“He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.”

(Revelations 2:29)

(John 15:26 – 16:1-15)

There’s one unfinished book in the Bible. Though this book has 28 chapters which are written and printed and published, yet the 28^th chapter is not the final nor concluding chapter. This incomplete document in the Holy Scriptures is the Book of Acts. It remains an unfinished document because it is a history of the Christian church and only the opening chapters are there recorded. The church is still living out the chapters of the Book of Acts. It must remain unfinished until all the testimony is in.

Jesus told His disciples in taking leave of them that He commissioned them to be His church. He sent them on His redemptive mission for the world. He assured them that the gates of hell should not prevail against His church. He further declared that He would send them the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, who would lead and guide them into all truth.

We read of the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise in our lesson this morning from the second chapter of the Book of Acts when the Holy Spirit came with power upon the Apostles and the church was born. We celebrate today, the 7^th Sunday after Easter, as Pentecost, the birthday of the Christian church.

Sometimes the history of the church seems to have come to a dismal end because the onward advance of the Christian cause has ground to an ignominious stop. A Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London once remarked: “This church is moving: it is moving down Fleet Street at a rate of one inch every hundred years.” Well, there are those who think this is par for every ecclesiastical course. That part of the church universal which is our Presbyterian denomination has been decreasing in membership for a number of years. The church is despised by many as an outmoded institution whose message is irrelevant, whose ethics are unrealistic, and whose members’ religious convictions and practices are so superficial as to be powerless in the contemporary world.

A faithful and devoted church woman who has given prodigiously of her time and effort, her money and her loyal devotion to the various ministries of a congregation in our Presbytery asked me recently in tones of deep sadness: “Are you hopeful or pessimistic about the future of our Presbyterian denomination?”

So many are the gloomy Jeremiads unleashed at the church today that some of her most faithful members are much like the man who ran a hamburger stand in a mid-western town back in the depression of the 1930s. It was hard work and the hours were long, but he managed to make it pay. With sacrificial economies he sent his son through college where the boy majored in economics. The son came home from college and informed his father at great length about the depth of the depression the country was experiencing. It frightened the old man so that he reduced the size of his buns, reduced the size of the meat patty, and he then experienced such a depression in his hamburger stand that he had to go out of business! I wonder what the old man would say about the astonishing survival and success of our present day hamburger stands like McDonald’s and Wendy’s?

Too often the effect of the detractors of the church in our time has been to strike fear into the hearts of the church’s most faithful, with the result that the church has slowed down in her services and withdrawn from the needy world, and weakened the content of the gospel she proclaims until she is at the point of going out of business.

Dr. Kenneth Scott Latourette, Yale University’s great professor of Church History, stated that his life-long study of the history of the Christian church reveals that there are distinct periods of ebb and flow in the church’s fortunes; of advance and decline in the influence and power of the church across the centuries. But there is this queer, recurring factor that Dr. Latourette discovered, every great advance is preceded by a period of decline or retreat, and the forces of renewal and advance always break out in some unexpected quarter and through some unforeseen new form of life and service.

Some years ago when he was Moderator of our General Assembly and visiting in our Presbytery, Dr. Ben Lacy Rose was asked a question about his interpretation of the meaning of “millennium” in the Book of Revelation. In his answer Dr. Rose remarked: “I believe that the Golden Age of the Church is yet to come. It has not passed. The church is moving on toward that Golden Age. This is my belief about the meaning of the “millennium” in the Book of Revelation.”

The present Moderator of our church, Dr. John Buchanan of Chicago, in an interview last month was quoted in our church magazine, Presbyterians Today, as stating: “I trust that God’s not done with us yet, that the Presbyterian Church has an important role to play, and that God continues to provide the resources and the inspiration to get us to the future.”

And the principal factor guaranteeing that future for the church is the presence of the Holy Spirit in the church of Jesus Christ. Because Jesus said: “When the Holy Spirit comes, who is the Spirit of Truth, He will lead you into all truth,” and because the first century church was born in a baptism of the Spirit and guided and empowered by the Holy Spirit, and because the church in every succeeding century since has had its own experience of the Spirit’s guidance and power, we can and must have hope that the Spirit will continue to lead and guide and empower Christ’s church.

John of Patmos, writing to the seven churches of Asia Minor whose congregations were suffering the violent persecution of Christians that threatened the extinction of the church, closed each of his brief epistles with the same repeated advice: “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith to the churches.”

Scientists use a term that is also very appropriate for the vocabulary of Christian church people today: the term, “break-through”. Scientists use this term to refer to that fruition of their labors and hopes which comes at some unpredictable juncture as they work toward great objectives: like a cure for cancer or AIDS, or a slowing down of the aging process, or a new fuel for automobiles that will not pollute our atmosphere. The “break-through” always comes, partly because of laborious hours of study, and partly because of immeasurable and careful experimentation, but also because an unknown and unpredictable factor from beyond their planning and labor has entered the endeavor resulting in the “break-through.”

This we can, and must, expect for the future for the Christian church. Where or when the break-through will occur in the church’s mission and service, we cannot predict, but it is God’s Holy Spirit — the Spirit of Truth — who is guiding us into all truth.

If we read the gospels carefully we cannot but be impressed with how frequently and urgently Jesus talked with His disciples about their relationship with the world. He strenuously wrestled with the problem of communicating to them His exact idea of what this important relationship should be. See what strong, dramatic figures of speech Jesus used!

“’You are the salt of the earth … You are the light of the world’ … He told His little company. To them He turned over the keys to the Kingdom; He compared His own work to that of bread and of water; He said that the Kingdom of God was like leaven, or yeast; He said He had come to cast fire on the earth. At first the variety of these figures is bewildering, but a powerful insight comes when we realize suddenly what all these figures have in common. Each figure represents some kind of penetration. The purpose of salt is to penetrate the meat and thus to preserve it. The function of the light is to penetrate the darkness. The only use of keys is to penetrate the lock. Bread is worthless until it penetrates the body. Water penetrates the hard crust of earth. Leaven penetrates the dough to make it rise. Fire continues only as it reaches new fuel, and the best way to extinguish it is to contain it.” (The Company of the Committed — Elton Trueblood)

Jesus went at it hard and endlessly to impress upon His disciples His idea of what their relationship to the world must be. And always it comes to this: they are to penetrate a pagan society with the new life from Him for the world’s redemption.

Now the crucial step in the strategy of Jesus was turning His disciples into apostles, from learners to protagonists, from citizens of His Kingdom into Ambassadors of that Kingdom. Jesus called them to Him to learn and to be fired with the Spirit. He sent them forth to penetrate the hostile and pagan world with His teaching and His Spirit for its salvation.

Therefore the church is never true to itself when it is living for itself. If it is concerned with saving its own life, it will lose it. The concept of a Christian as a church-goer only is utterly inept. Christians may indeed come in, but they do so only that they in consequence may go out. Church buildings should stand in the purpose of the Living Christ as drill halls where Christian soldiers assemble for training, exercise, discipline, in order that the company of the committed may go out into the world for more effective results in penetrating the unclaimed frontiers.

Are you and I puzzled about where and when and how our transformation from discipline to apostle takes place? The doctrine of the Holy Spirit is that there is a way — that the Holy Spirit is leading. The “break-through” will come when God’s people wait upon Him and pray and act.

As the succeeding chapters of the living Book of the Acts of the Apostles pile up, while the Holy Spirit is leading the saints and apostles of this, our age — just what is being recorded of you and me — of our Rosemark congregation of His people?

 

PASTORAL PRAYER

O God, our Heavenly Father, who did promise to send forth Thy Spirit and did fulfill Thy word on the day of Pentecost, we humbly beseech Thee that we, with Thy whole church, may at this time be made glad by Thy Holy Spirit’s presence and power among us. Let our bodies by Thy Holy Spirit’s temple; that we may be pure and unspotted from the world; and grant us a devout heart that we may rejoice to receive Thy Spirit’s instruction with meekness, Thy guidance with obedience, and Thy Holy Spirit’s comfort with a grateful heart.

Pour out Thy holy and consecrating Spirit upon us and upon Thy church everywhere, that repentant and forgiving, we may burn with love for God and all Thy children, and feeling the shame of the evils around us, may serve Thee with all our heart and soul and mind and strength in the work of Thy salvation.

Cease not Thy pleading with each one of us when our love grows cold and our prayer is dumb, and we fall into the sleep of selfish cares. Break in once more upon the darkness and void, waken us to Thy heavenly light to know Thee as the life of our deepest life, the voice of our inward conscience, the strength of our surrendered will, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.