The Spirit of Missions: Lessons from the Book of Acts, Part 2
And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language . . . . we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God. Acts 2:4-6, 11 (NKJV)
In the last entry, we considered how our Lord Jesus instructed His disciples in Jerusalem to wait for the Holy Spirit, who would give them power to be Jesus’ witness in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).
The disciples did not have to wait too long, for in the next chapter of Acts, Luke records how the Spirit fell upon them all on the day of Pentecost. And how are we told that the Holy Spirit empowered Jesus’s disciples to be His witnesses there in Jerusalem? If you answered something like “He gave them the gift of tongues” you would not be wrong. But you would not have the complete answer, either. The miraculous gift of tongues (that is, the ability to speak other languages without prior knowledge or study of those languages) served a further purpose—so that those gathered “from every nation under heaven” would hear in their own language the mighty works of God.
The displayed method of doing missions in the power of the Holy Spirit was speaking about God’s works and doing so from God’s Word. When the Apostle Peter took his stand with the eleven and began to preach before that crowd, he did so speaking from what we now know as the Old Testament scriptures of Joel 2, Psalm 16, and Psalm 110, pointing from the prophets unto Jesus Christ, and calling all men to repent and believe in him. This is what Jesus had also done in his earthly ministry (Mark 1:15, Luke 24:27, 44-49). It is also what the Holy Spirit had been doing all along through his work of inspiring the prophets who spoke of the Christ who was yet to come (1 Peter 1:10-12) and of continuing to do so through the apostles after Jesus’ earthly ministry (2 Peter 1:20-21, 3:1-2).
Can we also conclude that the Holy Spirit keeps working powerfully today through the church as we take the gospel message of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth? Absolutely! And lest we fall into the trap of thinking that proclaiming the word of God seems like an anticlimactic display of the Holy Spirit’s power, we should remember that it was by the word of his power that God spoke the universe into existence (Genesis 1, Psalm 33:6). It is by his Word that the dead are called to life—both spiritually and physically (John 5:25-29). The Word of God, as the sword of the Spirit, is living and active (Ephesians 6:17, Hebrews 4:12). And when the Word is proclaimed, it is not meant to communicate one’s own knowledge or cleverness, but it is meant as a “demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Corinthians 2:4).
When we, the church of Jesus Christ, speak of the mighty deeds of God revealed in his Word, proclaiming the salvation in Jesus Christ as promised in his Word, we have a God-given confidence that the Holy Spirit is working in and through us—and with great power—to be witnesses of Jesus. And so, we speak wherever we are. We go where we are called. Then they might also hear the mighty deeds of God. And as we use a variety of means to learn their language, they may even hear the mighty deeds of God in their own tongue.