A Pentecost People

Beloved People of God,

As I’ve been praying and preparing the summer series for our youth, following the repeating imagery of God’s presence in fire, I'm struck afresh by the faithfulness of God to us across the ages. In the Old Testament, at one of Abraham’s lowest moments, God anchored His promise to the patriarch by making a covenant with Abraham; one for which the Lord alone was responsible (Genesis 12.1-4; 15.17). Before His called and chosen servant’s watching eyes, as “a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch,” the Lord’s presence passed through the sacrifice. Through the fire, the Lord was saying to Abraham, we have made a covenant, but I alone am responsible to fulfill my promise.

When we consider Moses sharing this story with Abraham’s sons and daughters on their exodus journey out of slavery and into the Promised Land, God’s covenantal faithfulness becomes all the more pronounced! In the wilderness, all these men and women needed do was look up from their dark and dusty feet and fix their eyes on the pillar of fire by night and trust the Lord was faithful to His word (Exodus 13.21-22; Numbers 9.15-23).

When we arrive on the other side of salvation history—after Christ endured the cross for us, after He conquered death and the grave, after He ascended to the right hand of the Father—we rejoice as Jesus our Messiah pours out His Spirit in a mighty rushing wind and tongues of fire (Acts 2.1-4). In the wind and the fire and the tongues we see expressions of God’s everlasting faithfulness fulfilling His promises. In the Apostle's Pentecost sermon, as Richard Thompson once said, our attention is drawn toward this simple fact: “God acted as God promised.” On Pentecost, through the outpouring of His Spirit and the proclamation of the Gospel, God revealed His faithfulness. Like Abraham and the Exodus generation, the people in the crowd in Jerusalem were invited to believe – to believe Jesus was the Lord and Messiah, to believe the witness of the Apostles and Prophets, to repent and receive mercy.

Beloved friend, God’s faithfulness remains the same. It is the same mercy and grace which calls us to repentance and baptism today. It is the same love which makes a covenant with us, confirming His promise.

For Christ the King, 

Brett