In the Spirit’s Power
Luke 4: 1 – 15

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 27 May, 2007

TODAY IS Pentecost Sunday, and we could have focused on Acts 2 this morning, because we as believers in Jesus are participants in Pentecost whether we like it or not.

But I have gone back a step. We participate in Pentecost because Jesus has been there before us. He sets the pattern, and we follow.

We need to understand Pentecost if we are to have any real power to minister. I have seen many people who seem exemplary in their prayer life and their bible reading who have no evidence of spiritual power.

I have also chosen this passage because it puts the work of the Holy Spirit into a context for us in a way that the passages in Acts don’t.

Wherever we go in Acts, we see people believing, mostly being baptised, and then receiving the Holy Spirit. That reception of the Spirit was accompanied by signs which indicated that the Spirit was active in them.

For example, the first believers in Jerusalem had believed in the atoning death and the resurrection of Jesus for seven weeks. Then, on the Day of Pentecost, when they were all together, the Holy Spirit came on them and welded them into an effective Christian community, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied and, above all, preached Jesus in life–transforming power.

Then you see how Philip preached to the Samaritans and they believed and were baptised. But this time there was no clear indication that the Spirit had come. But some of the apostles came down from Jerusalem and laid hands on them and they received the Spirit.

We are not told how the coming of the Spirit was marked, but we know that it was very clearly manifested, because Simon the Sorcerer saw it happening and wanted to buy the power to cause the same to happen to other people.

Then there is Cornelius the Centurion and his household. They invited a very reluctant Peter to come and tell them about Jesus, and, before he had finished preaching, they believed and the Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. Peter said, "They have received the Spirit in the same way that we have, so we'd better baptise them.” — or words to that effect.

A bit later on, Paul finds some believers in Ephesus, but, when he quizzes them, they don’t know about Jesus all that well, and they know nothing about the Holy Spirit or about Christian baptism, so Paul sorts them out and baptises them and lays hands on them and they also speak in tongues and prophesy.

So there is a very clear pattern.

But it all goes back to Jesus. He is the model, the standard, the paradigm. It all goes back to him.

It was when he was empowered by the Spirit that he was able to come back to Nazareth and preach in power in the synagogue.
 

Let’s go back a little way before our passage, and remember what had happened.

John was preaching in the desert, and Jesus came down asking to be baptised. John was horrified.

“You should be baptising me, not the other way around!” he exclaimed.

But Jesus said that they should do everything the right way, and prevailed on John to do the deed.

And that is so, isn’t it? We might say, “Let’s not bother much with doing things the right way,” but we can cause trouble if we don’t.

Certainly we can sometimes go too far the other way, and be sticklers for some routine or other which is only a routine. We don’t have to have prayer times on Wednesdays. We had ours on Tuesdays for a while, and Fridays for many years until someone asked us to change. There’s no absolute reason why that shouldn’t change.

But the really important things are the people things, and there are principles and routines which we neglect at our peril, because we destroy people when we do.

So Jesus is talking about a vital people thing. He had to be baptised so that he could stand alongside you and me, and say, “I have gone down the same route that you have. I haven’t asked you to do anything that I wouldn’t do.”

So he was baptised and the Holy Spirit came on him immediately, and God was heard to speak a blessing on Jesus out of heaven.

The normal process is submission, declared by baptism followed by reception of the Spirit.

Submission, baptism, reception. And it normally follows like that, no waiting time, just one, two, three.
 

We begin chapter 4 of Luke’s gospel with Jesus submitted to God’s plan for his life, with Jesus baptised to indicate his total dedication to that call on his life, and with Jesus filled by the Holy Spirit ready for his ministry to begin.

Now we come to our passage.

Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert.

I want us to understand this very clearly. The Spirit often leads us from the Jordan to the desert, from the place of fruitfulness and blessing to the place of loneliness and struggle.

When John Wesley was converted, it only took a day or two before Satan began to attack him. Was it just his imagination? Surely he would be perfect if he was truly converted? All the things you and I have met and experienced.

Jesus met it and experienced it in far greater measure, because his ministry began with battle against Satan, and was the beginning of defeat for the evil one.
 

So Satan attacks when Jesus is at his weakest. He is starving. And Satan says,

“If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.”

This is one of the biggest temptations to overtake us individually or to overtake a church. When you are struggling, when you feel about to fail, when you are near the end of your tether, you look around for someone or something to rescue you from that pit.

It's similar with churches.

We did it here with the Greeks who used out buildings in the early 1980s and the Koreans after them. There was a tempting offer of rent, of help with outreach, of a brighter life together, and the members at the time grabbed for the branch, little realising that it was rotten. Maybe we were a little different with the Indonesians — I couldn’t say.

Someone comes along and says, “I will rescue you.” They come with ideas, they come with contacts, they come with all kinds of promises. But then the ideas fade, the energy goes, the contacts move on, and all you have are promises. Haven’t we been there before?

Jesus said,

“It is written: `Man does not live on bread alone.’ “

Hasn’t God provided when we have really gone to prayer? Hasn’t he shown us repeatedly that he is the God who sees and provides, Yahweh Yireh?

Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things will be added to you.

Then Satan hit Jesus from another angle:

The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. ⁶ And he said to him, “I will give you all their authority and splendour, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. ⁷ So if you worship me, it will all be yours.”

It"s Satan’s way. “You can have what you want, as long as you do things my way.”

Satan doesn’t mind Church growth. He doesn’t have any qualms about “evangelism” — as long as he is in ultimate control. He gets his people sitting in a church where he can watch over them. He gets people making decisions without any intention to change, decisions without repentance, decisions without faith.

There are churches like that, and I am not saying “Liberal” or “Catholic” or “High Church”. There are very genuine Christian believers everywhere who don’t do things our way and perhaps don’t even think exactly like us. As long as Jesus is their Lord and Saviour the rest is not really our business, other than to gently lead them to consider other ways and ideas. The Holy Spirit will do his work of glorifying Jesus and convicting human beings.

Jesus shows us the way ahead. There is only one solution for any Church:

Jesus answered, “It is written: `Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.’ “

Whilever we seek lesser answers, we leave Satan in control. He offers us good things, but they come with wrong motivation. And we fail and fall as much as Israel failed and fell when it turned from the Lord to the Ba‘alim.

As Jesus said elsewhere,

Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things will be added to you.

Finally, Satan tackled Jesus in a subtle way:

The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down from here. ¹⁰ For it is written:

“`He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully:
^4:11 they will lift you up in their hands
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’ “

It’s another basic temptation — try to back God into a corner, force him to do something that he promises, but for wrong reasons.

God has commanded his angels to protect his Son, but if Jesus pushed God into a corner just for his own gain, what would that do? Can we use God in that way?

Christian leaders, in particular, are regularly tempted to use their position to gain fame and fortune for themselves. I occasionally see bits of early morning TV, and I am sure that there are a few of these people inhabiting TV land.

One of the greatest temptations for any of us is to use the gifts of God, to use what he has given us, from talents through to promises, and everything in between, to use them for self-aggrandisement, to use them to make ourselves seem great.

And Jesus answers again,

“It says: `Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ “

He doesn’t, strictly speaking, tell Satan that you have to seek the Kingdom first, but that’s the underlying idea. The name we get for ourselves is never the real issue. When we seek the rule and the righteousness of God above all else, then God will take care of the reputation. Rule and righteousness are the keys to reputation.
 

Now I want us to see how this all ends up:

 ^{LK 4:14} Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. ¹⁵ He taught in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

It is only after going through this struggle that Jesus really bursts onto the world with a new power and a new message.

He went into the battle filled with the Spirit, as we see in the first verse; but he comes out of the battle in the power of the Spirit.

And he begins getting the reputation that the Devil wanted him to steal for himself by evil and illegitimate means, because we read,

...news about him spread through the whole countryside,

and

...everyone praised him.

Let’s sum this all up for us here, as we come to the end of our Pentecost Sunday reflections.

First, I pointed out that the book of Acts contains many illustrations of how the Holy Spirit came on different groups and empowered them for ministry and service.

But I said that Jesus is our primary model and paradigm, that he sets the pace, and he is the backdrop against which the accounts in Acts are to be seen. In fact, he is the backdrop against which our own experiences of the Holy Spirit must be seen, and the yardstick against which they must be measured.

When we look at Jesus own experience of the Spirit, it takes his willing submission to the will of God his father. It takes a submission which points us towards the repentant submission we all need if the Spirit is truly to work in our lives.

Then we see that the Spirit was poured out on Jesus and God’s words of blessing spoken over him.

But his experience of being filled with the Spirit was not enough. He had to be tested. He had to face struggles and temptations.

It was as he came through these that he found the power that he needed to minister effectively.

Every Christian believer must seek the fulness of the Holy Spirit, because we are commanded to do that. Paul says,

Be filled with the Holy Spirit...

It is a command.

And God never commands what he is not willing to supply.

In Luke’s gospel we read,

If you, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?

So we need to ask.

But, as James reminds us,

You don’t have, because you don’t ask God.

But then he continues and tells us,

When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.

Isn’t that the kind of thing Jesus himself battled with in the desert? He faced that temptation to ask with wrong motives, to act in his own interests even though it would have meant rebellion against God.

But if we come with repentant faith, then we will certainly receive; because, as the Bible tells us,

...it is by faith from beginning to end; because the righteous person shall live by faith.

Ask believing, and you will certainly receive the Spirit in all fulness. Seek with singleness of purpose, and you will find the blessings and empowerment needed to go forward and to bring great blessing to many. Knock determinedly, and the doors will be opened wide, and the blessings will pour out in a great flood!

If there is one thing I have desired for this church over the years I have been here, it has been revival.

It will come when the Spirit of God fills us all and brings glory to Jesus.

May it come quickly, even on this Pentecost Sunday.   

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)