Okay, this is reading about the Tower of Babylon, what was going on back then. At one time, all of the people in the world spoke the same language and used the same words. As the people migrated to the east, they found a plane in the land of Babylonia and settled there. Genesis 11, verses 1 through 2.
On the day of Pentecost, all the believers were meeting together in one place, Acts 2, Acts verses 2 and 1. They began saying to each other, let us make bricks and hardened them with fire. In this region, bricks were used instead of sown and tar was used for martyr. And they said, come, let's build a great city for ourselves and a tower that reaches to the sky.
This will make us famous and keep us from being scattered all over the world. But the Lord came down to look at the city and the tower and the people were building. Look, he said, the people are united and they all speak the same language. After this, nothing they set out to do will be impossible for them.
Come, let us go down and confuse the people with different languages. I then won't be able to understand each other. Genesis 11, 3, 3, 7. Suddenly there was a sound from heaven like the whirring of mighty windstorm and it filled the house where they were sitting.
Then what looked like flames or tongues of fire appeared and settled on each of them. And everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in other languages as the Holy Spirit gave them this ability, Acts 2, 2, 3, 4. In that way the Lord scattered them all over the world and they stopped building the city. That is why the city is called Babyl because that is where the Lord confused the people with different languages.
In this way he scattered them all over the world. Genesis 11, 8, 3, 9. At that time there were devout Jews from every nation living in Jerusalem. When they heard its loud noise everyone came running and they were bewildered to hear their own languages being spoken by the believers.
They were completely amazed. How can this be they explained? These people are all from Galilee and yet we hear them speaking in our own native languages. Here we are, Parthians, Medes, Elomites, people from Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappinocia, Pontus, the province of Asia, Phargetia, Pampilah, Egypt and the areas of Libya around Sarene, visitors from Rome, Jews and converts to Judaism, Christians and Arabs.
We all hear these people speaking in our own languages about the wonderful things God has done. They stood there amazed and perplexed. What can this mean? They asked each other.
Thank you all for our little experiment. I love those television shows that seem to build giant worlds around them. I was a rabid fan of lost. Does anybody remember the lost?
I love the game of Thrones. Now my new favorite series to watch like this is the Expanse. It's on Amazon. But the sad thing is I always get disappointed when shows like this end.
You know, they just seem to have, it might be an effect of them trying to draw you in every week to see what's going to happen next. But they end up just like leaving like storylines closed. Does that frustrate anybody else? We never got to find out about the smoke monster and lost.
I'm not going to talk about Game of Thrones and the Expanse hasn't disappointed me yet. But just those lines, the storylines get left aside and we never get to figure out exactly what's going on. Now I think one time, one of the reasons that we sometimes struggle reading scripture is it's a little complicated. It's a little big.
It can be a little wild at times. You've heard me say before that if you think the Bible is boring and you're not reading it. But like what do we do with some of this stuff sometimes? You know, it's even tougher because it was written thousands of years ago by dozens and dozens of people and it's time span.
It's just hundreds of years and we can look at scripture sometimes and feel that stories are not connecting and finishing. And the story that we have at Pentecost is that we celebrate the Tower of Babel and Pentecost, they kind of sit on top of each other really, really well. That's when we did stuff a little bit different for us to see this. And I think that by that sitting on top, we begin to understand a little bit more about what God was doing on this special day.
We celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit in a day that some people say they call it the birth of the church. But in a lot of ways we also see, hopefully you'll see this now, that Pentecost in some ways was just a reversal of Babel, of what happened there. And we see in here in the story that there's the wildness of people in the beginning of the battle that are trying to do things on their own versus the wildness of people and those very first days after the resurrection and ascension of Christ that are unlearning to do things on their own. So let's think about this reversal a little bit and we're going to kind of just dig into what some of the weirder parts are of this story but to realize why it's important for us to think about this in this way.
So this reversal, we know in Babel what we find is that there's a broken unity of all people. They were all together but they were all just trying to be the most important person they could be. At Pentecost we see the gathered body that's really focused on one thing. And then Jesus before he ascended said, hey, you need to go to Jerusalem, wait and pray.
And they had been there waiting and praying. So Babel we see in the text people said, let's go find our own name. Let's go build up our own significance. At Pentecost we see people come here saying, hey, we're going to be shared.
We're going to have a shared experience in Jesus and that's what's going to define us. And Babel people came here saying we have got to stay together no matter what. At Pentecost we see these first followers of Jesus being released into this world. And Babel and even if I was just listening to them and reading, I was like, no, we have some questions about why did God do what he did that seems a little horrific.
But God mixed up their speech because they needed to be distinct and not just be focused into their and one thing. But at Pentecost what we see is the power of God moving across chaos into clarity and just redefining the situation. Now the issue with Babel that was going on there, we can kind of quickly do this, but the issue with Babel is they were trying to find autonomy away from God. They were trying to seize in their own individualism.
And whenever we do that, whenever we try to define what is good for ourselves, that's always going to result in a world of tragedy and death. In many ways we look at this first like 10, 11, 12 chapters of Genesis where all like the super, super wild stuff happens. And what we see just repeating over and over and over is stories of people trying to define autonomy away from God and the result is tragedy and death. This kind of finishes out that story loop.
But how we respond to the promises and blessings of God changes the way that we are able to receive the promises and blessings of God. You know, Babel, we were trying to do things on our own. At Pentecost, becoming the Holy Spirit and what that did for us, we transcend the limits of our own ability. And instead we just situate ourself inside of God's ability and say, no, this is what we could do on our own, but this is what we can do with God and this is what we want.
That we trust God and we enjoy the good that He provides, not the good that we create instead of forfeiting the blessings of what we really see happen in Babel. They forfeited the blessings of God in their life. So I want to kind of talk a little bit about just the weird thing that's going on. This is always for nice like calm Christians.
We sometimes look at a Pentecost storm like, okay, there's stuff here. I don't know what to do with. So I'm just not going to think about it. And one of my favorite, one of my favorite preacher conversations is to talk about the wild stuff.
Most of y'all know that by now. I love the wild stuff. And we're going to talk about that. So the first thing we're going to talk about this one is we're going to talk about the tongue thing.
Okay. Is that kind of confused? Anybody else? Is that scary?
Is that out of the way? That's something that we don't normally know what to do with. But across Scripture, what we see is tongues are a mark of unity. So by me saying that statement, I'm also saying, yes, I believe this is a real thing because we see it across Scripture and it always tells a story of unity.
It's a mark of unity that's full of the presence and spirit of God. In the Old Testament, we see it in that way. But in the New Testament, we see this expand out even more. But it's also always known to encourage and to edify other people.
These things are not an individual gift, but this is a gift for the larger body. And it's for the encouragement and the edification of the people that are there. Now, we also can see some details inside the story that help us just kind of begin to filter out the questions that we might have. The first one is they're hearing this in their own languages.
Okay. So what we find in Scripture is when this is used to edify everyone, there's always a person speaking, there's always a person hearing. Now, I read this and I saw this and knew this kind of at a head level. But years ago, I was at my friend Jason's dad's church in Arkansas.
It was a larger assembly of God congregation. That morning, they were having a special commissioning service for some people that were leaving and this guy kind of raised his hand. And I didn't know what was going on. If one of you had raised your hand and you had to ask me a question right now, I'd kind of be a little bit nervous.
We saw that happen that morning and Mike, my friend Jason's dad, he knew exactly what was going. He immediately like stood up and you heard the guy from the lack of the church start ripping it out. And then immediately he sat down and Mike begins to look around saying, okay, and then another woman in the back raises her hand and then she comes up to and then she begins interpreting every single thing he said. The hair on my arm was just standing up because it's like, I know right now I'm in the middle of this very truthful situation.
That's the only time in my life I've seen it like that. We see this always is done that there's a back and forth. This is not happening just alone in the individual. It's done in the larger group and there's an interpretation that's there and it was to see that.
It was amazing. We also we go on even like deeper into the story and it begins just like telling us more truth about this is we see that these people that are speaking, they are hearing their own language being spoke by another person. And we pull this back and we realize that this is not an emotional thing, that this is not a supernatural thing just happening inside of someone's head, but that this was a real physical thing. Hearing someone speak in a language they did not know that people were there and they did hear and they did know.
Now I'm not going to go into the full out long story. A couple of y'all have heard this before. But I was let's just say there was a situation one time in Jamaica when I was on a mission trip. And the larger thing is this incredible kind of outpouring of the spirit.
One of the things that happened that night is a girl I knew from college began speaking in Spanish and it was a little bit different sounding. And another person that was there they raised their hand said okay she is not okay apparently what was going on is she began speaking not just in Spanish but in a particular dialect of Spanish that was found in Peru. So other girls in the room was a parent from missionaries and she had lived in South America from the time that she was a, can I get one of those, a lot of smikes. But there was another girl that was there and she had lived in Peru as a missionaries kid for the first 18 years of her life and she raised her hand.
She was also this girl's rooming. And she said I don't know what I can tell you she does not know Spanish. Second of all she is speaking this really really weird dialect that's found in a certain place. And then she begins talking about what the other girl is talking about.
And again another one is like that hair stands up on your arms thing. But both of them are these beautiful situations of the Holy Spirit. And we see is that this idea of tongues although it's kind of weird to some of us. It's a little scary to some of us maybe.
I see other people in the room smiling right now nodding their heads so it's not scary or weird it's kind of normal for other people in here. What we see and what scripture tells us here is that we're done right and we're done reverently that it's a special dispensation of the presence of God that's done in a particular moment for a particular people and for a reason. They're not there for the speaker but for the edification of the body. So we find here in Acts it kind of outlines what this looks like when it happens in a right way.
That leads us to really is the next question in the story. These are all kind of like I said this is reversing that idea of the Bible as well. But what does a movement of the spirit look like? You know the biblical precedent for this we find is in the Old Testament and he was anointed as king over Israel.
It said that he began he joined the company of prophets. The presence of God arrested on him. They said that he was uttering strange things. In the New Testament we see this continue to go in verse 12 it says they're speaking of God's deeds of power.
It's not what's going on to them. It's not the things that edify them but it's the power and the magnificence of God and that's that biblical presence. No movement to the spirit happened but they're always identified in the context of where people or what people are saying and it's always going to be about God and not themselves. So what we see right here is part of this circle closing is like where are we using our words?
Are we using our words to testify to who we are? Are we using our words to testify to who God is? Where are we trying to build up significance in our life? Are we drawing attention to ourselves?
Are we drawing attention to God? We also in this story Pentecost we see this move from individualization into the corporate and the Holy Spirit unity and they're not coming together for success but they're coming together in a shared experience and a desire to see more of God. You know Pentecost we always celebrate Pentecost 50 days after Easter. We know from scripture that Jesus rose from the grave was with the disciples for 40 days before he ascended into heaven and so for the last 10 days these first followers of Jesus have been waiting and praying.
Waiting and praying. The room that we typically hold tradition holds is where Pentecost happened and his crow flies is maybe a mile and a half away from where Jesus ascended. So they didn't go very far physically. They also didn't go very far spiritually.
They said they came together in unity and seek sought after the presence of God. This is a begin to be filled by the spirit. Have you ever overfilled something before? You know, I'm hard headed so I'm always trying to.
I also only want to bring one bag anywhere. As soon as you fill something up too much the seams are going to burst and something's going to spill out. What does it mean to be filled with the Holy Spirit? It's the exact same thing.
What does this look like? You know, movements of God happen. You know, something that we know all too well lately but the ground becomes saturated and there's no where else for anything to go. You know, movements of God happen when we as individuals but also us as a gathered body of Jesus when we become so full of the presence of God in our own just personal investigation and our personal awareness and our personal devotion and our personal yielding all of these things when there's no space left for the Holy Spirit to go.
So begin spilling out of us and into other people. When you see churches that come together corporately to look for this, the same thing happens around them and these hundred, hundred and twenty or so people have filled themselves up so much and those ten days that the spillover began to happen. That the blessings of God in their life reached a point to where the only place for it to go is without. Then we see these blessings become scattered.
No longer held for personal benefit but spread out around them. Another crazy story loop, okay. This is what weird details that lack together all throughout the first eleven chapters of Genesis. Every time anyone is trying to get away from God they always go to the east.
So the story of Cain, the story of his descendants, the story of this journey to Babel, everyone whenever you're trying to get away from the presence of God you're always going east. So interesting is when when a Luke who wrote Acts and begins to talk about all these languages they heard speaking the directionality is heading west back into the presence of God and then it begins to go and just a circular way and spread out and spread out and spread out across all of the known world. The presence of God becomes full in the lives of these first Christians, so full that it has to spill out and it's the presence of God is these mighty things of God they're talking about that that is what begins to scatter. They're always spirit unity.
It's our story. In many ways it's the narrative circle of Babel that happens in our own lives and Pentecost. But inside of this what we see is that selfishness is swapped for surrender every time. Selfishness is swapped for surrender.
We're in Babel people we're trying to be conductors of personal greatness. What we see at Pentecost is about people willing to be a conduit for the truth and power of God. Instead of filling our own lives with these personal hopes for greatness and power we become a conduit of the true power of God by waiting and expecting movements of God as people as individuals but also as churches as gathered bodies as assemblies coming together for a purpose. We're waiting and expecting on God.
We're investing personally in our own lives because we know it will be spilled over into the lives of others. So a couple of things I want us to think about quick and just to take home. We know every week we do a home sheet. We always print out a handful of them on the back counter back there.
You can go to my foundry.life and it's right there at the home sheet. So a couple of things that are on that home sheet but they're so important I want us to kind of real quick two things in front of everybody in here. The first question is this. What is your tower in life?
What is your tower? Where are you trying to make a name for yourself? For some of us you say, I'm not trying to make a name for myself. I'm just trying to be sufficient.
Others of us in the room we're trying to achieve greatness in some ways. But where's your tower? Where are you trying to have autonomy over every single thing? But the question I thought of so much this last couple weeks working on this is this is how might our own quest for significance be leaving an open but empty story line in our life.
A detail that will never come to fruition will never be solved. It will always just be existing out there without closure. Now where are towers? I think seeing identifying those in our lives is a very, very important thing.
The second thing is this. How are we responding to the promises and blessings of God? Are they scattered? I think this is what's going on.
I have this conversation. I talk about this a lot and I'll hear people say sometimes, which I don't think I really have anything. I don't. The problem is, yeah, you do, but you're scattered.
You don't know where they are. It's kind of thrown about. I think us going and finding those things and bringing them back to the same place. I was at with the Boy Scouts a couple of weeks ago and I decided to try to do something I've seen like the outdoor people on YouTube and TV trying to do.
I'm going to get the fire going this morning without having to use a match. And so it was problematic because we were putting the fire out the night before we actually did a good job putting the fire out. But I started trying to, like, sifting through the ashes trying to find all these embers to just pile them up on top of each other. And when you pile the embers up, they begin working off each other and creating even more and more and more heat.
Our blessings are like that. We've all been blessed by God, but we have left those blessings scattered about and there's something about us putting them together, sticking them all in the same place and allowing them to create their own intensity in our life. One thing, if you do one thing this week, I've talked about, I've, I've, I've, I've speak about this a lot, but I speak about a lot because I believe in a lot. But if you do one thing this week, just sit down, pull out a piece of paper and practice Thanksgiving in recognition.
Be thankful and recognize what God is doing in your life. And also thankful for what other people are doing in your life and how that is teaching you about God. Tell you that is a spiritual practice that does so much for our lives this morning and the, the, the daily office of a Psalm 118 and Psalm 118 begins and ends with this phrase, give thanks to God for his steadfast love and doers forever. I thought about that.
Like that is the book in that we need to our lives. It's thankfulness. And just practicing that reorients things. We need to learn to put pen to paper about it or put thumbs to screen, but start that list and keep that list and we'll write it down.
Let others know about it. It's a status update on Facebook, but you need to have a couple of people in life that you can have these things like, Hey, I'm really thankful for this right now. They were testifying to these mighty moves and these mighty powers of God. And the last thing is that's just quick.
You know, I've been thinking about this all week long, but those, those people were together for 10 days after the ascension of Jesus. It's a good weight and pray. And what I've been thinking about so much is what do you think they were praying for in those 10 days? I don't think they were asking for that much because they just experienced a lot of really cool stuff.
I would like to think that what they saw and what allowed this just mighty, mighty move of God, probably the biggest move of God in the life of people that was ever across the face of this earth, one of the presence of God spilled out in just magnificent ways. I think they were probably thankful and I think they were probably really, really hopeful. So God has things in all of our life that he wants to reverse. We all have those open and empty stories in our heart that he wants to close out.
And the best way to close it out is for us to just allow his presence to fully come in in those ways. And so what a seek to be a people not just, um, just scattered waiting, but intentional waiting and intentional hoping with the expectation of movements of God to happen among us. Let's pray together. Father, as we are here this morning, God hearing stories of wild things.
But God also know that, uh, every one of us has things in our life that, you know, we've been, we've been hoping, we've been, we've been wanting closure in God. That's not just a one time thing, but that's an attitude of our heart and attitude of our spirit. So God, I'm a prayer this morning for us. And they're here in this room for folks that are watching online, God, for people that listen afterwards.
Kind of prayer is for us to develop an attitude of expecting God. And we realize that, you know, being full of your presence, God, the answers come and that things change. And so what I pray for, for us to have expectant, but very deliberate hearts with you. God, for us also to be people that wait though, that are patient with being quiet and waiting for you.
Because we know that the things that we bring to you, God are just a little. God, the healing that you bring to us is great and magnificent. God also pray that we begin to be thankful, God, to be again gathering up the scattered embers who will light new fires in our life. God fires and provide light, light that provides clarity.
God, as John said about your son, that light has come and the darkness cannot overcome it. God, so I want to see you have that. We thank you for your love and your patience. God, we thank you for being a God who always comes to our world.
Let me pray. Amen.