share His love with Him, and then He would send the Holy Spirit to be with them as their advocate, but most importantly, it's the Holy Spirit's presence that would be this constant reminder of their deepest question. And show us the Father. This answer to us this morning with the coming of the Holy Spirit is the Father is here, and He is within you even now. Look at Romans. In Romans, we find that there's so much more to this relationship with the Holy Spirit. The quotes that I opened up with, the quotes that I opened up with, the world's answer is often to pursue a more enlightened understanding of the world or just simply to deny the dissonance altogether. And the problem is sometimes, maybe a lot of times, we do the same thing in the church. We find happier songs that we sing them louder, where we immerse ourselves in the jocks and the tittles of theology, and at that point, the Holy Spirit nearly enlightens our minds or just makes us feel better. And yet Paul calls us children through the Holy Spirit. We are made children of God and children don't seek assurance through enlightenment. They want their daddy. I'm reminded of a story about JFK Jr. It's probably not true. I don't know. I can't find it anywhere. I just keep hearing this story. One day, while his father, the president, President John Epinany, was in an important cabinet meeting, two-year-old John John needed to see his daddy. So it goes right in the room. No fear. He walks right up to his dad, and the president stops everything, picks up his child, and took care of him. That's our relationship with the father. We are made whole and then kept at arms length through the Holy Spirit. We're adopted into the family of God, and normally I wouldn't point out arguments with the translation of the text. But where you see the sentence, you have received the spirit of adoption in this text. There shouldn't be a period there. There we go. Where it says, you have received a spirit of adoption. It should continue with the phrase, by whom we cry, Abba. See if the adoption into the family that enables us to cry, Abba, Father, the spirit enables us to leave behind our slavery to the fear of the unknown. Our fearful cries become joyful shouts to the father, and we have nothing to fear because adoption cannot be undone. We are in this relationship with the security of knowing we will always be children of God and joint heirs with Christ. The answer to our hearts cries about the world's brokenness about our own brokenness is to go to God and cry, and finally, and act. And you're all probably wondering what the world is all about to do with Pentecost. Looking at this text in Acts 2, it's really, really easy to miss the forest for the trees. It's big. The Holy Spirit comes, and there's fire, and there's people speaking in tongues. We don't know it around here. And it was so crazy. That was a joke. Come on, y'all. It was so crazy that some of the people there thought they were drunk at 9 o'clock in the morning. Here's a thing. Pentecost is not primarily about tongues of fire. It's not primarily about miracles and manifestations. All that's important. But Pentecost is ultimately about one statement in the entire passage. This statement answers the question of our hearts cries. The whole Pentecost story boils down to one line, and that's it. You know what the line is, don't you? Anyone? Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. That's the point of the whole Pentecost story. It's the answer that comes when our hearts cries drive us finally to Jesus. Our only hope for peace is Christ. And that can only come when we finally call on him to be saved.
Our souls innately cry out for peace because they are broken and sinful. They cry for peace because we are separated from the one who created our souls. But more importantly, we are separated from the one for which we were created. We were created to live in fellowship with God and Adam's fall and our exclusion from the garden messed all of that up. And mankind, get this, mankind has been trying to fill that void ever since. And the only hope for this cognitive dissonance to end is to be reunited with Christ. And when we bring our own hearts, our own hearts cries to Christ. He offers us so much more than answers. He offers us peace and not as the world gives. That peace is a mockery of our pain. Christ's peace is the kind that stands in the face of fear. Why he says, do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid. It's only from this place of peace that we can cry with the psalmist, O Lord, how manifold are your works. Martin Luther wrote that him, a mighty fortress is our God. And he writes these words. Did we in our own strength confide our striving would be losing? We're not the right man on our side, the man of God's own choosing. You ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is He. Or Sabbath is named from age to age the same and He must win the path. If we have not yet, we must finally come to the point where our striving is merely losing. Because it's here, it's here that we turn to that mighty fortress who is our God and cry to Him. Amen.