The Holy Spirit in the Church

TROWEL & SWORD

The Holy Spirit in the Church

Rev. A. Esselbrugge

Some weeks ago now, the Church remembered and took note of the day when the Holy Spirit came down upon the church with His blessing. I invite you to look back with me as we seek to look into the future. Look back to see what the church was, and look forward to what it will be. By the way, when I refer to the church, I mean you and I as individuals in communion with each other and the Lord, this is the church. It is not some ill defined group “out there”. It is us! So what we are asking here is this, what will the Christian Reformed Church of Australia be as we combine together to be the church of some of the Reformed people of Australia? What will we be as we move forward into the future of the Lord’s time?

But before we go further with this, just consider something else first.
In the first chapter of the Gospel of John we are told something terribly sad. It says there that Jesus, the Son of God ”was in the world and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognise Him” (Jn 1:9-11). Can you imagine anything more terrible or sad? Yet, that same depressing fact continues today.

The entire creation testifies to Him and that He is the Lord. However, our televisions, the popular books that fill book stores and the shelves of well read people throughout the world, while looking at creation and admiring it, examining it in detail, and marvelling at its complexity and the wondrous design of it all, do not see that there can only be one explanation for it all. Why does the world not see that there is a God, and He made it and He made us, and we must therefore serve Him and love Him? “He was in the world, and though the world was made through Him, the world did not recognise Him.”

But there is another terribly sad and tragic thing like that in this world, and it is often seen in the church. The Holy Spirit was in the church and the church was made by Him, and the church did not know Him. Do you not think that is a tragedy of equal proportion?

There are churches, or perhaps we might more accurately describe them as communities, which call themselves Christian and they are often marvellous examples of moral and caring people, but who deny the Lord Jesus to be the Christ of God, and who deny any influence or presence or the power of the Holy Spirit. There are other communities which call themselves churches, where they speak of no-one else but the Holy Spirit. Their entire religion revolves around the Holy Spirit, and they go to all kinds of excesses in the name of the Holy Spirit. They attribute terrible and ridiculous and downright silly things to the Holy Spirit, and just like those other people we just mentioned, they do not know the Holy Spirit either.

It can happen that out of fear of what we see in others, we may be in a church that has been built by the Spirit of God, in which the Spirit of God is present, but that we still do not want to know Him or recognise Him.

Let us be quite clear. That the Christian faith exists today can never be attributed to the power or the goodness of the people, or the ministers, or the sessions. That we are here today, and that we can rejoice in the goodness of our heavenly Father to us is because the Lord has been with us, despite all the criticism we might have of the church. He is with us now by His Spirit, the third person of the Trinity.
So what kind of church shall we go on to be?

Witnessing Wimps

The early chapters of Acts (1-4) are about a mighty shaking and a rumbling of the power of God as the Spirit of God came upon His people.

When the Spirit of God came upon the church for the first time, He came with power. It was a dramatic and awesome occasion, and a little scary. We know the Spirit never came again like that upon the church. However, we also know He is still here now, and Acts 1:8 reminds us that the Holy Spirit makes witnesses out of weaklings, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses.” Now I mean no-one any offense, but I think you will probably agree with me, that is us. Its certainly me. I am a weakling when it comes to sharing my faith with other people.

Take the disciples in the book of Acts. Jesus had been crucified. Jesus the man from Nazareth. The man they had grown to love and follow with a deep conviction. Jesus, the One they were just beginning to come to grasp as the Christ, the anointed One of God. And then their lives and hopes and all their aspirations had been shattered when Jesus was arrested. Those men had been required to go through an immense change in their outlook and in their faith. First the Lord had been arrested and crucified in shame as a criminal. Then a mere three days later when the grief at His passing was just starting to become a reality, they met Him again, alive and risen from the dead. For forty days He had appeared at different times and places to them. For forty days they had Him again and yet not had Him. He was there, but not with them all the time, and then there had been the ascension. Jesus had the disciples gather on a mount outside of Jerusalem, and there He had ascended and returned to His Father in heaven. At each turning point the disciples had asked, “will it be now? Will He now restore the Kingdom of God?” At each point they had a new lesson to learn. Even at the ascension they were wondering what would happen, and whether they should be doing something.

But the lesson our Lord had for them there was that they were to go home and wait. You see, witnessing about the Lord can only really be done in the power of God, and His power in the Spirit had not yet come. So the disciples were to go home and wait.

Today the Spirit has come. The word then was, wait, and then witness. Now it is go, do not hang about, but in the power we already have, go now!

But here is a warning. So many today think that what we need is an infusion of power, some spiritual drug injection to put us on a high which will give us powers and words and abilities we never had before. Is that what we actually see in the New Testament though?

Think about what kind of people the disciples were. Peter’s greatest call to fame was that he denied His Lord three times. At a crucial and critical moment, Peter turned his back on the Lord. Philip could not even suggest a way to feed the five thousand when the Lord of heaven and earth stood there before him. Thomas was not going to believe anything supernatural like dead people being raised to life again, unless he could see the evidence with his own eyes and he could touch it. He would have been there when Lazarus was called out of the grave, but then, he had seen that! Unless he could prove for himself that the One who claimed to be Jesus was alive after having been put to death, and unless he could confirm the scars as he had seen the wounds inflicted on Jesus as being on this possible imposter, he was not going to believe it.

These are the people on whom the Spirit of God came down, and though I say it respectfully, they were a tiny group of weaklings, who were still used to turn the world upside down. Did they gain powers they did not have before?

On that first day of Pentecost they could speak in foreign languages they had never learned. But it seems that miracle ceased after the first day. And in the first few years after Pentecost, some of them like Peter and Paul too, could heal a person from time to time, but even those miraculous blessings soon became less and less until the New Testament falls silent about them by the time we get to the letters of the New Testament.

What the Holy Spirit really did was enhance and bring out gifts and abilities they already had, and gave them courage in the face of opposition that was sometimes severe, to go on preaching and teaching and just plainly speaking and living the gospel of salvation in the Lord Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit makes witnesses of weaklings.

Factionless Fellowship

Something else the Holy Spirit does, is create fellowship instead of factions.

Can you imagine what the possibilities would have been for division and fighting among the early disciples? First there was a jealousy among them as one or two seemed to have a special attention from the Lord. Then there was a competition about who would be allowed to sit at the Lord’s right hand in glory, and what about Peter’s denials? There is enough there for a few people to call his Christianity into question and to avoid him. Or Thomas’ unbelief, he is another one who should have been excommunicated. All of them also ran away from the Lord on the night of His betrayal.

Yet, in Acts we are told they come together, and the Spirit of God came down upon them and took up residence in their hearts, and they were bound together in a wonderful fellowship of love.

Think about our denomination. Over the years, perhaps more so at the beginning when there was a coming together of several streams of Reformed Churches and some hard headed Dutch characters, and we should have exploded into division. Even now, there is a similar thing happening. Among our South African brethren, there is a coming together of several streams of Reformed back grounds. Add to that the variations in culture and colour, character and taste, and humanly speaking the potential to fall into camps and divisions and party spirits is immense.

What do we see has been at work, and is at work now? Is it not the very power of God in His Spirit that over rules these divisions among us? God does not do this just to make us feel nice, but it is so that outreach and witnessing is not hindered - so that the telling of the story of the love of God and the Lord Jesus, His cross, His death, His resurrection, and His desire to grant saving faith to all who turn to Him in faith may be told in glory and honour to the Lord. What that tells us is - in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit produces growth without gimmicks.

There are ways to increase numbers with a whole range of tricks and gimmicks. Many churches feel the need to resort to those things. Loud and repetitive music with a strong beat, lighting, the creation of the expectation for the sensational, the use of so called dynamic speakers, strategic use of emotion stirring stories and silences. These are all things that can be used to increase numbers.

The reality of Scripture however tells us that the use of gimmicks shows a lack of power.

When we go out and come together in the power and the presence of the Spirit of God, we may simply rely on His power, His grace and His work. All He asks of us is that we use the God given gifts and abilities we have, and He will do the power work (1Pet 1:13-25).

My prayer is that we be a people of genuine weaklings, who know that we have been built and brought together by the Holy Spirit, and that we know Him, knowing that He resides in all of the people of God for the glory of God.

I pray that the presence and blessing of the Spirit of God will not grow weak but will strengthen and bind us together more closely than we are now, and that we will go on, able to avoid the temptations of the gimmicks for growth, depending instead upon the Spirit of God for our future.

May the Lord God our Father, the blessed Lord Jesus Christ and the abiding power of the Holy Spirit continue to rest upon us, so that by faith alone, by Scripture alone, by Christ alone, and by grace alone we may go on to the glory of God alone.

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