Beyond the Apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayer is the fact that God’s Presence was with the church, and this is the greatest need of the church. We as Christians in every era have a tendency to look at the book of Acts and miss the fact that passages like these aren’t formulas for successful churches, they are records of a church whose heart is in the right place.

Three-thousand souls are saved one day at one moment. What saved them? What was the key? What saved 3000 souls?! The Holy Spirit preaching through Peter the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Resurrected Lord!

*tech note - this audio has been edited to try and reduce an annoying hum in the background, it was not completely erased.

The ultimate intention of Peter on Pentecost Sunday’s sermon is to declare the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This is Peter’s hope. This is the church’s hope. This should be our ultimate desire. In God's entirety of human history, and His entirety of everything He does for all of time leans into this invitation.

I unashamedly, wholeheartedly, and without apology believe that the point of Pentecost Sunday is that the Holy Spirit is filling people! It is not the building up to, nor are we supposed to see the climax be, “Oh, they spoke in tongues,” but rather, three manifestations of the Spirit: audible, visual, and now verbal, to climax and reveal, “THE HOLY SPIRIT IS FILLING PEOPLE!”

This is life without the Spirit. This is life before the Holy Spirit came in the way that Jesus was telling the Disciples to wait for Him. In the interim, were the disciples wondering, “Where do we go from here?!” And so they return to praying, imitating their Teacher Jesus, who prayed often, and set a pattern of prayer. There are times that where it seems like our God has left. It seems like He’s silent. He’s not speaking. What do we do? I think this is a good pattern right here: return to where we know we ought to be.

The Necessity of the Spirit in and leading our churches is far more superior, important, and to be desired over any other principle we might implement from Acts when it comes to how it addresses our churches. We come into Acts and find that it’s not so much about what the Disciples did in that first generation of Christians, as it is about the power found in the Holy Spirit who led them and can lead us!

As Jesus breathed his last on the Cross, to His dying moment He was reviled... until one thief had a heart change, and recognized Jesus for who He is: the King of a Kingdom not of this world. He asked permission to enter it with Jesus, and to him it was granted.

*Audio from practice preach, not actual service.

At the end of Micah's book, is a lamentation and hope in what we still have hope in today: that God's faithfulness to us extends to us still even in the middle of our own sin and despair. We can take hope in the covenant that God enacted with Himself with Abraham. That was Micah's hope, and that is our's.

When people start sinning, corruption starts happening, when God's laws are thrown out and man's laws are implanted, when God is mocked, no injustice will go unpunished. In these moments, we rest our hopes not on broken, sinful people, but the One Good God.

Micah’s giving a Word to Jerusalem, what should have been the paradigm of Godliness for the world in their day. A rod is coming to the very heart of God’s people, but the hope and peace found in the rod is found in the One who ordained it.