Promises, Promises, Promises Acts 1:3-4

 Sermon by Pastor Dennis Gleason  -- January 14, 2007

What is a promise?

 Well, first of all, a promise is something said or written binding a person to do or not do something. Synonyms for promise include: vow, pledge, and covenant.

 A promise is also an indication of what may be expected. So, we can say: A promise gives us a ground for expectation.

 2 Peter 1:3-4 tells us that ^”As we know Jesus better, his divine power gives us everything we need for living a godly life. He has called us to receive his own glory and goodness! ⁴And by that same mighty power, he has given us all of his rich and wonderful promises.”

 As we think about the promises of God, we begin our study of the Book of Acts.

The author of the Book of Acts…which is really entitled “The Acts of the Apostles” is Luke. Luke’s first writing was what we call the Gospel of Luke. His purpose in writing the Gospel was to put things in consecutive order for a man named Theophilus so that he might know the exact truth about the things he had been taught (Luke 1:3-4).

 Luke is writing for Theophilus again and we have it as “The Acts of the Apostles”. He begins with the end of the first treatise regarding what Jesus did up to the day he ascended to Heaven after he had given orders by the Holy Spirit to his disciples. He recounts the command of Jesus to the disciples to wait in Jerusalem for “what the Father had promised.”

 What is the promise? What are they waiting for? They were waiting for God.

What does it mean to wait for God?

 G. Campbell Morgan once said:

“Waiting for God means, first, activity under command; second, readiness for any new command that may come; third, the ability to do nothing until the command is given.”

That is what Jesus had commanded these people to do….Wait. Wait for what God has promised. Do nothing until the promise is fulfilled.

To understand what the promise is, we have to look at what Luke had written in Luke 24:49:

“And now I will send the Holy Spirit, just as my Father promised. But stay here in the city until the Holy Spirit comes and fills you with power from heaven.”

 Jesus said he would send what the Father had promised. The fulfillment of the promise God the Father made was to send the Holy Spirit who would fill them with power from heaven.

 So, the promise is the Holy Spirit and power.

 Let’s see what Jesus had to say about this in John 14:26: ²⁶But when the Father sends the Counselor as my representative—and by the Counselor I mean the Holy Spirit—he will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I myself have told you.

 In John 20:22 He adds this: ²²Then he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

 This receiving in the Greek text indicates a commitment to a decisive and effective choice. It is a command: “Make this happen!” Do this! Begin to do this right now.

We saw what Jesus intended in Luke 24:49:

“And now I will send the Holy Spirit, just as my Father promised. But stay here in the city until the Holy Spirit comes and fills you with power from heaven.”

The word stay…stay in Jerusalem…means the same thing as receive in the passage above. ”Make it happen! Do this! Begin to do this right now!” It is the same commitment to a decisive and effective choice.

The New American Standard Version of Luke 24:49 adds an interesting thought when it renders the verse like this: “And behold, I am sending forth the promise of My Father upon you; but you are to stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”

Now the interesting thought added here is the promise (which we know is the gift of the Holy Spirit) being sent “upon us” to empower us.

The result is to be power. The word for power is dunamis. That is the word from the Greek that gives us our word for dynamite. Dynamite is an explosive. And it is explosive power that is in view here. Power in this sense is the inherent ability or capacity of someone or something to carry something out. It is power by virtue of one’s own ability and resources.

With that in mind, it is power available to us because the Holy Spirit has come upon us to power us by virtue of the Holy Spirit’s own ability and resources. It is the power of God himself and its purpose is to accomplish what God wants done in our lives and the world in which we live.

We should observe that the presence of the Holy Spirit within and the Holy Spirit coming upon us to empower us are two very different and distinct things. The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 8:9 “ But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him.” The conclusion we make is that we receive the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit when we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. He comes to live within us.

What of the disciples? They trusted and believed in Jesus. In John 20:22 we saw that he (Jesus) breathed on them (his disciples) and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Have you ever wondered what the inclusion of that phrase “he breathed on them” meant? When God breathed into Adam, the man he had created, he breathed into him the breath of life…by that is meant man’s soul or spirit. Jesus is talking about the Holy Spirit and he breathed on his men. This could very well be the moment at which the Holy Spirit entered into the lives of these men who believed in Jesus.

Is the Holy Spirit in the world prior to the day of Pentecost? We usually think not, but I would draw your attention to John 1:33 when the Holy Spirit came down from heaven at Jesus’ baptism. The Holy Spirit came upon him to empower him for the work he had to do to bring redemption to all who would believe in Him. Here we have the God-Man, Jesus who needed the power of the Holy Spirit in his life to do what God had for him to do.

So these disciples needed two things from the Holy Spirit. They needed the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, but they also needed the Holy Spirit to come down upon them to give them the power to do the work God had for them to do.

Neither Jesus nor the disciples could do the work without the power of the Holy Spirit.

The disciples were to wait for it.

God promised it. It would happen. They simply had to patiently wait for the promise to be fulfilled. What they were waiting for is the promised Holy Spirit to come upon them with power so that they could be witnesses for Jesus. They could not effectively witness with their own natural abilities. No, they needed the power of God to accomplish it.

God made the promise.

The disciples faithfully waited for God to fulfill the promise.

God fulfilled his promise. The Holy Spirit came upon them with power. And that power is immediately evident to them and the people around them.

If Jesus and the disciples needed the power of the Holy Spirit, can we need it any less?

We accept this as general principle that includes us because we are believers and we follow in the long train of those who have believed in Christ because of the testimony of those early disciples about Jesus.

But we can get more specific about this if we look at Acts 2:2b-3 ”…and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and your children, and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God shall call to himself.”

The gift of the Holy Spirit is tied very clearly to what happened on the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came down upon these disciples with the resulting power to effect the lives of others for Jesus.

The gift of the Holy Spirit in this sense of the Day of Pentecost is for us too. That is clearly stated in the fact that the promise is stated to be for those to whom the Book of Acts is written…Theophilus and all those who will also read it who are his contemporaries. It is also for their children who would follow them in the faith. But it does not stop there. It is for all who are far off…in distance and time. It is for as many as Jesus Christ shall call to believe in Him and serve him. That includes us today.

The gift of the Holy Spirit…upon us…to empower us is to be the same for us today as it was for them at Pentecost and the days that followed.

We have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. That is a given fact for everyone who believes in Jesus. But the question of power is something else all together. The question that follows once we have the Spirit of Christ within us is this: How much of us does the Holy Spirit have? Will we allow him to come upon us with power? If we remember that God is the same yesterday, today and forever, we will acknowledge that He does not change. What was important for Jesus and his disciples is also important for us and that means that we also need the power of the Holy Spirit. And we will have that power in direct proportion to how much of us the Holy Spirit has control of in our lives.

Let me close with this thought from Ezekiel. God said:

"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws"(EZEKIEL 36:26, 27).

 If people would have been asked in 1968 which nation would dominate the world in watch making during the 1990s and into the twenty-first century the answer would have been uniform: Switzerland. Why? Because Switzerland had dominated the world of watch making for the previous sixty years.

The Swiss made the best watches in the world and were committed to constant refinement of their expertise. It was the Swiss who came forward with the minute hand and the second hand. They led the world in discovering better ways to manufacture the gears, hearings, and mainsprings of watches. They even led the way in waterproofing techniques and self-winding models. By 1968, the Swiss made 65 percent of all watches sold in the world and laid claim to as much as 90 percent of the profits.

By 1980, however, they had laid off thousands of watch-makers and controlled less than 10 percent of the world market. Their profit domination dropped to less than 20 percent. Between 1979 and 1981, fifty thousand of the sixty-two thou-sand Swiss watchmakers lost their jobs. Why? The Swiss had refused to consider a new development—the—the Quartz movement—ironically, invented by a Swiss. Because it had no main-spring or knob, it was rejected. It was too much of a paradigm shift for them to embrace. Seiko, on the other hand, accepted it and, along with a few other companies, became the leader in the watch industry.

The lesson of the Swiss watchmakers is profound. A past that was so secure, so profitable, so dominant was destroyed by an unwillingness to consider the future. It was more than not being able to make predictions—it was an inability to re-think how they did business. Past success had blinded them to the importance of seeing the implications of the changing world and to admit that past accomplishment was no guarantee of future success. James Emery White, Rethinking The Church, Baker Books, 1998, p. 20.

Benjamin Franklin once said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”

 In much of the Church, we keep on trying to do things in our own strength and power and we keep on getting the same results. Nothing much happens. We need to rethink our future.

 If we will make the commitment to allow the Holy Spirit to come upon us to empower us for ministry, we can have a different result…people will be touched with the gospel and lives will be changed and salvation will come to many. Spiritual things can only happen when our ministries are done in the power of the Holy Spirit.

May every day be Pentecost for us!