The big idea
Many Christians quietly believe Pentecost was the day Christ handed the church to us and left. Acts 2 says the opposite. The Spirit was poured out on all flesh because Jesus is exalted at the Father’s right hand, and by that Spirit he is present and leading everywhere. God is not short-staffed. We lift Christ up, and he draws people to himself.
Key takeaways
- Burnout comes less from long hours than from taking responsibility for what is beyond our control – like evangelizing the world without upsetting anyone and without God’s leadership.
- From Abraham to the empty tomb, God has always been the one taking the initiative. The mission has never rested on the strength of men.
- At Pentecost the disciples were filled not with mere power but with the very person of God, the Holy Spirit.
- The Spirit was poured out on all flesh – sons and daughters, young and old, servants – not on an elite who prayed hard enough.
- Pentecost happened because the Father gave the promise to the Son and the exalted Son poured it out. Its explanation is Trinitarian.
- God gave us the ministry of reconciliation to honor us, the way parents let children help, not because he needs the help.
- Our task is not to take Christ’s keys and steer his ship, but to stay faithful and lift him up.
It was Pentecost Sunday, 2020, and Matt began with the state of things: a pandemic, a government shutdown, the death of George Floyd, and culture wars in which people agree a death was tragic and then scream at each other worse than at Thanksgiving dinner over what it means – “almost as if we are possessed by ideology.” You might want to cancel your free trial of 2020, or catch a SpaceX flight to another planet.
Who is steering?
The church has its own troubles: skeptics, scoffers, fear and confusion about reaching the next generation. It is almost as if God himself were in a panic. So church people rally around big-name organizations and preachers, and underneath that, Matt suspected, is a belief that since Pentecost “Christ left the church in the hands of men. It’s our turn to steer it. But we don’t know what we’re doing.” The true story of Pentecost, he said, is that by the Spirit Christ is present all the more – now globally.
Burnout and the passive-aggressive God
The week before, Matt had said our good name is social capital to spend, not hoard, and that it is fine if not everyone likes us. Now he added the rabbi and family-systems thinker Edwin Friedman’s insight: burnout is not mainly about hours. You can burn out on twenty hours a week. It tracks our emotional attachment to our work and how much responsibility we take for things beyond our control.
Picture the tender-hearted evangelical who has taken on the task of reaching the world through niceness, never upsetting anyone, without God’s leadership. “How insane is that? You’re surely going to burn out.” The inevitable result is a God who seems passive-aggressive or aloof: he left detailed instructions and said he will not come back until you finish his job. Then you conclude you are a bad Christian, and walking away gets easy.
Last week’s point mattered, Matt said, but this week’s matters more: “I also want to help you realize how unnecessary you are.” God did not give us the message of reconciliation because he was short-staffed. Ironically, he believed, we may be more likely to engage the world when we are not emotionally coerced into it. The ancient Near Eastern myths said humans were created to feed the gods; the God of Israel has no rival and no need of us to serve him.
A short history lesson
Matt ran through Scripture asking one question: who was leading whom? God called Abraham and gave him a covenant he did not think up; Abraham faltered and lied to Pharaoh, yet trusted when God spoke. Joseph’s brothers were busy plotting against him, not planning God’s fame, while God orchestrated salvation for Egypt and Canaan. Moses was nervous and needed Aaron. Israel was trapped between the army and the sea. In the desert man’s leadership produced a golden calf, and God preserved the nation anyway.
Who raised up judges and gave Samuel his words? Who directed him to David, raised up the prophets, preserved the people in exile and stirred the return to rebuild the walls and temple? Who sent the voice crying in the wilderness? When the disciples could not manage an extra hour awake, Jesus was preparing to conquer death. “I didn’t catch any overarching narrative of the strength of man’s leadership.” Pentecost does not break from this pattern; it cements it.
When Matt became an evangelical around eighteen, he absorbed blogs, podcasts and books that sometimes left the impression that leaders must huddle and devise a plan – as if the Spirit came so men could take over, or because the upper room prayed hard enough to reach a tipping point, or because every so often the right man was in the right place. Believe that, and the darkness of the world becomes a burden no mortal can carry. As if Paul had not been killing Christians, Peter trying to talk Jesus out of the cross, or the scribes lining up as early adopters. “He’s not asleep at the wheel.”
The day of Pentecost
Pentecost was a Jewish feast fifty days after Passover; the name comes from the Greek for fifty.
“When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
Acts 2:1–4It came from heaven, Matt stressed, and they were filled “not just with mere power,” though they did receive power, but “with the very person of God himself.” Devout Jews from every nation heard them in their own languages declaring the mighty works of God (Acts 2:5–11), and Peter stood to explain that this had been promised long ago.
On all flesh
“But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel: ‘And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.’”
Acts 2:16–18Matt asked everyone to sit with “all flesh” (Joel 2:28–29). Not the cream of the crop, not those who prayed best, not “the bearded ones” with the most training. Boys and girls, young and old, servants. “God is pouring out his very self, and not in a hyper-selective way, but generously.”
Because of who Jesus is
“Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know – this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it.”
Acts 2:22–24Peter is not rambling, Matt said; the person of Jesus is why the Spirit came. And notice “the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.” Could Pentecost have been botched if the upper room had prayed badly? David foresaw that the Christ would not be abandoned to Hades (Acts 2:31–32).
“Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourselves are seeing and hearing.”
Acts 2:33This verse, Matt said, has enormous explanatory power. The Spirit was poured out because Christ poured it out, because the Father gave the promise to the Son, because the Son was exalted. “The explanation for why Pentecost happened is Trinitarian.” It is in God himself, not in that upper room.
He anticipated a misunderstanding. Pentecost is not a template of power earned by praying, to be reenacted. Nor is he saying there is no further outpouring of the Spirit after baptism – the opposite. “Because Christ never got off his throne, the generous outpouring of the Spirit remains.” The Spirit was given not in percentages but as a person, from the greatest to the least. Peter ends with David’s psalm, “The Lord said to my Lord, ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool’” (Psalm 110:1), and the conclusion: “God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:34–36).
What Pentecost means
The outpoured Spirit is proof that Christ is Lord, enthroned as king. It is rooted in who the Son is and what he has done – “that should take off some pressure.” It guarantees God’s will is certain, because it fulfills an ancient promise by God’s own act. And it means Christ is present. Being enthroned above does not make him absent below. When he said “I am with you always, to the end of the age,” he did not mean “until I ascend, and then you’re on your own with some tools.”
So, facing a world thick with fury and vitriol, two things. A real proclamation is needed to pierce that darkness, not just niceness. And it is Christ’s leadership, not ours, that accomplishes it. He is the Rock that followed Israel in the wilderness (1 Corinthians 10:4). “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you” (Psalm 22:27) – with no passive-aggressive footnote reading “if you get your act together.” We are not offering the world a better ideology, or ourselves as nicer people to be attached to. God draws people to himself, so that they may know him.
God is not short-staffed
When Jesus says the harvest is plentiful and the laborers few, he does not say “if you loved me enough you would know what to do.” Matt left the congregation to look up what he does say (Matthew 9:37–38). Micah promises that “many nations shall come, and say: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord’” (Micah 4:2). He is the pursuer, the Shepherd who seeks and saves the lost.
“All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.”
2 Corinthians 5:18–19God does not need to go on LinkedIn to hire help; he could send angels who speak every language. The ministry of reconciliation is a gift that honors us – “like many parents, you let your kids help you with things you could do yourself,” to grow the relationship and let them know what you are like. And Paul goes on: “working together with him” (2 Corinthians 6:1). Not alone, and not with distant guidance now and then.
Lift him up
“The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand” (John 3:35). Not into his people’s hands – “and boy are we blowing it.” Into the Son’s.
“Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
John 12:31–32Lifted up means both the cross and his glorification. We lift him up, and he draws. So we engage the world not out of fear that it all depends on us and our niceness, but trusting his present, competent leadership and walking in his easy yoke. “He’s awake. We don’t need to wake him up. Instead, we lift him up.”
The world tries to reconcile around all sorts of ideas, but true reconciliation is in Christ, who reconciles people to himself and, as Paul says, kills the hostility by making the two one new man in his body (Ephesians 2:14–16). “He is truly the captain of our faith. He’s not incompetent; he never has been. We have been quite spectacularly incompetent, but we can trust him.” Our task is not to take his keys and steer his ship, but to stay faithful, obey, and exalt his name, confident that he will do what he said. Matt prayed that God would draw every tribe and tongue, help the church make a clear and coherent proclamation of the risen Lord, and rally around him with joy.