I know it can be awkward to visit a new church. We try to make it a little less awkward or maybe a little more. I don't know.
But we have some coffee and snacks in the lobby. You're welcome to help yourself.
And if you're going to be in kids' church, this is a great time to go. It looks like they're already gone.
So that wasn't helpful. I'm trying.
Anyway, if you're listening online, I'd especially like to welcome you this morning.
I'm glad that you're with us, and I believe that God can bless you right where you are.
I don't have any announcements.
We just have the men's and women's Bible study ongoing in the background if you'd like to join those.
And I will pray for the offering.
We're not going to pass a plate or a bucket or put anybody on the spot.
We have a box in the back, or you can give online with a little QR code,
and you can make your checks out to Two Rivers Church.
They're the ones that have so graciously helped us get this started.
So I'll pray for the offering.
Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you that every good and every perfect gift comes from you.
We thank you for every way that you provide for our needs, our physical needs, our financial needs.
We thank you for wages, bonuses, gifts, and other sources of increase that you bring into our lives.
And we just seek to honor you in our tithes and our offerings.
Lord, so we thank you for the opportunity to give and to sow a seed in the kingdom of God.
And we're thankful that it may leave our hands, but it will never leave our life.
In Jesus' mighty name, amen.
Hallelujah.
So we're going to be in Acts 2 this morning.
We're going to be talking about Pentecost.
This is an exciting topic.
It's kind of a turning point after Easter and kind of a turning point in our whole series that we're in about living in the supernatural world.
Have you ever been somewhere and you didn't understand the language?
Maybe you were traveling and everybody's speaking a language that you don't know.
And yeah, Sharon, very much so.
This is very fresh for you.
Maybe you were in another place or another country where you didn't understand what people were doing.
And it was very strange to you.
You didn't understand why there were no toilets, for example.
You don't understand why people eat what they eat, do what they do, walk the way they walk.
Or maybe you were in a room where you just didn't understand what the topic was they were talking about.
Like maybe they were talking about golf.
And you're just sitting there and you think, everybody knows this stuff about golf.
I know nothing about golf.
So you have this feeling of being surrounded and at a certain point you can feel, maybe I don't belong here.
You ever felt that?
You're present.
You're in the room.
You're near people.
But you're not inside of what is happening around you.
And you can hear what's being said but it's not reaching you.
It's not touching you.
And you see, language and culture, they have this way of doing that, don't they?
You can be in the same room but feel very distant.
Sometimes language can close that.
I've seen people that were here visiting from other countries and you know a little bit of their language.
You start talking to them and all of a sudden they feel at ease.
And they feel at home.
So language has a power to create distance.
And it has a power to bring people together.
I think that's what makes Pentecost so interesting and so beautiful.
You know, we think about Pentecost and we think about tongues and fire and power and all of this spiritual intensity and all of that was there.
But there's so much more going on.
I think it's a turning point in the saving, redemptive work of God.
And to understand Pentecost, we have to go back and take a look at Babel.
We talked about that maybe six weeks ago.
We talked about the Tower of Babel and how that was a rebellion.
And at Babel, humanity was grasping beyond.
They were grasping for a name for themselves.
They were grasping for security and they were trying to create some sense of unity apart from God.
And at Pentecost, we see Christ pouring out the Holy Spirit.
He's bridging this gap of language and culture.
And he starts gathering back together what our sin had scattered at Babel.
So I want to give a little bit of a review on Babel and then we'll get into our text in Acts 2.
Genesis 11, I'll kind of cruise through this quickly.
But it says,
The whole earth had a common language and a common vocabulary.
When the people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
Then they said to one another,
Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.
They had brick instead of stone and tar instead of mortar.
That's important.
Then they said,
Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens
so that we may make a name for ourselves.
Otherwise, we will be scattered across the face of the whole earth.
Now, right away, you can tell the story is not about architecture.
They want a name.
They want a sense of security and a sense of permanence.
They want a human future that they have some control over, right?
Ever felt that?
And you see this rebellion.
They want all of it without God.
You don't see them asking for God to bless them or help them or do anything or give them a vision.
They're manufacturing all of this themselves.
They don't even use stone, which is something that God made.
They make their own bricks.
It's all like stuff that they made.
You see this.
I get a sense they had a sort of technological pride, if you're with me.
I don't have time to unpack that today, but you see that there's a pride in what they were able to do and build and accomplish without God.
So that is Babel.
And they have this fear.
Otherwise, we'll be scattered.
Now, I don't see a reason, I don't see a precedence for that fear anywhere in the text.
It's like something they almost made up.
So they're gathering themselves into one place, had this one project and this proud act of, I guess, human consolidation.
And then the Lord has to come down and look at it because it obviously didn't achieve what they intended.
It's almost ironic that God has to come down and look at it.
So he comes down, takes a look at it, and a judgment happens and he scatters them and confuses their languages.
And it's a fitting judgment for what they were trying to accomplish.
And it gives us an explanation, not just why there's so many languages and cultures, but it's an explanation of what sin does.
Sin scatters people. Sin separates people.
It separates humanity from God and it separates humanity from one another.
So a separation in the vertical and in the horizontal.
And, you know, some of us, we can live this today.
Some of us are scattered in our inward life.
Our heart can be divided. Our love can be divided and disordered.
Our minds can be restless.
We can be pulled in all kinds of directions at once.
And we can be scattered outwardly.
We can be scattered relationally with the people around us.
And we can be scattered vertically in our relationship with God.
But Babel shows us something really important about humanity is that when we're left to ourselves,
how we don't make the greatest choices.
And we don't heal ourselves.
We deepen our own wounds and our own sin.
But thankfully, Babel is not the end.
So Abraham comes along and God makes a promise to Abraham.
This is in Genesis 12.
He says to Abraham,
Then I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you and I will make your name great.
So that you will exemplify divine blessing.
So you see a similar promise coming to Abraham.
I will bless those who bless you, but the one who treats you lightly I must curse.
So that all the families of the earth, I underline that part, may receive blessing through you.
So, all the way back to Abraham, we see God starting to answer this rebellion and this issue that came up at Babel.
You see, at Babel, humanity was grasping for a name for themselves and then God gives Abraham a name through this promise.
You see, God had to carry out some kind of judgment, but he never gave up his purpose.
God never said, well, I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I'm going to give up my purpose for my people.
He never gives up that purpose.
He works around it.
He works around our sin.
He works around our rebellion.
And even after our rebellion, here he is, a chapter later, coming up with a new blessing.
A new way to bring people together.
And a new way to give people mercy.
So Genesis 12 shows us a lot about the character of God.
That the nations may be scattered, but he has not forgotten them.
And they're not outside the reach of God's purpose.
So that should show us, when we look at Acts 2, that Pentecost is not this isolated, like New Testament moment of God doing something that's so surprising.
I think it's just a fulfillment and a continuation of the promise that God had given to Abraham.
So in Acts chapter 2, I'll just start reading that.
Now when the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.
That sounds familiar.
Suddenly a sound like a violent wind came from heaven and filled the entire house where they were sitting.
And tongues spreading out like a fire appeared to them and came to rest on each one of them.
All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and they began speaking in other languages as the Spirit enabled them.
Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven residing in Jerusalem.
When this sound occurred, a crowd gathered and was in confusion because each one heard them speaking in his own language.
Completely baffled, they said, aren't all these who are speaking Galileans?
And how is it that each one of us hears them in our own native language?
Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, and Capodicea, Pontus, and the province of Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphlet, Egypt, and the other parts of Libya near Cyrene, and visitors from Rome.
And here's what they're talking about.
About the great deeds God has done.
All were astounded and greatly confused, saying to one another, what does this mean?
But others jeered at the speakers, saying they are drunk a new wine.
So you see the parallels to Babel.
You see the languages, you see all these different people together, but everything is almost reversed.
It's coming down from heaven to the people.
They didn't do anything to earn it, anything to deserve it.
It's a total reversal.
And there's this sound, the sound of this rushing wind, and they all get filled with the Holy Spirit.
They start speaking in languages that somehow they can understand one another.
And there's a great emphasis on these people are from everywhere.
Verse 5, Luke tells us that they were from every nation under heaven.
And I think Luke is telling us how to interpret this event.
He's saying this is not just some private spiritual experience, you know, for the disciples or this small group of people or the people gathered at the church.
This was a public event.
It was a redemptive historical event, and it was for everyone.
And Luke makes this list, he goes out of his way to list all these different nations where people are from,
because I think he wants us to feel the scope of what was happening.
And what do they hear?
Verse 11, it says,
About the great deeds that God has done.
So this is not just a spectacle for its own sake.
It's not God putting on a show.
There's so much more here.
It's a revelation that God is being proclaimed to people that God has never really been proclaimed to before.
And it was all about him.
It was all about his mighty works.
And now he's being heard among the nations.
And you see at Babel, language had become a sign of judgment and a sign of human sin and scattering.
But here we have Pentecost language becomes a sign that God is speaking to everyone.
And Peter gives us his little sermon here.
He opens up the scriptures at verse 17, Acts 2, 17.
It says,
And in the last days it will be, God says, that I will pour out my spirit on all people.
And your sons and your daughters will prophesy.
And your young men will see visions.
And your old men will dream dreams.
Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days.
It doesn't just say that day and it was over.
It says those days.
And they will prophesy.
In verse 21 it says,
And then everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.
Hallelujah.
So Pentecost is so much more than just this miracle of tongues.
It is the arrival of this whole promised age of the spirit.
Jesus said, I'm going to send you a helper, a comforter, an advocate.
I'm going to send that.
And this is, this outpouring that Jesus had promised them, it had come.
It was this day it started.
And Peter doesn't stop there, being a man of many words.
He goes on to preach about Jesus.
Verse 22 it says,
The men of Israel listen to these words.
Jesus the Nazarene, a man clearly attested to you by God with powerful deeds, wonders, and miraculous signs that God performed among you through him, just as you yourselves know.
This man who was handed over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you executed by nailing him to a cross at the hands of the Gentiles.
But God raised him up, having released him from the pains of death, because it was not possible for him to be held in its power.
So they are seeing firsthand the evidence that Jesus is reigning in heaven.
Because he said, I'm going to go and I'm going to send a helper.
That was the Holy Spirit.
He promised this.
And they are hearing and experiencing for themselves the public proof that the crucified Jesus is God.
They are seeing that for themselves.
So Pentecost is not just, you know, an ecstatic experience, a spiritual experience.
You know, the mockers were sitting there saying, oh, well, they're just drunk on new wine.
That means they made wine.
They hadn't cut it down.
They always cut the wine with water.
So it was a little stronger than what they were used to.
They were saying they're drunk.
And that was it.
Verse 32 says,
So you see, Jesus is not absent from Pentecost.
He is the very reason that it is happening.
And he is making this announcement through Pentecost that Jesus is Lord.
And through this event, he is gathering what sin had destroyed and scattered.
He is now gathering back to gather.
Now, at this point, I think it would be easy to keep this whole thing at a level of, you know, redemptive history,
to look at the arc of history and God walking with humanity and not to make it personal
and not to let it touch us and not let it be relevant to where we are today.
But I don't think that the story allows for that.
Ephesians 2.13 says,
But now in Christ Jesus, you, who used to be far away, have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
So the gathering of the nations is not just a global concept.
It becomes very personal.
And, you know, some of us have areas of our lives that have been scattered in the past.
And some of them are still scattered and God is working on those things.
And, you know, we can have a divided loyalty between Christ and the things of this world and of ourselves.
And we can be fragmented and scattered by anxiety and sin and pride and bitterness and all kinds of things.
And we can have a scattered or a split mindset.
And we can even be near things that seem religious and yet be far from God.
And I think what Pentecost is really saying is that God is not indifferent to that distance.
And he comes speaking and he comes calling and he comes drawing people back in.
You know, Christianity is not a story of us making our way up to God.
Somehow climbing and making a way for ourselves to get to God.
It's never been about that.
It's always been the story about God drawing near to us.
Despite of ourselves, despite of how we've fallen short and rebelled and tried to build our own towers
and to build things in our own pride, it's still the story of God coming to us.
And the deepest truth about Christianity is not that we somehow ascended to God,
but that he came to us while we were still sinners, while we were still broken,
while we were still rebelling and angry and sinning.
He came to us.
Christ died for us.
He defeated the devil for us.
He rose and he reigns for us.
And he poured out his spirit for us.
And it's amazing that Christ still wants to work in us and through us.
Not because of us.
Not because we're great, but because he is great.
Because Jesus is Lord and Jesus is King.
So the question is not just what happened at Pentecost as a historical theological event.
The question is, have I received the mercy that God was so willingly and so eagerly bringing forward?
Have I come to Christ fully?
Have I invited the Holy Spirit into my life?
Have I stopped trying to make a name for myself?
Have I stopped building these little Babel projects out of pride and self-promotion and importance and control?
Or am I still somehow trying to secure an identity through these things?
Through my own righteousness, my own abilities?
And am I seeking a way that maybe I seek my own safety apart from him?
Because Babel is not just an ancient city.
It represents so much more.
I think it represents the temptations that we face every day to put other things in place of God.
And every time I try to secure myself apart from God's grace, somehow Babel comes alive in me.
Lord, help me.
That every time I try to make my name great, I am somehow building that Babel, right?
It's when I would rather build my own thing than trust God.
When I would rather control something than repent.
When I would rather perform than receive from God, somehow Babel finds a way of living in me.
And Pentecost is confronting that.
Pentecost says, stop building your own name.
Stop striving.
And stop trying to ascend to me in your own strength.
Acts 2.37 says,
When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart.
Your Bible might say they were convicted.
I like cut to the heart.
And said to Peter and the other apostles,
Brothers, what shall we do?
And if Pentecost was just an experience, Peter's sermon would not end like this.
It wouldn't end with a conviction.
And then comes the call, verse 38.
Peter says to them,
Repent, and each one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.
And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
For the promises for you and your children and for all who are far away,
as many as the Lord our God will call to himself.
You see, the deepest truth about us is not our background.
It's not where we came from.
It's not the way we were raised.
It's not the color of our skin.
It's not our tribe.
It's none of those things.
And it's not because these things are insignificant.
It's not because our culture disappears.
It's not because our background disappears or our language disappears.
It's not because these are meaningless things.
But none of them define how we access God.
None of them separate us into groups that God somehow treats differently.
That across culture and language, across appearances, across the color of our skin,
we're all the same to God.
The deepest truth about us is that we belong to Christ and we have his spirit.
So how do we respond to that?
First, I think we can repent of Babel and what it represents in our own hearts.
I don't think we can just read the story of Babel and think,
well, it's about an ancient people that lived a long, long time ago that had nothing to do with me.
I wasn't there. I don't have anything to do with it.
But I read that story and in a lot of ways I see myself, my temptation,
and I see our culture represented at that moment in Babel.
And I read that story and I think, well, we're not so different, you and I.
We're not so different.
And I think that the same thinking that they fell into that deceived them
has the ability today to deceive us.
So many times Jesus said, don't be deceived.
And I think that it represents the urge to build ourselves up and establish ourselves
and to make a name and to protect that name and defend that name and that reputation that we have.
And I think the gospel calls us to say no to that.
That we can stop trying to secure ourselves through our performance.
What God is already freely giving us through Christ.
I think that it's easy to take a religious mindset and feel like, well, I'm doing something for God.
And I want to leave a legacy of doing things for God.
I think that's an especially tempting trap for someone who's in ministry.
Or serving in the church to think, wow, I'm going to do these things for God.
But we cannot build a spiritual identity out of what we've done.
Because just as easily as it is to do things for God, it's easy, well, if I can look at all the things I've done for God,
well, now I have to take into account all the things I've done against God.
Well, now I have an accounting problem.
Right?
So this isn't about the things that we do.
And we cannot build an identity out of pride.
And we cannot make peace outside of what God is giving us.
But we can start living in God's peace.
And we can start living in a sense of security that everything that we need,
Jesus has already established for us.
That we don't have to strive and work.
We don't have to make a name for ourselves.
We don't have to somehow climb our way to heaven like they were doing with this Tower of Babel.
That we can just rest and know and be still.
And know that God is in control and in charge.
Number two, we can receive the mercy of being brought near to God.
I think it's easy to live as if God were speaking from a distance.
I remember when I was young and we had a rotary telephone on the wall.
And they got a really long cord for it.
Because there was one phone in the whole house.
I got some nods here.
And they got this little spirally cord.
And it was so long that they could take the telephone into the other room and close the door.
Right? You guys remember that, right?
And where was I going with this?
Anyway, some people live as if God were speaking from a distance.
Right?
And Christ is drawing so close through this event at Pentecost.
He wants to literally dwell within us.
And he wants to dwell within us richly and abundantly.
And he's not just using this to send a message or theological information.
And he is literally imparting his spirit to us.
And he's actually not far from any one of us.
For in him we live and we move and we have our being.
Amen.
So we can receive the mercy of being brought near to God.
Number three, we can reflect upon the story of Babel and the story of Pentecost.
And we can ask ourselves, well, where is my life scattered or divided or separated from God?
You know, where am I divided in my thought life?
Where is my love and my affection misplaced or disordered?
What am I hoping will happen that will somehow fix all the problems in my life?
Where am I living in contradiction and disagreement in my own thought?
Or where am I trying to keep a part of my life for Christ, this religious part?
And then this other part that's me and myself over here.
So I pray that you can read the story of Pentecost and see that God is trying to reconcile these things,
that he's trying to bring these things together.
And you can ask him to make your heart whole and intact where your life is still scattered.
Number four, you can live as one who has been gathered by grace.
You see, if God is the one that brought you near when you were far off,
then pride about your walk with God is completely out of place.
Pride of religion is completely out of place.
You see, God came and he found me when I wasn't looking.
How many of you had that experience?
I wasn't looking.
I wasn't interested.
I hated God.
Wasn't interested.
Had nothing to do with God.
But somehow through a friend of mine, he drew me close.
And this friend of mine was determined to somehow share the gospel with me.
It took him a while.
And one day, by the grace of God, that took hold in my heart and I was transformed by God.
But I wasn't looking.
I wasn't interested.
He came to me.
I didn't have to reach out to him and grasp and strive and earn my way to him.
So, when I talk about drawing near, it's not theoretical, it's personal.
And I experienced that act of God's mercy for myself and I think many of you have experienced that act of mercy too.
And if everything that we have in our life is mercy, if everything is given by God, if everything is provided by God, if our very relationship with God itself was not our own choosing and our own act, then there's nothing to be proud of.
There's nothing to claim for ourselves.
There's nothing for us to say, oh, well, I'm going to make my name great.
That's what they were doing at the Tower of Babel.
But our life should be about humility and patience and peace.
You see, Pentecost should make us gentler and more thankful and more patient and more ready to forgive.
And more aware that none of us got here by our own strength.
And that is an easy area to be deceived.
I mean, there are so many smart people in this world and in this room.
And there's so many things that we are capable of doing in our own strength.
But at a certain point, that strength is not enough.
And we need Jesus.
And we need the power of the Holy Spirit.
Amen?
One more Bible verse and I'll be done here.
Revelation 7.
This is kind of how the whole thing ends, I think.
Revelation 7, verse 9.
It says,
You see, this is the moment, I think, that Pentecost is pointing towards.
You know, Pentecost is not the finish line.
It was a turning point.
It was the beginning of people being gathered back together.
And the final picture of redemption is not us having an isolated spirituality.
A spirituality that's like just me and Jesus.
A spirituality that, well, I'll watch online.
Right?
But it's a group of people from every nation, every tribe, people, language, cultures,
united before Jesus.
That means there might be some people there that you don't understand.
Or that you don't like.
Right?
But that's the last word.
It's all people, all tribes gathered under one Savior.
You see, scattering is not the last word.
Gathering is.
And judgment is not the last word.
Forgiveness and mercy is the last word.
So what is Pentecost?
See, I don't think it's just a novel spiritual moment.
It sure is interesting.
It sure is fascinating.
But it's so much more than that.
It is the public sign that Christ was pouring out his spirit for all people.
And he was gathering people back to himself.
It's about people being drawn near.
It's about people being gathered and reconciled.
And it's about Christ making a people of his own.
And it was about not standing far from God but being near to him.
Not just admiring God from a distance.
Or admiring the idea of God or the thought of God or the philosophy of God.
But knowing God and being in his presence.
And it was an invitation to lay down your pride, your reputation, your selfish ambition,
the Babel projects, and to receive mercy from God bringing you near.
And if you have never experienced that,
if being near to God is a foreign concept to you,
I encourage you that today can be the day that you place your faith in God.
That you know God for yourself.
Not second-hand, but for yourself.
And we'd be glad to pray with you and answer any questions you may have about what that is like.
And how to go about that.
We'd also be glad to pray for anyone after the service for healing or breakthrough in your life.
I believe that God is able to do exceedingly abundantly beyond anything that we can ever ask for or imagine.
And I believe that he can meet you in this place this morning.
So we'd be glad to minister to you after service.
So dear Heavenly Father, we thank you that your spirit was poured out for us.
Lord, that even when we were a long way off,
that you came looking for us and running to us with your mercy, with your Holy Spirit.
And Lord, I pray that nothing separates us from your love.
Lord, we thank you that you are always near.
And that you are always available to help us and to minister us and to care for us.
Lord, I just pray for each and every person gathered here this morning.
That your joy and your peace can abound in them and abound in their households and everyone they come into contact with.
As you gather all of your people back to you.
So Lord, I pray that you can bless their hands as they work.
That you can bring peace and hope and joy into every household represented here.
Lord, I pray that your healing spirit ministers to people.
That healing is made manifest today.
Today, Lord, that you bring relief today.
That you bring breakthrough today, Lord.
And we thank you.
And we praise you.
And we honor you for what you do in our lives that we could never possibly do for ourselves.
And we thank you that we can know you as our Lord and as our King.
In Jesus' mighty name.
And everyone said, Amen.
God bless you guys.
We'll see you next Sunday.
If you'd like prayer or ministry, we'd be glad to minister to you up front after service.
