The Birth of the Church (Part 2) — Jim Cymbala

The Church’s Birth and Its Biblical Identity

Last week we started our study in the book of Acts and we learned that we were coming to real quick would be the birth of the church and that's what we're covering today, the birth of the Christian church and that's what we're in today.

This church, the called out ones, the body of Christ is something not seen in the Old Testament. There's hints at it but really God had his people Israel but a multicultural, multiracial body that would belong to Christ and be his body carrying out his will on earth after he would come and die for our sins and resurrect and then ascend.

This was unknown. And we learned last week in chapter one that it all began with a promise of power and the Lord said don't study and try to understand prophetic timings. No, here's your duty. You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be witnesses for me in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the ends of the earth.

So we learned some great things last week and now we have what happened. We left last Sunday, Jesus ascended after saying these final words to the disciples and now what did they do and what happened and how was the church born?

The Church Must Be Defined by Christ, Not Tradition

Now a word of caution for everyone as we said last week, the hard thing about studying this is that we think we know what the church should look like because some of us have gone to church a good part of our lives, Catholic, Protestant.

So that's our definition of church, what we've seen rather than going to the Bible and saying maybe what we've seen including the Brooklyn Tabernacle is not exactly what God had in mind. And maybe we should humble ourselves and say, God, let the church be what you intended the church to be because it's not Pastor Symbolist Church, it's the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

It's not a denomination that owns the church, it's only Christ. So I have no right, no one has a right to say, this is what church should be, it should be all black people, all white people, it should be whatever.

No, no, we yield, we humble ourselves and let's find out how it was born. Christ has left and now we pick up the story. Then they returned, the disciples, to Jerusalem from the hill called the Mount of Olives, a Sabbath day's walk from the city.

That was the most you could walk on a Sabbath in the Jewish tradition, about 5 8ths of a mile. And when they arrived, they went upstairs to the room where they were staying and those present were, Luke tells us, Peter, John, James, and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James, son of Alphaeus, and Simon the Zealot, and Judas, son of James.

They all joined together constantly in prayer along with the women, what women? The women who traveled with Jesus, helped support him, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers. These are the children Mary and Joseph had after Jesus was born who, by the way, were not followers of his for the most part of his ministry.

But now they've all gathered together. We find out about 120 of them and they're gathered at least here in a room. Now, chapter two, when the day of Pentecost came, what was Pentecost? Pentecost was a Jewish holiday.

There were three great feasts that every Jewish male had to come to Jerusalem to observe. The first one was Passover. The second one was Pentecost, or the Feast of Ingatherings, it was called. And it was celebrated the first harvest, the early harvest.

And it was 50 days, Pentecost was celebrated 50 days after the Sabbath of Passover week. Whenever the Sabbath of Passover week fell, add 50 days, that was the day of Pentecost where everyone had to come to Jerusalem and thank God and praise him for the bountiful blessings he had given them.

It was one of the feasts in the fall, the Feast of Tabernacles, that they came and celebrated. So Pentecost, when you hear Pentecostal and all of that, that's really a bad word, it has no meaning. Pentecost was a Jewish holiday.

But because of what happened here, we've developed the cultural name Pentecostal for people who believe that what we're about to read can still happen today and abides for all time. Suddenly, they were together in one place, and that together means not only that they were in one place, but they were united together in art.

Pentecost and the Outpouring of the Holy Spirit

Suddenly a sound, like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting, and they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them, hold that for a second.

Notice, suddenly a sound, like the blowing of a violent wind, it wasn't a wind, but it sounded like the blowing of a violent wind. And it came from heaven, it wasn't earthly, it was something from heaven, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting.

They weren't kneeling, they weren't standing, they were sitting when this happened, like we are. And they saw what seemed to be tongues of fire some kind, it seemed to be like fiery tongues on each one of them settling on their head that separated and came to rest on each of them.

And then, verse four, all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as we've heard this morning, in other languages unknown to them, and a static utterance of some kind prompted by the Spirit.

As the Spirit enabled them, it wasn't them talking, it was them prompted and energized and inspired by the Spirit, and now they were speaking languages that they didn't know themselves. Now, these were, they were staying in Jerusalem at that time, God-fearing Jews, because of the holiday, from every nation under heaven.

I'd said that this was one of the three major feasts. So there were people from all over the world, that part of the world, visiting Jerusalem, and when they heard this sound, we're not sure that sound was of the wind or of the people speaking in other tongues, 120 of them, when they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment.

Why were they bewildered? Because each one of them heard them speaking in his own language. Utterly amazed, they asked, are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? Most of all of Jesus' disciples, except possibly Judas, came from Galilee.

Judas, the one who betrayed them. And they were all Galileans, that was uncultured, that was more the boondocks, compared to Jerusalem. Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language?

How could they be speaking languages they don't know? Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt, and the parts of Libya near Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.

How are they praising God in languages they don't know? Where did they get this? Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, what does this mean? Some, however, made fun of them and said, ah, they've had too much wine, they're drunk.

Now, we're gonna probably study next week Peter's response to that and the fact that the first sermon of the Christian era is gonna be preached next week. And the crowd that was gathered because of this manifestation, supernatural manifestation.

And this is how the church was born. Forget Baptists, because to God, there are no Baptists, there's just one Baptist, John the Baptist, and he died a long time ago. There are no Pentecostals, there are no Charismatics, there are no Lutherans, there's no Presbyterians, God only has one church, and this is how it was born.

Are you with me so far? Say amen. There's no black church, there's no white church, there's no Kojic Church of God in Christ, there's none of that, that is all stuff we've made up. It does not exist to God, God does not exist, recognize any denomination.

Because if he did, he would be dividing the one body that he prayed would be one. He'd be encouraging people to be divided. So there's only one church, we're all in it. That's why you always root for every Christian you meet.

Every church you ever visit, you root for that pastor, you root for that congregation, you never tear another Christian, wait, another church down because we're all part of the same body. Sometimes we have interviews with new members, they come from another church where they had a bad experience.

We don't wanna hear about your bad experience. Let's serve Jesus, we don't have anything good to say, don't say anything at all, but let's lift one another up in the name of the Lord. Come on, everyone, say amen as you clap your hand.

The Holy Spirit and the Church’s New Era

Now, this is the birth of the church, and we live still today in the era of the church. The Father sent the Son, he was here for 33 1⁄2 years, he did the work assigned to him, he left, and he said, then it's better for you that I go because I'm gonna send the Spirit, and we learned last week that the Holy Spirit coming and living inside of believers was better than Jesus physically being with them, which is very hard for our minds to imagine.

But Jesus said, it's so. It's better for you that I go because unless I go, I can't send the Spirit, and when he comes, watch out. Now things will really change. When Jesus was discipling the people, he produced basically failures.

I say that reverently because when he was arrested, they all fled, none of them were strong. Peter was weak, we know. James and John once went to a town, they didn't like the way the people responded to them, they wanted to call down fire and wipe out the whole town.

That was their spirit. Repent or we'll blow you up, how about that? That's an approach. So now, and now a new day has come. Now there are incidentals, I don't wanna talk long, there are incidentals about this that we won't go into because they're never repeated again.

The blowing of a wind from heaven, that's never recorded again that it happened in the book of Acts. So it's not something we wanna focus on because we wanna gather now, what do we learn about the birth of the church?

What is God teaching us what the church should look like? What are the abiding principles that we can take home, not the incidentals that happened just that moment and never happened again? So the sound of the wind, as spectacular as it was, that's not repeated.

If God wants to blow a wind in this building, so be it. How many say amen? Amen. But it's not something we're supposed to look for or pray for. The tongues coming upon each one of fire, that is never mentioned again elsewhere in the Bible.

But what can we learn? Let's just get to it. First of all, we learn that the atmosphere, we learn of the atmosphere that the church was born in and which continued through the rest of the book of Acts and is mentioned in the epistles.

And wherever the church has been powerful and left influence on the earth, this atmosphere is reinstated. What is that atmosphere? The atmosphere, now forget what church you went to, what church I went to.

We're going now to the Bible. Jesus told them, you're gonna receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. How many believe that when Jesus said that, it's gonna happen? Just say amen. And yet they went and for the next 10 days continued steadfastly in prayer and worship and waiting.

Prayer, Worship, and Waiting for God’s Promise

This is a misunderstanding that most of us have, especially with the name and then claim it perversion of faith that is so prevalent since the 1960s or so. We think that because we read a promise in the Bible, we should just sit back and wait for it to happen.

That is nowhere found in the Bible. You pray the promise. They had a promise, you'll receive power. Go to Jerusalem, you'll receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you'll be my witnesses.

They didn't go back and just text one another and hang out and say, if Jesus said it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. No, they devoted themselves to three things, prayer, worship, and waiting. We know they prayed because we read it here.

At the end of Luke's gospel, he says, they went back after Jesus left and continued worshiping in the temple, the upper room. Some people believe that what we read about didn't happen in an upper room, but in one of the rooms, the many rooms that was in the temple area, and that's why the crowd could hear it, whatever that truth might be.

The place where it happened is irrelevant. Unlike American thinking and unlike 21st century Christian thinking, there are no sacred sites in the New Testament. The upper room, wherever it was, is never mentioned again.

You would think that where the church was born, everybody would just get T-shirts, I was in the upper room, sell them, and everybody would have tour groups going, here's where Peter stood, here's where they were.

They don't even mention it again. It's like it never even happened. It was the substance of what happened, not the place. There are no sacred places in the New Testament. No one finds anyone going to the hill where Jesus was crucified.

Nobody's looking for his tomb and saying, I went where they laid him. It's never even mentioned. They had to get on with business, and business was to be what God wants you to be so that you can witness for the Lord Jesus Christ and build his church.

So we know that they prayed, they worshiped, and they waited, even though they had the promise. Most people just get the promise, mentally affirm it, oh, I know God will come through for me. Disconnect, and then wonder why the promise doesn't come.

Promises are not to be just frivolously thought about in the mind, they're to be prayed for. You'll find out in the Old Testament, God made promise after promise, and then those people would pray, do what you said.

Remember your word to your servant, for you have given me hope. God, I'm reminding you. In other words, God gives promises so that we will pray the promise back to him and wait and worship until he fulfills that which he has said.

You will find Paul in the New Testament in the church era saying, pray for me. Well, if God said you're gonna be a great apostle, why do you need anyone to pray for you? Because the promise has to be prayed for.

God wants us connected. We become joint workers with God in this business of building the church of Jesus Christ. Now, worshiping and praying and waiting, and you need the balance of that. That's the atmosphere of what a church should be, and how do we know that's true?

What did Jesus say when he cleansed the temple? You've turned this to a den of thieves. You're trying to make money here personally. You're making commissions on the animals that you're selling for the sacrifice, but my Father's house shall be called a what?

A house of prayer. Why? So that people connect with the promises of God and actually experience what God has promised. You'll find that over again in the Bible. So it's a place of prayer, which means petition, asking God, God, do what you said.

My daughter's away from God. God, bring her back. I dedicated her with my wife, but bring her back. Bring her back. No, if you dedicate her, God's gonna do it. No, that's wrong. You pray what God said he would do.

How many are with me? Put your hands together. Come on, real strong, mas fuerte. So, do what you have said, not some lackadaisical mental kind of thing. But they not only pray, they worship. If all you do is petition God, and you don't have an element of worship, you'll get depressed and very negative.

People who just ask, ask, and ask, and never are thanking God for what he's already done. That church will get a heavy spirit in. That Christian will have a heavy spirit to them, always groaning and asking.

There's a time to groan and ask, but how many know there's a time to just say, God, I praise you for the great things you have done. Can we say amen to that? So we mix the prayer with the praise. But you gotta mix one other element, choir, with the prayer and the praise, and that's to wait.

And wait means be quiet and listen, because God might wanna say something and do something, and your asking and your worshiping might actually defer the moment. So here was the atmosphere of the early church.

Here's what it was born in. Isn't this interesting? Nobody was preaching when the church was born. They were worshiping, praying, and waiting. No concert was being given by a six-time Grammy award-winning choir, and I thank God for the choir.

But there's a time for everything under the sun. But the early atmosphere of the church, it was very simple, remember? Prayer, worship, waiting. And then, of course, the word is gonna be preached now.

But this is where God did something great among these waiting disciples. That's the atmosphere of a Christian church. Why do you think my wife has, starts almost every choir practice, and has for years with a time of prayer?

Because what good if they all sing their notes and the Holy Spirit doesn't anoint them? Did you feel the Spirit anointing them when they were singing that last song? That wasn't them, they're not that good.

They sing with all their hearts. No, I mean they're good. We love the choir. Choir, you know what I meant by that, okay? I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. How many know what I'm talking about? They sing great, but it's not, if you want great singing, go to Broadway.

This is not a show. They're supposed to be used by the Holy Spirit. Unless they pray and worship and wait, the connection won't be made. Lives won't be changed. We've seen people converted while they were singing.

We've got testimonies of people being set free from demonic oppression while they're singing. We got, I just heard about a lady ministering in Timbuktu on the other side of the world and she told someone, a friend of mine who she met, he was traveling there, just tell the wife, the pastor's wife, tell Carol Cimbala and that choir, the only thing that's kept me on the field for 10 years is listening to their CDs.

I put it on and I feel God in my house. Now that's not by might nor by power nor by soprano nor by alto nor by tenor, but by my spirit, say of the Lord, amen, amen. So that was the atmosphere. We make too much of preaching.

We make too much of teaching and preaching and teaching will only be measured as really good if it leads to prayer, worship, and waiting. Otherwise, we become Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses. All they can do is give their doctrine, teaching, and have a teaching session.

Everybody goes home with more mental knowledge. But let's get to the second point so I can close. The other thing that happened was the church was born when all of them had an experience with the Holy Spirit.

Experiencing the Holy Spirit Rather Than Merely Studying

The Bible says clearly they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. Something came from heaven. The Christian church was born with something supernatural coming from heaven. I don't care if it's loud or quiet.

I don't care if it's gradual or in an instant. But the Christian church was born with something coming from heaven. We prayed for something from heaven before we came down here with the prayer band. And God has fulfilled his word already.

He didn't even need for me to preach. We've met God today already, haven't we? So, something came from heaven. Do you think most churches expect that when they have their services on Sunday? Do you think most churches are praying, God, disrupt the sequence of the service.

Do whatever you want, but come Holy Spirit. Come Holy Spirit. Just rearrange the meeting. It belongs to you. No, over periods of time, liturgy has developed and now there's no place for the Holy Spirit.

Hardly to break in. I was once at a church in a service. They give me what they call the script of the meeting. Every place I go, the script of the meeting. I had 11 minutes to preach. And they said, don't go too long or the people will walk out while you're speaking.

Be hard for the Holy Spirit to break in there, right? Somebody who just spoke here recently said, so what's the script of the meeting? He said, we don't have one. So they said, well, how long do I have to preach?

It was Ravi Zacharias who asked me. I said, when you're tired, stop. What can I tell you? But we wanna keep it that way. How many say amen? Why? Because God knows what's best for any meeting and the meeting at 12 will be different than the meeting at nine.

If you sit here during the day, you'll find out that there's no programmed meetings. We're trying to be open to the Holy Spirit. Now notice, they had an experience with the Spirit. Let me finish with this.

They had an experience. They didn't study the Holy Spirit. They experienced the Holy Spirit. You can study something all you want. Unless you experience the Holy Spirit, it won't change you in one iota.

They didn't have a Bible study to start the church. They had an invasion by the Spirit of God. Is teaching important? Yes, I'm trying to do it now. Is preaching important? Yes, I'm trying to do it now.

But they had an experience with the Holy Spirit. Heaven opened and something came down and they were changed by this contact with the Holy Spirit. When was the last time that some of you were changed by the power of the Holy Spirit?

Now this was repeated in case you think I'm going off on a bad track here. The Bible talks in the next chapter in chapter three that seasons of refreshing might come from the presence of the Lord, whether it's to comfort us, encourage us at the altar here while people are calling out to God to lift those burdens.

They were having experiences with the Holy Spirit, the God of all comfort, comforting them, not studying what the word comfort means, getting the comfort of the Holy Spirit. If you're hungry, you don't want a picture of a pizza.

You want to eat a pizza. How many say amen? You don't want to study how dough is made. You want to put it in your mouth. You want to eat it. The Bible said not oh, study and see. It says what? Oh, taste and see that the what?

The Lord is good. And why church is boring to so many people and why kids fade away is they have no experience with God the Holy Spirit. So the church was born with an experience. That's what I pray for more for that than anything else in the world.

I cry sometimes when I counsel people and they come to our church and they see, I see they've had no invasion of the Spirit of God in their life. They're harder than the pulpit. And I've been preaching my head off and other pastors and we're trying to do our best, but unless God invades you, how will you be changed?

Teaching doesn't do it. Jesus taught them for three and a half years, nothing happened. You couldn't have a better teacher. People say no, I need a model. He modeled for them too. He was their perfect model.

And nothing changed in these men until they were invaded by the Holy Spirit. Why do you think Carol sometimes says, lift up your hands and praise the Lord or open your hearts? Because we want you to experience God.

Otherwise you're gonna go to church. What in the world is going to church gonna help you? When the enemy comes to discourage you and oppress you, what are you gonna say? I was in church yesterday. No, you need to be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might.

You need to experience the Holy Spirit. Let me close. They all had it. This was totally new. First of all, in the Old Testament, the Spirit only came on a few people. When they were building the tabernacle, the Spirit came on men who were skilled in certain crafts and they built the tabernacle.

The Spirit came on Moses. The Spirit was on Joshua. The Spirit was on Samuel from a little boy. The Spirit would come on David. But for the rank and file people, no. This is a new day now. The Spirit is not coming on just a couple people.

The Holy Spirit is coming inside all of them, men and women. This is unheard of in all the thousands of years of Hebrew history. This is a new departure. This is the birth of the church. This is what Jesus said.

If anybody's thirsty, let them come to me and drink. I'm not gonna give you a picture of water. I'm gonna give you water, speaking of the Spirit. And it happened to every one of them. Women, Jesus' mother, were told she was there.

The apostles. In other words, there's no hierarchy clergy where they have to meet God and we just sit and observe and see what they do. That's unknown. That's American Christianity. That's Western culture Christianity.

You sit, you watch. No, the Spirit comes on everybody. The manifestation of the Spirit, 1 Corinthians 14, 12, is given to everyone for the profit of the church. What good does it, if God helps me to preach and you don't meet God and have the Holy Spirit come on you, how will that help you?

That's not God's plan for the church. No, we're all members of the body. And every member has to be functioning. So the Spirit doesn't come on a couple people like just the soloist. The whole choir has to be anointed.

This is totally unknown. Every one of them. Of every race. For in Jesus Christ is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female. Women are gonna prophesy. Women are gonna be used. You find that rarely in the Old Testament.

All gonna happen by the Spirit. And what happened? We learned the atmosphere. We learn now what happened. The Holy Spirit came. Now, how did it actualize? What did it look like that first time? Well, the wind and the fire, they're done away with or they're not repeated.

Tongues, Interpretation, and Spiritual Gifts

But the Bible says, and we just had an example of that for those of you visiting who didn't know exactly what was happening. They all began to speak in other languages as we heard this morning as the Spirit gave the mutterings.

Now, that is called modern terms, glossolalia. And glossolalia is speaking in words that you don't know. Inspired by the Holy Spirit. Now, as we go through this, the Book of Acts, we're gonna learn a lot about the Holy Spirit.

And we're gonna have to at some point talk about the teaching of 1 Corinthians 12 and 1 Corinthians 14, where tongues can happen in a meeting, but they must be interpreted. In other words, if that message wasn't interpreted, it was out of order.

Because nobody understood what the sister was saying when she was speaking in an unknown language. The interpretation must happen in a public meeting. This is different now. The Spirit is poured out now.

And because people are from all over the world, they come and they hear actual languages, even though the men speaking it and women speaking it don't know what that language is. They're from all over the world and they're saying, we understand.

And they're praising God in languages they don't know. So, they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. And they spoke in other languages. Now, that other languages are repeated. It's repeated throughout the Book of Acts.

And in 1 Corinthians, Paul says to the church at Corinth, I would that all of you speak in tongues, but I'd rather have you prophesy in a meeting because speaking in tongues is only proper in a meeting if it's gonna hold center stage if it's interpreted.

Otherwise, chaos breaks out. It has to be in the language of the people or it's out of order. But, oh, he says, I will pray in the Spirit now, being alone and praying in another language, which to the most churches, 99 of the churches, most members, what are you talking about?

I will pray with my understanding, but I will also pray with my spirit. I don't know those two kinds of praying. It's in the Bible. Some say that ended when all the 66 books of the Bible were put together.

When the canon of Scripture was agreed upon, all these gifts stopped. This church does not believe that. We believe that what God did 2 ,000 years ago, he could still do today. Come on, all in favor with me, put your hands together and say aye.

And the reason for that is there's no verse that says what the interpreters are saying. Well, now more and more people are saying, because of the growth of Christianity around the world and in most places that it's growing strongest in Africa, South America, elsewhere, are with people who believe that the manifestations of the Spirit mentioned in the Bible are still present for today, that God has not changed.

Our faith has changed. Our openness has changed. So let me close. They had the faith somehow to be filled with the Holy Spirit. What does filled mean? This held me back for many years of my life. And I pondered this, as God knows, because I am drinking Poland Spring.

Notice Poland. This is a very excellent country. My Polish mother's here today. She'll enjoy that. This bottle is just about filled with water. If I open it and took more water, I filled it, it would overflow.

And there's a good metaphor there, good symbolism, because they were filled. There wasn't some little trickle, they were filled. You know, you go to the Mississippi River right now in Louisiana, it's rocking and rolling, coming down there, overflowing.

You can go up to the Catskills and see a river, too, where the water's about this high. Are they both rivers? Yes. Do they both have water in it? Yes. Is there a difference? Yes. So a Christian can have just a little stream going of the Spirit in his life.

Obviously, that's why the Bible says, keep being filled with the Holy Spirit. But the bad thing about that metaphor is that the Holy Spirit is not water. The Holy Spirit is not wind. Those are symbols of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is a person. So how do you get filled with a person? You get filled by a person, what happened to them, when you come under the control of that person. When you have the childlike faith and openness to say, come Holy Spirit.

And now, he begins to take control, like you've been controlling your life all your life, and our flesh can control our life and get us in trouble, and our pride can control us, and we're unable to say, I'm sorry, I'm wrong.

And lust can overcome us and become a driving force. And love of money and racial prejudice can control us, that makes us act ugly to other people who are innocent. Well, now, these men were controlled, and women were controlled by the Holy Spirit.

That's what filled means, controlled, influenced. And the Lord now tells us, through his word, that he wants us to live lives constantly controlled, filled, led by the Holy Spirit. That's the only way you act like Jesus, not struggling to be more like Christ, yielding so that the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Christ, can produce Christian fruit, love, joy, peace.

It's not even your love, it's not even your joy. Don't even try to have it. It's not yours. It's his joy, his peace, in you, as you yield to his control. Oh, how many are happy for that? Say amen. Christianity is not, argh, struggling.

Jason comes to play. Now, what did they do? I mentioned to you they spoke in tongues. That's another subject for another time, but I want you to see the bigger picture. What happened throughout history now is when you come under the control of the Holy Spirit, do you remember the promise Jesus gave?

Spirit-Empowered Witness and Giving God the Glory

You will receive power when? When the Holy Spirit comes upon you. You can't separate power from the Holy Spirit. There's no such thing as getting power. You only can get power from the Holy Spirit. There's no isolated thing called power.

I'm gonna get power today. No, it's the Holy Spirit who grants the power. When you grieve the Holy Spirit, the power stops flowing. When you live in sin and you hurt the Holy Spirit, you won't find much power in your life at all.

It's impossible, imposible. It's connected to the Holy Spirit. So as they yielded to him, what did they do? And characterizing the rest of the church era and should characterize us today, they began to do things they couldn't do.

That's the whole history of the church. When the Holy Spirit comes, people start doing things they can't do. In this early case, they began to speak languages they didn't know. Soon Peter's gonna stand up.

He's not a preacher. He wasn't even a strong Christian when the Lord was there. Next thing you know, he's preaching. Wait a minute, he's preaching effectively. They're pricked in their hearts and 3 ,000 people get saved that day.

How did he pull that off? It's not him. It's the power of the Holy Spirit. Study the whole book. Study the church history. God is always taking people, men and women, who have limitations like we all do, and saying, no, as you yield to my spirit, I will lift you up into another realm.

You will do things you cannot do. You will say things you can't say. You will pray things you can't pray. You will have faith that you don't have. And it'll all be inspired by the Holy Spirit. And that way, God will get all the glory.

So when we go to heaven, nobody's gonna be walking saying, I did this, I spoke in tongues, I preached a message, I worked with special needs kids. Everybody will sing to him be all the glory and power.