It is remarkable that in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark the only reference to the Holy Spirit in the life of a disciple is in connection with his witness to Jesus.
Matthew 10:20, "You will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear testimony before them, and the Gentiles. When they deliver you up, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say. For what you are to say will be given to you in that hour; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you."
Mark 13:11 says much the same: "Say whatever is given you in that hour, for it is not you who speak but the Holy Spirit."
Very soon after Pentecost, when the Spirit was given, the Apostles proved out the promise Jesus had made. After the healing of the cripple by the Gate Beautiful in the Jerusalem Temple, Peter and John were dragged before the Sanhedrin, the governing body of Israel, to answer for the stir they had created, and Luke observes that Peter, as he rose to reply, was "filled with the Holy Spirit." (Acts 4:8) The effect his testimony had is stated very simply, "Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished; and they recognised that they had been with Jesus." (Acts 4:13)
Soon, it will be said of Stephen, "they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he spoke." (Acts 6:10) It did not persuade them, mind you, nor did it save Stephen's life. The promise of the Spirit in our evangelism is not at all the same thing as the promise of swift and easy success in it. Stephen's Spirit-inspired testimony to Jesus lost Stephen his life, broke up the Church in Jerusalem and provoked Saul the Pharisee to a fanatical campaign of persecution. If the testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of prophecy, as John reminds us in Rev. 19:10, we do well to remember our Lord's own honest warning that bearing testimony to Him will be a costly business.
Here is an extract from a letter written in 1982 by Pastor Yakou Skorniakoff from the Jambul concentration camp in the USSR:
"With regard to our defencelessness, humanly speaking, let us understand that no-one has such a strong defence than that of true Christians. For our defence we do not at all need knives, pistols, nor anything of that nature. It is sufficient that He, our God of love and peace be with us. Then we are mighty in our defencelessness, even in our death. We are strong to pray for our tormentors and persecutors, not to revenge or curse in hatred and despair. We are strong to pray the God of love to help us forgive them - as Jesus did on the Cross; as did the first martyr of Christ, Stephen."
Without the Spirit of God, how can such a testimony to Jesus be born? But if, in His power and persistence it indeed be borne, how can it prove finally fruitless? Out of Stephen's death comes the conversion of Paul; out of the break-up of the Jerusalem Church due to persecution flows the evangelisation of the Samaritans.
The Spirit of God is given for witness. As Michael Green so splendidly put it, "The Comforter has come, not to make men comfortable, but to make them missionary." ('I Believe in the Holy Spirit, Hodder & Stoughton, p. 58)
Indeed, this was the thought uppermost in the mind of Christ Himself when, between His Resurrection and His Ascension, He spoke of the promise of the Spirit to His disciples. As John tells us in John 20:21, when Jesus met His disciples in the evening of the day He rose from the dead, He said to them, "As the Father has sent me, even so send I you." When He had said this, He breathed on them and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit." Later, on the day that He ascended into Heaven to assume His reign at the Father's right hand, He said, "You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth." (Acts 1:8)
In the Lord's mind the chief purpose for which the Spirit was given was witness -and Luke shapes his whole record of the early expansion of the Church to show how this purpose was realised. The Book of Acts falls quite obviously into five sections.
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Section I |
chs 1-5 |
how the witness to Jesus was made first in Jerusalem |
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Section II |
chs 6-9 |
how the Gospel was taken to Samaria by such witnesses as Phillip |
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Section III. |
chs 10-12 |
how the Gospel overleapt its Jewish boundaries and was carried, first by Peter to Caesarea, and then by rank and file of Christians north to Antioch |
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Section IV |
chs 13-15 |
how the first overseas missionaries, Paul and Barnabas, were enabled to open a door of faith to the Gentiles in Asia Minor. |
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Section V |
chs 16-19 |
how the Gospel was carried to the shores of Europe, beginning in Macedonia at Philippi, and spreading south through Thessalonica and Berœa to Athens and Corinth and West to Illyricum |
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Section VI |
ch 20-28 |
how the Good News was carried from Jerusalem to Rome, from whence it would spread to Gaul and Britain |
In Jerusalem, the link between the Spirit and the mission was established on the very first day of His out-pouring in the rebirth of 3,000 souls. By the time the Apostles were arraigned before the Jerusalem Council, Peter understood that link very well. As he bore witness to the death and resurrection of his Lord and His gift of repentance and forgiveness to Israel, he said (quoting the Lord's own words spoken in the Upper Room, John 15:26, 27), "We are witnesses to these things and so is the Holy Spirit, Whom God has given to those who obey Him." (Acts 5:32)
In Samaria, the Spirit puts His seal upon the preaching of the Gospel to the despised Samaritans, and prompts Phillip to evangelise the Ethiopian eunuch in his chariot, thereby giving the Gospel wings into Africa. (Acts 8:29)
It is the Spirit Who bids Peter go with the deputation who have come to him from the Gentile, Cornelius, in Caesarea, so that the Gospel at last overlaps its Jewish boundaries. (Acts 10:19) It is the Spirit Who finally ends all Jewish prejudice in the matter by falling on Cornelius and his assembled company - even before Peter could make an appeal at the end of his Gospel address! (Acts 10:44)
In Antioch, it is the Spirit Who again takes the initiative in directing the Church there to set aside Paul and Barnabas for their work of ministry overseas. Luke is emphatic that it was the Holy Spirit Who sent them out. (Acts 13:4)
From then on the book of Acts is dominated by Paul's mission to the Gentiles. It is the Spirit Who on their second journey forbids Paul and Silas to extend their mission in Asia, and so steers them out of Asia altogether and into Greece.
Bound in the Spirit Paul makes his last journey to Jerusalem (Acts 20:22), and it is there that the risen Lord meets him in a vision and assures him that as he had testified in Jerusalem, so he must bear witness also in Rome. (Acts 23:11)
Every one of these occasions marked a fresh advance in the progress of the Gospel, and every one of them was instigated by the Holy Spirit.
If the book of Acts opens with a clear statement of the mind of Christ for His Church: "You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you shall be my witnesses to the ends of the earth," it ends with a marvellously suggestive picture of the way that purpose is to control the whole of its open future far into the days that lie beyond the compass of the book of Acts - the picture of Paul planting the Gospel firmly in Rome, with a clear suggestion that its future progress is assured: there in his own house, "Paul welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the Kingdom of God, and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered."
Luke offers not a hint of Paul's fateful future; the one hint he does offer is of the Gospel's unfettered future ... "quite openly and unhindered." The same Spirit Who on the Day of Pentecost transformed the disciples of Jesus into a missionary congregation will surely have no other purpose than to keep them so.
God's purpose in calling into being in every age a people for His Name is that they should know Him, that they should reflect what they know in their character and life together, and that they should make Him known through all the world ... to know, to show and to share the Truth. It is to promote that threefold task that God endows His people with His Spirit. The missionary task belongs essentially to the New Covenant in which God has bound us to Himself.
Indeed, it was surely no accident that God chose the Jewish Feast of Pentecost as the day on which to pour out His Spirit on all flesh, for by New Testament times, the Jewish Feast of Pentecost celebrated not one but two things: the spring harvest, and the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai (the Covenant). The bestowal of the Spirit was therefore to be seen as the harvest of all the long sowing by God of the seed of His Word among this people Israel through the centuries of their story, and as the crowning feature of the establishment of the New Covenant long foreshadowed by the old. The Law had been given among the fires of Sinai, and so the Jews conceived of the Ten Words of the Law as being etched into the Tables of Stone in flames of fire on the wind-swept heights of the mountains. Now on the Day of Pentecost, the new Law of Christ was written on the fleshy tablets of men's hearts with tongues as of fire amid the gale by which the Spirit from on high swept over them. And so was fulfilled both Moses' longing and Joel's prophecy that all God's people should become prophets.
If all this be true - that one of the supreme thrusts of the Spirit for which God gave Him to us is to impel and empower us in mission - then unless our congregations espouse the missionary task that God has committed to us in our generation, we quench the Spirit. Unless we are passionately concerned to play a real part in carrying the Gospel to the ends of the earth, beginning, (as that task must always begin) on the home front, we betray the Covenant, forfeit our election, and grieve the Holy Spirit of God in Whom we were sealed for the Day of Redemption.
It must be our aim, our steady aim, our eager aim to be more and more a missionary and a witnessing people.
Let us each be asking, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?"
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