Building The Church

It’s Pentecost Sunday—a day where we celebrate the falling of the Holy Spirit in a powerful and unforgettable way. It’s a story told throughout the centuries of tongues of fire and thousands coming to believe in Jesus. It’s also something most of us are searching for and wanting today. What does a modern day Pentecost look like? What does the Holy Spirit mean for our everyday life? Join us Sunday as we dive deeper into this amazing moment of the early church and look for our own experience of the Spirit falling.

According to Luke, one of the last things Jesus instructed his disciples to do in preparation for Pentecost and the gift of the Holy Spirit was to wait. Of course, waiting is not something we enjoy very much. In fact, the entire last year has felt one long exercise in waiting. But what Luke wants us to understand is that there is an unexpected blessing in the practice of waiting on God. Today, we’ll look at how God has used the last year of waiting to prepare us for a future beyond our wildest dreams.

Can you imagine what it must’ve been like for the disciples when the resurrected Jesus appeared in the midst? It must’ve been exciting and exhilarating and most certainly surreal. But perhaps even more exciting and exhilarating was Jesus’ promise that after he was gone, they would be “clothed with power from on high.” Obviously, Jesus was talking about the Holy Spirit. But what does that mean for the church to receive its power through the Holy Spirit? Today, we’ll look at how this unexpected source of power is essential to the future of the church.

We spend a lot of time in life trying to forget our worst moments, trying to outrun our mistakes. The past is just too painful to contemplate sometimes. But the the only way we’ll ever get to a place of healing is through facing the pain head-on. Peter was not looking forward to this conversation with Jesus, but Jesus loved him too much to let him off the hook. And even though reliving his worst moment hurt every bit as much as Peter had feared it would, it also opened the door to redemption. It gave him the chance to decide how he wanted to be remembered from that moment on.

It’s interesting to note that after the most earth-shattering event in human history—the resurrection of Jesus--the first story in John 21 is about Peter and four other disciples getting in a boat and going fishing. Why? Because they figured it was time to go back to normal. Of course, after a year-long pandemic, the church has been anxious to get back to normal too. But what if where God is leading us isn’t back to normal but into a new reality of what it means to be the church in a post-Easter world? Today, we’ll explore what that new reality looks like and the opportunities God wants us to pursue.

For nearly 2,000 years, the disciple Thomas has been the church’s poster child of spiritual doubt. Instead of taking the other disciples’ word for it when it came to the resurrection of Jesus, he insisted that he wouldn’t believe until he saw it with his own two eyes. But is that all Thomas was looking for? Was there something more than just proof that Jesus was alive that Thomas wanted to see? Today, we’ll look at what Thomas’ interaction with the resurrected Jesus taught the disciples—and us—about what it means to be the church.

For the disciples, the first problem of Easter was a recognition problem. On the road to Emmaus, two disciples didn’t realize that Jesus was in their presence the whole time. 2000 years later and we still have the same problem in the church. We don’t always recognize Jesus when he’s in our midst. So what’s the solution? According to Jesus, sometimes the key to seeing what’s in front of you is looking back on what’s behind you. Sometimes the key to seeing the future is by remembering the past.