I want to ask you, I just tell you a story first, so we get going to someone about my friend, Cassie. Cassie, I went to college with her, I met her when she was 18 years old, she ended up marrying one of my best friends, I toured with him for years. Cassie, when she was about 23, 24, God put it on her heart, she'd always been just deeply passionate about homeless people. And she started this organization in Shreveport, it's called the Hub Urban Ministries, and the Hub began serving the needs of the people who struggled for homeless in Shreveport, but also with the travelers community, these people who kind of moved from town to town, you know, back in the day we would call them hobo's, like they take the trains, that sort of thing.
And they just started tremendous ministry about that. A couple years later, they were able to do with some grants and some cooperation with the city of Shreveport, got an entire building downtown, and they built what's called the Lovewell Center. And the Lovewell Center serves as a day shelter for people who struggle with finding housing and adequate supplies and just things they need. The Lovewell Center has GED classes, it has just so many things there, there's a giant bank of like washers and dryers for people to keep their clothes clean, just amazing resources to stretch out through that.
And then a couple years later, they started this ministry, it's called Purchase, that reaches out to women who are part of the adult entertainment industry. And then they also went a second later under that and working alongside of government officials to fight sex trafficking. All these amazing things, tons and tons of amazing things. By the time Cassie was 30 days to start all these things.
Now in college Cassie was most well known for the time that she lost a Mon Junies meatball in her purse for four days. I text Cassie this week and said, hey can I talk about you and tell the meatball story, I won't name names. And she said, yeah you can tell the story and I think you absolutely should name names. Yeah, like she always carried way too big of a purse and me and Cassie and her boyfriend had gone out to Mon Junies on Tuesdays for I think was like $3.99 spaghetti night back then in Rustin.
And it was that weekend we were often doubtless doing a job at a church and she reached inside of her purse and like outside of her hand was like nasty and like rotten spaghetti sauce and we found, we've all seen a Mon Junies meatball right? Not meatballs like meatballs like old girl lost a meatball in her purse. A couple of years ago I was in the phone with her, they're still good friends of ours, they're in our wedding, holding on Yarsi, saying in our wedding and I told her I said, Cassie I said no offense but I love you but there is no greater evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit in someone's life than in your life and she said absolutely. All I do is I try to say yes to God.
And that's what we're going to talk about this morning. Last week I said while we're in this liminal this kind of stage in between right now as a church, we're going to be talking about the book of Acts and we're going to be talking about what are the marks of a movement? What happens there? Last week we talked about the power of patient prayer and of waiting.
This week we're going to be kind of like the part two to that message, we're going to go straight into chapter two. What I want us to talk about is what does it mean to expect boundaries to be stretched? So Acts chapter two verses one through six, I will get kicked off, we've got this on the screens right here. It says on the day of Pentecost all the believers were meeting together in one place, suddenly there was a sound from heaven like the roaring of a mighty windstorm and it filled the house where they were sitting.
It looked like flames or tongues of fire appeared and settled on each of them. Everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in other languages, the Holy Spirit gave them this ability. At that time they were devout Jews from every nation living in Jerusalem and they heard the loud noise, everyone came running and they would be willedered to hear their own languages being spoken by the believers. This takes place at the festival of Pentecost, 50 days where we were last week.
It was during the Passover, the Jews died, the 40s, they're waiting and so they're there in this season and in this space. Now the festival of Pentecost was interesting because Pentecost was about a harvest festival. It was about seeing the dividends of your work, of your patient work. And we think about what happens with these prayers, what happens where they see answered, what do they see that was going on in their lives.
And I feel like we can really look at that and begin finding out from ourselves or what are the benefits of this waiting, what does this mean? Now we spent some time earlier this year talking about the presence of God and we realized that the presence of God works in a couple of different ways. There's the omnipresence of God. I think everyone who's a Christian has this underlying belief that God's presence is with us everywhere.
We know God's here, God's always with us. I've seen some of our kids shaking their head. That's kind of basic stuff. There's also this thing called the manifest presence of God.
The manifest presence of God is when there's a pouring out of his presence because of a specific thing and it's to specific people and it's to a specific place and it's specific. The manifest presence also happens for a purpose. And in scripture when we read about this, we always find the manifest presence is poured out because of a period of waiting, because of God's people crying out to experience Him in a different way, in a necessary way that's needed for a specific time. I would say right now that not just us as a church, but our world, like we need the manifest presence, right?
Like we need God's presence to come in a new and a specific way for a specific reason with what we have that's going on. Last week we talked about the power of waiting and the power of patience and one of the things we said was that boundaries are shifted in accordance to the spiritual awareness of God's people. So what we just read, this was a boundary that shifted because these early followers of Jesus and scripture tells us it was the 11 disciples. It was Mary, the mother of Jesus, some other women who've been following Jesus along.
So Mary, Magdalene, Martha, these familiar cast of characters. There's the family of Jesus that finally come around was there with Him. Tradition tells us about 120 people who've been there specifically waiting and praying. Now it says that the Holy Spirit settled on them.
It's settled. No, for us, the word settle is a little bit weird of a word. It's probably not the best translation, but what this is language for is to put in charge. There's someone who's given something because you're in charge and you're going to need this.
But it's a permanent endowment. We know how a permanent endowment's working. A couple of days ago, many of us kind of surprised to wake up and the first thing we saw in our new cycle was the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. You know, the Supreme Court appointments are for life.
Like that is appointed to you for life. The nine minutes of church bishops are appointed for life. We think of what are those things that people are given as theirs for all the rest of time they're there. It's just the spirit settled on them for their lives.
They were given this permanent endowment of the power of God and what that means. Richard Lovelace says this about spiritual movements and about present space movements. This is a quote. The name of God's spirit supernaturally reinforced the armies of the Lord with grace and equipped them to recover ground and liberate new territory.
I don't like using militaristic language to describe how God works and how we're supposed to be as people. But one of the things we've talked about a lot of these last few weeks is us recognizing that supernaturally we are in a time of crisis. And that when God lifts veils and allows people to see things that are truly going on around them, the language and scripture often use is language of military. We realize that we are in a battle.
One of the quotes that I found comfort in, I shared with you all earlier this summer and I've heard from multiple people like Chad Mann that hits the nail on the head. It's Pastor John Tyson here at City says we should not be surprised when we're in times of spiritual warfare when we take on shrapnel. Like we realize the dimensions of what's going on around us. These outpourings of God's presence are given to us for specific reasons.
One is to regain things that are lost. Whether it's through our laziness, whether it's through intentional sin, whether it's through frustration, but we lose ground. We lose ground spiritually. We lose authority spiritually when we're not inside and seeking the presence of God.
But it's not just about the things that we have lost. What's really sad is when all people want is to get back what they used to have. Not just that. This is instead that God's spirit is out poured upon us to gain new territory.
I worked in Christian retail for a few years and I remember in the late 90s, early 2000s, the hot ticket item in Christian retail was the whole prayer of J.Bess. You all remember that? Okay. A couple people do.
It's this book that came out. It's this one passage and I think it's in Second Chronicles. I talked about this man named J.Bess and his prayer was Lord increase my territory. It kind of got picked up by the prosperity gospel movement.
And I'm telling you, we sold like throw blankets with this embroidered on them. We made a lot of money off the prayer of J.Bess. I rolled my eyes with it for a long time, about a long time. So a few years ago, I was reading through Chronicles and I came upon it and you see, they say, stretch out my tent stakes and large my territory.
It's a prayer of people saying, God, we don't want just what we can understand. We want new capacity in our lives to see you move. We're willing to take on more responsibility. We're ready to take on more things and new things.
Now, friends, next Wednesday night after we vote, foundry takes on more responsibility. We've been planning all along to be responsible for a 6,000 square foot sanctuary. Now we're going to be responsible for four buildings in total. Our property is double.
Insurance doubles. Mowing stuff. Mowing the yard. I'm like, I'm mowing the yard.
I can't get extra at my anxiousness. I'm going on mowing the yard. You know what we're saying? God, we want to see more of you.
We're willing to take on more responsibilities for things. Outpouring of God's spirit, give us grace to take back what has been lost and to gain new ground and to make new ways forward. That's the power of seeing this in our life. Verse 4 and verse 73.
We'll talk a little bit about what's going on here. But verse 4 says this. And everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit. It began speaking in other languages as the Holy Spirit gave them this ability.
And verse 17 and 18. This is Peter now who's finally stepping up into the leader that he's been called to be. He said this from the Prophet Joel. He's quoting this.
In the last days God says, I will pour out my spirit upon all people. And your sons and daughters will prophesy. Your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams.
And in those days I will pour out my spirit even on my servants, men and women alike. And they will prophesy. This is the Holy Spirit giving them specific things. These people, we're going to talk more about them in a moment that they're not hearing.
We're not going to take a huge sidebar off into the gifts of the Spirit. This was a miraculous event where people were hearing very specific things in their own languages. The Holy Spirit moved and broke down walls of communication where they could hear clearly what these followers of Jesus were saying. Your specific thoughts, specific dreams, specific vision, specific requests.
Like when the Spirit of God moves it happens in specificity. You know, the Spirit of God does not bring chaos. The Spirit of God brings clarity. And that's what we see moving in with these people.
It's like last week we asked ourselves that kind of the God in statement for what we're doing. We say, you know, what does it mean to be part of a movement of permanent and eternal consequence? At this point for us to realize that, you know, what if some movement of permanent and eternal consequence here in our community with the places God has given us, with the people God has given us influence over both as individuals, but also as a church, what if that movement of eternal consequence is a movement of truth and is a movement of definiteness, especially when our world is hazardily false right now and is also without any definition. Now, what if that is the reason we need to be praying and requesting these things so that we can be a stable anchoring point for others and for our community?
So, how does this happen? How do we bring this in? How do we have this? You know, what does this look like?
It sounds all great, but I mean, we're high capacity people here at Foundry. It's one of the things that's unique about this congregation. How does this happen? Well, the only thing I'll tell you is it happens the way the gospel does stuff, which is the exact opposite of the way that we would do things.
You know, God loves to confuse us and do things that we thought were impossible. As a church founder, what we've always said is when we do things by the book, the way they work for everybody else, they normally fail incredibly. When we come in and say, we're going to do things, everyone says there's no way that will work. What we have usually found then is our greatest points of success.
You know, the gospel is designed to confound us in order to draw us closer in a trusting relationship to Jesus, only verse 11 for you of what this says. Verse 9 through 11, sorry. So visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, cretins and Arabs, and we all hear these people speaking in our own, can we go back to that first slide, Meredith? Yeah, okay.
Here we are. We are going to do things like Jesus, Medes, Iblomites, people from Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontius, the province of Asia, Phaegeia, Pamphilia, Egypt, the areas of Libya around Cyrene. Visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, cretins and Arabs. And here we all hear these people speaking in our own language about the wonderful things God has done.
You know, remember last week, Jesus said, you're going to speak my words into Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, into the ends of the earth. And we just went through a gigantic geographical listing of people who were there for the festival of Pentecost who heard these things to happen. They're already seeing this, these words that Jesus, these are the things that you will do. We see Jesus accomplishing them in this just a few short days later, but the secret right there was what's in yellow to go back to that slot.
It's like the wonderful things God has done. You know, normally when we try to sell something to somebody, we talk about ourselves, right? Oh, it's done this for me. It's done this for me.
It's done this for me. And really, all we're trying to do is talk about ourselves. We see the content of what they were saying, all these things. This is all about what God has done.
It's not about us. It's all about him. These movements that take place happen because people are willing to disregard themselves and said, realize this is about what God has done. Veil-raising scenarios.
We talked about this last week. Last week was one. This is one as well. It's when our eyes are open to see the spiritual reality and the spiritual truth of what's already going on around us.
God allows that to happen. No, veil-raising scenarios. And this is one as well. If they're ones to where they show us what we have not been able to see.
In the middle of that, we then begin to realize the folly of our own individualism as it's contrasted with the manifest presence of God. We see, wow, what I thought I could do and what I could do was absolutely nothing. It was down right. Silly.
When I contrast it, this is what God's presence wants to do. And this is where he wants to take me and realize the difference between those two things. That is the how, what happened to us just simply surrendering. It's about brokenness.
It's about yielding. And think about this. This is what I've been trying to do. What was going on in their lives between chapter one and chapter two?
What was going on? What changed in their hearts? What changed in their minds? How were they able to, as we've used this language already, to spiritually calibrate themselves to the presence of the Holy Spirit in order for this to happen?
What did they do to get to this place? Now, these are moments of personal unsatisfaction with the boundaries that they had in place already. Mike Breen, a true movement leader, says this about movements. You see, people are not born movement leaders.
My observation is that people who go on to help lead kingdom movements are those who have been willing to embrace an unbelievably difficult breaking experience. You know, for us to get that. In this experience, God was able to form something deep within them by them constantly returning to the truth. Paul said this, my power is made perfect in your weakness.
You know, the power of God comes when we realize our own inadequate season life. And the drastic, amazing transformation that He wants to do. And I found personally, it's not so much about what we're good at on our own. That's not that much of a miracle.
Don't you expect to see success in the things that you're good at, right? It's more amazing to see success in the things you know you're horribly weak at. You know, weaknesses are different. We don't tell people our weaknesses, do we?
We're probably off like in bear-spy our weaknesses. Like we try to conceal them, we try to hide them. It's in my power, the power of God is made perfect, not in your strengths, because that's how humans think we will work. This made perfect in your weaknesses, because that's the opposite way the world works.
You know, we have to offer up our weaknesses to God. We have to not try to conceal them. I think some of the ways this happens is having, they were willing to expose their weaknesses. There's vulnerable points that are there.
We have to offer those things up to God. Now, we have to allow our understanding of our capacity to be broken and to be rebuilt instead by God. I've loved the idea of Pentecost for years. This isn't so much a Pentecost sermon, but I think there's something about Pentecost that we have to realize it's happening here.
Verse 17, it says, there's a little short phrase that's there in the last days. Now, y'all, we are apocalyptically obsessed in our culture, right? I think half of the churches I know are having message series on Revelation right now. We had one this summer.
The amount of Facebook messages I've gotten from people about this in the last few weeks is incredible. With all of the chaos of 2020, we sit there around that and we're obsessed. But hopefully by now, y'all know me, y'all know that I'm not crazy. I'm not obsessed with doom and gloom and destruction and these sorts of things.
We read this in scripture in the last days. Now, we could do one of two things. The first thing we could do is we could take the falsey reading of saying in the last days and realize, oh, this is about God coming to destroy everything. Oh, my goodness.
But if we say that, what we can't admit to is that what that really creates inside of ourselves is this false system where for 2,000 years, humanity has simply just been one bad decision away from destruction. God doesn't work like that. God doesn't change things like that. God doesn't empower things like it.
Love does not look like being terrified of the consequences of one bad decision. You know what you call a relationship where you're one bad decision away from horrible things happening? You call that abusive. God's not abusive.
The other way we could look at this is saying this. We can deeply think about what the writers are saying. Whereas at 2,000 years ago, they've been calling these the last times. They believe they've come into the point to where time has definitely changed because Jesus is now fully on the scene and the Holy Spirit has been settled among us as a permanent endowment.
They even know we're living in the same world. There are now different rules at play. The Holy Spirit isn't contained. As humans, we both have both individual and corporate access to the power of God and the presence of God.
It's for all people, not just the Jews, but for everyone. We are all now players in this divine plan. Yes, we are hurtling towards something, but what we are hurtling towards is not destruction. What we're hurtling towards is completion.
That God is finishing what he began among us. It's not a warning, but it's a call towards a renewed life like no other. It's about honesty and genuineness that we are coming into this space and that we're taking on this mantle, we're taking on this responsibility, we're taking on this mission of Jesus among us. As we ask that prayer, what does it mean to be part of something of permanent and eternal consequence?
What does it mean for us to simply realize that we have to give things up in order to see things move forward? What are the ways that we're willing to open ourselves up to a movement of the Spirit? And what happens if we're not willing to open ourselves up to this move? Let's pray together.
God, thank you for our space that we are here. God as we move into this together, we pray for a clarity of mind and clarity of heart. That clarity of things that you want us to do, the things that you have been asking us to do. God as we hear stories and we read about these movements of the past and these things that have happened.
God, we realize that the how and the why that's there is often a how and why of difficult things is a how and why of just being incredibly honest with ourselves about what this looks like. And so Jesus, we offer ourselves to you fully and completely as we always do. God, we pray for it to see movements around us. God, we realize that our own prayers of being part of this means that we have to be there in prayers and ways of saying, God, we're willing to do whatever it takes to be part of this.
And we love you. Shall I pray? Amen.