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The scripture reading of the morning is from the book of the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 2. I begin the reading at the verse numbered 1. When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place, and suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the

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house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as a fire distributed and resting 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. Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every

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nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered because each one heard them speaking in his own language. And they were amazed and wondered, saying, "Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear each of us in his own native language,

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Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pymphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians? We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God." And

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all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" But others mocked, said, "They are filled with new wine." But Peter, standing with the eleven, lifted up his voice and addressed them, "Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and give ear to my words. For these men are

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not drunk, as you suppose, since it's only the third hour of the day, but this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel. And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men

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shall dream dreams. Yea, and on my menservants and my maidservants in those days, I will pour out my spirit and they shall prophesy, and I shall show wonders in the heaven above and signs on the earth beneath, blood and fire and vapor of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before

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the day of the Lord comes, the great and manifest day. And it shall be that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

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Speaking of tongues, let me put before you two pictures. The first of these is drawn from the early pages of the Old Testament, the second from the early pages of the New Testament. The first is at the Tower of Babel. A group of individuals, all of whom speak the language of commonality, that is speak

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the same tongue, are impressed with their own power. And so they decide to build a tower which they plan to build until it reaches heaven itself. God, in order to demonstrate their folly and their presumption, sends his Holy Spirit and causes these people who all spoke a common language to suddenly be speaking

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in many different tongues. And the result, of course, is confusion. Someone gives an order, another person is not able to understand it, two people try to discuss some aspect of the plans and are unable to communicate, order quickly breaks into disorder, the project comes to nothing, and each wanders off talking to herself

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or himself alone. Now the second picture from the New Testament is Pentecost. Many people from many different lands speaking many different languages are gathered together in Jerusalem. The Holy Spirit comes upon them and enables them by his power to understand everything that is said in terms of their own

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languages, so that where there was disorder there suddenly is order, and where there was disunity there now is unity, and where there was confusion there is comprehension, and where there is weakness there is strength. And 3,000 people were added to the church on that day. Now the question I would like to ask

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is, in which of these two pictures do you find yourself? Now I do not ask that question to make you feel uncomfortable. I ask it rather because I am concerned for each and every one of you. I ask it as an expression of love. Do you find in your life that there is frustration and confusion? Do your goals elude you? Are

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you out of control? Do you find yourself wandering off and not really communicating with others so that there is a strength of purpose in the course of your days? That would put you in the Babel picture. Or are you a person who is leading a very exciting life, who has discipline in his days? Do you experience

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not disunity but unity? Do you have an energy that comes from beyond yourself? Is there a courage in you which sometimes surprises you? Are you finding yourself to be consistently successful in the things which you are seeking to do? If that is the picture of your life, then you are part of the Pentecost scene.

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Now it seems to me that everyone who is part of that Babel picture would like to be a part of the Pentecost picture. And in like manner, those who are already part of that Pentecost picture would want to have even more of Pentecost in their hearts. So for all of us, regardless of what picture we find

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ourselves in, I would offer this morning this wonderful word of the Apostle Paul. He says, "The kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power." Now talk is very powerful. We would not have civilization if we were not able to communicate with one another. There could be no education if a teacher and a

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student could not speak to one another. There could not be success if a buyer and a businessman in business, there could be no success if a buyer and a seller could not communicate. There could be no government. Much of love would be lost because we express much of our love in our words. Worship would become

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essentially meaningless. Language is a very strong element in the development of civilization. Let me demonstrate to you a very small but what I think is a significant miracle. Dr. Helene and Dr. Meek, will you please stand? With eight words I have lifted 300 pounds. You may be seated. Such is the power of speech or

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sometimes when speech becomes confused we are entertained by what happens. I read of a meteorologist in Washington DC a year and a half ago and he was giving the weather report and he said the temperature is 87 degrees, the barometer is falling, and the relative stupidity is a hundred percent. The next time

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someone says to you that one picture is worth a thousand words, reply would you please draw me a picture of the Sermon on the Mount or of the Gettysburg Address. Babel without communication and Pentecost with communication both demonstrate that speech, language, tongues is very very powerful. Speech is

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strong but the Apostle Paul says in this word for us this morning that the power of God is stronger than the power of speech or of talk. Now he is not disparaging the power of speech. After all, Paul was a very distinguished orator in his day. He knew how to use words and didn't hesitate to use them.

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But he goes on to say that that which builds the kingdom of God is more powerful than speech. Now whenever the New Testament uses the word power in a positive sense, it is speaking about a gift of God and the one who gives the gift of God, any gift of God, is the Holy Spirit. So when Paul says to us that the

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kingdom of God is greater than talk, great as talk is, and says that it is instead power, he is saying that it is nothing less than the gift of God. It is the presence, the indwelling of his own Holy Spirit. The Spirit, you see, is much more powerful than talk. At Babel, the Spirit changed communication into

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incommunication simply by changing talk. At Pentecost, the Spirit changed the lack of communication into communication, again, by his power. The power of the Spirit is greater than the power of speech. So Paul is saying if you want to really know what it's like to be a part of the triumphant kingdom of God, you've

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got to rely on something even more powerful than human speech itself. You've got to rely on the gift-giving presence of the Holy Spirit. So the question becomes, are we walking, are we yielding and obeying to the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives? Or to put it in another way, how do we plug into the Holy

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Spirit's power? I'd like to make six suggestions which I have built in the form of an acrostic in order that they might be easily remembered. Each letter in the word "Spirit" leads us to a different insight into how to plug into the Spirit's power. S, seek the Holy Spirit. In the Old Testament, the word for

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Spirit is "ruach" and it's sometimes translated "wind" or "breath." In the New Testament, the word for Spirit is "numah" and it is sometimes translated in the same way. In other words, the Spirit is thought of as something like the wind or air. Now our planet floats in an envelope of air. We live in an ocean of air. We

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don't think of it very often. We are largely unconscious of it, but we are moving always in an ocean of air. And just so, we are moving always in the presence of the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures say that we have our being in God and the Holy Spirit is one aspect of God's appearing. God then, by the Holy

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Spirit, is always around us. The difficulty is that we are often not aware of this and we must seek this awareness. And it is easily had. Jesus says to us, "If you being evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Holy Father give the Holy Spirit to those who seek him?" All

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you have to do is ask and the awareness of the Spirit will be yours. Some years ago, Henry James wrote a short story called "The Beast in the Jungle." Now it's the story of a man named John Marshall. And John Marshall has the idea that something very dramatic and unusual is going to happen in his life. And he talks

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about this all the time. And he meets a girl and she's a lovely girl and they begin to communicate on an intimate level and he talks about this all the time. And their lives become more and more intertwined and they become more and more dependent upon each other and there is a great intimacy between them.

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But all the time he keeps talking about this surprising thing which he expects that's going to leap on him like some beast leaps out in the jungle. And she becomes ill. She loves him very much and she knows that she is grievously ill, that she may in fact die. And she says to him when he's sitting there beside her, still

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talking about this great thing that he expects to come to pass, she says to him, "This great thing is passing you by right now." And he doesn't get the point and she dies. And it is not until he goes to her grave that he recognizes how much he misses her. That he recognizes how much he loved her. That he recognizes in fact

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that while he was looking for some marvelous thing to happen, the marvelous thing had happened. They were there. The two of them could have become one with all the blessings attendant. And because she is gone, her life over, he discovers that his life is over as well. There are a lot of people who go about expecting

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some dramatic miraculous experience of the Holy Spirit. What the scriptures teach us is that the Holy Spirit is all about us. What we must be is simply aware of that. So we seek God's guidance in making us aware of it. S, seek. P, practice the presence of the Spirit. That is, not only become aware of it, but realize that,

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think about that, make that a part of every day. Gertrude Stein was one of the significant literary figures of the 20th century. She was born right over here on the north side of Pittsburgh. And she's most famous for that line of hers, "A rose is a rose is a rose." Now a lot of people laugh at that line, but it had

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very serious intent. You see, Gertrude Stein believed that words had been so overused and misused that they had largely lost their meaning. When a poet would write "Oh love" or "Oh moon" or "Oh sea," these things had become so stale in the poetic literature that they had lost all of their impact. So Stein said it's

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important for an author, a poet, to try to intensify, to restore the meaning of words, to get them back to what they really represent. And she said every author should build strategies into her writings, should somehow invent ways of causing people to think about what a word really means. So that when she wrote

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"A rose is a rose is a rose," she wanted people to think about the beautiful object which a rose is and not something which language had made into something ordinary and not important. Just the same way, when I say "The spirit is the spirit is the spirit," I am saying that we must become aware of the fact that we walk in

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the spirit, that what we see he sees, that what we hear he hears, that what we touch he touches, that what we smell he smells, that what we taste he tastes, that he surrounds us. The very hairs of our heads are numbered, and medical science tells us that the average person loses 60 hairs a day. That's quite a process of

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calculation. But the Holy Spirit is so involved, you see, and we are so much in the midst of him. We need to become conscious of this, and that's the reason we practice his presence. Now of course when you do realize this, you become very quickly aware of your own sin. And that leads us to our third letter, I, which is

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introspection. Jesus says the Holy Spirit convicts the world of sin. Whenever the Holy Spirit puts his yardstick down in the middle of your life, whenever you begin to think about the fact that he sees and is involved in observing every single thing that we think and say and do, well then you become convicted. Then

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you recognize that your life is not what it ought to be, and so we introspect, we examine ourselves, and separate from us those things which would dishonor the presence of the Spirit. I read a good number of years ago now about a man who was on the Anzio beachhead of the Second World War, and he had thrown himself out

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on the sand to avoid enemy fire, and a tank went by and somehow his fingers got caught in the track of that moving tank, and he found his hand being drawn into those crushing gears, and he knew that if he didn't do something, his hand, his arm, his whole body might be drawn in and he would lose his life. And so he pulled out

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his pistol and shot off his fingers one at a time, and thus saved his life. Now Jesus says to us, "If your eye offends you, pluck it out. If your right hand leads you into temptation, cut it off. It is better to enter the kingdom of heaven maimed," he says, "than not to enter the kingdom of heaven at all." When we become

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aware of the Holy Spirit, when we practice his presence, we want to cut out of our lives those things which are not acceptable to him. His presence convicts us of those things, and he enables us and comforts us, he's called the Comforter, comforts us as we battle these things in our lives. What I'm saying very simply is

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this, if you want to know the presence of the Holy Spirit in your life, you must love the Spirit more than you love your sin. Now the fourth letter is R, regimen, and that simply means this, that there must be discipline in the Christian life. You know, the word "disciple" and the word "discipline" have the same root. I've

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discovered in my ministry that it's not really difficult to lead people to the place where they'll accept Jesus Christ. What's hard is getting them to stay with that acceptance, to become apprentices of God, and to develop the gifts of God in their lives. It's not difficult to get people to be born again. What's difficult

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is then to keep them growing in the faith, to attach them to the means of grace so that they want to study the scriptures, and they want to pray, and they want to be in the fellowship of the church, they want to experience the sacraments. These things strengthen them for their lives. Heinrich Heine, the great

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German philosopher, was standing in Almion on one occasion with a friend, and they were standing before the great cathedral at Almion. And the friend said to him, "How is it that people don't build buildings like that anymore?" And Heine replied, "Well, in those days people had convictions. Today we have opinions, and

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opinions will not build a Gothic cathedral." The fact of the matter is that many people who wear the name of Christ are biblically and theologically and historically ignorant. It's been a long time since they've read a book which takes them deeper into the faith, which edifies their spirits. It's been a long

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time since they've been involved in any classroom situation where they grow in the things of God. But that's what we are to do, and the scriptures say that we grieve the Holy Spirit when we do not do these things. It is no wonder that some Christians, when they go out into the world, are quickly defeated by temptation,

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are turned upside down and shaken inside out. The enemies of God are serious, and the servants of God must be equally serious. That means regimen, discipline. The fifth letter, I, involvement. Do you ever think about the fact that in large measure we owe the spread of civilization to the winds? As you know,

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most of the surface of the earth is water. The continents are largely separated by water, and those boats that crossed the water carried civilization, the ideas of one group of people to another people, and it was in this cross-fertilization of ideas that the progress of the race developed. John

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Ruskin said a long time ago that "In the bow of a boat is the gift of another world." Well, the Holy Spirit wants to blow our boats, to fill the winds of our sails in such a way that we encourage and support and meet and develop one another. That's the reason Jesus says, "Where two or three are gathered together

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in my name, there I am." He's not present physically, he's present by his Holy Spirit. "There I am in the midst of them." It's when we come together with other Christians that we grow in the faith. You ever stood beside a lake and watched a bunch of sailboats on that lake, and some of those boats scud across the water, and

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they scintillate in the sun, and they go just where they want to go, and other boats don't seem to go anywhere? They get all their sails tangled and their lines tangled, and they miss the guidance of the gusts. Why is that? Well, it's because some of those sailors are good sailors and some of those sailors are bad

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sailors. And it's when you go to the lake, and it's when those sailors get together and observe one another, that they all learn a little bit more about their sailing. Just so, the Holy Spirit, with his wind, wants to blow us together. He wants us to be involved in one another's lives, and out of that

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involvement we learn from one another. We're plugged in to one another and thus plugged in to the power of the Spirit. And the last letter is T, trust. When you love someone, when you're really passionate about someone, when you're zealous about your relationship with someone, you're willing to run risks for

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them. That is, you're willing to really trust them. Wherever the Holy Spirit is, things happen. On Pentecost, 3,000 people were saved. Individuals talk about being in the Spirit and all by themselves. That's not the way the Spirit's movement is depicted for us in Scripture. There, the Scripture tells us the Spirit leads

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people out into the world where they have impact on the course of affairs. I've talked to people who have gone down the Colorado River in these rafts, and they say that sometimes you'll be thrown out of the raft into a whirlpool or a roller, and you'll be sucked under by the water. And if you try to fight that, you'll

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probably never make it back to the surface alive. But if you yield to it, suddenly you will find yourself hurtling toward the surface, and you'll bob up some 30 or 50 feet ahead of where you went under. Well, to be filled with the Holy Spirit, to use the New Testament's phrase, means to be out in the white

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water, to be out in the swift currents, to be yielded to God's influence in your life, to bear witness to him, to live for Jesus Christ. And sometimes when you do that, you're sucked under. But if you stay yielded, if you continue to trust, then you bob to the surface again ahead of where you were before. So how do you plug

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into the power of the Holy Spirit? S, you seek him. That means you become aware of his presence. P, you practice that presence. You concentrate on his reality. I, you introspect, you examine your own life. R, you practice a spiritual regimen. You are disciplined in your discipleship. I, you are involved in the lives of other

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Christians. You study other sailors and learn from them. And T, you trust. You put some risk in your religion that you might know the thrill of the filling power of the Holy Spirit. I know that's hard, but I also know, and you do too, and there's no necessity of my illustrating this, that there's absolutely nothing in

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life that is worthwhile that doesn't take effort and commitment. So are you part of Babel or part of Pentecost? Is your life one of confusion or comprehension, disorder or order? Are you failing or are you accomplishing? Do you know disunity or unity? Are you alone or do you stand with others? Is there

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aimlessness or is there purpose? Is there weakness or is there strength? Listen to what Paul says. The kingdom of God does not consist in talk, powerful as that is. The kingdom of God consists of the power of the gift-giving Holy Spirit. And it is in his name on this Pentecost Sunday that I invite you to shake the dust

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of Babel from your feet and to become part of the Pentecost parade. Let us pray. O God, use these words in the hearts of all those who will hear. To the honor of thy Son and of thy Holy Spirit and of thy holy name, amen. >> Yeah, that's it.

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