A Pentecost thought

This coming Sunday is Pentecost Sunday for the Christian church. Throughout the world Christians will gather to celebrate the ‘birth’ of the church on that first Pentecost some 2,000 years ago. That particular day was a day of very special happenings:

‘Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.
They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.’ Acts 2:2,3

It was truly a day of signs and wonders. Of course we are a church that is big on signs and wonders. On any given Sunday as I am out the front, people give me a variety of signs and I am usually left wondering. Sorry about that.

Events like that first Pentecost are very special and I have been fortunate to experience a couple of times not unlike those events. Please note that I say a couple of times; and that is in more than 25 years of a Christian journey. Does that mean we only get to experience the work of the Spirit of God on the occasional blue moon Sunday? Let me introduce you to another Pentecost experience of the disciples that happened several weeks earlier.

Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!”
After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.
Again Jesus said, “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”
And with that he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.
If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.” John 20:19-23

Here was a quieter, gentler experience of the coming of the Holy Spirit and I believe that we can learn more from this passage than the more well known Acts version. Most of my spiritual heroes were touched by the Holy Spirit in a way more like John than Acts.

John Wesley’s ‘conversion’ occurred just over 271 years ago on May 24 1738:

‘Before I could raise my usual question (concerning this change that God works in the heart through faith in Christ) the Holy Spirit performed His miracle, and I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone for salvation..’

James Hudson Taylor, the great missionary to China, was born in the Yorkshire mill town of Barnsley in 1824 and from a young age was convinced of God’s hand upon his life. Hudson Taylor recalled his holy ground experience on the 2nd of December 1849:

‘Never shall I forget’, he wrote, ‘The feeling that came over me then. Words can never describe it. I felt I was in the presence of God, entering into the covenant with the Almighty. I felt as though I wished to withdraw my promise, but could not. Something seemed to say “Your prayer is answered, your conditions are accepted”. And from that time the conviction never left me that I was called to China.’

So many look for the grand show but more often than not God works quietly yet profoundly in the lives of those who seek to know and love him more. The Catholic French mystic Jeanne Guyon (1648-1717), frustrated in her efforts to find God’s blessing was told by a priest, ‘Why do you seek without what is within?’

. We are all created in the image of God – ‘imago Dei’. Perhaps our challenge in these crazy times is to simply be still long enough to feel the breath of God upon us and hear Jesus’ word for us?
Cheers - John