Here’s my longer sermon notes from this morning’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 5th Nov. 2023), session six in our series on the Holy Spirit.
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded).
‘Where the church is, there is also the Spirit of God; where the Spirit of God is, there is also the church and all grace’
Irenaeus[i]
‘The dove descending breaks the air |With flame of incandescent terror.’
T. S. Elliot[ii]
READ: ACTS 1:1-8
‘So when the apostles were with Jesus, they kept asking him, “Lord, has the time come for you to free Israel and restore our kingdom?”
He replied, “The Father alone has the authority to set those dates and times, and they are not for you to know. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere—in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”’ (Acts 1:6-8)
I want you to note my italics above. They will come in handy in what follows.
MISS RABBIT
It’s no secret that I enjoy my superheroes, whether it’s in comic form or cinematically. I’ve been known, from time to time, to talk about Spider-man, and I have, on many occasions ‘nerded-out’ over the current Marvel films and TV shows.
However, the greatest fictional hero is not Spider-man, and nor are they from a Marvel-created story. No. The greatest fictional hero to ever grace our TV screens is this:
If you don’t know who this is, shame on you.
This is the legend known as Miss Rabbit, a character from the equally legendary television series, Peppa Pig.
If you’ve seen the show—whether by choice or duty—then you’ll be aware that Miss Rabbit is the most active, hard-working, and productive character in the Peppa-verse. If there’s any need, if there’s a vacancy to be filled, if there’s something to be done, then Miss Rabbit is always there. In fact, Miss Rabbit seems to perform every job in the town where Peppa Pig lives.
Miss Rabbit’s list of jobs covers everything from face painting tigers at a fete, to running shops and stalls in museums and parks. She is a dental nurse, a crane operator, a taxi, train and bus driver, a helicopter pilot and a scuba diver. An ice-skating attendant, a cashier at the supermarket, a librarian, and a firefighter. She’s even been an astronaut! According to one person’s count, she has a total of 47 jobs, and frequently does 3 different jobs in a single episode.
She is simply amazing.
In an epic episode of Peppa Pig, called Miss Rabbit’s Day Off, Miss Rabbit hurts her foot and can’t work, meaning a whole host of other characters attempt to do her many jobs. Unsurprisingly, they struggle and fail. No one can do what Miss Rabbit does.
In case you’re wondering, I am forty-three years old.
Nevertheless, I want you to appreciate that, without Miss Rabbit, nothing would happen. She is the glue holding community together, and the driving force that keeps community moving forward.
A WHISTLE-STOP TOUR
As we jump into a whistle-stop tour of Acts today, I can’t help but think of the Holy Spirit being a little like Miss Rabbit. The Spirit is everywhere in Acts, and nothing would happen if it were not for the Spirit.
The book of Acts is the second part of Luke’s writing.
In his first part, what we know as The Gospel of Luke, Luke wrote to his friend, Theophilus, telling him all about Jesus—his birth, his life, his death, his resurrection and his ascension.
As Andy Barclay-Watt reminded us the other week, Luke talks about the Holy-Spirit-soaked ministry and mission of Jesus, to heal, rescue and restore humanity.
As Peter describes it in his letter, when we form ourselves around the chief cornerstone of Jesus, we are renovated back to our original calling as living stones in God’s world (1 Pet. 2:5): earthy-matter, soaked with God’s Spirit, transmitting God’s nature.
Paul, in 2 Corinthians, explains it as being like mirrors: the Spirit removes the veil from our eyes, helping us see and reflect the glory of God, and through seeing Him, the Lord makes us more and more like Him (2 Cor. 3:17-18. See also Col. 3:10).
As we have said over the past few weeks, God is trinity; God is mutual self-giving love to the core, and God creates from out of this eternally-loving relationship in order to share it. God makes humanity, intentionally as a community—God makes them (Gen 1:27)—inviting us to freely participate in, and enjoy and reflect this eternally-loving relationship.
We’re made to reflect the internal life of God—to love God, to love others. When we do this, the knowledge of God’s glory is seen. Conversely, when we mistake and misuse our freedom as independence from others and God, when instead of being self-giving, we become greedy, prideful, apathetic, and prejudiced—self inclined and self worshipping—we destroy, twist, and fray the fabric of what God has created instead of making God known.
We are in need of repair and rescue.
Jesus, God in flesh, came, in the power of the Spirit, to liberate us from the power of evil (Acts 10:38) and to baptise us, plunge us, in the Holy Spirit (Lk. 3:16; 24: 29; Acts 1:4-5). To remake us, to renew us.
Or, as Miroslav Volf words it, ‘God came into the world so as to make human beings, created in the image of God, live with one another and with God in the kind of communion in which the divine persons live with one another.’[iii]
Everyone everywhere needs this.
To repeat what I said a few weeks back, it’s not that we are not in the presence of the Holy Spirit—that’s not our problem. As Psalm 139 showed, there is nowhere we can be where God’s Spirit is not. It’s not a problem of geography or physical distance. It’s about reign; reuniting our hearts with the heart and rule of God.
God wants us to vibrate, to move with, to resonate with the Spirit, to be filled with God. For us to be a deep, full-to-bursting, reverberating echo of God’s heart. It’s about us freely, not forcefully, surrendering ourselves to be living portraits of God.
God is not forceful. Love requires consent.
The Spirit of God does not and will not possess people, ignoring personal choice, and removing our freedom and human-ness. It’s a demonic thing to do, to possess and drive out the humanity. When God fills us, God does not displace our humanity but fulfils our humanity. We don’t become less human, but rather the humanity we are made to be—a humanity like Jesus’, because we allow the Spirit to reign in our life, and to teach us this Jesus-shaped life, and how to express that Jesus-shaped life among us.
So Jesus came to plunge us and soak us in the Spirit, because Jesus has come to restore our humanity.
In Acts, Luke carries on telling this same story, the story he started in his gospel. It’s the story of Jesus—of His lordship, His life, His gift of salvation, His work of human restoration. Except, unlike his gospel, where Jesus is physically present, working in the power of the Spirit, here, in Acts, Jesus ascends (he doesn’t disappear), and it’s Jesus’ followers—those who believe in him and those who come to believe in him—who are blown along by the power of the Spirit.
They are caught up in the mission of God seeking union with humanity.
There is no emphasis in Acts on human ideas, human achievements, human innovation, or how to build a good human organization. Although it is known as The Acts of the Apostles, it would make more sense to call it The Acts of the Spirit, because the Holy Spirit is everywhere in this story, behind the scenes and in the foreground, as the primary innovator, organizer and doer, just like Miss Rabbit from Peppa Pig.
Without the Holy Spirit, nothing would happen. At every stage, every turn of the page in Acts, the growth and mission of the church is inspired, directed and enabled by the Holy Spirit.
I need to be clear and correct a common misconception: Acts is not when the Holy Spirit first shows up! We’ve already seen in this series that the Holy Spirit has always been. He is part of the Trinity; He is the shaker, beautifier and liberator of creation; As Andy pointed out, we’ve already seen the Spirit at work in Luke’s gospel.
Even in the first sentence of this letter, Luke makes it clear that the disciples had not only been in the presence of the resurrected Jesus, learning about the Kingdom of God, but also that, before ascending, Jesus had been giving them instructions through the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:2). Already, Jesus’ follows have been learning to listen to the Spirit. Almost as if Jesus had been teaching them how listen before he leaves them.
So the Holy Spirit is not new. But, when we reach Acts, a new era in humanity breaks out. Something explosive and expansive happens. Today, I just want to highlight a couple of things about the acts of the Spirit within this era: The Spirit is the Language Giver and the Border Crosser.
I: LANGUAGE GIVER
In chapter 2, we have the famous scene when the believers are meeting together, in one place, at the festival of Pentecost in Jerusalem. As the Spirit does at the beginning of Genesis, things begin to shake; there’s a movement of wind, like a mighty storm, that fills the house they are in. Then, what looks like tongues of fire settles on all of them (not a few of them), and everyone present is filled with the Holy Spirit and starts speaking about the wonderful things God has done in a language that they hadn’t learnt (Acts 2:1-13).
They are not alone when this happens. The tight streets of Jerusalem and the houses around them are flooded with visiting Jewish people, who have come from many other nations: Arabia, Crete, Rome, etc. And these visitors are amazed, because these Spirit-filled people are speaking their native languages. They can understand what is being said about the wonderful things God has done.
We’ll come back to that.
Peter then gets up, and addresses this crowd of spectators because they’re confused by what they’re seeing and hearing, and some are thinking that these Jesus-followers have been hitting the bottle and gotten drunk. But Peter explains that this isn’t the case: what’s happening is only what God had promised to do long ago, through an Old Testament prophet, called Joel: ‘In the last days, I will pour our my Spirit upon all people, sons and daughters, young and old, men and women alike…’ (Acts 2:17-18; Joel 2:28-32).
It’s not all Peter says. He then goes on to talk about Jesus; who he was, what happened to him, how Jesus is the Messiah, and how Jesus, who now sits at the right-hand of God, is pouring out the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:33). Peter encourages these people to baptise, to plunge themselves into Jesus. If they do, they will discover forgiveness and will find Jesus plunging them into the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38-39).
This kind of thing—the Spirit ‘filling’ people, being ‘poured out’ on people, being ‘given’ to people—happens again and again in the story of Acts, with similar effects.
In Acts 8, the Holy Spirit is poured out on some Samaritans who believe in Jesus, after Peter and John lay there hands on them. In Acts 10, the Holy Spirit ‘falls upon’ a Roman officer called Cornelius, and the Roman occupants of his home. No one lays hands on them, it just happens, and like in Acts 2, these Romans start speaking a language they hadn’t learnt about God’s wonderful work. In Acts 19, it’s Greeks, in a city called Ephesus, who the Holy Spirit ‘comes upon’ and, again, they speak in another tongue and prophesy (which is not about predicting the future, but rather about speaking the heart of God).
There’s something going on here: the Spirit falls, and the language of praise flows out
There can be a temptation to solely focus on the unknown aspect of these languages, that, in some cases, people speak a language they hadn’t learnt. But I don’t want us to miss something vital here.
Yes, in Acts 2, the Jewish believers have this ecstatic experience and start speaking in non-Jewish languages, but they are languages that those around them can understand. Those listening can understand that they’re praising God for what God has done.
In Acts 10 and Acts 19, when some Romans and Greeks speak in a non-Roman and non-Greek language, we’re told again that they praise God or prophesy. Ask yourself, how do the Jewish-speaking people present (Peter, in Acts 8; Paul in Acts 19), know they are speaking about God? Is it not likely, that these non-Jewish speaking people start speaking in Peter and Paul’s native language, Hebrew, and Peter and Paul, amazed, can understand them talking about God? It’s like a reverse version of Acts 2.
When the earliest believers are filled with the Holy Spirit in Acts 2, the speak about God in a way that can be understood. When the Romans in Acts 10 are filled with the Spirit, they praise God in a way that can be understood. When the Greek (Ephesian) are filled they prophesy—which is to say something about God that is practical and can be understood.
There’s a pattern here, and it’s not new to Acts.
In Luke’s gospel—the prequel to Acts—when Elizabeth, John the Baptists mother, is filled with the Spirit, she starts praising God for what God is doing in the womb of her relative Mary. She doesn’t speak in an unlearnt language, she speaks in her native tongue. But Mary, Jesus’s mother, who is present at this moment, can understand what is being said (Lk. 1:39-45), and Mary responds by praising God in a way Elizabeth can understand.
When Zechariah, John’s dad, is filled with the Spirit (Lk. 1:67-79), it’s the same thing; he says something about God’s work through Jesus that those listening can understand.
In Acts 4, even though they have already been filled with the Spirit in Acts 2, the believers are filled again with the Spirit, the house shakes once more, and they are strengthen, empowered by the Spirit to do what? Speak about Jesus to others (Acts 4: 31).
Are we seeing the pattern?
Sometimes it’s with an unlearnt languages, sometimes it’s with their native tongue, but however it comes, there’s this empowerment to speak, in a way that can be understood by others, about what God has done in Jesus (also see, Acts 4:8, Acts 6:55-56). Even when it’s an unlearnt language, and the disciples have an extraordinary, ecstatic moment, the purpose remains the same. As Jack Levison says it, ‘There is no ecstasy for ecstasy’s sake. The purpose of [these tongues] is to communicate a clear and comprehensible word that recounts God’s praiseworthy acts.’[iv]
In other words, the Holy Spirit empowers us to say something about Jesus that can be clearly understood by others. And not just to those who are like us, but even by those who are not us.
This is exactly what Jesus told his disciples would happen in Acts 1; ‘You will tell people about me, everywhere.’
II: BORDER CROSSER
This brings me to the second thing I want to highlight about the acts of the Spirit: The Spirit throughout this book seem to push and, like a wild goose, chase the followers of Jesus over geographical borders and cultural boundaries that they would not have crossed in their own steam, understanding, or desire.
At first, everything starts in Jerusalem. Even in Jerusalem, with this gift of language, the Spirit itself is reaching out to others—even when they are the same ethnicity as the disciples. However, you don’t have to go far in this book before that changes, and Spirit shows itself as working in the Samaritans who come to know Jesus (Acts 8). Samaritans and Jews did not get on; racial tensions were high. But, these Jewish believers starting realising that they have brothers and sisters in Jesus who are Samaritan.
One of the disciples who lays hands on these Samaritans is John. It was not that long ago when the particular disciple wanted the power to call down destructive fire from heaven to destroy a village of Samaritans! A request Jesus rebukes, because John didn’t know God’s heart (Lk. 9:51-55). This man’s heart has changed, dramatically. He is embracing people that he used to want to see destroyed, praying for them to be filled with the Spirit, the fire of life.
Later in Acts 8, the Spirit leads Philip to an Ethiopian Eunuch. The Eunuch reading the Jewish scriptures at the time, and he doesn’t understand what they mean. According to Moses’ law Eunuchs couldn’t be part of God’s assembly (Deut. 23:1), but the Eunuch’s reading Isaiah’s famous servant song (Isa. 40-55), and the climax of that song is God doing something through his suffering servant that will open up God’s kingdom to non-Jewish people and to Eunuchs, too (Isa. 56:3-5). Philip talks to him about Jesus, explaining that this suffering servant is Jesus, and then baptises the Eunuch into this Jesus community. The Spirit all of orchestrates this!
In Acts 9, the early churches biggest enemy, a Jewish man named Saul (also known as Paul), comes to faith in Jesus and is filled with the Spirit under the ministry of Ananias (Acts 9:1-17), and the church in Jerusalem has to learn how to love and accept someone who used to persecute them (Acts 9:26). They are, understandably, uncomfortable with this. It took a man called Barnabas to step across the line and embrace Paul as a brother.
In Acts 10, it’s Romans, as we’ve said before. But it takes the Spirit some extraordinary effort to persuade Peter to enter a non-Jewish home. In Acts 19, it’s Greeks… As the book goes on, especially as we follow Paul’s story, the Spirit is sweeping like a wind across the known nations, well beyond the people of Israel—and this work causes friction in the original Jewish believers about what all this means (Acts 11:1-18; Acts 15)
Again and again, they find themselves going to people and crossing cultural boundaries that they wouldn’t have previously crossed.
It’s not like the first believers are spreading the Spirit of God—it’s more like they are having to catch up with it, and have to really wrestle with the questions that the Spirit’s acts bring up.
As one commentator describes its, ‘The deepest reality of life in the Spirit depicted in the book of Acts is that the disciples of Jesus rarely, if ever, go where they want to go or to whom they would want to go. The Spirit seems to always be pressing the disciples to go to those whom they would in fact strongly prefer never to share space, or a meal, and definitely not life together. Yet, it is precisely this prodding to be boundary-crossing and border-transgressing that marks the presence of the Spirit of God’[v]
The Holy Spirit, the wild goose, chases them into diversity.
The apostles, at the very beginning of Acts, ask Jesus when he’s going to restore Israel, our Kingdom (Acts 1:6). But Jesus’ response, and the Spirit’s acts, are prodding these early followers—who were all Jewish—to realise that the Kingdom of God is so much bigger than a single nation, a single ethnicity, a single language.
It’s little wonder that it is Luke, the only non-Jewish writer in the New Testament (possibly, the whole Bible), who is telling us this story about the Acts of the Spirit.
Because of Jesus, the Spirit is being poured out on all people. God’s not seeking to solely restore Israel; the plan is to restore the whole of humanity. And the evidence of this, as seen in Acts, and that remains the evidence of the Spirit’s activity today, is that the Spirit brings people together of differing backgrounds, differing tribes, differing colours and joins them together as one body. There’s this diversity woven together in unity.
The Holy Spirit, like Miss Rabbit, is the glue pulling and holding this community together, and the driving force that keeps this community moving forward.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Christians, not for the first time (or last time), began seeking the Spirit for a fresh dose of empowerment. There’s a lot of stories from this time about experiences similar to Pentecost, in Acts 2: miracles and tongues, and I firmly believe that is still an experience for today.
However, in our focus on the dramatic, we can easily miss how revolutionary and radical the work of the Spirit was at this time.
In Azuza Street, California, there was a church led by a wonderful man called William Seymour. William Seymour was a black man, living in America at the era of Jim Crow laws about segregation. His church was filled with a fresh outpouring of the Spirit—miracles happened, people praised God and spoke about Jesus in languages known and unknown (but in ways that could be understood)
This wasn’t what grabbed the headlines of the Los Angeles Times, however. They labelled the church on Azuza Street as scandalous (so did some other churches, sadly). It was labelled as scandalous because, if you walked into Azuza Street, you would be met with the sight of ‘Black, White, Hispanic, and Asian people all worshipping together’, all sat among each other and ‘dancing with each other’.[vi] Forming friendships, romances, kinship—seeing one another as equals in status. And not just in the meetings! These changes in status were flowing out in the the streets, continuing beyond the time slot of a service, into the very infrastructure and fabric of society.
Within the walls of Azuza Street, under the power of the Spirit, the boundaries of American segregation where crumbling. As with Acts, when the Spirit fills, man-made borders collapse, and community is born.
New wine was bursting old wine skins. Or, as we said it recently in our Colossians’ series, new worlds were being created in old wardrobes.
What happens when the Spirit moves—humanity is transformed and renewed. Not just on an individual level, but corporately.
Paul describes the Holy Spirit as being the ‘firstfruits’ (Rom. 8:23); that the Holy Spirit is a foretaste of the future world.[vii] We get a taste of redeemed life: a humanity free of struggling against one another, free of injustice and oppression, free of warfare, jealousy and selfishness. When the Spirit fills, our hearts should be swayed by a tug from the future, to live differently in the present with each other. As the Holy Spirit broods on our minds, like he did at creation, it shakes the chaos within us and forms the beginnings of a new and better world.
Amos Yong, a Malaysian-American theologian, describes the Holy Spirit like this, ‘The Holy Spirit is God’s imagination let loose and working with all the freedom of God in the world.’[viii]
To word that differently: The Spirit of God remakes the world to be a better place where God’s ethos, God’s dream, God’s Kingdom flourishes; God does so, by reforming me and you into us, under the headship of Jesus.
BODY BUILDER
I know I’ve not covered everything in Acts, regarding the work of the Spirit. Maybe, later next year, we’ll take a slower journey through this amazing book. And we will return to this book in this series.
But, in highlighting these acts of the Spirit—giving language and crossing borders—I want us to understand what the Holy Spirit is up to, not only in this book, but what the Spirit is still up to today.
Yes, there’s a lot of the dramatic, in this story, as one extraordinary experience is followed by another. But it would be wrong to see the work of the Holy Spirit as only being in the dramatic and the miraculous, and it would be ironic, as the theologian, Jane Williams notes, to uncouple these dramatic experiences from the purpose of the Holy Spirit in Luke’s telling of the story.
The primary effect of the presence of the Holy Spirit in Acts is the creation of a renewed human community that proclaims Jesus Christ as Lord.[ix]
And this community is not one colour, or one sound, or one culture. As Revelation 7 paints it, the Kingdom of God is a vast crowd, too great to count, from every nation, tribe, and people and language, standing around God’s throne, with Jesus, the Lamb of God, at the centre, all praising and proclaiming the mighty wonderful works of God; shouting that salvation comes from the Lamb (Rev. 7:9-10).
In Acts 1:8, Jesus tells his disciples that they will receive power when the ‘Holy Spirit has come upon you.’ Thirty-three years earlier, Luke used the exact same words to talk about the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary (Acts 1:35).
In both cases, whether it’s within a woman’s womb, or a house full of people, the Holy Spirit is stitching together the body of Jesus.
Being chased by the Goose, or led by the Spirit is more than experiencing the miraculous and wanting supernatural gifts. It’s allowing the Spirit to bring us together as the body of Christ. Exercising gifts alone, without primarily seeking to be a body together, is just a human-led event, which misses the point. It’s like having the strings of a guitar, but not bothering with the body of the guitar.
This is what Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians, to a bunch of believers who love the dramatic but do not love each other. To paraphrase his message to the church, ‘You have the gifts, but you are not moving with the Spirit. You speak in tongues, but you’re not chasing the wind to where it is blowing.’
In 1 Corinthians, Paul writes, ‘For we were all baptised by one Spirit so as to form one body – whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free –we were all given the one Spirit to drink.’ (1 Cor. 12:13, NLT).
Why are we filled with the Spirit? To speak in tongues? No. To perform miracles? No. They can be present, but they are not the reason. The reason we are to resonate with the Spirit of God is so we can love one another and lift up the name of Jesus together, and manifest His life in the world.
We aren’t Spirit-filled to form an isolated life. God’s heart is not about creating lone rangers or celebs. The work of the Spirit is to teach us—everyone of us—how to be a community that reflects the life of God into our world, for our world. The Holy Spirit wants to make the faithful, life-giving and loving God visible through how we relate to one another.[x]
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, but the hardest spiritual practice is not prayer, or reading scripture—though they’re vital. The hardest practice is being a community.
It’s a slow learning curve—because it cuts against everything within us that is self-inclined, self-preserving and self-worshipping. We’re not perfect. I’m not always lovable and I am not always loving. Even in the books of Acts, they are not perfect at this. There are times when they are so good at this that the believers share all they have and no one is in need (Acts 2:43-47; 4:32-37), and there’s times when it goes wrong, when people try to exhort the charity of others, and when people’s prejudices lead them to overlook others (Acts 5:1-11; 6:1-6).
If Acts argues anything, it is that this community is not a human idea and it won’t be a human achievement. As Scot McKnight describes it, we need the Spirit precisely because ‘it is not a fellowship of everyone’s-the-same, but a fellowship of everyone’s-so-different.’[xi] It will always be a fellowship of everyone’s-so-different.
Without the Spirit’s help, this is humanly impossible. With the Spirit, it’s a learning process for every single one of us. And just because we get it wrong, and we do, often, does not mean that it is not the process or direction that the Spirit is ushering us toward.
What is the evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work in a church? It’s where people are learning to love each other and understand each other, across all sorts of boundaries, all sorts of borders, diversity coming together as one, with the chief purpose of proclaiming and embodying Jesus in our world.
‘God, be gracious to us, and bless us |May he make his face shine toward us |(Selah) |so that your way may be known on earth |your salvation among all nations.’
Psalm 67:2-3, CJB
‘We shall not cease from exploration | And the end of all our exploring | Will be to arrive where we started | And know the place for the first time.’
T. S. Elliot, Little Gidding V
[i] Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses) 3, 24, 1: SC 211, 474 (circa 180-185 AD)
[ii] T. S. Elliot, Little Gidding, verse IV, Four Quartets
[iii] Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1996), p. 181
[iv] Jack Levison, Fresh Air: The Holy Spirit for an Inspired Life (Paraclete Press, Massachusetts, 2012), p. 192
[v] Willie James Jennings, Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible
[vi] Cheryl Bridge Johns, Re-Enchanting the Text: Discovering the Bible as Sacred, Dangerous, and Mysterious (Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2023), p. 109
[vii] Paul’s naming here (firstfruits) is apt for many reasons. Primarily, because the feast of Pentecost was also the festival where the firstfruits of the harvest where presented to God (Lev. 23:4-14). Unlike the mosaic festival, however, at Pentecost, instead of us bringing the gifts our labour to God, God clothes the believers with the Holy Spirit, the fruit of Christ’s work.
[viii] Amos Yong, Spirit-Word-Community: Theological Hermeneutics in Trinitarian Perspective (Wipf & Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2002), p.18
[ix] Jane Williams, Acts of the Apostles, part 7: The Acts of the Holy Spirit, https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jan/26/religion-christianity-apostles
[x] To reword the words of Matt Ayers, in his book, The Holy Spirit: An Introduction
[xi] Scot McKnight, Open to the Spirit: God in Us, God with Us, God Transforming Us (Waterbrook, and imprint of Crown Publishing, New York, 2018), p. 105
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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