Reasonable Enthusiasts

Acts 2:1-4

June 5, 2022 (Pentecost) • Mount Pleasant UMC

The church I grew up in had what I would call a fairly traditional rural Methodist order of worship. At least that’s what I would call it now; back then I just knew it as “the way we did church.” And one of the things we did every single Sunday was to sing the “Gloria Patri.” Some of you probably know the song I’m talking about. I didn’t know who Gloria Patri was, but every week I faithfully sang…

Glory be to the Father,

And to the Son,

And to the Holy Ghost…

Now, I knew who the Father was and I knew who the Son was, but then we got to that Holy Ghost. Honestly, I had no idea what the song was talking about, and in my childhood brain, I conjured up an image that looked something like Casper the Friendly Ghost. God’s sidekick, the Holy Ghost, would obviously be friendly, right? I pictured God’s sidekick would always be smiling just like Casper. So that was it, then. Casper the Holy Ghost. That’s sort of what I pictured when we sang that song. But, I was wrong.

This morning, we’re wrapping up a four-week series on revival and what sorts of things, historically, are usually in place when revival comes. The last three weeks, we've talked about how revival is usually evidenced by changed lives, contagious Christianity and intentional discipleship (passing the faith on to the next generation). But all of those things are powered by something else—or rather, someone else. On this Pentecost Sunday, we’re going to look at the fourth ingredient in our revival recipe, the ingredient that, you might say, gives flavor to all the rest and holds everything together: the power of the Holy Spirit. As important as all the others are, this is the essential ingredient for a true revival.

In a 2021 study published by Arizona Christian University and conducted by the Barna Group (a Christian research firm), 62% of professing Christians said they do not believe that the Holy Spirit exists. The Spirit, they said, is “merely a symbol of God’s power, presence or purity” (Christian Post online, September 10, 2021). That’s a staggering number to me, but it shows how poorly a job we have done in the church of teaching about and helping people to experience the Holy Spirit. It was not just a symbol of God’s presence that those first disciples experienced in the Upper Room on that first Pentecost. It was a radical, transforming experience. Ten days before, just before they saw Jesus ascend into heaven, they had heard him promise that once he was gone, the Holy Spirit would arrive. But it would not be instantly. “Wait for the gift my Father promised,” he told them. “In a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:4-5).

So they waited. And while they waited, they prayed. There wasn’t anything they could do to make the Holy Spirit show up. “The next move [was] up to God” (Willimon, Acts [Interpretation], pg. 27). Bishop Will Willimon says it this way: “In a sense this is what prayer is—the bold, even arrogant effort on the part of the community to hold God to his promises…Prayer is this boldness born out of confidence in the faithfulness of God to the promises he makes, confidence that God will be true to himself” (27). And so these powerless, fear-filled disciples gather in the Upper Room, the last place they were with Jesus before his death, and they wait and pray because they know only God can give them what they need (cf. Willimon 27). By the way, next Sunday we’re going to start a short series on desperate prayer, because we believe the same thing they did: only God can give us what we most need.

So they wait. They wait for ten days. I wonder if at any point in those ten days someone suggested they have a strategy meeting, hire a marketing expert, or just DO something? That’s what we would do. Ten days can seem like an interminable length of time! But Luke, who wrote the book of Acts, gives us no indication they did any of that. They prayed, and they waited just as Jesus had told them to do.

In response to their prayers—their faithful prayers—God did what he promised. He sent the Holy Spirit and the disciples experienced in as a “violent wind” and “tongues of fire” (2:2-3). They also experienced the Spirit as they gained new abilities—specifically, the ability to speak in languages they had not learned so that everyone who was in Jerusalem, from all sorts of different places on earth, could understand the Gospel. There are debates as to whether they actually spoke unlearned languages or whether they people just heard them speaking in their own languages, like some sort of miraculous translator, but either way, it is in fact a miracle. The people say, “We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” (2:11). However it happened, it was evidence of the power of the Spirit. These ordinary men and women experienced what Jesus had promised them and to me, the evidence that it’s more than just a symbol is the fact that these people were transformed. From this moment on, you never find them holed up in a room. From this moment on they are out in the community making disciples of Jesus and transforming the world. And the reason for that transformation is that the whole community was transformed by the power of the living, active Holy Spirit.

In the same church where we sang about the “Holy Ghost,” we didn’t actually talk a whole lot about the Holy Spirit. I don’t remember a single sermon or Sunday School lesson about the Spirit, nor did we really talk all that much about Pentecost. This was the 1970’s, so if there was any discussion of the Spirit, it was usually in connection with the Pentecostal movement that was gaining momentum in those days—and it wasn’t often positive. As I grew up, and especially when I went to college, I would hear the Spirit referred to as “it,” as if the Spirit was some sort of tool or instrument that God used, for some reason. But I’ve learned the Holy Spirit is a person; he is the third person of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One God in three persons (something we also sang as part of that “Gloria Patri”). And, no, I don’t quite understand how it all works or how that can even be possible, but as I’ve said before, if I could understand God, he wouldn’t really be God, would he? The way I’ve kind of thought of it (and this is a vast oversimplification) is that the Father is the creator, the Son came to save us, and the Spirit enables us to live the life we’re called to life. He is the strength, the power for living today.

On the last night Jesus was with his disciples on earth, he spoke to them quite a bit about the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised would come if he went away (John 16:7). Jesus said the Spirit would help the disciples remember what Jesus had taught them (John 14:26) and he would testify about Jesus (John 15:26). The Spirit would guide them into all truth (John 16:13) and his main purpose is to glorify Jesus (John 16:14). Later in the New Testament, Paul talks about the Spirit who gives gifts for all different kinds of ministry (1 Corinthians 12; Romans 12) and who helps fruit (Galatians 5:22-23) grow in our lives (love, joy, peace, patience and the rest), evidence of his work in our lives. In short, I guess we could say that the Spirit’s job is to help us become more like Jesus.

A focus on the Holy Spirit has ebbed and flowed down throughout history. In the days of the early Methodist movement, the official clergy of the day largely downplayed emotional experiences; it was the age of reason, after all, and everything could be thought through or proved by science. Sound familiar? John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, certainly didn’t downplay reason, thought or science. He collected great literature and even wrote a medical manual, sort of an early first-aid guide. He believed health was important and he valued the contributions of modern science. However, the movement was also marked by a move of the Holy Spirit that some called “enthusiasm.” Now, that’s an interesting word—enthusiasm. We think of it as excitement, like when your team is winning the game, you get enthusiastic. Or when your candidate has won the race, or when you’re genuinely excited about an upcoming project. In today’s world, enthusiasm and excitement are basically the same thing. But the word originally (and in Wesley’s day) meant “full of God.” It’s a combination of two words—“en” meaning “in” and “theos” meaning “God.” En-theos. In God; full of God. And in an age when reason and logic was the most valued thing, to call someone enthusiastic was meant to be an insult. It’s sort of like calling someone today a “religious nut.”

But when people looked at Wesley and the Methodists, they saw a dual emphasis on both reason and experience, and so people began to call them “reasonable enthusiasts.” I’m not sure if that was supposed to be half an insult or what, but Wesley took the title as a badge of honor. He believed we need an “enthusiastic” faith, a faith that filled with and marked by the Holy Spirit (cf. Bevins, Marks of a Movement, pgs. 81-83). In fact, one of Wesley’s biggest fears was that we would lose the emphasis on the Holy Spirit. In 1786, as he looked back at the revival God had brought about, he wrote these words: “I am not afraid that the people called Methodist should ever cease to exist either in Europe or America. But I am afraid lest they should only exist as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power. And this undoubtedly will be the case unless they hold fast both the doctrine, spirit, and discipline with which they first set out” (Wesley, Works, Vol. XIII, pg. 258).

I believe we are still called to be “reasonable enthusiasts” today. If we’re going to experience all that God has for us, we need not just logic, reason and all the rest. We need the power that fuels our faith, the power those first disciples experienced from the Holy Spirit in the Upper Room on that Pentecost long ago. But here’s the critical question: are we open to the work of the Holy Spirit in our church and in our lives (cf. Bevins 89)? Usually, especially in public or at church, we will say, “Well, yes, of course we are,” but I find in my own life I’m really only open to the work of the Spirit until he begins to challenge the way I am living or the way I want to live. Or when he begins to chisel off a rough edge from my character. He calls me to grow more in the fruit of the spirit: love or peace or self-control or something else. Or, worst of all, he works in someone’s life in a way that I’m uncomfortable with. “Well, God surely wouldn’t do that, would he?” But he just did. When the Holy Spirit challenges or stretches my already-settled theology, I’m not as open as I think I am to his work. So how open are we to allowing the Spirit to do what he wants to do?

There are a couple of ways the Spirit works that I want to talk about, recognizing that the Holy Spirit is God and can work in any way he wants to. I’m certain he’s glad to hear me say that, to give him that kind of permission! But seriously, there are a couple of general ways Jesus clearly says the Spirit will work in us, the first being giving guidance. Jesus said, “When he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). The Spirit gives us direction for our lives. We are not left alone to figure things out. We have a good guide who is always with us. So I often pray in the morning, “God, guide me today, lead me where you want me to go.” There was a song a few years ago that makes a pretty good prayer: “Lead me to the ones I need, and to the one who's needing me” (“Greet the Day,” Amy Grant).

God doesn’t often or even usually guide through an audible, spoken voice, at least in my experience. Instead, the Spirit who lives within us will give us an impression or a word or a whisper within. I may have told this story before, but I several years ago I had a morning planned where I was going to work in the office and then go to the hospital to visit a lady that afternoon. When I sat down in my office, I couldn’t focus on the work I had planned to do. I kept having this strong impression to go see Barb in the hospital. And I kept telling myself that I was going to do that in the afternoon. But the impression became so strong that I finally gave up and got in the car. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else anyway! When I got to the hospital and entered Barb’s room, the nurse told me Barb had just received some bad news and my timing was perfect. Except it wasn’t my timing; it was the work of the Spirit that I only reluctantly responded to. My friend Paul Carey often prays at our pastor’s prayer meetings, “Lord, we have many things planned today but you have the edit pen.” That’s a good prayer, a prayer for guidance.

Let me also say that not everything people believe “God told them” is actually from God. We are just as good at tuning out the Spirit’s voice and listening to our own. Here’s a good clue that someone is listening to their own desires rather than the Spirit’s guidance: if they claim to have a better revelation than what God has already given us in the Bible, they are not being guided by the Holy Spirit. It may be a spirit, but it’s not holy. The Spirit’s job is to point to Jesus, so if someone’s so-called guidance points away from Jesus, or toward themselves, then it’s not the Spirit working. 1 John says, “Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (4:1). Many years ago in another town, I had an acquaintance whose wife was given a life-threatening diagnosis. We were praying for the situation when he declared that God had told him to leave his wife to be with another woman. He did just that and moved out of town. Now, I was not in on that conversation, but I can confidently say that was not the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Not everything we hear is from the Spirit, but that should’t make us afraid to ask and listen for God’s direction. He speaks to those who are willing to listen (cf. Bevins 93-94).

A second way the Holy Spirit works in the community of faith is exactly what happens there in Acts 2. He empowers the church for witness. When Jesus told the disciples to wait for the arrival of the Spirit, he didn’t say the Spirit was just coming so they could feel good about themselves or have some spiritual experience. No, he said this: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses…” (Acts 1:8). The word for “witness” in the New Testament is martus, from which we get the word martyr, someone who gives their life for their faith. A “witness” is someone who stakes everything on their faith and isn’t afraid to share with others about it. Jesus promised the disciples when they were brought before authorities, the Spirit would help them know what to say (Luke 12:11-12), and later on in the book of Acts, after Peter and John have been released from prison, the disciples pray and ask for boldness. “Enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness,” they pray (Acts 4:29). And Luke records that their prayer was answered just two verses later: “The place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly” (Acts 4:31; Bivens 94-95). What Jesus promised came true: the Spirit gave power for witnessing to their faith.

According to research from LifeWay, 61% of people who attend church today never share anything about their faith, and yet the amazing thing is 47% of unchurched people say they would be open to a conversation about faith. 31% more would listen without responding, so a total of 78% of unchurched people would be willing to hear about our faith, and yet most of us never say a word about what we believe. By the way, that same 78% say they are even more willing to hear about a person’s faith if they see them living it out in public. A lot of times we say we need more knowledge, or we need to memorize something to share, or we need more confidence. But, as Jesus once said, the fields are ripe (cf. John 4:35). People are willing to hear about our faith. All we need is to ask the Holy Spirit to give us boldness to witness, which he has promised to do if we ask.

Of all days on the church calendar, Pentecost should send us out with boldness to share about our faith. When the Holy Spirit arrived among those first disciples, Peter went out and responded to the crowd’s accusation that they were drunk. He explained what was happening, and then he called the people to faith in Jesus (cf. Acts 2:14-41). Bold Peter, who not that long ago was hiding from the authorities. What if we followed in his footsteps? What if we allowed the Spirit to guide us to persons who need the hope that this faith brings and we asked the Spirit for the boldness to simply tell our story? What if we, like those Methodists of long ago, became reasonable enthusiasts? Because God calls us not just to stay in this “upper room,” but to go and make a difference As Eugene Peterson once said, “Pentecost means that God is not a spectator, in turn amused and alarmed at world history; rather, he is a participant” (qtd. in McKnight, Acts [Everyday Bible Study], pg. 23). God’s Spirit calls us to be a radically reshaped community, making a difference each and every day. Will you be a reasonable enthusiast?

Changed lives. Contagious Christianity. Intentional discipleship. And the power of the Holy Spirit. Lord, send revival! We need it. Revive us, O Lord.

Remember I said a few moments ago that one of the Spirit’s jobs is to point to Jesus, to remind us of what Jesus said? One way the Spirit does that is to call us to the communion table, the Lord’s supper, which reminds us not only of what Jesus said but of what he did. The Spirit takes ordinary bread and juice and uses them to help us experience the presence of Jesus. This is a Spirit-driven meal, and on this Pentecost Sunday, I invite you to join me at the table of the Lord. Let’s pray.