Pentecost Sunday 2026

Transcript is automatically produced. Errors may be present.

Good morning friends. It’s so much nicer to talk than to be talked about, and so here we go. I’m gonna ask you guys to just do something for me really quick. I want you to turn around and look at the clock on the back wall. You can see it up there in big red letters. The service finishes in t-t-t-t-t 34 minutes.

And so when we’re still here at 12:30, it’s not my fault. It was everyone else’s fault. And I’m gonna move as quick as we can. So if at times you feel like we’re moving a little too fast that’s just me trying to keep pace with us. We’re gonna be reading from Acts chapter 2 in just a moment, the Pentecost story.

If you’d like to turn there, I’ll have you stand in just a moment. But first I’m gonna do something that’s maybe a little bit dangerous for us today ’cause we’re a fairly unimaginative group of people. I’m gonna invite you into an act of imagination. So you can close your eyes if you’d like to.

Keep them open if you want to. I want you to imagine it’s 27 AD or 33 AD, around the time of Jesus. I think we’re using those kind of terms for it, yeah. And you wake up one beautiful Jerusalem morning, blue skies, birds in the air. You start wandering down the local Jerusalem high street. It’s a festival day.

The city’s gone from maybe 150,000 people to maybe a million people. Maybe you stop and grab some coffee at your favorite Jerusalem coffee shop. Enjoy the smell and the taste of that coffee. Greet a couple of local people that you know and just say hi and complain about the tourists while appreciating the money that they’re bringing in.

Then you notice a crowd together. It’s noisy. They’re yelling. And you’re just curious, so you go over to see. Think maybe it’s just a normal everyday street preacher who’s just doing his thing. Then you notice this crowd’s different. First, it’s the voices. There’s languages from every different tribe that you can possibly imagine.

More languages than then you pick out your language and hear those words as though they’re just for you. In the midst of that, you hear them start to tell a story. Not about Jesus’ death, but about Jesus’ resurrection. You start to wonder what that means. Resurrection, people don’t rise from the dead.

You start to recognize one or two of the people in the crowd and recognize that they were disciples of Jesus. “Why are they here?” you wonder. They should be running. They should be getting out of town. And here they are talking about Jesus in front of everybody else. But the language thing is the thing that grabs you.

You start to look at all sorts of different people recognizing their own language spoken. And you realize in this moment people from all over the world are hearing the wonders of God spoken in their own language by people that shouldn’t know how to speak it. You can open your eyes if you had your eyes closed.

This is the Pentecost story. It’s one that we easily miss. We get used to it. We kinda get lost maybe in the triad of festivals. We have the Chri- the Christmas festival, we have the Easter festival, and then Pentecost seems like the third place one, the third tier. And yet I have a feeling that Pentecost is as important as the others.

And what it means for us today is truly one of the most transformative things i- in terms of being a follower of Jesus in today’s world. Now, maybe you’re kinda visiting, maybe you’re dropping in. You’re new to church, you’re new to faith, and your question is what is Pentecost?” And we’ll get there.

But maybe you come with an assumption that y- you already know what Pentecost is. Maybe you associate it with the word Pentecostal, that slightly strange tribe of our brothers that I grew up in. They’ll have their own little place in eternity where they get to do their thing by themselves. Or maybe you know some Greek language and you know what penti means, five, like pentagon, pentagram, all those different concepts.

And costa means 10, so it means 50. Maybe it has something to do with the word 50. Tho- those are important details when it comes to Pentecost. They don’t really get to the heart of the story. And that’s what I hope we can do today. I hope I can help you understand what’s the heartbeat to this story.

Why, out of all the stories that we come across in scripture, is this one, one that’s transformative for you and I? So if you’d stand with me, we’re gonna start reading from Acts 2:1

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly, a sound like the blowing of violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Now, they were staying in Jerusalem, God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked, “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it each of us hears them in our native language?

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 tongue.” Amazed and perplexed, p- perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”

Some of them, however, made fun of them and said, “They have had too much wine.” Jesus, with this text, would you speak to our hearts? Holy Spirit, would you remind us that you are central to our lives? Help us to open our hearts to you, to live with your strength today. For anyone who’s here who doesn’t know this story belongs to them yet, may you open their eyes to see and hear.

May this story grip us, transform us, as it’s designed to do. Amen. You may be seated. Chapter two, verse one: When the day of Pentecost came. Easy for us to miss in the midst of our feeling like we understand the text is that this festival, Pentecost, came 50 days after the festival of Passover. Passover was around the time that Jesus died and Jesus rose again.

And most people coming into town for the festival, would hang around for those 50 days. The town would swell. People would come from all over the place, and they would linger, experiencing the highlights of the festival. This, to Jewish people in the first century, was a big deal, a moment in their story that needed to be celebrated.

And so for the first disciples, the apprentices, the followers of Jesus in the midst of Jesus’ death and resurrection, this festival is somewhat of a tension. It’s both a thing to celebrate, but they’re also waiting for something to happen unsure of what’s next in the journey. The day of Pentecost came.

They were all together in one place. They’re pausing, not going anywhere. By all accounts, they should be leaving, running. They’re waiting to see if what Jesus promised would come true. For those of you that traveled with us during our John series that covered most of the last year, throughout John, there’s this moment, especially in 14, 15, and 16, the later chapters, where Jesus begins to say something to them like this: “I’m gonna leave, and it’s gonna be better for you that I do.”

I always wonder whether those first disciples have side conversations about stuff Jesus said with themselves when Jesus isn’t around. ‘Cause most of the time I think when Jesus says something, I’m instantly like, “That’s true. That feels good. Might be hard to do, but it feels like it’s the right thing.” And this one, I have questions.

Even if you’re not someone who would say you follow Jesus, think about some of the things that Jesus claimed to do and assume that they’re true for just a moment. Jesus repeatedly healed the sick. If you’d been sick in the last year or so, if Jesus was here, he could have healed you. Jesus fed people, 5,000 people at one time.

If you were hungry, if you lacked anything, if you needed something, if Jesus had been here right with us he could have fixed that problem as well. In fact, there’s almost no situation that you might not find yourself in that Jesus couldn’t handle personally. And for most of the time Jesus has taught for this three years, his followers have wandered around fairly unsure what’s happening, fairly unable to help themselves, fairly reliant on Jesus.

And now Jesus says to them, “It’s better that I go away.” The idea that’s on your page in front of you, if you have the notes, is that the Spirit inside you is greater than Jesus beside you. Jesus said, “It’s better that I go,” ’cause there’s this story that’s going to emerge from here, a Spirit story that’s greater than this story, at least in how far it’s able to reach.

That this story’s gonna go from a local thing to all over the place with this new Spirit story. This is what these followers of Jesus are waiting for in this moment in history right now. Verse two, “Suddenly a sound, like a blowing of a violent wind, came from heaven.” The author describes the three parts of the story or the experience behind the story.

They go from abstract down to concrete, and the first one is the most abstract of those. “Like the blowing of a violent wind, came from heaven.” Have you ever noticed how when you experience something close to transcendent- That you start to rely on metaphors to explain it. It’s harder to rely on like concrete stuff like a blowing wind.

Not a blowing wind but like it. Maybe you’ve used language like this at specific moments in your own life that feel like, “Oh, this is a different kind of moment.” Here’s some that, that I think I’ve used at different points. “It was like walking on air.” Maybe the moment you first fall in love, the moment you first have that experience and you’re like, “Oh my goodness, that was like I was walking on air.”

Maybe you’ve never walked on air, but you feel like this experience must be like it if you could ever do that. “My heart was on fire.” Maybe the first moment you became passionate about something. Maybe the first moment you keep, deeply started to care for something. It wasn’t on fire. It was like it was on fire.

“It was like str- being struck by lightning.” The most painful of these three and the one that I most hope that you haven’t actually experienced. There’s a moment where something strikes you for the first time. “That was like lightning, struck by lightning.” Here for these followers of Jesus, the language they use is, “It was like a blowing wind.”

It was noisy in there. There was wind everywhere. Maybe today they’d say it was like a jet engine went off. They’re trying to capture some of the bigness of this moment. And then it gets just a little bit more concrete in verse three. “They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.”

There’s this visual part where they start to notice something happening. That something is happening in the room in this moment. And then the third one that’s the most concrete. That’s the moment where the experience goes to something that could’ve been hallucinated, something that could’ve been imagined to something that nobody could make up.

In this moment in verse four, it says, “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.” How many of you in the room, just throw up a hand, how many of you have traveled to a country that doesn’t speak your language? Just throw up a hand, anyone.

Imagine in that moment you enter into that country, a language you do not speak. Maybe you’re trying to purchase something and the person constantly misunderstands you. Maybe you’re trying to order a taxi and no one can understand what you’re trying to say and in this moment suddenly those words, those, that other language starts rising up out of you and you start speaking fluently in the language of those people.

This is an experience that every single one of these people in the story had. Something here that’s concrete, that’s real. And then even more concrete is that the experience doesn’t stay just in a group. It spills out into the street. It becomes part of the whole of Jerusalem. It’s a story that now isn’t just an interior group holding onto one particular story.

This is a story now shared with everyone. Verse five and six say this: “Now they were staying in Jerusalem, God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard their language being spoken.” Go back for a moment to that foreign country that you were in And remind yourself what it’s like in that moment to suddenly hear someone talking a language that you understand.

Someone in your moment of need connecting with you. That’s true when you’re British living in America. Americans, by some generosity of spirit, can be included in the English-speaking people of the world. That’s a little joke, a little parting little thing. It’s not serious. I love you all deeply. But my first experience of living here was to be deeply homesick.

And I was about to travel. I was stood in an airport, and in that moment, I heard the deep, guttural sounds of a British speaker from the middle of the country. I turned round to see an old friend just happened to be in Detroit. In that moment, and the joy that entered into my soul was incredible. It’s wonderful to hear your own language, but this is not just that.

This is them hearing in their own language the wonders that God has done. And so imagine now that language is not just telling you everyday details. It’s not just an encounter with someone you happen to know. It’s hearing for the first time the story of what Jesus has done. That’s this Pentecost story.

In the midst of the story, people respond. The crowd enter into the story, and they’re curious they have questions. A- and then there’s another cr- part of the crowd that, that might be termed the certain, the dismissive. They have insults. They’re the ones that cry, “They must have been drinking too much wine.”

But our focus point today is the questions, ’cause I think they’re the ones that nudge us into the story. That maybe if we come with our own questions, they’re the ones that help us embrace the story just for a moment. Wonder about it. Maybe open ourselves to the fact it could be true. These are the questions from verse seven onwards.

“Utterly amazed, they asked, ‘Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans?'” Simple folk from the outskirts. People from where? From Kansas or wherever we might pick today. “Aren’t they all…” There’s someone from Kansas in the room. I know it. I can feel it. “Aren’t all these speaking Galileans? Then how is it each of us hears them in our native language?”

Question one. Question two. “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 tongue.”

It’s as much as to say everywhere in the known world had gathered in this space with all sorts of people present. And that all of them hear spoken in their own language the wonders of God. Which leads us to the third question in verse 12. “Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, ‘What does this mean?'”

What does what’s happening here mean for us today? What’s going on in this story? What are you and I today, 2,000 years later, supposed to take from it? What are they 50- for 2,000 years ago supposed to take from it? And of course, yes, some said they had too much wine. These are the questions that they ask.

“Aren’t these speaking Galileans? How do you hear them sp- how do we hear them speaking in our own languages? And what does this mean?” We’re gonna kinda look at these in reverse order, which I usually find helpful for this passage. What does this mean? I would suggest to understand this story really, you need to place it alongside another story.

This is really an old story that’s been pulled out and is now being refreshed, brushed off, and delivered in a new, and I would suggest, better way to a generation 2,000 years ago. That is what I hope you take away. This is God moving again as He’s moved before. This is a map of the London Underground system.

Could be New York, could be Tokyo, could be Budapest, all sorts of cities that have trains that go underground. I sometimes think that the Bible works like this. It looks confusing on the surface, but when you can get underneath, there’s all sorts of lines that run through it. They move through different verses, and if you can capture that, then it starts to become clear.

On the surface, all of these lines look confusing, but take just all of the rest away and leave one. Suddenly, you get a clear line moving in specific ways. The scriptures have these big verses that lots of the lines run through. Genesis 3, the story of creation. Exodus, the story of God’s people moving out of Egypt.

These lines move all the way through to stories of resurrection and all sorts of wonderful things. And this story we’re gonna focus on today is the story of Exodus in Exodus chapter 12. In this story, God’s people have been imprisoned in a nation, in Egypt. They’ve been there for 300 years. They have no freedom, no capacity to leave.

In this story, God acts supernaturally. He pulls them out of this nation that has them in captivity and sets them free. And in the midst of doing that, He says to them this The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, “This month is to be for you the first month of your year.” What does he mean when he says this?

He means that in this moment, God is doing a new thing, a new story. And I want you to start the year by remembering this story. Have you ever found yourself in a moment in your story where it feels like nothing will ever be new again? That there’s no way anything can change. You feel locked in a particular line, a particular story that seems to show no signs of ending And you start wondering, can God create new stories where there has been an old story?

Can God bring healing to that story and release you into a new moment? Exodus would say yes, absolutely. And that every year, the first month of the year, they would gather and remember that God does new things. What God is essentially saying in this moment is this: a new story is emerging. Today is a new day.

These people leave Egypt en masse. Thousands of them exit, all taking possessions from Egypt. There’s a mass of humanity there, but not just the people of Israel, not just the Jewish people. There’s other people with them. A fascinating little detail in the text in verse 38, “Many other people went up with them, and also large droves of livestock, both flocks and herds.”

The Hebrew word behind that term, many other people, is the term “erev rav,” a mixed multitude, an odd bunch of people. This is a group of people from everywhere that just happen to have ended up in one place together. If you want a picture of this in real life it’s the food court. That moment you walk into a specific place and you see all sorts of people selling food.

You look around and there’s Indian food, there’s Chinese food, there’s Mediterranean food, and you begin to think that maybe every culture has brought their food to this one specific location. This erev rav is that. It’s a group of people from all sorts of places all over the world now leaving Egypt together.

You could describe it as a ragtag bunch of nobodies. Ragtag is a term that defines a collection of things just thrown together with no particular thought. That’s what this group feels like. Or you could think about it like a pirate ship, a group that will take anyone that will serve them. It’s a motley crew, this group that leaves Egypt.

Anybody who put their hands up can say yes. Anybody can go. You just have to leave. That’s what this group is that leaves Egypt. And then there’s this moment in Exodus 19 where they arrive at a mountain. “On the first day of the third month after the Israelites left Egypt,” 50 days after they left, “Israel encamped there in the desert in front of the mountain.”

They gather in a place called Sinai, a desert land where nothing grows. This is a picture of some of the territory. You can’t live in Sinai. Can’t grow crops in Sinai. In Sinai, there’s nothing. There’s no king of Sinai, no ruler. No one wants it. It’s valueless. Why does God take this bunch of people, this all-over-the-page group of people, this food court group, this motley crew of people, why would he take them and bring them to a place like this?

I would suggest this. God brings them to a place of complete dependence. They can’t survive here by themselves. God provides for them in the story. He cares for them, gives them what they need. Again, why? I would suggest this group of people have a problem. Yes, it’s wonderful that anyone can take this journey.

Yes, it’s wonderful that anyone’s invited. No one’s rejected. The odds and sods of society get to come on this journey together, but they have nothing in common. There’s no commonality in this group. How do they know how to live together? How do they know what the rules are? How do they know what society looks like for them?

And you’ve experienced this moment. You live with people that you’re trying to figure out a common journey with. We do this in a church community right here, but you also do it in the homes you happen to live in. Do you remember that experience of living with someone for the first time? Maybe it’s your first moment of consciousness as a kid, and you start to realize your brothers and sisters, your family members are different to you.

Maybe it’s moving in with housemates in college. Maybe it’s sharing a place with someone as you start to work. Maybe it’s getting married for the first time, the most difficult of them all. Maybe it’s moving back in with grandkids or grandparents, and you have this moment that pe- you realize people are different.

I think this picture, for me, exemplifies it Every relationship has one person who stacks the dishwasher like a Swedish architect. There are people out there that have one gift in life, it’s filling dishwashers. And if you’ve chosen that as your gift, good for you, congratulations. If you as a teenager believe you are this person, all my experience tells me you are not this person under any circumstances.

Everyone else fills the dishwasher like a raccoon on drugs. They just grab things and they just throw it in. If you don’t know which one you are then you’re the raccoon. Welcome to the raccoon side of the room. Have you experienced that moment of watching someone you know and love and think of as an intelligent person try to do this simple task and wonder what is going on in your brain?

That’s this crowd. It’s a group of people that have left together. All sorts of backgrounds, all sorts of languages, all sorts of experiences, all sort- sorts of nationalities, everything mixed in a group. But they have no common rules. And God takes them and lands them in this place called Sinai to do exactly that.

At Sinai, gi- God gives the law to these people. He gives them a list of things that say, “This is what you now have in common. Live this way. This is what my way looks like. Follow it. That’s gonna be your identity together as a group of people.” God takes a ragtag bunch of people, nobodies, and gathers them in one place.

See, in this story, God’s deep desire is to make a group of people for himself. In fact, the language is more than just a law. Look at this. This is Exodus 19:5. “Now therefore, if you,” this ragtag group … I didn’t mean to point at you guys when I said ragtag group. You, this ragtag group. “If you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, then you will be a special treasure to me above all people.

For all the mearth- earth is mine.” To that group, the nobodies, the messy ones, the broken humanity, to the ones that just went along for the journey, to the ones who didn’t know why they were there, God said, “Welcome in. This is how you live now. Come into the story.” That’s an incredible story. That’s what God does with people in this story.

He longs to bring them into that story, and says, “Yes, there’ll be change. Yes, you’re gonna be moved to places you didn’t realize you were gonna be moved, but you are welcome into the story.” So watch this flow here. Passover, 50 days pass, and Pentecost, where God meets a group of ragtag people at a mountain and calls them his, makes them his own.

1,500 years later, on Passover, Jesus dies And then 50 days pass. Brief aside you, for you for a moment. After the Exodus story, this group of people actually instituted another festival called the Festival of First Fruits. It happened the day after Passover. And in this festival, they remembered and gave thanks for the fact that a seed was buried in the ground, and it produced new life and fed them and gave them life in its turn.

That happened on the day Jesus rose from the dead. Kind of alarm bells and things going off constantly with this story. Jesus dies. 50 days later, Pentecost. But there’s tension in this story. There’s a waiting. ‘Cause none of them in the story know how it’s going to move. They know what Jesus said, but they don’t know where it’s going yet, and so they wait, and they wait.

The story hasn’t been shared yet. People have tried, but nobody believes it when they hear it. They don’t believe until they’ve seen Jesus for themselves. And so the question that hovers on this story at Pentecost in 27 AD or 33 AD or whichever it happens to be in reality is, can the story be shared without Jesus being seen?

Do you have to see him to believe he’s risen from the dead? Or can someone tell you the story, and can you believe it? Passover, Jesus dies. 50 days pass. Pentecost. What happens on Pentecost? 1,500 years after the original Pentecost. It’s the same story, right? Same story. On this day, a ragtag bunch of people are gathered in Jerusalem from all sorts of part, parts of the world, all sorts of experiences, all sorts of languages.

And in that moment, the Spirit comes, and a whole group of people hear the wonders that God has done in their own language. On a sociological level, a lot of writers think that the story back at Exodus, that story is one of the few times in history that a whole group of people heard from God as a group.

Most religions begin when one person says, “I heard something from God,” they write it down, they start passing it to other people, and later on, the story kinda crystallizes. But this one’s different. This one starts with a mass of humanity. It’s not quite unique though, ’cause it happens again in Acts 2.

That’s the second question: How do we hear them speaking in our own language? And the answer is this: that God is still looking for people. In the same way, at a mountain in a place called Sinai, he called a group of people. In Acts 2, in a city called Jerusalem, he calls a whole bunch of people again. That day, Peter will stand up and he’ll begin telling the story again.

3,000 people will get baptized, and from the stor- from that moment, the story will cascade into the world to this point now where two billion people say this story is their central story. Once again, in Acts 2, a new story is emerging, and today is a new day. This God has a way of creating those kind of stories, of welcoming in anyone who will put their hand up and say, “I want into this story.

I believe this story is central.” The pattern repeats. It’s so similar. It’s not quite the same, right? I would say the story is just a touch different in one important way. I want for a moment for you to hold in your mind that person who received that law code, that way of living those 3,500 years ago now, and hold everyone who’s followed this way of Jesus in two separate hands.

I want you to see how they’re different. Aren’t all these speaking Galileans? Is the third question. Are they just ordinary people? Are they nobodies with no education? How is it that these people get to play in this story? How is it that they get to get involved in this story, to share it? How are they participants, yes, and messengers even more than that?

And to help us understand this for just a moment, I’d like to talk about my 32nd favorite hockey team, the Colorado Avalanche. Any Avalanche fans in the room? How you guys doing? You guys okay? Do you need any counseling? You need anyone to come alongside you and give you some thoughts? I don’t know. As a Red Wings fan, I’m here to help.

We know what suffering is these days. Think about what it is to go to any sporting event now. Pick your favorite. I wanted to grab this picture of the crowd from behind ’cause I wanted to grab a name of a person on a shirt. What happens when you go and attend a Navs game or a Rockies game or a Broncos game and you put on your favorite sweater and you put a name on the back of a particular player that you happen to really associate with really what are you saying there in that moment?

I would say you’re saying something like this: “I’m part of this tribe. I identify. We, as this ragtag bunch of people, are in on this thing.” But then let me suppose a scenario for you for a second. What happens if in this moment Nathan MacKinnon skates onto the ice and accidentally catches an edge and sprains his ankle?

I know I’m speaking to some of your deep fears right now. You guys are nothing without MacKinnon. But in that moment, what happens once the trainers have come on to the ice and have helped him kinda limp away? Does the coach in this story walk out onto the ice, point up into the rafters at you in your MacKinnon shirt and say, “Hey, you’re the new Nathan MacKinnon.

I want you to come down here and play for Nathan ’cause he can’t play tonight”? No. The result would be terrible. Even if you think you’re good at ice skating, you now have to manage this small flying disc with a stick of some kind. You’ve got 250-pound guys hitting you all over the place. You can’t play in that game.

That’s Sinai. The experience of the Jewish people at Sinai was this. They were given a standard they could never live up to. They couldn’t get on the field. They couldn’t play. What happens in this new story? Suddenly this new story, everybody’s involved. The concept, the idea of what happens in Acts chapter 2 is that spirit moment, that experience is not just for one person in the room.

It’s not for a couple of people in the room. It’s everybody in the room. And then that day, 3,000 people joined the church, and guess what? The story’s for them as well, and they get to share that story with everyone else. The beauty of this story, it’s as though when you put on a Nathan MacKinnon shirt, you actually became Nathan MacKinnon.

And all of the wonder that would be, the incredible gift that would be to your life. At Sinai, people received Torah, but no power to live it. No way to live that out in the world around them. But in the midst of that story, God gave them a promise. Ezekiel 36, this prophet in the Old Testament, he said, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you.

I will remove from your heart, y- you, your hearts of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” If you’ve been trying to do this story by yourself, you can’t do this story by yourself. You’re not good enough, smart enough, honest enough, strong enough.

You’re not any of those things. This story can’t be lived out by you. But in this Acts 2 moment, Jesus gives his disciples work to do, and he gives them the power to do it. We’re spirit people now. That’s the one thing that is most true about us This has been the story of the church for 2,000 years now.

The story isn’t about where you meet. Doesn’t matter that we own a strip mall. It’s not the most true thing about us. Doesn’t matter that we gather people with all sorts of feelings about church, all sorts of feelings about … Not the most true thing about us. The most true thing about us is that we are spirit people.

That’s how God created his church. And what’s interesting about that to me, what I think amazes me about the story of the church, that is perhaps the greatest evidence of its reality, of the truth of its story, the one that it’s held for these 2,000 years, is this: That every time someone comes and says, “I’m gonna hammer down on this story.

I’m gonna make sure I get rid of this thing,” the story grows faster than ever. In the first century, a guy called Nero decided to get rid of the church. The two emperors after him decided the same thing. In that period, the church went from 20,000 people to two million people. It seems when you dial up the pressure on this thing, it just keeps growing, just keeps expanding.

I- In the last 100 years, Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin decided they were gonna get rid of the church. When Mao came to power in China, there were about two million Chinese Christians. Today, some numbers predict 12- 200 million Chinese Christians, it seems. In this church thing, when you take away everything it thinks it needs and just leave it with the Spirit, this church thing just keeps growing, just keeps spreading.

That’s been our story, too. This is a church that lost its building. Church kept going. Church that lost all its money. Church kept going. Somewhere, this story, when you take away all the trappings, all the different things, and it just boils down to a story that says let me tell you about what God did for me,” that thing transforms people.

One of the things I’ve loved about being part of this community is just occasionally, or actually more often than occasionally, I get to have a conversation with someone like one of you in the room, and you’ll tell me that you invited someone, that someone came here because you brought them here. And when I get to the heartbeat of why, it’s not ’cause the building’s amazing.

It’s not ’cause the budget’s the best budget. It’s ’cause somewhere the Jesus story came alive for you here in a new way, and you just had to tell someone about it. That’s what this story is. In Acts chapter 2, this group of people couldn’t help but share the story. When we dreamed up what we hoped South looked like a few years ago, one of the ideas was this.

Our dream was not that we could just get really good at planning experiences. It’s that we could create experiences that somewhere gave way to encounters with Jesus. And what Jesus always seems to do in the midst of those encounters is he comes alongside you, and the room gets really small, just like it does in John all the way through, where it seems like everybody else fades out, and it’s just you and Jesus in the center.

And in the midst of that, Jesus gives you something to do. I love how at times so many people in the room have said something like this: “I actually am not sure I love coming on Sunday mornings to church. I’m doing it ’cause it’s a practice.” But you can’t get away from Jesus. Jesus has glued himself to you, and you are in on the story all the way.

I think that’s what this Jesus story does. It captivates us. It’s the Spirit thing. Jesus, I pray for my friends. In this season of stepping out, knowing for me the loss of that, the absence of that, the cost of that- Our prayer for them is not That they build a better building. It’s not that the budget makes sense, although that would be great It’s actually that they continue to be people captivated by your story

God, I pray that for those of us in the room that might say that story feels like it’s pretty distant right now Then we might get back to that core story. That we are deeply loved, wonderfully loved. That God still looks for people just like us, ragtag nobodies, to enter this story with no idea what we’re getting into.

And he not only accept us and bring us in, he say we get to participate in the story. Thank you, Jesus, that 2,000 years ago, you made that story possible. And then 50 days later, that story came to life in our hearts. Amen.