Pentecostal Preaching
Feb 6, 2012 Posted in Featured, So That!
Acts 2:14 Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say.
Powerful preaching is still God’s plan for proclamation. That doesn’t mean it’s the only way we should unpack the Word, but it does mean that when both Jesus and Paul give unambiguous commands to teach & preach, we should. But preaching must be Spirit-lead and Spirit-fed if it is to have any eternal significance at all. Peter, in Acts 2:14-41, preached the very first Christian sermon ever. It was powerful then and it is our model now. Peter takes the opportunity to explain a current conundrum with the exposition of an ancient text. He essentially says, “this is that.” All good preaching should aspire to that strategy. Rather than merely “teaching the Bible to people,” powerful preaching takes the truth of God’s Word, synthesizes it with the contemporary context, and addresses the latent questions of the hearers. It must matter. It must change people.
Answers for “why now” and “how then” come from God’s Word written way back when. Peter explains the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit by preaching from Joel 2, Psalm 16, and Psalm 110. Interestingly, Joel was also preaching from an ancient text as he references Deuteronomy. And what is the powerful message? The Gospel. Peter explains a mystery. The last days began at Pentecost, but they haven’t finished. We’re in them. The end has come, it’s just not over yet. He unpacks what Joel and David could not have seen: There has been one Advent and there will be another. The first advent was catalytic; the second will be cataclysmic.
The Gospel presentation lands with the intended wallop. The hearers are cut to the heart and they are moved to response. So too must we. Peter’s Gospel presentation cuts them to heal them; ruins them to resurrect them. We killed the Christ, but God has made Him Lord. And it was God’s plan. Pride is dealt a death blow when we realize that repentance means we envision Christ on the cross by our own hand and will. Then we ask our Father to apply our sin to our King. He did. He also imputes the full righteousness of Christ to us. What a marvelous exchange. What we intend for evil, God actually intends for good. This is that.
Our sole response is our soul response. We are living in the last days, the days of the soul. No longer is our identity merely national, it is individual. The Kingdom has inaugurated, and indeed it is here in it’s spiritual sense. The earthly Kingdom is yet to come. Until then, we live as citizens of heaven and we eagerly await our Savior from there, and while we wait, we offer our bodies as living sacrifices in view of God’s mercy. This is that.