Pentecost and the Inside-Out Church

You might be thinking, “Well, of course God didn’t want to fill people with the Holy Spirit in the temple or in a synagogue. Jesus had come to establish a new way of living and a new way of worship: He didn’t want people to associate the filling of the Holy Spirit with Jewish worship and ritual, so the Spirit had to fill people outside of the temple until God could establish the Church.”

Let’s think about that for a moment. God’s intention and desire has always been to include the Jews, not to exclude them: Jesus said that “salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22), and Paul wrote that the power of God for salvation is for the Jews first (Romans 1:16).

Some Gentile Christians have a tendency to view the day of Pentecost as the birthday of the Gentile Church, as God’s first determined step away from the Jews. But God has never abandoned or given up on the Jews, not before the day of Pentecost and not after (see Romans 11).

In fact, everybody who was in the upper room on the day of Pentecost when the Church was born was a Jew, through and through, as was Jesus. It was a beautifully Jewish birthday. All of those 3,000 converts on the day of Pentecost were Jews, either by birth or by conversion to Judaism. Evidently, God poured out the power of the Holy Spirit in the streets of Jerusalem instead of in the temple, not because He was abandoning the Jews but because He was trying all the more to reach them.

Never be fooled into the believing the dangerous idea that the Holy Spirit worked primarily outside the temple because He had rejected the Jews. That leads too easily to ugly anti-Semitism.

And besides, the Book of Acts plainly reveals that, even after the Church had been established and they were gathering regularly (with some local congregations including only Jewish Christians, others later on comprising only Gentile believers, and some with a glorious mixture of Jews and Gentiles), the Holy Spirit continued to move in power more outside than inside.

For example, consider the disciples who were the first to be baptized in the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. They were “all together in one place” (Acts 2:1), which I guess we could call a meeting of the Church. But the Holy Spirit immediately compelled them to leave their gathering of believers and to take the message of God’s love and of Christ’s sacrifice to the streets.

This pattern is repeated throughout the Book of Acts: whenever the Holy Spirit filled the believers in a large-group gathering (a church meeting), He gave them boldness and urgency to speak and to witness outside of that meeting place (see for example Acts 4:31).Clearly, the Holy Spirit loves the Church; just as clearly, He seems to love the Church best when it is the Church EVERYWHERE (not just all together in one building) and AT ALL TIMES (not just when church is “in session”).

The following incidents in the Book of Acts can teach us a lot about where the Holy Spirit likes to work:

1. Both Peter (Acts 4:8) and Stephen (Acts 7:55) were filled with the Holy Spirit while on trial before the rulers, elders, and scribes. This was exactly what Jesus had promised would happen: He said that the Holy Spirit would be with us and would teach us what to say when we stand before rulers and authorities (Luke 12:2).
2. The Holy Spirit filled the Samaritans, people the Jews were prejudiced against for both racial and religious reasons (Acts 8:14-17). Because of the Jews’ hatred of this people group, the Samaritans couldn’t come to meetings of the Church in Jerusalem – so the Holy Spirit went to them, just as Jesus had promised (Acts 1:8). He loves to go to the places where people are disadvantaged, discriminated against, hated, and oppressed.
3. Later in Acts 8, God led Philip to go out to a desert road, and the Holy Spirit instructed him to run up and join a passing chariot. The chariot’s owner was a seeker, and Philip led him to Christ. Then the Holy Spirit snatched Philip away and deposited him in another city while the seeker continued on his way back home to Africa (Acts 8:26-40). It’s important to note that the Holy Spirit could have arranged for this Ethiopian man to find a Christian in Jerusalem who might have invited him to a gathering of believers – but He didn’t. For some reason, the Holy Spirit wanted to meet that man outside.
4. What about the filling of the Apostle Paul? Saul of Tarsus was filled with the Holy Spirit in a house on Straight Street in Damascus (Acts 9:17). God sent a believer named Ananias to go to Paul. He could just as easily have directed Paul to go to a gathering of believers somewhere in Damascus. Evidently, the Holy Spirit likes to pour out on people in living rooms.
5. When the Holy Spirit was about to break the bitter, centuries-old division between Jews and Gentiles, He decided to speak to Peter about it. Where was Peter when the Holy Spirit spoke to him? On the roof of a house in Joppa (Acts 10:19).
6. The Holy Spirit spoke to Peter on that roof in response to the prayers of Cornelius, a Gentile who feared God. An angel appeared to Cornelius and told him to send for Peter. That angel could just as easily have told Cornelius to go to Peter; Peter could have arranged to bring Cornelius to a special meeting of the believers in Joppa. Instead, the Holy Spirit told Peter to leave Joppa and to go to Cornelius in Caesarea. As a result, Cornelius, his family, and his friends were saved and filled with the Holy Spirit in Cornelius’ house.
7. In Acts 19, the Holy Spirit filled a number of Ephesians. This is significant because Ephesus was known throughout the ancient world as a center of idolatry and sorcery. Ever feel like the places where you live and work are dark, lost, maybe even evil? Those are the places where the Holy Spirit yearns to be.

There are many more examples, but maybe these are enough to show us an important pattern: the Holy Spirit’s presence and power are not confined to the walls of a church building or to gatherings of believers. He is out there where seekers are looking for God, out there where believers are trying to reach the lost, out there where believers are “on trial,” in the wilderness, in the courtroom, in the living room, among the powerless and the disenfranchised, in the cities where darkness and idolatry and witchcraft seem to prevail. He is out there. Of course, the Book of Acts also reveals that the Holy Spirit was deeply involved in the Church and that His power was evident wherever believers gathered together (see, for example, Acts 15 where the Holy Spirit unifies the Church during a contentious and crucial meeting). But the Gospels and the Book of Acts indicate that the activity of the Holy Spirit was largely concentrated outside of the large-group gatherings of believers: He was continually sending believers OUT and He was going with them.

Tags: church, insideout, pentecost

Category: Living the Faith, Spring 2002