Acts 2:1-41

Welcome back to this new week of Connect Devotionals!  This is the final week in our Holy Spirit: Presence, Power and Purpose series, and we’ll be looking at the second chapter of Acts.

This chapter moves from an upper room to the open public streets of Jerusalem.  It starts with a gathering of 120 souls, and ends, less than twenty-four hours later, with a church of more than three thousand.  It begins with a monolingual, mono-cultural group (“Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans?”, verse 7), then explodes into more than a dozen languages spoken all across the Mediterranean basin.  Initially, there is puzzlement, bewilderment, and ridicule; shortly thereafter, the Good News of Jesus is proclaimed with great power and received with deep conviction.

Sounds just like the presence, power and purpose of God the Holy Spirit at work!

Luke frames his account of Pentecost with two questions, both asked by the crowd in Jerusalem that gathers around the apostles.  Their first question: “What does this mean?” (verse 12).

The second: “What must we do?” (verse 37).

The crowd initially gathers because something amazing, astonishing, shocking, bewildering and perplexing is happening: these Christians are speaking in languages they don’t know and never learned.  And they’re not merely passing some random fluency test; they are declaring the wonders of God in the native tongues of more than a dozen different language groups from all around the Mediterranean basin.  “What does this mean?”

Well, the poured-out Spirit of God that empowered this astonishing “speaking in tongues” now empowers Peter to answer the question.  Starting with their own familiar Scriptures (remember, Peter is speaking as a Jew to an all-Jewish crowd), Peter declares news.  Not information, not “content”; news.

And this is a particular, special kind of news.  It is the completely unexpected, never-before-imagined news that God has acted to do something for them and for the entire world that will change the world and their lives here and into eternity. Peter lays out “what all this means” by communicating to this Jewish crowd that Jesus is the promised King, the prophesied Savior, the God-in-our-flesh Victor over Sin and Death, the Righteous Judge, and the reigning, liberating Lord of earth and heaven.

Now: “What must we do?”

Three things, Peter replies: Repent.  Be baptized.  Receive the promised gift of the Holy Spirit.

Repent: change your direction, attitudes, priorities, and preferences.  Whole-life allegiance to Jesus!

Be baptized: this following Jesus way of life is not private, merely “interior”; it’s public.

Receive the promised gift of the Holy Spirit: you, too, following Jesus alongside others, will learn to behave in ways that the “crowd” of your family, your neighbors, your workplace or classroom may find amazing, bewildering and perplexing because they don’t have an explanation for why you are behaving the way you do.  They’ll start to ask – and you’ll get to tell them!

Is there something right now which the Holy Spirit is directing you to do?