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The Power of the Holy Spirit
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Apart from the Holy Spirit, the church’s mission is impossible. Yet by His divine empowerment, no opposition can stop the gospel from going to all nations. Today, Sinclair Ferguson calls us to confident reliance on the Spirit. Request Things Unseen,...
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I remember John Stott saying that today we have salmonettes that produce Christianettes. And we would be foolish to think that the slender diet that we experience is going to turn us into the kind of Christians who will turn the world upside down.
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Over the course of three days, thousands of Christians gathered in Orlando, Florida to consider the promise of Jesus that he will build his church. So how is he accomplishing that? And what is the significance of the day of Pentecost? This is a Thursday edition of Renewing youg Mind. And today you'll hear Sinclair Ferguson's closing message from Ligonier's 2025 national conference. But before we get to today's message, when you show your support of renewing your mind with a donation before midnight tonight, we'll send you a hardcover copy of Dr. Ferguson's year long devotional Unseen. Each day's devotional brings his signature warmth and wisdom. And each week's reflections follow a theme to help you look to the Lord and live by faith. Request your copy with your donation@renewingyourmind.org before this offer ends tonight. Well, what did the early church look like? And was it any different than a typical church is today? Here's Dr. Ferguson recorded live at Ligonier's 2025 National Conferen.
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Well, we've come to the last main session in our study on Christ building His church. And we are now seeking to remind ourselves that when Jesus promised to be with the church every day, always to the end of the age, he was within that promise, promising to them the gift of the Holy Spirit. And you'll remember how he gave his disciples instructions. They're recorded in Acts, chapter one, that they were to remain in Jerusalem and then the Holy Spirit would come upon them. This is Acts chapter one and verse eight. And they would receive power. When the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth. And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up and a cloud, the glory cloud of the tabernacle, the glory cloud took him out of their sight. And they gazed into heaven and in God's mercy as they returned to Jerusalem, as they waited on God in prayer, the day of Pentecost came and they experienced what Jesus had promised, the power of the Holy Spirit that would enable them to be witnesses to him in Jerusalem, in Judea, as well as Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. And in a way, the Acts of the Apostles ends there doesn't it? It's a journey to the center of the earth, which spiritually was also the ends of the earth. And we are told at the end of the Acts of the Apostles that Paul was preaching the Gospel in Rome without hindrance. We often say, don't we, that the Acts of the Apostles would have been better titled the Acts of the Holy Spirit, but it would be even better titled the Acts of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit. Because the Acts begin with Luke saying that in the first book of his two volume book about Jesus, he had explained what Jesus began to do and began to teach. And now the Acts of the Apostles, and indeed the story of the whole Christian Church is the story of what the Lord Jesus, the King and head of the Church, the prophet of the Church, who continues to speak through his word, the priest of the Church who bears us before the presence of the Father on his heart and on his shoulders. What the Lord Jesus is continuing to do. And he continues to do it, the Acts of the Apostles teaches us by the power of the Holy Spirit. And this was exactly what Jesus had prophesied. Even within Jesus own teaching, there is what we sometimes call progressive revelation. Not only progressive revelation through the whole of the Bible, but progressive revelation within the teaching of Jesus. He is going to build his church. But it's only as he is speaking to his disciples on the eve of his crucifixion that he tells them the means by which he is going to build his church in them and through them is by the gift of the Holy Spirit. And what the opening chapters of Acts, and especially Acts chapter two underscores for us is first of all that Jesus has purchased this gift for us. Remember the second Psalm. In the midst of all the opposition of the kings of this age, the Father has said to His Son, ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance. But in order to have the nations for his inheritance, in order for the nations to be undeceived, it is requisite that Jesus receive from the Father the gift of the Holy Spirit to pour out upon the church. And this too he has purchased by his shed blood. So having purchased that gift on our behalf to give to us, he promises that he will do it. I will send you another comforter. I will send you the Holy Spirit. And there is a little statement hidden into Peter's sermon on the day of Pentecost in the second chapter of Acts, where he says what Pentecost means, first of all is that an invisible, hidden transaction has taken place among Father, Son, and Spirit, and especially between the Father and the Son. Jesus has ascended in this cloud of glory into the presence of the Father. And as he promised, he has asked the Father to send the Holy Spirit. And Peter says, this is what is happening here. This is the visible indication to you in this extraordinary series of events that are encapsulated in the few hours of the day of Pentecost. This is the visible indication to you that Christ has kept his promise. The Father has kept his promise. Jesus reigns. He has all dominion, all authority. And now he is beginning to exercise that not only in Jerusalem, but but throughout the nations of the world, to the ends of the earth, to undeceive the nations and to bring his elect children to him in repentance and faith. And so, in a sense, on the day of Pentecost, there is a kind of microcosm of world evangelism. There are people, it seems, from all the known places in the world who have gathered on the day of Pentecost. And God has chosen that day. That is the day Christ has been given His Father's permission to send the Holy Spirit to the Church to begin this new age that will only be consummated when he returns again in majesty and glory at the end of time. And so he now provides what he has promised. And we see on the day of Pentecost, in a sense, the fulfillment of John 16, 7, 11, don't we? Which, of course, we apply generally. When the Spirit comes, He will convince the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. And it's right that we apply that generally and permanently. But it is actually a specific prophecy of Pentecost, because that's exactly what happens at Pentecost. The men who are there are convicted of their sin. They understand that those who crucified Christ were in the wrong and Christ was righteous. And they are brought by the Holy Spirit through the preaching of the Word to this lively faith in Jesus Christ. 3,000 of them, we're told. It is really interesting that in this period, it seems that the day of Pentecost was often the day when the ancient people of God remembered how God had brought them out of Egypt in the Exodus and gathered them at Sinai. And the law of God came down. And you remember the result of the law of God coming down and being breached was that 3,000 men were slain. It was a kind of picture of the fact that the law on its own cannot justify it can only condemn. And by contrast with Moses, our Lord Jesus ascends the mountain. Also with Jesus, there is this cloud of glory. But when Jesus comes down, there are 3,000 not slain, but regenerated and resurrected and brought into this new epoch of the Kingdom of God. And it's like an event. I remember when I was a child, the coronation of our late Queen Elizabeth, when in the city in which I lived, every child was given gifts. They were spread abundantly because this was a day of rejoicing. We had a monarch. And this is what happens on the day of Pentecost. This is what is singular about the day of pentecost. As a 5 year old, I might have thought, maybe we're going to get these candies every day of the Queen's reign. But no, this was a special celebration, celebration of a coronation. And it's this that is taking place on the day of Pentecost. That is why Pentecost is not a repeated event in the story of the Church. It's a once and for all event in the story of the Church. So that we do not have, although some people have spoken this way, we do not have a personal individualized Pentecost in this sense any more than we have a personal Bethlehem or Jordan or Gethsemane or Calvary or garden tomb. This is a once and for all event. But it is spiritually an earthquake that changes everything. This is the point at which what God had always promised was in view. The nations are going to be blessed. And the story of the Acts of the Apostles is that once this earthquake has taken place, there will be aftershocks as the Gospel spreads first from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria, and then as God works in the life of Simon Peter by His Spirit, it spreads deliberately to the Gentiles. And ultimately, as the apostles go, at least as our church traditions tell us, to so many different countries in the ancient world, it spreads to the ends of the earth. But the marvelous thing is that although Pentecost is a once and for all event in the history of redemption, it's an event in which individually, we are all, as it were, brought in to share. Just as we can say we are united to Christ, and therefore in Christ have died to sin and been raised to newness of life. So we understand that in this great event in which Christ gives his Spirit, we too are able to say, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12, we too have entered into this one baptism of the Church with the Holy Spirit. Abrahm Kuyper has, I think, a lovely illustration of this. He says, imagine a town that has created a new water system. The mayor comes along and he opens the tap, and every house in the town now has water flowing to it. He says that's like the day of Pentecost. But then he says it's also true that every new house, every new family that moves into the town will then be connected to that water system. And that's what happens to us, isn't it? As we're brought to faith in Christ, as we are regenerated by the Spirit, as we're able to say with Paul in 1 Corinthians, we have all been baptized into one body with one and the same Spirit. And that meansand this is the extraordinary thing. This, in a sense, belongs to the very heart of our life together in the church. That what has happened is that Jesus has poured out upon the church his own Holy Spirit. Not a reserve Holy Spirit, not a Holy Spirit who was kept in heaven while Jesus was ministering here on earth, but the very Spirit who was on Jesus life throughout the whole course of his ministry. So you can imagine the angels, the cherubim, and the seraphim overhearing the conversation that lies behind the day of Pentecost when they hear the Son saying to the Father, father, you promised but I could now send the Holy Spirit together with you, that we would send him who has been with me all the way through my life and ministry, that we can send him to them so that There are not 4,000 holy spirits in this room. This is what makes the Church so radically different from the best natural communities in the world, that each of us who is really Christ's, is indwelt by the Spirit of Christ, baptized with one Spirit into one body, indwelt by Christ through His Spirit. And since the Spirit has, as Calvin said, this very first title, Spirit of sonship, that's what makes us family. That's what creates this intuitive and instinctive bond in the Church, that we are all recipients of one and the same Spirit. We are all indwelt by Christ through one and the same Spirit. And he who is at work in us is also at work as the divine strategist, as he takes the promise of Jesus and keeps that promise going until the time when Jesus himself returns in majesty and glory. And it is clear that he really does have all dominion. And what I think we find in the Acts of the Apostles, and I think this in some ways is reflected in the story of the church, is that the Spirit has a regular ministry in building the church. And you may well have noticed that when Luke writes the Acts of the Apostles, he punctuates it Especially the first half of it. But there are also indications of this later on. He punctuates it, as it were, by pressing the pause button on the story of the church. And he then will give us a little description of what the church was like at this stage of the Spirit's ministry of building the church through his own people. The best known, of course, is in Acts, chapter 2, at the end of Acts, chapter 2, in verses 42. Following there is the longest description in which Luke is saying, this is what the church was like when it was being built in the power of the Holy Spirit. But then he punctuates the rest of the book by similar statements. There's another one in chapter four, in verse 32. There's another one in chapter five, verses 12 to 16. There's another one in chapter six and verse one, and verse seven. There's another one in chapter nine, verse 31, another in 1224, another in 165. And in a sense, there's another right at the end, in 28, 32, 31. And in that, Luke is saying to us, let's pause for a moment and look at the glorious work of the Holy Spirit, the work of Christ the church builder through the Holy Spirit, as he builds the church in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, and ultimately, as it were, breaks through, brings the people through to the ends of the earth. And yet, at the same time, And I think Dr. Godfrey referred to this earlier on, the Spirit does seem to work in spurts, in what we might call fresh seasons of awakening or revival, what Acts seems to refer to as times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord. I found myself in this last year in parts of the world that I've never been in before. And had that sense in being in these parts of the world in the southern hemisphere, that it seems as though while the Spirit continues his work here, where we are a steady work of church building, there are other places in the world where there are these spurts. And when you go there, it is like drinking fresh water from a mountain stream somewhere in the Highlands of Scotland. And you realize, in a sense, you have been looking at the work of the Spirit upside down. You have been seeing the work of the Spirit in places where there seems to be a spiritual cloud although the Spirit continues to work. And now you are seeing as it were, the work of the Spirit when the Spirit has dispersed the clouds. And what you encounter, in a sense, is like one of these punctuation marks of Luke where he says, this is what the church looks like. When the Spirit of God is given full reign. And also in that context, within that context, the Spirit comes also on individuals or groups of individuals. And so the Acts of the Apostles is also punctuated by the way in which particular individuals were for their ministry, filled with the Holy Spirit. And it becomes clear that although these are named individuals, they're not isolated individuals. And the same is true in the history of the Church, isn't it? Most of us could go through the history of the Church, at least from the Reformation to the present day, and we would be able to articulate names, individuals through whom God seems to have worked in very special ways, who have been filled with the Spirit. But as we begin to read about them, we discover they were not on their own. They were not Lone ranger Christians. They were always surrounded with a brotherhood and sisterhood of those who prayed for them, helped them, supported them, nourished them and shared in their work. And the same is true in the Acts of the Apostles. But it is punctuated by the story of individuals, Simon Peter and then Stephen. Stephen, who in my view, perhaps more than anyone else, made an impact on the life and ministry and even thought of the Apostle Paul. Stephen, who was lamented by the Church in Jerusalem that didn't know that from this death life would be produced in the man whom we generally regard apart from the Lord Jesus, as the greatest theologian and perhaps the greatest evangelist that the early Church knew. And then there is Philip the evangelist. But they are surrounded by others, by brothers and sisters, as the Gospel goes from Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria. And eventually, of course, in chapter 16, begins to break into what we would call Europe. And the Holy Spirit is constantly pursuing his work. There is individual refreshment and awakening and revival. There is citywide revival. There is community wide revival. There seems to be revival in cities that somehow or another are connected with each other. Just as we read of the work of God in the times of the Reformation, the connectednesses between people like Luther and Melanchthon and Wittenberg and Calvin and Geneva and Butser, they didn't all cross each other's T's and dot each other's I's. But there was a sense that God the Spirit had caught them up into something that was far bigger than themselves, and that God was marching on, and that God was building his church in Christ and by the Holy Spirit. And just as in the Acts of the Apostles, he was empowering the preaching of the Gospel, he was protecting the Church against the gates of hell, and he was directing the Church in its mission. Something that, of course, is particularly clear in the experience of Paul and his apostolic band in Acts 16, about which there was a question earlier on the way in which he closed doors and opened doors, and the way in which the apostles became convinced in the power of the Holy Spirit of where they were to go. And of these snapshots, and as I say, there are, there are probably at least 10 of them in the Acts of the Apostles. Of these snapshots, the first is the longest and the most detailed. And I think there can be no doubt from the point of view of interpreting the Acts of the Apostles that what Luke is saying here is if you want to see what the Holy Spirit does in a group of people as he fulfills Christ's purpose to build his church, this is it. This, in a sense, is the Church in its pristine condition. This is the Church in its definitive condition. It will not be long before that church is marauded from the outside by persecution, is attacked from the inside by false ambition, is in danger of breaking in two because of internal division. But this is what the church is meant to be. And although I'm sure you've heard a multitude of sermons on the end of Acts Chapter two, I want us to think about it for a few minutes from this particular perspective, that this is what the Holy Spirit did and seeks to do in the life of the Church that he seeks to use. And this is done in the power of the Holy Spirit, not just through specially filled individuals, but through the church. And as he said earlier on, we have been living, I imagine now, for 175 years, maybe or even longer, where the general mantra in preaching has been guilt creating questions about our individual witness. And of course, we are individually witnesses. But the striking emphasis of the New Testament is that we are community witnesses and that actually the greatest need of the world in which we live is for churches to be churches like the Jerusalem Church. Because when churches are like the Jerusalem Church, something changes in our evangelism. I don't know if it is quite as true today as it has been in the last 50 years, but so many councils for evangelism have been training individuals how to ask questions to others in order to start a spiritual conversation. And sometimes, to be honest, I've felt there's a certain duplicity about that, standing in the street and saying, we're just here to ask a few questions when the real reason is hidden. But do you remember what Simon Peter says? He says, you must always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you, when people ask you questions, that's the difference between the 21st century church and the Jerusalem church. In the days of the Jerusalem church, it was non Christians who were asking Christians questions because they could see the difference. They could see the godliness, the holiness of the church. And as Luke goes on to record later on in Acts chapter five, in perhaps the most paradoxical statement in the Acts of the Apostles, he says about people in Jerusalem, nobody dared join them. Now that's not the kind of church that the gurus of 21st century church growth have baptized the church into. But the church, when it is really the church, creates in people a sense of I do not belong there. And yet at the same time says, look, none dared to join them, but the people held them in high esteem. That's the issue. It's like the criminal in the dark who hopes that the judge is going to quash his sentence, but he knows this judge never will. And he is convinced of his righteousness, no matter how much he hates it. That's the kind of church that we need. I don't mean in a metallic sense, in a pharisaical sense, but a church. And this goes back to our worship again, doesn't it? A church that has such a sense of the awe and glory and grace of God that people sense they don't really belong here. But the very next verse says, and more than ever were added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women. And people say, well, that's not going to work. And if you say to them, well, why is it not going to work? The only answer they can possibly give is, I've never had an experience like that. And if that's the case, then for all we may think that we are churches giving free reign to the Holy Spirit. We haven't really been reading our Bibles. The church that Jesus Christ builds has this unique combination on the one hand of causing people to understand that they don't belong, and yet at the same time causing many people to want to belong more than anything else in their lives. I actually have, I would say sellotaped. You would probably say Scotch taped, but I wouldn't use that language about tape. Dutch tape maybe, but not Scotch tape. I have taped into the back of my Bible as a reminder to me every time I use this particular Bible, it's my carry to the pulpit Bible. The verse numbers are getting far too small and I need a bigger Bible. But a deacon in the church that both Derek and I served in, Columbia and South Carolina, came up to me at the end of a morning service with a torn off scrap from the order of service. And this is what it. Mr. Ferguson, I was wondering if you would pray for me because I'm not a Christian, but I want to be more than anything else in the world. I hope you find this. And whoever he or she was, they've been on my heart now for many years. But it's there in my Bible, not just to remind me that there may be people present every time I teach from the Bible who are not yet Christians. It's also there to remind me of the impact that a church living in the power of the Spirit will have on outsiders who come in. And isn't it exactly what Paul says to the Corinthians? He says, if you're all speaking in tongues and an outsider comes in, he'll think you're all mad. But if there is the speaking of the word of God, the prophetic word of God, he will find himself at least inwardly constrained to bow down and say, surely God is in this place. And that's what we need to pray for in our churches, to long for, if we are ministers, to pray for help, for our ministers to conduct worship and to minister God's word in such a way that. That a joyful awe will fall upon us. I've never forgotten. It must have been sometime around the same time, at the end of a funeral service in our church, a lady coming from outside of the church came to me and she said to me, I didn't realize I was coming to a worship service. And I thought, well, given some of the funerals I've been at, where people have tried to joke death away, I'm not surprised that you didn't expect it. But I thank God that you recognized it, that here, as we gather round our loved ones who have broken hearts, yes, they too, and we together know that in the presence of our great God and Savior, all is well and we are safe and Christ is here, the spirit is working. And as I say, the day of Pentecost is not an event that is repeated, but there are clearly patterns that we see in the event of Pentecost and in the church that Pentecost produces, that in a sense, are prototypes for us, the prayerfulness of the apostles and the others who gathered with them. Does it never strike you as one of the most amazing things in the world in our culture here that we have these vast churches, thousands of people, and yet if the elders call the congregation to an evening of prayer, hardly anyone is there? And it really does make you worry if we are building with wood and hay and stubble rather than the power of the Holy Spirit. They are filled with the Spirit. They're emboldened in their preaching. And as the Westminster Catechism say, it's by the preaching of the Word that people are converted. And that's why it's so important to find wayswhile we can still find ways in our society to invite others to come and sit under the Gospel and to sense not just the truth of the Gospel, but the connectedness between that truth and the lives and love of those who sit around them. And that's why the hallmarks here, the marks of the Church, are first of all, the preaching of the Word, and a lot of preaching of the Word. I remember John Stott saying that today we have sermonettes that produce Christianettes. And we assume that half an hour on a Sunday morning is all we need to be the kind of strong Christians that there were in Geneva in the time of the Reformation when they were listening to Calvin preaching for 50 minutes, day in and day out, and the Word was being poured into them. I'm not suggesting we can repeat that in the sociology of our societies, but we would be foolish to think that the slender diet that we experience is going to turn us into the kind of Christians who will turn the world upside down. And so there is this great focus on the preaching of the apostolic Word, and then there is this commitment to the fellowship. I think we could almost translate Luke's words addiction to the fellowship in the sense you feel you can't get enough of it and you can't live without it. And he describes what this fellowship is like. And if you were looking for one word to describe that fellowship, you would say that these people who were all indwelt by the spirit of adoption were living together as a family. They were listening to the Father's Word. They were loving one another as brothers and sisters. They were sharing what they had. There was none who was in need. It was as though for a moment in Jerusalem the Garden of Eden had reappeared before the fall, and there was harmony, the harmony of being indwelt by the one Spirit, being obedient to the one Word, that produced a mutual love for one another. I have often thought that the Church has gone astray very often because it's thought that the big picture for the church in the New Testament is the body of Christ. And it can't be. And the reason it can't be because there's only one author in the New Testament who uses that picture the fundamental picture for the church in the New Testament, the one word that would encapsulate everything that you find in Acts chapter two as family. And this, again, is why our local church is so significant, because we are living today in a world of dysfunctional families where the dysfunctional family may actually be becoming the norm. And when people who are familyless, people from broken homes, broken marriages, dysfunctionality, encounter this, yes, warts and all, at last they find the only community reality that can satisfy their souls if they find in that community the one who will save their souls. And it's so fascinating in this context that not only is there an addiction to the ministry of the Word, an addiction to fellowship, we just can't live without this. We can't live without one another. We are family here. Right at the heart of it is the addiction to the worship of the Lord, to the breaking of bread and to prayers. And so what people find in the family, people who are intellectually lost find truth. People who are in the far country find home. And people who are without Christ, find Christ and his salvation. It's not rocket science. It's listening to and being obedient to every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord and from the teaching that Jesus gave to the apostles and they have passed on to us. I know a man, it may be some of you also know him, who works in places where it is always dangerous to go. But in God's Providence meets the most striking illustrations. What happens when believers live this simple life. This man he told me about was a passport forger. He bought stolen passports. And the passport forger had this particular passport of a young woman. And because he had her passport, he knew where she was. And there was just something about the look on the face of this young woman that was like a fishhook in his soul. And because he had her passport, he knew where he could find her. And he did. And without telling her anything about his vocation in life, he engineered meeting with her and got to know her. And eventually one day, he actually said to her, you know, I'm in love with you. And she said, no, no, you're not in love with me. What has happened to you is that you've seen the Lord Jesus in me. And if you imagine that that were multiplied for all our faults and failures, then surely great awe would fall upon us. Our worship to him would be energetic and glorious, and people would come among us, drawn by the Holy Spirit, and say, surely God is among you. I know I'm not a Christian, but I want to be more than anything else in the world. And you know as well as I do that Ligonier Conferences are not the church, that those who speak are not your local pastor. And so it's not by coming here, but by going there that in the power of the Spirit, the Lord Jesus will build his church.
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Amen. And as you are helped, whether at a Ligonier conference or from the teaching you hear on Renewing youg Mind, our prayer is that the Lord would use it for his glory as you go and worship fellowship and serve in a local congregation. Today's message from Ligonier's Vice Chairman, Sinclair Ferguson was the closing session of our 2025 national conference. And although this event is over, you can join us next April in Orlando, Florida for our national conference on the theme Crucial Questions. Thousands have already registered, so secure your place today. Learn more and register@ligonier.org 2026This was the closing address of the conference, but it's not the final session you'll hear from the conference as tomorrow will feature one of the Q and A's. Yet it is the final day to request today's resource offer, Sinclair Ferguson's year long Devotional Things Unseen when you give a donation of any amount@renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343 based on his popular podcast, this hardcover book can be your companion over the course of a year as Dr. Ferguson guides you through key themes of the Christian life. Request yours@renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast Show Notes and and if you live outside of the US Or Canada, the ebook edition is available for you to request@renewingyourmind.org global. Thank you for making this daily outreach possible. Through your generosity. You tell us often that the Q and A sessions at our conferences are a highlight, and tomorrow we'll be featuring one of several that took place during the conference. Here's a preview.
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I was converted through a sermon on John 8:12 I am the light of the world. He who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. And that you know, that's a great text to be converted through, but it's also a great word to live on. He has promised he'll be with you and he will keep you to the end.
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So what questions do our speakers answer in this Q and A? To find out, join us tomorrow here on Renewing your Mind.