There Is No Man-Made Revival

Listen Online:

Transcript:

Turn with me in your Bibles to Acts chapter 2, Acts chapter 2. I’ve preached on this passage a number of times, not just here. I don’t recall if I’ve preached on it here or not, but rarely have I ever preached on the beginning of the passage, usually focus on the end.

We’re going to look at Acts chapter 2 today, what’s popularly known as Pentecost. While you’re turning there, you know, we as a human race have been capable of doing some very intelligent things. On the other hand, you all can attest we’re capable of doing some not so intelligent things as well. But if you think about the progress that’s been made in the last century or so, it’s pretty amazing what God has enabled us to do.

I mean, God has given us such a mental capacity that within a hundred years, We went from not having electricity readily available to taming the power of the atom for electricity and for weapons and what have you. We sent a man to space. We sent people to the moon.

I know there are some who question that. I’ve got some questions about that myself. I’ve always wondered why the flag was waving in the video if there’s not air on the moon, but I’m not here to speculate conspiracy theories.

We’ve at least put people into space and maybe even put them on the moon. We’ve built skyscrapers thousands of stories high. The human race is capable of doing some amazing things.

And yet, even in all of our intelligence, even in all of our technical skill, even all of our experience, there are some things we still cannot do. I thought about this this week as I was looking at our plants outside. I know I talk about gardening a lot, but you talk about the things you know.

It wouldn’t really do for me to give you a lot of football metaphors and things I don’t know about. Our plants, I would water for weeks and weeks. I’d water every other day, it seemed, just trying to keep them alive.

Some of them have died anyway. And I could water every day, and I could soak them well. And in all this heat and this drought, they just died.

And Christian had some flowers that I managed to keep alive, but they were just kind of sad looking. and I’d water them every day and yet bean plants died, okra died, everything but squash died, couldn’t keep the flowers. In all of our intellect, we figured out how to harness water and we figured out how to pump it and we figured out how to get it running through a hose and that’s, you know, we take it for granted but it’s pretty incredible that we have this technology that they didn’t have necessarily a hundred years ago and yet it still couldn’t keep my garden alive and yet one day of rain.

We were talking about it just talking about gardening, and I think Miss Jody said it best, heaven’s rain is always best. You know, just a little bit of rain that God sent, you know, brought the garden back to life. Christian’s flowers, when we left this morning, were just incredible at how they were blooming. And all my effort and all my watering did nothing, but God sent a little bit of rain, and it was amazing the results.

See, there are some things that we can’t do that God can do. One of those is spiritual revival. We cannot revive ourselves. We cannot bring spiritual revival to this church.

We can kill ourselves trying, but we won’t be successful if God’s not in it. That’s what we’re going to talk about this morning from Acts chapter 2. And when the day of Pentecost, verse 1, when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. The members of the church there at Jerusalem that I like to call the First Missionary Baptist Church of Jerusalem, just to irritate people who aren’t of our theological bent, this church, they were all sitting there in one place, and they were worshiping, they were doing what they did, and all of a sudden, unbeknownst to them, the Holy Spirit showed up, came rushing in. Yes, they were doing what they knew to do, but they didn’t have anything to do with what was going to happen shortly thereafter.

The church, and when I say the church, I mean that local church, they were told to stay put. Christ had given them, we talked about this some at Vacation Bible School, Christ had given them their marching orders, their plan, which was to go and tell everybody about Jesus Christ, tell everybody about redemption, tell everybody what he had done on the cross for them, and yet he said, not yet, stay put. and they were told to sit there in Jerusalem until he sent them out.

And they could have gone on their own and tried and tried and shared Christ with people, and you know what? They might have reached a few here and there. But he said there was something even greater for them, and that was the Holy Spirit, and they were told to sit there.

And so in the meantime, they met together, they fellowshipped, they prayed, they did what churches do. Folks, they probably looked very much like us. We get together on a weekly basis.

Sometimes we get together more than once a week. We should get together more than once a week. It’s good for us.

I believe they got together on a daily basis, and they did what they were supposed to do. They prayed, they worshiped, they fellowshipped, they studied, they did all these things. But there was a remarkable change in this church after the Holy Spirit showed up.

He came in, the Holy Spirit came in as a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as a fire, and it sat upon each of them. And I’ve seen, you’ve probably all seen pictures, either illustrations in Bibles or paintings or different things where you’ll see this, you’ll see where people have tried to make an artist’s rendition of what this looked like.

And usually it’s people standing around and they’ve got little, look like flames, just a tiny little candle flame on the top of their head. And I guess that’s as good a representation as I could do, but I think it was nothing compared to the glory of what this really was. I think any effort we could make to try to picture this or to draw it would completely fall short of capturing the glory of God’s Holy Spirit.

And he said, these cloven tongues like as of fire sat on each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now I’m going to digress just for a second here so we’re all clear on something we’re talking about.

It says these people were all filled with the Holy Spirit. Now, these people had all been with Christ. They’d all trusted Christ. I believe they were saved already by this point. They’re referred to as His church.

I believe they were already saved. We should not take from this passage about something that happened once upon a time, not at the founding of the church, but at the empowering of the church that was already established by Christ. We should not take from this passage that you’re saved, and then later on you have to get filled with the Holy Spirit as some sort of separate experience. From studying what it means about the gift of the Holy Spirit, baptism of the Holy Spirit, filling with the Holy Spirit, all the terminology of the New Testament that has to do with the Holy Spirit doing something with us, I believe that the Holy Spirit indwells every believer at the time of conversion.

I believe that when the Bible talks about the gift of the Holy Spirit, when the Bible talks about baptism in the Holy Spirit, I believe it’s talking about what, under normal circumstances, happens at conversion. This was a different circumstance. The Holy Spirit had not come upon the church yet up until this point.

Now that the Holy Spirit has come upon the church, I believe this happens at conversion. I believe there’s also something called the filling with the Holy Spirit that I think happens from time to time when we just pour over with the Holy Spirit. Our cup just runs over.

I don’t believe that manifests itself in charismatic experiences. I believe it manifests itself in the things that are talked about at the end of this chapter that we’ll get to in just a minute with worship, with prayer, with praise, with fellowship. I believe it’s when the Holy Spirit gets in us and just takes over the driver’s seat.

And I’ve explained it this way before, that I always love my wife. And most of the time, 99% of the time, I like my wife too. She would say the same about me.

You can love somebody and not always like them, but it’s important that you do both. I always love my wife, but sometimes she’ll do something or say something, and I feel inside like I just fall in love with her all over again. Any of you men know that feeling?

Okay. You better say yes if your wife is sitting here with you. I just feel like I fall in love with her all over again.

I just overflow. Okay? I’m always, I always have the Holy Spirit.

I always, as a believer, I always have the Holy Spirit. but sometimes you just overflow with it. And so the baptism of the Holy Spirit, the gift of the Holy Spirit that happened here, I believe under normal circumstances today happened to us at the moment of conversion.

I believe what we see here is the result of them being baptized and filled all at the same time. That we get baptized and gifted the Holy Spirit at the moment of conversion, and then sometimes after that, it just overflows out of us. So the reason I diverted from the text for just a minute, I wanted to make sure I don’t leave you with the impression that we all have to have this tongue-speaking, overflowing experience at some later time in order to prove that we’re saved, as some churches now teach.

And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, verse 4, and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men out of every nation under heaven. And when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together and were confounded because that every man heard them speak in his own language.

And they were all amazed and marveled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galileans. So what happened was the church was having a regular service time, basically. They were getting together, they were worshiping, and the Holy Spirit showed up.

And the Bible said they were filled with the Holy Spirit, and as a result they began to speak in tongues. We’re Baptists, we don’t believe in speaking in tongues. Now, I believe in speaking in tongues.

I don’t believe I can. I believe they did, and I believe it doesn’t look anything like what goes on today. There are two things that people refer to when they talk about speaking in tongues.

One is glossolalia, which is what we see today, where people babble in languages that don’t really exist as languages. And there’s xenoglossia, which is what’s described here. Those are just fancy Greek words.

You don’t have to remember those. What is described here, people speaking in tongues, people speaking in real languages that they don’t understand. That’s what’s described here.

That’s what’s so miraculous about this. Anybody can make up noises and sounds. Benjamin’s very good at that.

Anybody can make up noises and sounds and syllables. But the Holy Spirit got a hold of these people, and for the first time ever, they went out to preach the gospel, as they were sent to do, and because they waited on God’s direction, because they waited on God’s timing, because it was led and influenced and driven by the Holy Spirit, when they went out to preach the gospel for the first time, they had the ability to preach to everybody that was there, regardless of their heart language, and they were able to speak to people in languages they didn’t know, and they heard the gospel for the first time and understood it, and they were amazed. I have no training whatsoever in Mandarin Chinese.

I have no training whatsoever in Arabic, other than a few little words I’ve picked up as I’ve studied about Islam. But as far as speaking the language, no training whatsoever. This would be what we see here today, would be as if the Holy Spirit got a hold of this church, as if we were filled with the Holy Spirit in this church, And there were people here from other countries, or we went out into the city of Fayetteville, and I began to preach the gospel in Mandarin Chinese or Arabic.

And people heard that and said, wait a minute, he’s from Oklahoma. Why does he speak those words? He can barely speak English.

Why would he speak our language? That’s what’s going on here. Folks, this was something incredible that only the Holy Spirit could do.

And they heard the words they spoke, and they were amazed. And folks, they were not, as we’ll read on, they were not just amazed by the fact that they were speaking in their own languages. They were amazed at what they were saying.

They were all amazed and marveled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galileans. And how hear we every man in our own tongue wherein we were born? How is it possible that we all hear this in our own language?

Parthians and Medes and Elamites and the dwellers of Mesopotamia and in Judea and Cappadocia and Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia and in Egypt and in parts of Libya about Cyrene and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God. They were not just amazed at what was going on. They weren’t just amazed at the abundance of languages.

They were amazed at what they were telling them. Because these men were testifying in these tongues, they were testifying to how incredible God was and the amazing work that He had done in sharing salvation with us through Jesus Christ. And they were all amazed, verse 12, and were in doubt, saying one another, what meaneth this? And others mocking said, these men are full of new wine.

So everybody’s amazed. Some people are, everybody’s amazed by the languages that are being spoken. Some people hearing what’s being said are amazed at the wonderful works of God that these men are testifying to.

Some people are amazed at how goofy they sound, because if you’ll remember throughout the New Testament, it’s told to us that the gospel sounds foolish to the world. And that wasn’t just something that started in Paul’s day, that was already going on. And people heard this that was spoken, and you would think they would pick up on the miracle that took place here, that the Holy Spirit gave them utterance in all these languages.

But some of them didn’t recognize that it came from God, and instead mocked the message and said, these people are full of new wine. These people have had too much to drink. And so they tried to, this revival that took place in this church, they began to try to mock and explain away.

But Peter, standing up with the eleven, he’s come a long way from the days when he denied Christ and didn’t want anybody to know he was associated with him. See, he’s seen Christ resurrected. He knows how the story ends, and he’s ready to testify.

He’s ready to tell of Jesus Christ. But Peter, standing up with the eleven, lifted up his voice and said unto them, ye men of Judea and all ye that dwell at Jerusalem, be this known unto you and hearken to my words. He addresses the crowd and he said, all of you, you need to listen to me and pay attention to what I’m saying. For these are not drunken as ye suppose, seeing it as but the third hour of the day.

These men with me are not drunk like you claim they are. It’s only 9 a. m.

But this is that which was spoken of by the prophet Joel. See, most of these people that were there were Jews. Yes, they’d come from other countries, but they were converts and they’d come there to Jerusalem to worship.

And so they would have known what Joel said. He said, this is that which was spoken of by the prophet Joel, and it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams. And on my servants and on my handmaidens, I will pour out in those days of my spirit, and they shall prophesy. And I will show wonders in heaven above and signs and earth beneath blood and fire and vapor of smoke.

The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before that great and notable day of the Lord come. And it shall come to pass that whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. So he turns them back to their own scriptures and said, these men are not drunk.

This is the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy that in the last days, and when he’s talking about last days, he doesn’t mean the end times. He means this is the time when prophecy has been fulfilled. The Messiah has come, and now these men stand before you where God has poured out His Spirit, and He promised that He would pour out His Spirit, and they would prophesy, and they would share His Word, and they would tell all about Him, and there would be signs and wonders.

And He says, Ye men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know. Him being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.

And he points them, he’s gone from Joel now, and the fact that they were prophesying under the Spirit of God, and he points them to Jesus Christ. And he said, Jesus Christ was approved unto you of God. God proved by miracles and wonders and signs that Jesus Christ was sent from him, and this same Jesus Christ that God sent to you, you took and you crucified him by wicked hands. And he incidentally points out just for their edification that it was according to the counsel and foreknowledge of God.

Even though they had done it by their own wicked hands and their own wicked hearts, it was part of God’s plan all along. And God was not caught off guard. Jesus was not powerless.

It was part of his plan all along. Whom God hath raised up, speaking of Jesus Christ, God raised him up having loosed the pains of death because it was not possible that he should be holden of it. For David speaketh concerning him, he points them back again to the Old Testament scriptures.

For David speaketh concerning him, I foresaw the Lord always before my face, for he is on my right hand that I should not be moved. Therefore did my heart rejoice and my tongue was glad. Moreover, also my flesh shall rest in hope because thou wilt not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one to see corruption.

Thou hast made known to me the ways of life, thou shalt make me full of joy with thy countenance. Men and brethren, let me freely speak unto you of the patriarch David that he is both dead and buried, and his sepulcher, his tomb, is with us to this day. Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn an oath to him that of the fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit on his throne.

He, seeing this before, spake of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hell, neither did his flesh see corruption. And so he points them back to the Psalms and says what David wrote about, about the resurrection, was about Jesus Christ. And he shows them in yet another way that Christ was the fulfillment of the Old Testament. This wasn’t something new.

This had been God’s plan all along. This Jesus, verse 32, hath God raised up whereof we are all witnesses. These people in Jerusalem had been there when Christ rose from the dead.

Many of them would have been eyewitnesses either having seen him or having heard the news that he’s dead and if they’ve not, I’m sorry, he’s alive, and if they haven’t seen him firsthand, they’ve probably seen the empty tomb. This Jesus hath God raised up whereof we are all witnesses. Therefore being by the right hand of God exalted and having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Ghost, he hath shed forth this which ye now see and hear.

For David has not ascended into the heavens, but he saith himself, the Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou on my right hand until I make thy foes a footstool. Therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God hath made the same Jesus whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ. He consistently points them back to the Old Testament scriptures and says it all referred to Jesus Christ. And the same Christ that it talks of, the same Christ that you crucified, God has made him Lord and Christ, has made him Messiah, has made him Savior. Verse 37, now when they heard this, they were pricked in their hearts.

And said unto Peter and the rest of the apostles, men and brethren, what shall we do? It’s always the question you want when you preach or when you teach somebody, to have them pricked in their hearts, to have God get a hold of their heart and have them say, what do we need to do now? That’s exactly what happened.

Peter stood up and preached the gospel to these people and it said they were pricked in their hearts. They were convicted. Cut them like a knife.

And they said, what do we need to do now? Verse 38 said, Then Peter said unto them, Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. And folks, that does not mean that you need to be baptized in order to be saved. To say that would contradict far too many plain scriptures.

But it was assumed in that day that if you trusted Christ, If you became his follower, you would be baptized and be part of the local church. There was none of this concept of lone ranger Christians. And so he tells them to repent.

He tells them to repent. For the promise is unto you and to your children and to all that are far off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call. And the promise he’s referring to is the same promise that God made throughout the Old Testament.

The same promise that was given to Abraham. The same promise we’ve been talking about on Sunday nights in Galatians. that God would deal with the problem of sin.

Folks, in Jesus Christ, God dealt with the problem of sin for these people who wanted to know what they needed to do. And he said, repent, because the promise is to you and to those that are far off, and as many as the Lord our God shall call. And with many other words did he testify and exhort, saying, save yourselves from this untoward generation.

It’s incredible enough that Peter was able to preach that day and have people wondering, what do we do now? It was not his intention to preach a message and have them go, oh, that was clever, oh, I never thought about that before. They wanted to know, okay, what do we need to do with this?

The Holy Spirit was moving among them, convicting them of sins, and pushing them, compelling them to do something. Then they that gladly received his word were baptized, and the same day there were added unto them about 3,000 souls. Ladies and gentlemen, you want to talk about a revival in a church.

One day they are sitting there having church, and the Holy Spirit gets a hold of them, and people begin to preach, people begin to prophesy, and 3,000 people got saved. We could not handle it if 3,000 people got saved and were added to the church. They’re not just talking names on a roll here.

As I’ve told you many, many times, Christianity in their day cost them something. These are people that believed with all their hearts. They had repented of trying to earn their salvation before God with good works, and they trusted Christ, and they’d been baptized, they’d been added to the church.

And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine, and in fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers. And fear came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were done by the apostles. And all that believed were together, and had all things common, and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men as every man had need.

And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved. We talked just briefly last week about what revival would look like.

And I read you that definition that I loved, and I put it on the bulletin board out there if you want to see it. But it tells us what revival would look like in a church. If the Holy Spirit gets a hold of a church and brings it back to life, what it’s going to look like in this last part of the passage.

People are being saved and baptized and discipled through the ministry of that church. Folks, if that’s not going on, something’s wrong in the church. If we don’t see people getting saved and people being baptized and people being discipled through our ministry, something is wrong here.

The church is faithful to the teachings of God’s Word. They continued in the apostles’ doctrine. Not the apostles’ opinion, but the doctrine they taught, which was the Word of God.

The church was faithful to the teachings of God’s Word. any church that begins to deviate from the Bible, something is wrong in here. There was genuine fellowship between the people, among the people.

I’m not talking about, hi, how are you on a Sunday morning? But there was an intimate relationship between the people where they were involved in one another’s lives. Folks, if we don’t have fellowship where we love one another and we’re part of the same body, something is lacking, something is wrong in the heart.

This church was fervent in prayer. We see this throughout the book of Acts that when this church got together and prayed, things happened. Because they prayed, they took their needs and their requests before God for one another.

And God honored them. We see that the church feared the Lord. Does our church fear the Lord?

You don’t have to answer that question. Do we as individuals in the church fear the Lord? Do we live like it?

Do we concern ourselves with what He wants? This church was so in tune to the Holy Spirit that not only did they fear the Lord, but those around them feared the Lord for the things he was doing in their midst. Ladies and gentlemen, the church is not supposed to limp along and surrender and give in to the culture outside. We’re supposed to shake things up.

And if the Holy Spirit gets a hold of us, we will shake up Fayetteville. The church was passionate about meeting one another’s needs because so great was their love for one another and the people outside. And they were driven to care for one another.

It’s one thing that we do very well. I’m not saying we don’t do the others well. That’s one thing I think we do well.

The church functioned as the church daily. You notice it said they got together daily from house to house. This idea of just getting together and having services a couple times a week and we all go back to our separate quarters and that’s the extent of our church involvement.

That doesn’t work. That’s not a church. And I’m not saying we have to have church services every day.

What I’m saying is that we function as the church every day or we don’t function as the church at all. You hear me on that? If we don’t function as the church Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, if we just function as the church on Sunday and Wednesday, we don’t function as the church at all.

They got together daily. They were involved in the Lord’s work daily. The church couldn’t control themselves when it came to praise for God.

Everywhere they went, people sang praises in jail. People glorified God in everything they did. Ladies and gentlemen, if the Holy Spirit got a hold of us and there was a revival in this place, everybody would know it because we couldn’t contain ourselves but praise God and glorify Him everywhere we went for the things that He does.

Revival is not something that we can make happen. I just told you what the Bible says, what the Bible shows here, a revival looked like in that church, but what I believe it would look like here in any church where it happened, some of the hallmarks, some of the things we would see. And we may think, I want that.

So many of you talked to me after last Sunday morning service and said, You’re right. What we’re doing is not cutting it. It’s not been cutting it for me.

I felt empty. I felt spiritually unfulfilled. And we may think what he’s talking about, this kind of Christianity they practiced in Acts chapter 2, that sounds good.

I want that. I want that close connection with God. I want that close connection with the church.

I want that. What can I do? And all too often, we confuse revival with reformation.

I don’t mean the reformation with a capital R. I mean, okay, well, he’s talking about the Holy Spirit leading us, and okay, I’ll just try to do better. I’ll just try to read my Bible more.

I’ll try to pray more. Folks, those are good things, but they in and of themselves will not bring revival. They’re going to be part of it. They’ll get us in condition for it, and we should do those things, but just trying harder is not going to bring revival to this church or to any other.

We confuse revival with activity. Say, well, if we could just get more things going. create excitement, give people things to do, give people a reason to come in.

Surely that would fix things. It’s just a bunch of empty religious activities. It’s not bad for us to have things going on.

I like when we have excuses to get together. I especially like when we have excuses to get together and do ministry together. But folks, just doing more things will not revive us, will not get us closer together, will not get us closer to God.

We think sometimes that revival is something we can schedule. I talked about that last week. And a friend of mine pointed out flyers for some camp meeting service or some conference that was coming and meeting for a week in town and posters up and radio advertisements said that be there at whatever stadium, the Shekinah glory of God will fall each night at 7 o’clock.

If y’all know anything about the Old Testament, God doesn’t work that way. In the Old Testament, the Shekinah glory talks about the glory of God that dwelt among them and they couldn’t

Powered by atecplugins.com