HIS Experienced Gospel Leads to HIS Experienced Pentecost!
HIS Experienced Gospel Leads to HIS Experienced Pentecost!
In the person, deeds, conversations, and teachings of the divinely incarnate Jesus we see as much of our Father in Heaven as CAN be revealed in a human being.
In the words that His released Spirit inspired His anointed ones to write, we see as much of Jesus as can be revealed in writing.
The path to our Father in Heaven is to start with “read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest” what He caused to be written, and to surrender our trust and obedience to those inspired writings in the same detail and passion that JESUS had fulfilled those earlier prophetic writings that applied to Him, even to something as “petty” as entering Jerusalem on that prophesied donkey! Through that yielding to the influence of His Spirit, His character, wisdom, and yearnings are fashioned within us, in the same way they had been in His first disciples.
When we are finally ready to yield to His authority over us without conditions or qualifications, He has appointed the baptismal immersion to both symbolize and effect our “wedding” to Him. Just as two humans go into their vows as individuals and depart from them as “one flesh,” so we go down into the water as an individual and come up from it covenantly-yoked to Jesus as “one Spirit”! It is in that baptismal immersion that the sacrificial suffering of Jesus on our behalf cleanses us of the spiritual “affliction” we were born into and to which we deepened with our own decisions: it is that “baptism that now SAVES us also (not the removal of physical filth, but the appeal into God from a good conscience) through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 3:21).
On the day of Pentecost, He had released into His apostles and first disciples the very same Spirit that HE had received when He was baptized on our behalf. And because we have been properly taught, and now trust in His wonderful promises, His next step for us is to receive into us – spirit, and soul, and body – the very same Holy Spirit of our Father that had entered into Jesus at His baptismal immersion! What He promises to happen to us is a repetition of what He caused to happen to His apostles and disciples – as described within Acts chapter 2 (the previously immersed “one hundred twenty”), chapter 8 (the previously immersed Samaritan disciples), chapter 9 (the recently converted Paul), chapter 10 (the soon to BE immersed household of Roman centurion Cornelius), and chapter 19 (the unbaptized “disciples” in Ephesus). As you can seen from what He had taught them in John 14-16, that personally experienced entrance of His powerful Spirit had been His goal for them from the very beginning. It is our own “Pentecost” that is experiential goal of GOD’s version of “the Gospel.” It is that personally experienced entrance and presence of His Spirit that enables Him – IN us – to make possible what is impossible for us: “When His disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished, saying, ‘Who then can be saved?’ But Jesus looked at them and said to them, ‘With men this IS impossible, but with God all things are possible’” (Matthew 19:25-26).
May this coming feast of Pentecost not merely be a way of REMEMBERING their experienced Pentecost, but of EXPERIENCING your own!
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