LIVE Join our service streaming live right now! Click here to watch.
Most of our days do not feel like turning points in history; they feel like errands, obligations, and familiar routines, leaving us to wonder whether our lives matter in any story beyond our own. Those on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in Acts 2 might have wondered the same thing.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Hi, so here we are in Acts, and you might say if you’ve been following our series we’ve had this year, wait, something seems wrong here, Tim. You said that this is a series entitled For Told, F-O-U-R Told, four voices that we are going to hear about with perspectives on who Jesus is. And we’re on week six, and you’d be right to point out I’m not the best mathematician, but there is a reason for this. Last week on Christmas Eve we looked at Revelation 12. Revelation is written by John, so we had previously heard from the Gospel of John, so we’ve heard from John twice. Now we’re hearing from Luke twice, because you see Acts is written by Luke, the same man who travels with Paul and wrote the Gospel of Luke.
And so here we see, okay, we’ve heard the life story of Jesus, who He is, how the ministry of Jesus on earth progresses, but now is the sending. Now Jesus is going to send His church to go do His work. And what better ways we’re wrapping up the Christmas season, we’re thinking about what do we do in 2023, than to think, well, what did Jesus say from the beginning was what we were supposed to do?
And we say, but what’s in a day? You know, here we are, we’re in 2023, does anyone feel significantly different than you felt yesterday? Anyone? Ah, we have one hand up, the commander’s hand is up, yes, so how do you feel different this year? More tired, okay, so yeah, that’s a common feeling on the first day of the year, right? We’re more tired. It’s funny, we have all these resolutions, we’re going to get healthier, we’re going to sleep better, we’re going to sit off in the new year, and we start off the year tired, right? Yeah.
Well, so I was thinking about this, though, we make a big deal out of the new year, and we say, okay, now it’s going to be something different, right? Everyone was excited last night, I think my neighbors were really excited last night, they were shooting off a ton of fireworks, we’re in a new year. But what makes January 1st a different year from December 31st?
Well, it’s on the calendar, but if you start digging around, it’s not like the sun switches on a little switch and it’s a new year or something, there’s nothing in particular in the calendar, other than the calendar itself that makes a new year. Turn to the Bible, return here, maybe I’ll start going through it here. Let’s see, there’s nothing about a new year on January 1st. There actually is a new year in here, but it’s not the one that we observe on January 1st, so what do you know? So why is it any different? What’s different?
Actually, I discovered in reading about this, that it wasn’t until Julius Caesar established January 1st as the new year that that became sort of the standard bearer new year and he did that, it was the day that the two top elected officials in Rome were installed each year and so it was a good day for that. Prior to that, many people celebrated in March, there were some that celebrated in summertime and in fact, and this is something I had no idea about, that if you go back in our American history, that following the British, it wasn’t until 1752 that we celebrated New Year’s Day on January 1st, it was on March 25th, because they said, well, it was all those pagans that were celebrating on January 1st, so we’re going to do it some other time.
Apparently in church history, there were many times where it was placed on the 25th of March because that was traditionally the day of the annunciation when Gabriel appears to Mary and says that she’s going to give birth to a son and so it seemed like a good starting point. Apparently, people tried out starting it on Christmas Day, so okay, we’re going to observe this is when Jesus is born, so we’ll start the year there. Lots of different days have been tried out, but we say January 1st and what strikes me there when I start thinking about it that way suddenly doesn’t this day sort of almost feel disorienting?
Wait a second, there’s not anything you mean particularly significant about January 1st, but then you say, well, what’s significant about 2023? I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out and some of us might say it was a great year, some important events happened this year, milestones in my life, achievements, others of us might get to the end of 2023 and say I’m so glad it’s over because it was just a horrendous year, but really it’s just arbitrary, right? We’ve said we’re going to count from the birth of Christ and we’ve estimated it’s approximately around the year one, not quite more than likely, but we’ll say thereabouts and so now we’re counting up, we’re at year 2023 and we start a new year and so it all feels very arbitrary.
And so we start to think, well, or at least sometimes I can, well, then how far can I take that? Is everything about life arbitrary as far as my point in it? You know, yeah, there were significant things that happened in biblical times, but what’s significant about now? Why should I think that anything that we’ll do today or anything we’ll do this week or anything we’ll do this year is of significance? Should I? And it can kind of feel like history as we’re presently experiencing it is detached from what God’s doing and I believe what we see in Acts chapter two is a reminder that that’s very much not the case because the people in this story, in this point here, we see in Acts one the ascension, so that feels significant, right? There are people that are watching Jesus ascend into heaven, but now we’re just with the average crowd in Jerusalem and they’re going about average stuff. They’re there for a holiday, for Pentecost. It was the feast to celebrate the firstfruits. You’re coming in, you’re offering that to God and it was one of the three major holiday days each year that if you were an observant Jew you would go and make a pilgrimage for. This was one that you went into town, so it was an exciting day, but it was a normal occurrence. You did it every year and so they’re in Jerusalem for a day that’s been appointed, like it’s been appointed in years past, over and over again. No reason to think there is anything significant to it, it’s just a day, just like today is just a day. And that’s where we find ourselves.
As we prepare to look at that, let’s come before God and ask that he would help us as we think about their ordinary day that turns out to be not so ordinary. We can see how he’s working in our day too. Let’s pray.
Father, it’s sometimes hard for us to understand how you are working, to understand what makes today or any day particularly significant in a story beyond our own, a story of the history of the world, a story of what you’re doing in the world. Lord, you call us though to see how you are working in each day and so as we reflect on this passage today, would you help us to see that? We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Let’s go ahead and take a look at Luke chapter 2, verse 1. Luke says, “When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind and it filled the entire house where they were sitting, and divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven.”
It seems like an ordinary day, not for the disciples, they’re waiting, but for everybody else it seems like an ordinary day. They’re there just to do their normal pilgrimage. Like maybe as you were going through the last week or two and maybe there are certain traditions that you do every year. You go see certain family members or friends, you eat certain foods, and they’re special to us and yet we don’t expect it to be transformative to history, right? We have the Christmas ham, didn’t change the world. Now the Christmas potato casserole, that may be world changing. But we don’t expect overall that those sorts of things are history-changing things. They’re just what we do. They’re nice. They give us comfort, but they’re not changing, and yet God works through such things.
Actually, if we rewind just a bit to earlier in Luke’s writing back to Luke chapter 2, verse 1, we see another very ordinary day in a sense. What’s more ordinary than tax day? What do we read here? In those days, a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all should be registered. This was the first registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria and all went to be registered each to his own town. And Joseph went up from Galilee from the town of Nazareth to Judea to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David to be registered with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child. And while they were there, the time came for her to give birth and she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn.
And in the same region, there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them in the glory of the Lord shown around them and they were filled with great fear. We’re actually going to skip past the rest of this, not because it’s not wonderful to revisit, but I just want us to think about the ordinary life that we were reading about there. I would imagine when you pay your taxes on April 15th, see, I can’t even get the word out. It’s just too painful, right? It’s just too painful. Tax day. Not even an ordinary day. It’s a bad day, right? So they can be taxed, not a happy thing, not a vacation. They’re traveling to be taxed, bad enough traveling to the mailbox to be taxed. They have to travel to a different town to be taxed. And then you have the shepherds. They’ve clocked in on the time clock. They punch their time card for the day. They’re waiting as the hours go by tending to their sheep. Very ordinary day. And yet we see what does God do here? God takes that ordinary day and he uses it, that ordinary time, to bring Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem to fulfill prophecy so that Jesus would be born in the city of David just as been foretold in the Old Testament.
You know that’s not what Caesar Augustus was thinking. He’s thinking about all that great money that’s going to come in. And you know, that’s not what all the people traveling there were thinking. They’re grumbling. Those Romans, those taxes, oh, we’d say vote the bums out, but we can’t because we can’t elect them. You know, they’re not happy about this, but it feels very, very mundane and yet God’s using it to fulfill the prophecy that the Messiah would come in the city of David. And for the shepherds, what’s he doing? He has them out. They’re just going about their ordinary day. So they’re ready that when the angels appear, they’re going to hear that message and they’re going to come and they’re going to worship the newborn King. Ordinary day turned into an extraordinary day. God is using just normal, everyday, mundane life to accomplish more than just what seems mundane. He’s using it to change the course of history of the world, using it to save anyone that trusts in Jesus.
And so it is true that on Pentecost, God here in Acts 2 is using a normal observance of a normal holiday that had been observed for centuries. He’s using that to put everybody where they need to be to start the explosion of the gospel. Because think about this. Let’s say God had sent the disciples, Jesus told them, “Now, I’m going to send into heaven and I want you to go into a remote cabin in the woods, in the wilderness, up in the mountains near the Dead Sea. And I want you to stay there until the Holy Spirit comes to you.” Now he could have done that. And he could have done that and then done whatever he wanted to spread the news. But God works quite frequently, even most often through ordinary means.
And so what does God do here? God sets it up so that the disciples are in a place where a bunch of people have just come on a pilgrimage. They’re there to do their religious duty so that when the disciples come out fresh and receiving the Holy Spirit, they have this giant audience ready to hear the preaching, a giant group of people, observant religious people that have been praying for the day that the Messiah would come, being told that the Messiah has come. He’s ascended now into heaven, but the effect of what he’s come to do is there for them. And we’re told that they come from all over the known world.
You think about that quite frequently in that time period, people could spend their entire lives without traveling more than a few miles from where they were born. But here you have these people on pilgrimage that have traveled throughout the world. Now they’d go back. They were going to go back to people who didn’t necessarily go on pilgrimages. They go back to people who hadn’t ever been to Jerusalem or maybe out of Europe or maybe out of the Far East, maybe out of Africa. They come here and converged on Jerusalem right at the time the Holy Spirit shows up. And so they’re coming to do their duty.
And also one of the traditions that had come around Pentecost was that Pentecost was the day that the people remembered God giving them the law. So they wanted to observe the wonder that God had revealed himself through his law. And so this is when they celebrated that. Now there’s tradition and there’s debate between commentators on whether this tradition existed at the time of the first Pentecost that we talk about, the coming of the Holy Spirit, that is. But it’s possible it was, and that’s that there had been this tradition that God had given the law in 70 different languages, representing all the known languages of the world.
And there’s nothing in the Bible that says that. But there’s certainly the possibility that the people at the time were thinking in terms of how God had made his law available in a multitude of languages. And certainly over time they had become true. The people there were testimony to that. Many of them, most of them, their first language wasn’t the language of Palestine. Their language, their primary language may not have even been Greek or Latin as you’d find in the Roman Empire, because we’re told they’re coming from all over. That’s what’s about to get really amazing.
But imagine as we gather for a service, if it could just be that we discovered, oh, wait a second, God called us to meet on this day, and it just happens to be that a giant convention has been called to happen in our parking lot. That would be kind of weird. But if it were, can you imagine, and we’d say, well, let’s get out of this building here and go preach out there, because there’s people from all over the world out there. They’re just out there. Let’s go see what we can do. That’s basically what happens that day. Ordinary day, people going about their ordinary business, but God’s setting the stage for something big to happen.
Do we even know when God’s doing that? Well, the answer is frequently, no. Frequently we don’t.
A friend of mine wrote an article a number of weeks ago, actually right before Thanksgiving, talking about the unknown blessings we experience, kind of an interesting phrase, I think. And the way he conveyed it, he’s done a lot of writing on the space program over the years, and he was reflecting on our current NASA administrator, Bill Nelson, served in Congress for many decades. And in fact, he was, I believe, the second Congress person to ever go up into space while serving in Congress back in ‘86.
So he was scheduled to go up on the space shuttle Columbia, and as he was scheduled to do so, he had the flight delayed—actually, the flight was delayed a number of times for little inconsequential, ordinary, everyday kinds of things, things that don’t seem to matter. Well, that’s not very exciting, is it? Probably thought, come on already. I just want to get up. I want to go do this. And I’m sure all the rest of the crew there, you can see the crew of that particular mission there. They were probably all really excited to go up and get into space. A number of them had never been up in space before. And so here’s that crew.
Well, here’s the thing that they didn’t know when their flight was delayed. There was a valve that was crucial to the cooling system, I believe it was, of the space shuttle that was broken. And during a routine check when they had to prepare for another launch after that shuttle was delayed, they discovered this broken valve. If they’d launched, they would have all died. But they didn’t know that. They probably were thinking, this feels like this whole thing is cursed. We can’t even get off the ground. And in fact, they were receiving an unknown blessing. We might say that God was protecting them there. I don’t think that’s really a stretch. It very well could be that God providentially hindered them because he had more for them to do in life that they wouldn’t have done it had they gone up in that spacecraft at the time.
And my friend was reflecting on his own life how often he goes about life and things even seem to go wrong. And he doesn’t think to stop and praise God. Thank you, God, for what’s happened. He was writing this after a deer had jumped out in front of his car and done massive damage to his car. He tried to get a rental car and been denied the rental car, so he was stuck trying to get a ride. He lives out in the country like 50 miles away to get his car because he couldn’t get a rental car. His car was all messed up.
It wasn’t the sort of place where he was wanting to praise God. I wouldn’t be thinking first and foremost, I need to praise God for this either. We’ve all had those sorts of ordinary, mundane, but incredibly frustrating experiences, and we’re not thinking, wow, look at what God’s doing. But he thought about that story about Bill Nelson and thought, what if there was something else that was going to happen to me? What if a car was careening down the road that would have been on if my car hadn’t been hit by that deer, and instead of having my front end smashed up, I would have died in a terrible accident? That’s a pretty good perspective. And I often don’t have, but it’s a reminder that God’s working in ways that we often don’t know.
Maybe the disciples, as they’re trying to sit quietly waiting for the Holy Spirit to come, are peering out the window every once in a while and thinking, could they hold down that racket out there? We’re tired of hearing about all these people celebrating Pentecost. We’re just waiting for whatever God’s going to do next. I don’t know that we’re thinking that, but they could have been, at least some of them. And some of the people out there surely were grumpy that the crowds and the difficulty of getting to the temple to offer sacrifices. They weren’t thinking in terms of, wow, God’s about to do something profound. They were thinking in terms of, just trying to get through this, going to get through it here. We’ll get back home. It’s going to be a three-day journey. It’s going to be long. It’s going to be arduous. Then we have to go back to work, didn’t know what was going to happen.
I think that challenges us to ask the question, too. What is God using the normal stuff of my life and your lives for to set up what he’s doing for his kingdom? What’s he doing right now? It doesn’t have to be frustrating things. It could be good things. It could have been a conversation over Christmas. It could have been something that you’re going to start in this new year that’s good, that’s going to be key to something he plans to do with your life. We don’t know.
Or it could be something entirely frustrating. We’ve been online the last few weeks as I caught some kind of bug and it was down, and a number of others of us did, and it wasn’t exactly what I had planned. I may never know. We may never know if anything significant came out of that, but it could have. We don’t know.
The point being that we see here, and we see over and over again in scripture, is that we as humans don’t know how God is working, but we know that he is working. He’s not just working when the angels are singing on high in front of us, because most of us won’t have that experience. He’s with us when we’re standing in line trying to get through the busy Pentecost shopping spree and can’t get to the temple on time. He’s working in those moments too. Ordinary stuff in 2023 is God going to use in your life, because here’s what we know. We know that God is using each of us. He doesn’t have any excess people in the world that are just there kind of filling up space, the placeholders. He doesn’t have the people that show up in the big crowd scenes in the movies that don’t even get in the scrolling credits at the end, much less than the opening credits. They’re just there as extras. He doesn’t have people like that. No one’s an extra in God’s world. God’s using each of us. No one was an extra there that day on Pentecost. He was using them.
The shepherds may have felt like extras on that first Christmas morning, but they weren’t. I still think about them today. They didn’t know that at the time. How many nights have they been out there maybe complaining about their shepherding job, thinking no one even knows I’m out here? What’s God using us for? What we need to understand is that God uses ordinary time and that our time in particular is situated such that there’s significance. We’re not in the quiet period that doesn’t mean anything in the history of the world. We’re right smack dab in the middle of God’s work. And we’re reminded of that as we go on and see what happens as Peter preaches.
Let’s go ahead and turn now to Acts 2, verse 6, says, “And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, Are not all these those who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear each of us in his own native language? Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia and Judea and Cappadocia and Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia and Egypt and parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God.” And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, What does this mean? Others, mocking said, They are filled with new wine.”
Well, that was a lot of different names, but if you start to map it out on a map, you see it starting over on the far eastern side of the “known world,” way outside of the Roman Empire. Because if you’re living in the Roman Empire, you basically think of the Roman Empire as the world, whether it’s in Europe or Asia Minor, Middle East, just the edge there with Palestine over on to northern Africa, that is the world as far as the Romans are concerned and the people that live in the Roman Empire. Everything significant is happening there, and yet there’s also the Persian Empire and so we’re told that people are coming from that way and beyond, we’re being told they’re coming from everywhere. Arabia wasn’t really of great significance, but the Arabians are singled out.
And I don’t mean there weren’t of significance like the people didn’t matter to God there, but as far as if you were writing a history as a literate person in the Roman world like Luke, they weren’t significant, and yet they’re mentioned here. What’s he want us to know? What he wants to say is every place you can think of, there are people gathered, and that’s not an exaggeration because the Jews had been scattered over the different wars that happened. They had gone all over the known world and so they would come back, but they’d also come back with people who had heard something about this God who had preserved them, maybe in remnant all over the world, but preserved them. They’d heard about this God and they wanted something to do with him too, and that phrase proselytes we see there, we usually don’t use that phrase unless we’re reading a corporate human resource policy that says you can’t proselytize with your fellow employees or something. But proselyte, a proselyte is someone who has become a convert, in this context, a convert to Judaism, someone who isn’t a Jew but has started to follow the God of Israel.
And so here they are, you have people from all over the world gathered together and it would be really easy to stop there and say, “Well, that’s nice.” So then this amazing thing happens, right? Suddenly the disciples, these average everyday people are preaching in all kinds of languages that they didn’t know before. These were not men of letters who had spent great deals of time studying foreign languages, right? We probably all, I don’t know if anyone here is such a person, but we probably all know people who fluently speak tons of languages and sort of, I know I look at them and think, “Wow, that’s amazing. How do you do that? Wow.” Oh yeah, I want to travel someplace. I decided to study such and such and suddenly a few months later they’re speaking it fluently enough to go all over the place outside of touristy areas. I mean, what a gift, but we may know some people like that, but do you know anyone who goes into a house and a few days later comes out and speaking a wide multitude of languages so that everyone in a worldwide gathered crowd can understand in their own language? I don’t know anyone that can do that.
Neither do the people here. Now, someone might say, “Well, how in the world if these people are from all over do they know that not only are these Jews that are speaking, but they’re Galilean Jews?” If you’re not from an area, you probably don’t know the nuances of accent. How is that? And basically what it seems like Luke is doing here is he’s sort of giving us an overall picture of the things being discussed in the crowd. And so you’ll probably, some people have no idea where these men are from. All they know is, “Wow, this is amazing. They’re speaking in a language that I know and it’s not a language I’ve learned so I can travel here. It’s a language that I know because I grew up speaking it. Wow, isn’t this neat?” Can you imagine being in a foreign land and unexpectedly someone speaking your own language? How comforting that would be. Maybe you’ve had that experience. Wow, this is wonderful.
Now, other people, though, say they’re just babbling up there. They must be drunk on new wine. Well, certainly a lot of people were drunk on wine and other things last night. It was New Year’s Eve and I’m not at all suggesting that’s a good idea, but maybe we should do an investigation today. Why don’t you go and call up the people that you knew partied hardest last night, drank the most and see what languages they picked up overnight? I’d love to hear that that would be amazing. Oh yeah, I picked up Latin and Swahili and Chinese with not the simplified alphabet even, the full complex one. I picked that up last night. I was partying really hard. It was amazing. It’s not going to happen. It’s kind of ridiculous.
These people are seeing a miracle happening before them and their reaction is, well, maybe the people are drunk. You think, well, these fools, can’t they see what God’s doing here? Now, I have never heard someone speaking fluently in another language and thought the first thing I should do is accuse them of drinking too much, but there are plenty of times where God is working and I find ways to discount it. And I think that’s what we see here. Yes, that’s the particular way they do it, but how often has someone around you had God working in his or her life? Something happening. How often has God been working in your own life and we discount it because we’re just not expecting it and we’re not open to it. We think, my particular moment in time is too ordinary. There’s no way that anything special is going to happen. And so we come up with some ordinary excuse, there’s this drunkenness, but some ordinary excuse to say, that didn’t really happen the way it seemed. There’s nothing really special happening. How often is it that we’re not really set up to see what God is doing?
Now, Peter explains to them why this is happening and he goes and he cites prophecies from the Old Testament and in particular, he doesn’t just cite any old prophecy. Oh, there’s a prophecy. Oh, some people are going to speak in a multitude of languages someday or something. But he goes on in verse 17, we’re going to look at this more tomorrow night on Steadfast, but he goes in verse 17 and says that he cites this from the prophet Joel, he says, “And in the last days it shall be God declares that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.” So that’s what’s happening here.
And he goes on, we could go on and on, it’s a much longer prophecy, but the basic gist of it is there’s going to be an ending point in time. And when that comes, God is going to do spectacular things with everybody, not just some people, but with everybody. And once he’s going to do that, he’s going to do that in the last days. And Peter says, that’s where we are, we’re in the last days.
Oh, you say, wait a second here. I was flipping through TV last week and I ended up on one of those channels that has prophets on it. And I heard that the year 2023 is going to be the last days. It’s coming this year, right? 2012 was the last days too, incidentally. They weren’t wrong in a sense because every year since Jesus has ascended into heaven, it’s been part of the last days. But the problem is when we toss around that term in our present age, we often mean it as something spectacular, special effects, Hollywood movie, destruction, chaos, everything going wrong kind of last days. And up until that point, we’re in ordinary, plain old, regular, meaningless, waiting for last days history. And Peter says to the people on the day of Pentecost, you’re in the last days. You’re in the days that the prophets have been telling about. And here’s why, because Jesus has come, Jesus has ascended into heaven, and now he’s poured out his spirit.
And while we see the Old Testament going over again and again that the Holy Spirit shows up to certain people, something revolutionary had happened. Something had changed that hadn’t been that way in the course of history up to this point, which is that the Holy Spirit would dwell in all who follow the Lord Jesus. Since the first days of Adam and Eve, when sin came into the world and that fellowship with God had been broken, there hadn’t been that level of close fellowship with God. And yet in these last days, Peter says, it’s happening right before you. We’re not drunk. We didn’t pick up language by drinking. We are speaking in these languages, languages we didn’t know yesterday because the Holy Spirit’s working through us and he wants you to hear something.
Now, if they’re in the last days, that means we are too. And what that really means is that we’re at a turning point in history that the birth and ministry and death and resurrection of Jesus, that the earthly ministry of Jesus is the turning point on which all of history hinges. Everything before is the time leading up to that and everything after that is the expanding ripple of that. That’s where we are.
And if we keep that in mind, reminds us that we might think that 2023 is ordinary and at the end of 2023, I’m not expecting every one of us to come back here and be able to say, you were right, Tim, this year was the transformative year. All of history will look back on the power of 2023 and what happened in it. I’m not saying that. Some of you might be able to say, well, I really see why 2023 was significant in my life or how God was using me. Some of us may say, I don’t know, I’m still trying to figure out what in the world happened in 2023. What do we know that God’s working? How many Pentecost did those people have to go to before the one where they got to see this amazing miracle? How many people went to Pentecost the year before, maybe weren’t even there that day, but went back, told their neighbors about the wonderful God they’d gone to worship in Jerusalem and someone else came and went that day and was there to experience what was happening? So that first individuals experienced seemed entirely ordinary and maybe even a little bit meaningless and yet they were actually infusing great meaning where someone got to experience this proclamation of the gospel.
We don’t always get to see how God’s going to infuse meaning, but we know he’s working and so it gives us a call to be on alert, but to already know what’s happening. It’s a different kind of alert than we often hear with the last days.
Maybe someone watching or here today got a new pair of earbuds for Christmas. And I did not, but I was gifted one a while back, a pair of Apple AirPods. I love them, they’re wonderful, I’m not trying to do a commercial, but one of the neat things on some of these newfangled earbuds is that they can do, with two earbuds, they can simulate surround sound where it feels like things are moving around you and you can even move your head and it feels like you’re moving in the sound that you’re in, it’s really pretty amazing.
And I’d read about it and I thought, this sounds pretty amazing, so I put them in and I played something when I first got them and thought, oh, this sounds good, wow, I can really hear it, it’s so amazing, wow, I’m turning my head, yeah, this has to be amazing, this is really amazing, yeah, I’m sure, this is amazing and so I was sure I had the signs because I’d picked up the signs of this surround sound, but I didn’t realize I was just playing plain old stereo sound, nothing was actually happening, it just sounded good to me because I was insisting it sounded good to me.
And then, and then I’m just going about my business a few weeks later and I hit play on something I hadn’t played before I downloaded and I’m working, it sounds really, really good and I turn my head and I think, wait a second, the instruments just moved and I turn my head again, they’re moving, like it was, you could hear the guitars and the violins and the drums and they were kind of like in fixed points out there in front of me and my head’s moving and I thought, wow, this is amazing. I had been looking for the wrong signs, I thought, I was hearing this and I wasn’t actually experiencing it.
And I think sometimes we, in life we have those earbuds and we’re either just thinking, oh, this is disappointing, nothing’s happening and so we miss when God’s working or what we do is we keep adding, we’re trying to add special effect meaning to ordinary stuff and saying, well, that’s what’s going to define that this is a turning point, that’s what’s going to define the end times, that’s what’s going to define meaning in my life or meaning in other people’s lives. That’s sort of what’s happening here.
And yet what Peter says is here’s what you need to know: Jesus came into the world, Jesus died for your sins, Jesus offers you forgiveness, you’re already immersed in the surround sound of salvation, it’s right around you everywhere and you need to know that that’s what’s happening and that’s what’s happening for us too. We don’t need to be looking for signs to somehow prove that we’re in a significant moment in history. The significant moment in history is that Jesus came and that Jesus offers that salvation to each of us and His Holy Spirit to each of us so that as we go into this year we’re equipped to go do His work, not because suddenly some big burning bush is going to be outside those doors you walk out that’s going to tell you that. God’s Word tells us that, it’s right here.
Jim is actually going to share, we’re going to have an online message later in the week and he’s going to share more in thinking in terms of how the Holy Spirit relates to sharing the Gospel. But I think the starting point we need to think about is just this, that each of us, if we trust in Jesus, each of us is empowered by the Holy Spirit, doesn’t take some special year to make that special. Every year God is working and He’s going to put you and me in different situations and He’s going to use those to fulfill His ultimate plans. He’s going to use those in a way that we can have confidence that those plans will come about because God doesn’t need the spectacular in a moment to do His spectacular work. He does it every single day. That is right in the middle of all of history, including our history, including in 2023.
Would you pray with me please?
Father, thank You for Your goodness and Your love, Your care for us, that we are not just those forgotten in some meaningless part of history, but right now is meaningful. Right now matters. Right now You are with us. Lord, would You help us, that You would help us to be aware of the opportunities You give us each and every day to serve You and to do Your work? Would You help us to see how You can use us even tonight, even tomorrow, even the next day, every single day this year and in the years to come? We wouldn’t be waiting for some special turning point, but we’d see that we are already past it, that You have come by sending Your Son into the world. That salvation is here to be proclaimed and experienced. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Start the Conversation