Atos 1

Dwight Pentecost · Citado em PreceptAustin

Atos 1

Atos 1:8

Pentecost - A pastor I know and love is discouraged. Although he is diligent in prayer and works hard, his church remains small while a new congregation nearby is rapidly developing into a megachurch. Yet when I think of the alcoholics, drug addicts, and sexually immoral people he has led to the Savior and a new way of life, I see him as one who witnesses in the power of the Holy Spirit. Because of what happened on the Day of Pentecost (described in Acts 2), we tend to associate the Holy Spirit’s presence and power with amazing phenomena and large numbers. We forget that a little later the same people filled with the same Holy Spirit were rejected, flogged, imprisoned, even executed. But through it all they were powerful witnesses! The Holy Spirit’s presence and power can be evidenced in a dynamic preacher who attracts great audiences. But it is seen as well in the volunteer who carries on a one-on-one prison ministry, in the person who witnesses to a co-worker or a neighbor, and in the Sunday school teacher who faithfully teaches week after week. The power of Pentecost is not reserved for the highly gifted. It is available to all believers in Christ who want to serve Him. God's guidance and help that we need day to day Are given to all who believe; The Spirit has come and He is the source Of power that we can receive. —Branon The power of God's Spirit gives power to our witness. Derek Tidball writes that D L Moody was a very ordinary man but adds that... one of his very attractive qualities is precisely his ordinariness, his humanity and his limitations. And yet, he became a remarkable evangelist who in his 1875 mission to London alone would preach to two and a half million people. Even his critics agreed that he ‘reduced the population of hell by a million souls’. God surprisingly transformed this humble, ordinary shoe salesman into a preacher who could proclaim the gospel persuasively to peers and paupers, to duchesses and dockers alike. Why was this? How? What made the difference? The answer is the Holy Spirit. No doubt, there were other factors involved. He had, for example, learned through the example of Harry Moorhouse, a Lancashire lad, to preach the love of God rather than to harass people into heaven through the harsh threat of hell. But others knew how to do that without the same effect. D. L. Moody, however, was the one called in God’s sovereign purposes to be the chosen instrument of revival in his day and to be anointed by the Holy Spirit with remarkable power....he exhorts the believers of his own day, and ours, to seek not just the Holy Spirit ‘in’ them but also ‘on’ them. In his sermon, ‘Power—“In” and “Upon” ’ he sets out the need to the church. The greatest lack of the church, (Moody) claims, is a want of power. How could believers see their relatives and neighbours going to eternal ruin and not be concerned to speak to them about Christ? Something, surely, must be wrong with a church like that. Yet, from what he writes it is apparent that not all would agree with him that the problem lay in a lack of power. Many saw the source of the trouble as lying elsewhere. A great many people are thinking we need new measures, that we need new churches, that we need new organs, and that we need new choirs, and all these new things. That is not what the church of God needs today. It is the old power that the Apostles had, which we want; and if we have that in our churches, there will be new life. Then we shall have new ministers, not the same old ministers, renewed with power; filled with the Spirit. Not many people today would attribute the decline of the church in the United Kingdom to the need for new organs and choirs....Today it is, ‘Let’s get rid of the organs, choirs and buildings which smack of yesteryear and let’s restore popular culture, language and dress codes to the church through the use of guitars, worship bands, modern technology, contemporary songs and through pastors and priests that look like ordinary human beings.’ But we still believe that the adjustment of the outward packaging of the gospel, the adoption of new methods, holds the secret to successful evangelism. The truth is, we have tried it all and it has proved to be no more successful than old-fashioned ways. The answer does not appear to lie in methods, but as Moody correctly diagnosed, in a want of power. To bypass that answer is to condemn the church to yet more failure....They have not lacked innovation. But they have lacked the old power. Moody pointed out that churches needed spiritual irrigation if they were to produce fruitful crops.... Our churches, he said, needed to be irrigated with the Holy Spirit. But, even more particularly, we needed to be ‘artesian wells’. Other pumps demanded pumping, pumping, pumping, as he obviously well remembered. That was hard work, but unproductive. And many ministers appeared to be doing just that in their pulpits. But, oh for a continual flow of God’s grace that did not depend on resorting to such methods. ‘You cannot get water out of a dry well,’ he proclaimed, ‘there must be something in the well, or you cannot get anything out.’ And that was exactly the problem with so much energetic but unanointed activity in the church. All the new measures in Christendom will prove futile, if the well is dry. So the greatest need now, as then, is the need of power. But how is power to be obtained? Moody’s answer is to wait on God until it comes. That demands we resist the temptation to activity. David Bebbington has taught us that ‘activism’ is one of the cardinal characteristics of the Evangelical movement. Our activism arises from the best of motives. We desire to see others converted and therefore use every means and all our energy and ingenuity to that end. It results in busy lives and busy churches. Mark Noll has made a similar comment in reference to America. ‘The tendency of American evangelicals, when confronted with a problem, is to act.’ His concern is that as a result of this tendency Evangelicals frequently fail to think, deeply, wisely or strategically. So, he wryly adds, ‘For the sake of Christian thinking, that tendency must be suppressed.’ Moody was equally concerned about resisting the temptation of activism, but for a different reason. Activism frequently led to fruitlessness because it was not impregnated with the Spirit’s power.... ‘Some people think that they are losing time if they wait on God for His power; and so they go and work, without unction; they are working without any anointing; they are working without any power.’ (Quote from D L Moody) To waiting, Moody added thirsting as a precondition for the Spirit’s anointing. He asked whether people really wanted the power. ‘The great question before us now is, Do we want it?’ In Moody’s view it was the absence of any serious hunger and thirst for power that prevented the church from experiencing it. They were not committed to seeking it, even if they glibly acknowledged that it would be a good thing to have. He was convinced that if the church genuinely sought power from God they would receive it. We all need it together; and let us rest not day nor night until we possess it. If that is the uppermost thought in our hearts, God will give it to us; He will grant us the blessing, if we just hunger and thirst for it, and say, ‘God helping me, I will not rest until endued with power from on high’. Why should people not want such power? The question remains a pertinent one for the contemporary church. It is one to which there are several answers. First, we often prefer to do things our way rather than God’s. We neither want to give up control, nor status. We are more comfortable in thinking that we should be able to organize a response to the gospel by more conventional, worldly means—like advertising, good publicity, contemporary music, academic argument, entertaining speakers and by getting celebrities to give their testimonies—than in God’s way which, consistent with the cross of Christ, is through weakness. That way we feel much more on a level with the world and we shake off the very thing that the early church took glory in, namely, that they were among the poor, weak, insignificant and powerless in the world. We will demonstrate our power, our cleverness and our importance. But the one thing this will not do is to demonstrate the ‘knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus’ since such an approach is not compatible with his gospel. It will not display the glory of God for we cannot display his glory and our own at the same time. Second, we often want the power but are not prepared to meet the conditions of receiving it. God will not give his power to those who tolerate sin in their lives. Arrogant impatience for power for its own sake and selfish ambition will not yield the desired result. Third, many do not thirst for God with the passion Moody commended lest God should quench their thirst, meet them powerfully in their request and change them. Of one thing Moody was sure. God wanted to bless his people. He wanted to shine on his world, to lift up his work, to give his people power. If we seek his blessing with all our hearts, we will obtain it. The blockage does not lie with God. It lies in the half-hearted desire of his people and their lack of seriousness about the work of God. Keep filled: we leak Is this waiting on God and thirsting for his anointing, once granted, a one-off second blessing, as some would teach? Having experienced it, does it guarantee fruitfulness from then on? Not for Moody. He was aware that we needed to keep on seeking such anointing. We need to keep fresh. The fact is, to use Moody’s typically down-to-earth way of putting it, that when the Holy Spirit comes, he comes to ‘leaky vessels’. We may be filled now, but we lose the Holy Spirit within and ‘we have to keep right under the fountain all the time and so have a fresh supply’. The supply of ten years ago will not do. Because we leak we need to seek the Holy Spirit for today. We are in constant need of fresh power, fresh supplies, fresh anointing. The result of such anointing is that we shall preach Christ and preach him effectively. We will not be talking of self. We shall not exhibit anything of self. We shall be concerned for God and his glory alone. We may wish to argue about the finer points of Moody’s theology. We may want to express things differently than he did. We may not feel as easy about the rigid distinction between power ‘in’ and power ‘upon’ as he was. But the evidence is surely all around that what we desperately need is the power, whatever language we use, and whether ‘in’ or ‘upon’. We need the fresh anointing of the Holy Spirit and Moody challenges us to ask for it. He challenges us as to whether we are going to wait for it, hunger and thirst for it, find it and then seek it again, or not. Without it, all our other activity will have no value. Moody finished his exhortation by wishing that the spirit of Elijah that fell on Elisha and gave to Elisha a double portion of Elijah’s God, would fall again. He urged his hearers, and us through them, to cry out until we too received a double portion of Elijah’s God, confident that ‘If we seek for it we shall have it’. (George, Timothy. Mr Moody and the Evangelical Tradition. London; New York: T&T Clark)