Our Lord told His disciples they had a huge job before them: to preach the gospel to every creature, to go everywhere throughout the world and tell them that they could be saved by faith in Jesus Christ. Yet He forbade them to go immediately. He said, “You are to go,” and when they started, He said, “Now, don’t go.” There must have been a compelling reason for His telling them to wait.
Right here let me tell you a little trick people have. It is the neatest little trick imaginable for getting out of tight spot when it comes to the necessity for being filled with the Spirit. We push conversion down and make it to be less to make room for the deeper work of grace. Then, when we get the deeper work of grace, we do not have any more than our old Baptist and Presbyterian and Methodist Fathers had when they had their initial experience of being born again.
I do not want to do that. I do not want to make sinners out of these disciples so that I might later make room for their being converted. That is a good way to dodge, but, brother and sister, one of these days you and I will be where dodges will not work. We had better not dodge now; we should face up to things while we can.
Now, who were these to whom Jesus spoke?
They were His called and chosen disciples. They possessed and had received divine authority. They had an authority that very few people now would dare to try to exercise. He said, “Go everywhere; and when you go, cast out the devils, and heal the sick, and take all my authority.” He gave it to these people. He did not give His authority to people who had no spiritual experience. You can be sure of that. The persons to whom Jesus said, “tarry until ye be endued with power” knew Jesus Christ in a warm, intimate way. They knew Him living, they knew Him dead, and then they knew Him living again. They had been with Him three years and over. Then they had seen Him die on a cross, and then they had seen Him after He had risen from the dead. So they knew Him living, dead and living again. They had shown evidence of being truly converted persons.
Some people say they were converted when the Spirit came upon them at Pentecost. I do not believe that at all. It is a modern twist people have given doctrine to make room for their cold carnality. They had shown evidence of being truly converted men and Christ had declared them so. Now if you doubt that, let me read the prayer that Jesus made about these disciples. He prayed “For I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from thee, and they have believed that thou didst send me” (John 17:8).
Then He said in verse 14, “I have given them thy word; and the world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world” (John 17:1).
These were the things Jesus said to His Father about His disciples He had gathered around Him there. Surely, that did not sound like the Lord talking about sinners.
Christ outlined for them a program of world evangelization and told them in Acts, “But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth” (Acts 1:8).
He said they were to enter a new era. We are always praying for revival. What is praying for revival? What do we hope to have when we have a revival? I do not know what some people want, but I suppose generally we are hoping to enter a new spiritual era. God was to introduce a change of dispensation, but He was not to introduce a change of dispensation apart from a stepped up and elevated spiritual experience.
The Lord does not have calendars that He pulls off a January and puts up a February, and shifts and change dispensationally like that. He has dispensations, but those dispensations have to do with people, not with calendars. They have to do with spiritual experience, not with calendars. So when they were to enter a new era it was not only to be a change over from one dispensation to another. It was to be introduced by a coming down of a new afflatus from above. Something was to come that had not been there before. And it was to enter them and possess them. It was to bring God to them in a way He was not with them then, and was to enter them and dwell there.
That is the difference between Christianity and all of the oriental cults and occult religions. The occult religions try to wake up what you already have. Christianity says, what you have isn’t enough; I’m going to send an enduement from above that shall enter you and be to you what you lack. There is the difference.
They say, “Wake up your solar plexus,” which is one religion. I do not even know where mine is. I could not even locate the thing. Then they say, “Stir up the thing that is in you.” What is the use? If there were four or five lions coming, you could not say to a little French poodle, “Wake up the lion in you.” That would not work. They would chew the poor little fellow up and swallow him, haircut and all, because a French poodle just is not sufficient for the lion. If God wanted a French poodle to fight a lion, He would have to put the heart and body of the lion in the poodle. He would have to make him bigger and stronger than his opponent.
That is exactly what the Holy Spirit says He does. But the occult religion says, concentrate and free your mind and release the creative powers that lie in you and you will be all right. The simple fact is creative powers do not lie in us. We begin to die the moment we are born.
You and I do not have hidden potentials, creative impulses, and all that kind of stuff in us. We walk around on the earth barely able to keep going. As we get older, the gravitational pull slowly drags us down and humps us over. Finally, we give up one day with a sigh and go back to Mother Earth. That is the kind of potential we have. We have the potential to be a corpse. God Almighty says, “I do not want to wake up the power that lies in you. Ye shall receive the power of the Holy Spirit coming upon you.” That is a different thing altogether, my friend.
If we only need to be awakened, the Lord would simply have gone around waking us up. But we needed more than just to be awakened. We need to be endued with power from on high.
They were to enter a new era and it was to mark something grandly new and an enriched spiritual condition. What difference did this make? What difference did it make to these disciples?
Let me point out some things it did not do. We must rule out as evidence all the blessings they had before. Because, obviously anything they had before, the Spirit did not bring when He came.
For instance, they were true disciples and they had a consciousness of true discipleship. They were the Lord’s own loving disciples. That did not come at Pentecost. That had been before. They were converted and forgiven and had fellowship with Christ and they had something a lot of people, even ministers, now do not have. They had the gift of preaching and went around everywhere preaching. And they had power to work miracles. Such a power that they came back saying, “Lord, even the devils are under our power when we go out.” The Lord told them to be glad their names were written in heaven. He did not say they did not have the power. He knew they did. He gave it to them.
Some say that if you are filled with the Spirit you will have a miracle, forgetting they had miracles before they were filled with the Spirit.
As I shall try to show, the power of the Holy Spirit is not necessary to make miracle workers. The power of the Holy Spirit is something infinitely higher, grander and more wonderful than that. They worked miracles before the Spirit ever came.
What Difference Did the Holy Spirit Make?
Here were the disciples in the book of John. Then there was a sudden change and the disciples were in the book of Acts and spilled over into the epistles and Revelation. What difference was there? Was there a difference? There was a time when they were pre-Pentecost then came the outpouring of the Spirit and they were post-Pentecost. What was the difference?
Let me point out seven things the Holy Spirit did for them. I believe in searching the Scripture to see if these things are true. And if they are true, amen and if not then it would make no difference who said they were. I could get up here and talk from now until the end of this century, and if I were not preaching according to the Scripture there would not be a bit of truth in what I have said.
The first is a sudden brilliant consciousness of God being actually present. They had this. They knew Jesus and loved Jesus; but now, when the Holy Spirit came upon them, they had a sudden consciousness; brilliant consciousness of God being actually present. A veil was raised and they felt God. A sense of acute God-consciousness was on them from that time on. They knew themselves to be in immediate contact with another world.
My brethren, that is exactly what the average Gospel church does not have today. We are not in contact with another world. We are very happily in contact with this world. But those disciples were other-worldly. Many liberals have made fun of that hyphenated expression “other-worldly.” They say, “You are so everlastingly good you are no good. You are so heavenly you are no good on earth.”
The day will come when God will judge every man out of his own mouth. I believe in being other-worldly. That is, I believe that a sense of God and heaven ought to be upon us. We ought to live in that. Day by day whether we are businessmen or farmers or schoolteachers or whatever we are, we ought to have this sense of heaven upon us.
I can tell you that only the Holy Spirit can give, bring, impart and maintain that sense of the divine presence. There was a sudden freshness of seeing and hearing and feeling that came on these disciples. As if, a cloud had been rolled back and the city of God, before unsuspected and unseen, now suddenly became clearly visible before their eyes. There was a word that entered then, found in the book of Acts, the word wonder. So they wondered. The word “wonder” occurred so much.
The church these days does not have any sense of wonder. Have you noticed that? No sense of wonderment. You can explain everything. There is a constant note of joyous surprise in the book of Acts and on over in the epistles. They were being surprised by God. There was a note of wonder; they were amazed at what God was doing. He was blessing them to the point where He was amazing them.
One dear man said, “God is so good to me that it scares me. God is so good to me that it amazes me and frightens me.” That is what I mean. That came to these disciples and it is a spirit, a quality that lies upon them from that time on.
The second difference the Holy Spirit made was He gave them the joy of the Holy Ghost. That is, a change of emotional tone came at once. In the Four Gospels, there is not too much joy. There is instruction and a lot of subdued and quiet joy, or at least peace. However, there is not the joy there. When we get over into the book of Acts, it changes from the minor key into the major. Have you ever heard the old Jewish songs sung in a minor key? I like to hear them. They are somewhat sad and gloomy, and if you sing them long enough I suppose you would break down. The point is that they are joyless. They groan, moan, plead and long, but they never arrive at anything.
I am thinking about God’s dear people always praying for joy and praying for light and praying for every benediction, and yet they do not get it. They want to pray for it Sunday all day long and then Sunday night go home and sigh, and go to bed and give up, and come back and do the same thing over again. The nearest thing that illustrates that is a story the old Greeks told.
In Greek mythology, old Zeus punished Sisyphus by sending him to limbo or whatever kind of hell the Greeks had. Here is what he had to do throughout eternity. They gave him a great big rock and told him to roll it to the top of the hill. He rolled it, sweating and struggling and pushing and bruising his shoulder. He rolled the rock up within an inch or two of the top and just when he got near the top, he slipped and fell. The rock rolled back to the bottom and he had to go back and do it all over again. He would have that to do through eternity as a punishment for his sin.
The fellow who thought that out had a little preview of hell, for the frustration, the disappointment, the labor without reward that must be there. Surely, they must have had some vision of hell. But I hate to think that it gets among the Christians. We ought to know better. Christians work themselves up Sunday, then go back down, and start all over on a lower level on Monday. Perhaps they work themselves up a little on Wednesday night, but the point is, it never seems to stick. The bell loses its clapper. It does not ring any more.
The happiness of these disciples was the happiness of the Holy Ghost. God sang, and the Scripture says that we are to be filled with the Spirit singing. Singing and making melody in your hearts unto the Lord. Choirs ought not to sing for churches, they ought to sing for the Lord and let the church hear. That is the way it is when the Holy Ghost is in control. We are to be filled with the Holy Ghost, singing unto the Lord, and the people hear. Then they are blessed while we sing unto the Lord.
The happiness of these people was not the happiness of Adam. It was not the happiness of nature. When we try to work nature up to happiness, a child can be happy.
We work up a joy of some sort. We try to get joy in our hearts and we try it in dance halls, in rock and roll sessions. I do not own a TV but when I am around a hotel, I look at one. I have seen some of those young people rocking and rolling and I never saw a happy face yet. They seem to be in a cold trance of some sort. That is the effort to work Adam up into joy. Adam is not basically happy because Adam has to die and go back to earth again, and go to hell unless he is converted through the blood. The human race is anything but happy, so we work ourselves up.
The joy of the Holy Ghost is not worked up. The joy of the Holy Ghost is that which comes to the heart. It is a post-resurrection joy. You see, Christ came out of the grave and the Spirit of the Risen Christ comes back to His people; and the joy we have is the joy that looks back on death, not the joy that we have in spite of the fact we have to die. But the joy we have is a result of the fact that, in Christ, we already died and rose, and there is no death out there for the true child of God.
There was the joy of the Holy Ghost and there is the third, the power of their words to penetrate and arrest. I do not have to tell you there is a difference between the penetrating power of words. Even the same words and the same sentence spoken by one man will put you under conviction, spoken by another man leaves you completely cold. The Holy Spirit makes that difference. He said, “Ye shall be endued with power,” and the word power there means the ability to do.
When Peter preached at Pentecost, they were stricken in their hearts when they heard him. They were pierced, stricken through in their hearts and they said, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?”
If you will look at the second chapter of Acts, you will see what it says there. They were pricked in their hearts and said unto Peter, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” That Pricking in Their Heart
When it says in the Gospel of John that the soldier pierced the heart of Jesus, the word used, pierced, is not as strong a word as the word pricked. It is a stronger word in the original. In other words, the words of Peter at Pentecost went further into the hearts of the hearers then the spear went into the heart of Jesus. The word is a stronger word, not in English but in Greek. The Holy Spirited penetrated, and that is one of the works of the Holy Spirit. He comes and penetrates; He sharpens the point of the arrows of the man of God.
D. L. Moody said he preached the same sermons after he was filled with the Spirit. “I didn’t change sermons but, what a difference.” Moody had the power that penetrated. Before he simply tried to reason with people, beg them and coax them to come. Now a divine penetration went straight through, passed their reasoning power into their heart.
They had, fourth, a clear sense of the reality of everything. You noticed that in the Four Gospels, they were asking questions and in the book of Acts, they were answering questions. That is the difference. That is the difference between a Spirit-filled man and one that is not. The man of God, the preacher that is not Spirit-filled makes a great deal, and one of his phrases is likely to be “and now let us ask ourselves this question.” Have you ever heard this from the pulpit? I have often wondered why the reverend wanted to ask himself a question. Why didn’t he settle that at home before he came to church? Always asking questions. “And, now, what shall we say?”
Brother, God never put a preacher in the pulpit to ask questions; he put a preacher in the pulpit to answer questions. He put him there with authority to stand up in the name of God to speak and answer questions. Back in the Gospels, they were always asking questions. “Lord, shall it be? Lord how shall it be? Lord, who? Lord, what?” But when they got to the book of Acts, they began to answer questions. And they stood with authority. The same Peter that sneaked around, warmed his hand at the world’s fire, and lied to the little woman that recognized his accent. He was standing boldly to preach the word of the Lord. That was the difference. There was authority there. That is our trouble.
I know there ought to be a lot more authority in the pulpit than there is. A preacher ought to reign from the pulpit as a king from his throne. Not by law, not by regulations, or not by board meetings and annual meetings only, although I believe in them too. He ought to by moral ascendancy. When a man of God stands to speak, he ought to have the authority of God on him so he makes the people responsible to listen to him. When they do not listen to him, they are accountable to God for turning down the divine word. Instead of that, we have a lot of tabby-cats with their claws carefully trimmed in the seminary. They can paw over their congregations and never scratch them at all. They have had their claws trimmed. They are just as soft and sweet.
I believe in the authority of God. And I believe if a man does not have it, he ought to go away somewhere and wait until he gets the authority. Then stand up to speak if he has to begin by preaching on a soapbox on a street corner or go to a rescue mission and preach with authority. They had it in those days. When they stood up, there was authority there.
Then, a sharp separation between them and the world. I suppose I ought to skip that. On their part, they were seeing another world. They were looking at another world. They really saw another world. Nowadays, evangelical Christianity is trying to convert this world to the Church. Bringing it in, head over heels, world and all. Unregenerated, uncleansed, unshriven, unbaptised, unsanctified ... bringing the world right into the church. If you can just get a big-shot to say something nice about the church, they rush into print, usually in bad English, and tell about this fellow. What nice things he said. I do not give a hoot about big-shots because I serve a living Savior and Jesus Christ is Lord of lords and King of kings. He picked up a farm boy from the hills of Pennsylvania, anointed my head with oil and said, “Go out and tell them.”
And I have been telling them. I do not care whether people listen, but they will know a prophet has been among them. I believe every man ought to have this authority, this separation, that will make him see another world. If there is any converting, it is going to be a one-way street. The world is going to come to us; we are not going to the world.
Then another thing; they took a great delight in prayer. The only one who could stay awake praying in the Gospels was Jesus. Others tried to pray but they came to Him and said, “Teach us to pray.” But He knew you could not teach anybody to pray. They are giving courses on how to pray, today. How ridiculous. It is like giving a course on how to fall in love. No, when the Holy Spirit comes, He takes the things of God and translates them into language our hearts understand. Even if we do not know the will of God, the Holy Ghost does, and He prays with groanings that cannot be uttered.
These disciples were praying people. They were always praying somewhere, always off somewhere praying. Before that, they would fall asleep. Now, nobody was sleeping. They had a great delight in prayer.
And a passionate love for the Scriptures. This is the seventh thought. Did you know that Jesus quoted the Scriptures in the Gospels but the disciples quoted the Scriptures in the Acts? There was the difference.
I remember a dear saint of God who said once, years ago, “When I was filled with the Spirit I loved the Scriptures so much that if I could have gotten more of the word inside me by eating it I would have eaten the book, leather and everything, if I could have gotten more of the book inside my heart.” You do not get it by eating it, although Ezekiel was told to eat the roll. And so the woman had some Scriptural authority for what she said.
But, the word of God is sweet to the Spirit-filled person because the Spirit wrote the Scriptures. You cannot read the Scriptures with the spirit of Adam, for the Spirit of God inspired them. The spirit of the world does not appreciate the Scriptures. It is the Spirit of God that appreciates the Scriptures. One little flash of the Holy Ghost will give you more inward divine illumination on the meaning of the text then all the commentators that ever commentated. Yet I have commentaries. I am not talking against things. I am only trying to show you that if you have everything and have not the fullness of the Holy Ghost, you are nothing. When you have the Holy Spirit, then God may use anything and everything. He uses boards and ladies praying groups and commentators and all the rest.
But we try to get along without the Holy Spirit and that is the terrible thing. How different it is today, the contrast. We live by hearsay. A vague sense of reality and wonder is missing.
The Moravians were just quiet people like you and me. But they waited one morning and suddenly, as they waited and prepared their hearts, something came which they called a “sense of the loving nearness of the Savior instantaneously bestowed.”
When the Holy Spirit is allowed, and when He does have particular intimacy with the human soul, He never talks about Himself; He talks about the Lord Jesus Christ for He came to reveal Jesus.
The Holy Ghost fell on that Moravian crowd in 1727. They did not say a sense of the loving nearness of the Spirit, but a sense of the loving nearness of the Savior instantaneously bestowed. Zinzendorf said, “That group of seventy-five German Christians arose and went out from that building so happy, that they did not know whether they were on earth or had already gone to heaven.” The historian says that the result of that was that in twenty short years, those Spirit-filled Moravians did more for world missions than all the church put together had done in 200 years. They made missionaries out of them. In Hurenhut, they went up, had a prayer chamber and divided it into four-hour segments, so that they kept prayer going twenty-four hours a day for one hundred years. “What happened?” I will tell you what happened. John Wesley was crossing the ocean from the United States to England, when they came into a storm and even the sailors got scared. There was one little group that did not get scared. They huddled together and sang hymns with shining faces. They were the Moravians. And John Wesley said to them, “Why aren’t you praying? Why are you so happy?”
They said, “If the Lord wills to have us all drowned, sudden death will be sudden glory.”
This dignified Anglican did not know what to make of that, but it went very deep. He went over and found his brother Charles had already been converted. He went to Peter Bowler, the Moravian and said, “Brother Peter, I don’t have what you have and I don’t have what my brother Charles has. What will I do?”
“Well,” he said, “it is by grace, brother, its all by grace.”
“Well,” Wesley said, “I don’t have the grace. What should I do, quit preaching?”
“No,” he said, “preach grace because it’s in the Bible till you get it, and then after you get it, preach it because you have it.”
You all know the story of Aldersgate Street, when John Wesley felt his heart strangely warmed. It is too much known about to mention. Do you know, that wasn’t the end of it? Not only did Methodism encircle the globe; the Salvation Army was born out of that. That same Pentecostal outpouring in 1727 spilled over, and the Salvation Army was born out of that as well as the Christian and Missionary Alliance.
Out of the direct descent from the Pentecost that came to the German Christians, back there when the Holy Spirit came on them, bestowed a sense of the loving nearness of Jesus and made them so happy they did not know whether they were on earth or had gone to heaven. They were good, well-behaved Germans but the Holy Ghost came where He ought to be, inside of them. He made Jesus so real that they were so happy they could hardly stay alive.
That is what we need here. We need this.
Oh, may God grant it. Do you want God to do that for us? Do you want God to do that for me, for us? I do. That is the difference the Holy Spirit makes.