Day 40 - Go, but first, stay!

by Dwight Hartman

Acts 2:1-12

Go Go Go! Aren’t we always on the run and super busy! Pastor John Mark Comer even wrote a telling book dealing with busy-ness in our Christian life – The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. It’s a good read. Yet, even the Gospel writers tell us to Go!  At the end of the books of Matthew and Mark, we are urged to Go: preach the gospel, make disciples, baptize, teach them all that Jesus taught. Whew! It’s like we’ve been appointed to a job, commissioned to a sacred task. Hurry; GO! 

But in Acts, Luke records something different. Here, instead of GO, Jesus says STAY! Stay in Jerusalem. You’re not quite ready for the task I’ve assigned. Even with years of a personal relationship with Jesus, these disciples needed one more gift: the Holy Spirit. You know the story – it’s Pentecost (or in Jesus’ Jewish calendar, Shavuot). A violent windstorm sweeps in from heaven filling the house. Fire roars in, separating into tongue-like flames landing on each of them. How many followers would you get for that social media post? Awesome, but would have missed the point. The disciples needed the power of the Holy Spirit. 

Yep, there’s that uncomfortable bit where they break out speaking in tongues. That’s weird, but not quite as weird if I see it as a reversal of the Tower of Babylon. People wanted to be like God and built a tower to reach the heavens. God acted. He divided the people by confusing their languages; now he unites people in clarity through languages.  

Sometimes I get an idea in my head. I charge headlong into making it work. The question I don’t ask myself often enough is, “Am I doing this for the glory of Dwight, or the glory of God?” When I don’t sit and pray about this idea, letting it marinate in my soul, I am ignoring the power of the Holy Spirit that was gifted to me when I first believed. That power is ever-so-slowly changing my heart, molding me to think and act more like Jesus.

I went to Jerusalem’s old city once with a bunch of pamphlets in my back pocket – the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew. I was going to make disciples! Good idea Dwight, but naïve. This didn’t work. I had prayed for the courage to do this, but it wasn’t going to be. I learned, and am continuing to learn, that any job God has for me will be accompanied by the Power of the Holy Spirit to accomplish it.

So, let’s Go AND Stay. Go and make disciples. Stay for the power of the Holy Spirit.  The disciples needed the power of the Holy Spirit to make disciples; so do we.