EPISODE 48 ACTS Chapter 2 "Birthday of the Church"

You're listening to Share the Word podcast. If you're just joining us, we want you to know that we are a Great Commission project and feel the best way to learn your way through the New Testament is one chapter at a time. This episode focuses on Acts chapter 2. We'll see what happened on the day the church was born and its impact on Jerusalem. Let's get started. Acts chapter 2: Birthday of the Church.

Birthdays are important milestones in our lives. I don't remember my own birth, duh, but I do vividly remember my first child's birth. It was a little nerve-wracking anticipating that event, honestly. And when the day finally came, it was the most exhilarating experience of my life. I was in the delivery room during the labor period, and it seemed to go on and on and on for many hours. The wait seemed like forever.

But when our daughter was finally born, man, nothing really could have prepared me for the feelings that I had. It was an entirely new, seemingly miraculous thing to witness. I'm not a very emotional person, honestly, but I remember actually hyperventilating watching her birth and holding her. My heart was racing. Acts chapter 2, where we're studying today, is about a birthday. Whose birthday, you might be thinking?

Actually, this chapter describes the birthday of the Christian church. The event is what Jesus had told his disciples to stay in Jerusalem and wait for. He said it wouldn't be a long wait, and actually ended up being about 10 days, which is a kind of long wait if you ask me. But it passed with the apostles, I'm sure, waiting nervously, not knowing what to expect. Then 10 days after they'd witnessed Jesus ascend to heaven on a Jewish holiday called Shabbat, or in Greek, Pentecost. What Jesus promised finally happened, and it was quite remarkable and unforgettable.

It was the day the promised Holy Spirit came to indwell and empower Jesus' followers to begin the work of the Great Commission. It was the day the church was born. Let's think about Luke's description of how it happened. I'm reading now from Acts chapter 2 from the beginning. When the day of Pentecost came, they, that is the apostles of Jesus, 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 over each of them. All of them were then filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in languages as the Holy Spirit enabled them. Now there were in Jerusalem at that time 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 of these men speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us is hearing them in our own native language?

Amazed and perplexed, they asked each other, What could this possibly mean? Jesus evidently wanted to leave no doubt in the apostles' minds about when the promise he had made to them about the Holy Spirit's coming happened. Remember his instruction before the ascension: Wait for the gift my Father has promised, John, referring to John the Baptist, baptized with water, but not many days from now you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit. The morning it happened, a sudden powerful wind came down from heaven and was blowing throughout the place where the apostles were staying. Even more strangely, fire appeared, not like something was on fire, but just fire in the air. That must have been unnerving.

Then the fire divided itself, sending an individual burning flame over each of their heads. I'm sure these phenomena were to unmistakably mark the arrival of God's Holy Spirit. Wind and spirit, by the way, are the same word in Greek, which Luke is writing in here, and fire often represents the presence of God in the Bible. The apostles, I'm sure, realized what was going on had to be what Jesus had promised them would occur shortly: the arriving Holy Spirit. As he entered and filled them, they began praising God. Because Shavuot or Pentecost was an important religious holiday of the Jews, the city was filled with worshipers, many of whom were religious pilgrims who had come to Jerusalem from places throughout the Roman Empire.

In fact, Luke mentions in this section people from at least 15 different foreign lands were in Jerusalem that day and who witnessed some of this phenomenon. Those in the temple area, including, I'm sure, some priests and rabbis, heard that powerful wind sound, probably sounded like a tornado roaring. People came out of their homes and others fled out of the temple area to see what in the world was causing this. At the same time, the apostles came down out of the upper room where they were staying and out onto the busy street. They were praising God, yes, but the odd part was the foreigners in Jerusalem that day heard them speaking in their own native languages. They heard them speaking Persian and Latin and Egyptian and Greek and many other languages.

How could that possibly be? Aren't these men all Galileans? What does this mean? they wanted to know. Some in the bewildered crowd, Luke says, said, The apostles must be drunk. That was kind of early in the day for that.

When Peter finally quieted them down, he tried to explain. What he said makes it apparent to me that one thing the apostles had spent a lot of time doing over the last several days was studying the Old Testament Scripture like they had never studied it before, scouring the Old Testament for prophecies about Jesus and the things he had fulfilled and more things he was not yet fulfilled, for any clues about what might come next. Peter's attempt to explain what they had all just witnessed was to quote lines that occurred to him from the prophet Joel about the last days and the phenomena that will occur then. The ultimate fulfillment of Joel's prophecy is still in the future at Jesus' second coming. But Peter identified what was happening that morning when the Holy Spirit arrived and filled the believers in Jerusalem with these future events.

I think Peter may have been jumping the gun a little bit with that interpretation, honestly. But what he got right was the part in Joel about promised Holy Spirit being poured out by God, because that's certainly what was happening here. And the other things in Joel's prophecy about signs that will mark Jesus' second coming, that was not happening yet, as much as Peter and the other apostles probably wanted it to be. That part of Joel's prophecy is still ahead of us. Peter then remarkably launched into a powerful sermon to this large crowd that gathered. This man who only weeks before, remember, had denied even knowing Jesus, much less being a follower of Jesus, right now in the heart of Jerusalem, he stood up boldly and addressed this large crowd.

Fellow Israelites, he said, listen to me. Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves all know. This man was handed over to you by God's deliberate plan and foreknowledge, and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold over him. Then Peter quoted some messianic passages from the Psalms, which talk about resurrection, explaining David, who wrote these words, was not talking about himself. He was writing prophetically about his offspring, about Jesus the Messiah.

And then he pounded home the truth. God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father now the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you have seen and what you are hearing. Therefore, let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah. Wow. I think it's very important that we consider just what Peter was claiming there in Jerusalem, only weeks after Jesus' public crucifixion in this town.

Peter was boldly asserting that the leaders of Judaism had killed their Messiah, and that God had raised him from the dead. Speaking for himself and the other apostles, Peter insisted, We are witnesses of these things. Implied in his words was a challenge to any doubters in his crowd or opponents that if this is not so, if the resurrection did not in fact happen, prove us wrong. Don't miss this. It's a myth too many have repeated that needs to be exploded. Christianity did not somehow gradually arise out of the gray foggy mist of history, many decades or even centuries removed from the actual events surrounding Jesus' life and death, like a nebulous legend that gradually formed and somehow took on a life of its own.

No. Christianity was born in one day, the day called Pentecost in the year 33 A.D., just weeks after Jesus' death and resurrection. That day, the Holy Spirit arrived and filled the followers of Jesus, and that day they boldly, publicly asserted to thousands of worshipers in Jerusalem that this Jesus, who the religious leaders had executed, was bodily resurrected and was very much alive, and they were witnesses of it. They challenged the leaders of Jerusalem to prove them wrong, and of course they couldn't. So Peter urged the crowd that day, everyone in the crowd, including the religious leaders, to repent. That means turn around and accept Jesus for who he really was, who his resurrection proved him to be.

Christianity was born that day, not in some faraway place, but right there in the very city where Jesus had been executed and then resurrected three days later. The Christian movement burst suddenly onto the world scene because the claims of Peter and the other apostles were impossible to refute, and because there were too many eyewitnesses and too much evidence in their favor. The birth of Christianity was an explosion, a world-changing event whose aftershocks are still reverberating to our very day. Luke describes the effect of Peter's speech on this audience. He says they were cut to the heart. You know what that means.

They cried out to Peter and to the other apostles, Brothers, then what should we do? What can we do now? Peter told them, Do this: repent, again, change your hearts and minds, and be baptized into the name of Jesus Christ, every one of you, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you too will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Change your minds about Jesus. Accept him for who he really is. Demonstrate a heart change by being willing to be publicly baptized.

This is what Peter challenged them to do, and a lot of people did it. Luke reports that those who heard that first gospel challenge and accepted Peter's invitation to accept Jesus as their Messiah and Savior numbered about 3,000 souls. Wow. So that's Luke's amazing account of the birthday of the church. It occurred on a Sunday morning, by the way. The resurrection of Jesus also happened to occur on a Sunday morning, and that's the reason Christians have always set aside Sunday morning as a special time to gather for worship.

Every Sunday morning you gather with your Christian friends to worship, you are commemorating both the resurrection of Jesus and the birthday of the Christian church. As Luke concludes chapter 2, he notes that right away those first believers in Jerusalem began to meet together, both in homes and in the pavilions of the temple courtyard. They began learning from the apostles' teaching, spending time together in prayer, celebrating the Lord's Supper, and taking meals together. Some locals generously sold valuable possessions and even real estate to share with the Christians who were in need. This is a pretty good formula, I think, for what the church should be and do forever, right now. Believers meeting together, learning together, worshiping together, serving each other's needs, and inviting others to join in.

Don't you like the simplicity of that? Every day, Luke says, the number of believers kept increasing. Now, let me clarify some things for you you probably have questions about as you read this chapter. For one, you may wonder how thousands of people could have possibly been baptized that day as Luke claims happened. Well, recent archaeological finds have uncovered around the Temple Mount in Jerusalem many what were called mikvahs. These were baptistries, we would say, that were used by the Jews in purification rites before entering the temple, and also for Gentiles who wanted to become Jews, who wanted to be proselytes.

The idea of water baptism was not new to Christianity, but it was used by the early Christians in a new and different way. It became the way new believers publicly showed their faith in Jesus. Baptism by immersion in water pictured their identification with Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection, and also the cleansing away of their sins and the start of a new life in Christ. Not only were these mikvahs near the entrance of the temple being used, I'm sure, by the apostles, but there were also pools in Jerusalem that we've heard about in the Gospels, like the Pool of Bethesda and the Pool of Siloam. Archaeologists have actually located the Pool of Siloam very recently. It was a pool over an acre in size.

That's a big pool, and it's also under restoration right now. You can Google some photos of it. These pools were where all of these early Christians were being baptized that day. A mass baptismal service, as thousands of people who responded to the call of the gospel were publicly identified as Jesus followers through baptism. Speaking of that, let me be clear that there was, or is, nothing in the water that's magical. Jesus, in his Great Commission, had told his apostles to proclaim the gospel and to baptize those who would believe it, and then to teach them all the things that he'd taught them.

That's the Great Commission. It's clear from the doctrinal epistles in the New Testament that it's the heart change, the decision to place our faith into Jesus as our Savior, that actually changes our relationship with God. No rituals save us, not baptism or communion or anything else. The outward rituals, though, do serve a purpose. For example, with baptism, realize the significance for a Jew in Jerusalem in a somewhat hostile climate in 33 A.D. openly proclaiming their faith in Jesus that way. That was quite a statement.

It showed the sincerity of their intentions to follow Christ and would stand for them, I think, as a lifelong reminder of that turning point decision. I just don't want anybody listening to be confused about what God is looking for in you that leads to salvation. If you hear the gospel message today about who Jesus is and what he's done for you, and you believe in your heart that it's the truth, and you embrace Jesus for your Savior and your leader, and you turn your life toward following him, you're a Christian. Even if you're in the middle of a Sahara desert and there's no water within a thousand miles, you're still a Christian. God sees your faith, and we're saved by grace through faith in Christ, as we've seen. However, when you have the opportunity to publicly declare your faith in Christ and identify as a follower of His by being baptized, you should do that.

Your obedience will please God. It will be a spiritual landmark in your own life, and it will be a testimony to all those there who witness it. Here's a second concept to be clear on. You may wonder exactly, when I say the word church, as I titled this lesson, Birthday of the Church, you have every right to be confused if you are about exactly what a church is because, hmm, Christians over the centuries have made it pretty confusing. There are today countless professing Christian denominations, and some even insist that they alone are the true church of Jesus Christ. They're wrong, of course.

And the fact there are so many different denominations probably looks to outsiders like we believers are competitors rather than brothers and sisters in Christ. From God's perspective, let me assure you, there's only one church, and it's made up of all those who have put their faith in Jesus Christ and have been born again into His family. People from everywhere, from every nation, ethnicity, and language group on earth. If you've accepted Jesus as your Savior and Leader, you are a part of this big group called the church. We see the term church used in the New Testament that way as a designation for all believers everywhere collectively, the spiritual family of God, we might say. But going forward, we'll also see church used in the New Testament in a local sense of the sense of a group of believers that met in a certain place.

Who met together to do the things we just read about in Acts chapter 2, that is, worship together and learn God's Word together and serve each other and fellowship together and share their faith with others and invite them to join in. So when you hear the word church in the New Testament, it's going to be used in one of those two ways. It's always about people, though, believers in Jesus, whether universally or locally. It's always about the people. It's never about buildings or about denominations. All of that stuff, unfortunately, developed much later.

There's one more important question that you may have that comes up in this chapter, and that is about the terminology baptism with the Spirit. The meaning of the term has become something of a controversy, honestly, over the last hundred years or so. As we've seen, Jesus promised that he would baptize his first followers with the Holy Spirit and told them to wait in Jerusalem for that to happen. What happened that remarkable day Luke describes for us here in chapter 2 is clearly the event that Jesus promised. So what exactly happened? What happened beyond the sound and fury was Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to indwell and empower his followers to be his witnesses.

And this new thing God had been planning, the Church of Jesus Christ, was born. That's the best way to understand it. Baptism with the Spirit is the actual spiritual act by which God takes believers out of the world and then places them into his body, the body of Christ, the Church. This is something that God does in us and to us in the spiritual realm. And it was on that day Luke is telling us about that it first occurred in the first believers. Jesus' first followers were indwelt by the Holy Spirit that day and became the living, growing spiritual body of Christ on earth.

Since that time, whenever someone decides to become a follower of Jesus and receives Him as their Lord and Savior, the Holy Spirit comes to indwell them too. They are added to the church. The unusual phenomena we read about here happening in Jerusalem that morning, those were signs that day to confirm to the apostles that it was starting, that what Jesus had promised was now happening. Unfortunately, in my opinion, some today put the focus on the experiential phenomena that occurred that day and on the, I believe, faulty premise, as I said before, that Acts is meant to be a blueprint. They then insist that baptism with the Holy Spirit is mostly about having a supernatural experience. Some even insist that speaking in tongues, whatever they mean by that, is a necessary sign to prove you have had the experience.

I think this is way off base. For one thing, the speaking in tongues some Christian groups practice today is not at all what occurred on the day in Jerusalem we've read about, because on that day, the apostles on that occasion were clearly given the ability to speak in known languages and were even told what the languages were, because they were testifying to people in Jerusalem from faraway places who understood those languages. It wasn't some experience of uttering ecstatic gibberish. Be sure you see that. I just had a conversation with a woman recently who told me that she'd been told that unless she had spoken in tongues, again, whatever that is, that she had not really received the Holy Spirit, and this really troubled her because she had accepted Jesus as her Savior. What she was told is nonsense.

I asked her, did those who insist that you experience tongues, whatever that is, also say that you had to have experienced a wild rush of wind from heaven or have a flame of fire observable over your head to prove your faith is real? And if not, why not? Because those phenomena also happened on that day with the apostles, on that unique occasion. Focusing on these outward experiential supernatural signs God gave on the day of Pentecost to confirm to his apostles the outset of this new thing he was doing, and imagining that we have to somehow reproduce them, is badly confusing the point of what was so significant about what was happening then. What happened that day that was so significant was the Holy Spirit came to indwell Jesus' followers, and when that happened, the Church of Jesus Christ was born.

My advice to you, if you're a younger believer, is to keep your focus on the important things rather than chasing this and that experience others people tell you you need to have. Remember, Acts is primarily a history of what happened during that unique foundational era. It's not necessarily a blueprint of what needs to happen today or what you need to go through. We'll learn more about all this as we move forward in our study of the New Testament, I promise you. But for now, the Holy Spirit has arrived as Jesus promised. He's filled Jesus' followers as he promised.

The Church has been born, and from day one, it was growing like a wildfire in and around Jerusalem in the year 33 A.D. Thanks, Paul. You know, as many times as I've listened to each episode, there are still things that I pick up every time I listen again. And by the way, check out our archive at sharetheword.org. Share the Word podcast began in September of 2023, and our goal is to see it shared around the world. If you have friends and family outside of the U.S., please help us connect with them.

From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.