2¹ When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. ² And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. ³ Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. ⁴ All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

⁵ Now there were devout Jews from every people under heaven living in Jerusalem. ⁶ And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 

¹² All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” ¹³ But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

¹⁴ But Peter, standing with the eleven, raised his voice and addressed them, “Fellow Jews and all who live in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and listen to what I say. ¹⁵ Indeed, these are not drunk, as you suppose, for it is only nine o’clock in the morning. ¹⁶ No, this is what was spoken through the prophet Joel:

¹⁷ ‘In the last days it will 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 shall dream dreams.’

³² “This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. ³³ Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you see and hear. ³⁴ For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, ³⁵ until I make your enemies your footstool.” ’ ³⁶ “Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

³⁷ Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” ³⁸ Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. ³⁹ For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” ⁴⁰ And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” ⁴¹ So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added.  ⁴² They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

I want to talk about repentance this morning.

I’ve probably lost half of you already!  If you’ve moved in certain church circles I bet that word makes you think that I’m going to tell you that you’re all a bunch of sinners and that if you don’t repent then you’re all going to hell!  Well, I’m not! Or am I?  Perhaps I should leave you guessing!

And with all this stuff about being baptised in the Holy Spirit, and being filled with power, why on earth would you want to talk about repentance?

Well, I hope in the course of the next few minutes we may be able to see how those two things are intimately connected.

Let’s pray…

The most important thing we can do as a Christian is to spend time in the Father’s presence.  ‘Eternal life is knowing the Father, and Jesus Christ whom he sent.’  (Jn  17:3) That’s what Jesus said in his prayer over his disciples before he was crucified.  How can you know the Father unless you spend time with him? 

People have different ways of picturing that.  Some people use the picture from Psalm 91: being in the secret place of the Most High.

I tend to use what Jesus said in John 14, that he has prepared a room for each of us in his Father’s house.  Of course, in the King James’s Version it is called a “mansion”, and from the modern use of the word that leads people to think of something only a little smaller than a palace. 

I’m sorry, but if that’s what you think, I’m going to disillusion you.

The word ‘mansions’ in the Authorised Version is a transliteration of the word ‘Mansiones’ in the Latin translation of the Bible that was used by the western church for centuries.  ‘Mansiones’ is the plural of ‘Mansio’, and a Mansio was the Roman version of a government motel.  If you were a Roman official on a journey and you needed to stop for the night, you would pull up at a Mansio.  They were spaced along the chief Roman roads at intervals of twenty-five miles or so. 

The word in Greek is Mone, which just means a room, although it has overtones of permanence – an abiding place.

The whole point is that there is this room in heaven that Jesus has prepared for you, not for when you pass from this life, you will have a permanent place then, but a place for you to go to now, whenever you want to.  Jesus prepared it for you by his death on the  cross.  The room has your name on the door.  And by going there you are in your Father’s presence. 

At various times I have been up here I have made this seemingly outrageous claim that there is no barrier to your going there, you simply have to believe in Jesus, you don’t even have to repent!

I am really surprised that no-one has ever challenged me on that.  Everyone must be all too polite!

Look at what we have in our scripture today.

Repent and be baptised.  That’s the way to become a Christian, isn’t it?  You’re a sinner.  You need to get rid of your sins, and then you will be acceptable to God.  Or, unless I’m wrong, that is the way that it is often presented.

Well, I will stick to my assertion, here me out!

In Ephesians Paul says we are saved by grace, through faith, it’s God’s gift. ( Eph 2:8-9 )  Salvation is a huge word in scripture,  It can refer to being healed; to being rescued from a peril, like when Jesus calmed the storm on the lake of Galilee; to being released from slavery, like the people of Israel from Egypt.  But if one of the aspects of salvation is Eternal Life, and Eternal Life is knowing the Father, then we enter the presence of the Father by faith in Jesus.  It is being in Jesus that makes it possible for us to enter into the Father’s presence. 

Does repenting your sins make you acceptable to God, or is it being in Christ Jesus that does?

God loves you so much that he will do anything to spend time with you.  In fact, he already has! 

By grace you have been saved through faith.  God has done it, by his faithfulness in sending his Son to break every barrier and giving you his Spirit that has brought about faith in you.

And when you enter into Heaven, into the presence of the Father, he will give you another  gift through his Spirit.  That gift is called conviction. 

You see, when you get into the Father’s presence, or even get close to it, you realise that it is not only a place of infinite love and joy and peace, but it is also a place of infinite holiness, and that you are not holy! 

We have a name for that feeling, we call it conviction.  When you are convicted, you realise that not only have you done stuff that you shouldn’t have, that you haven’t done stuff that you should have, but you see the reason for that fact is because your nature is that way.  The only hope is to have a new nature.

You have come to a point where not only do you know that you are a sinner, but that you hate it so much that you will do anything to be changed.  That is the point of repentance.  Repentance is the only answer for that feeling of conviction.  Repentance is not a pre-condition to your being with the Father, it is the result of your getting close to him.

And in repentance you identify with the death of Jesus on the cross, so that his resurrection can be at work in you.  You have come to the point of knowing that you have been crucified with Christ.  It is no longer your life that you are living, but Christ Jesus living in you.

As I say, conviction is the natural outcome of getting close to the Kingdom of God.  You see what happened at Pentecost, is that the crowd encountered a bunch of people who had let the Holy Spirit fill them to a mighty degree, they had made space for him.  In other words, they were filled with heaven.

And the crowd was convicted because they had got close to heaven, and that was why they knew they needed to repent.  As we heard in our passage today,

“³⁷ Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, ‘Brothers, what should we do?’” (Acts 2:37)

This was also true of John the Baptist, who we read was ‘filled with the Holy Spirit from before his birth.’ (Lk 1:15)  For people who met him, truly the ‘Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.’

The same happens at times of Revival.  It was said that Charles Finney only had to look at someone for them to be convicted.

Now, I think that conviction and repentance are perhaps like an earthquake.  And we have learned recently that earthquakes don’t always happen as a sudden, large, event.  Sometimes they happen slowly, over a period of time.  And for some people, clearly, conviction comes in a rush, for others it may be a long, gentle, process. 

But whatever way it happens, the cross of Jesus is the only answer if you feel that conviction.  Don’t try and fix yourself!

I have good news for you.  God doesn’t want you improved!  You don’t have to improve yourself!

Now I had better make clear that I’m not talking about human achievements.  If you are learning music, practice all you can to be the best musician you can be.  That is honouring to God.  Ditto if you are a sportsman, strive to beat your personal best.  If you are in business, apply yourself to be the best you can at it.  And so on.

No, I’m not talking about that.  But you see, being the best musician in the world doesn’t make you a better person!  Being a successful business person doesn’t make you a righteous business person.  And in that sense God doesn’t go in for improvement, he goes in for death and resurrection!  That’s how you get the new nature.

While we are in this life on earth, death and resurrection will be going on together in us all the time.  The Old is passing away, the New is coming to be. And the New is not you being resurrected, but you staying dead and the resurrected Jesus being in you, and you being in the resurrected Jesus.

And when you are in the resurrected Jesus, you are in heaven, because that’s where Jesus is now!  It is the cross of Jesus that has got you there.

But the story doesn’t end there.

So, you have found yourself in heaven, and found it to be a place of love and joy and peace, and all the other fruits of the Spirit, and more.  The question now is, how much of that can you bring back?  What is your capacity to hold heaven within you? 

When you entered heaven for the first time, by faith, you came into a union, a ‘communion’ with the spirit of Our Father, the Holy Spirit, and that puts the Kingdom of Heaven within you. 

The apostle Paul refers to it in second Corinthians as this extraordinary power that we have within us that he likens to a treasure in a clay pot. (2 Cor 4:7)  I don’t know if you think of that treasure as being a heap of gold coins.  I rather think of it as a precious jewel. 

Now that jewel will expand to fill the space available for it.  The problem is that it is not the only thing in that clay pot.  I want to suggest to you that there are probably a whole lot of rocks in there as well!  And if there are, they are taking up a lot of space.  And you may not even be aware that they are there.

But if you spend time in the Father’s presence, and ask him to reveal them to you, you will gradually become aware of them.  You may find those rocks are called selfishness, or self-righteousness, or almost any of the words that have self at the beginning, or unbelief, or any of the seven deadly sins, and the list goes on. 

And those rocks may also include good things we have done, if we think that they have gained us any credit in God’s eyes.  Yes, we may have to repent the good stuff as well as the bad stuff!

Now, I’m not saying all this to make you feel bad.  I am simply trying to show you the potential you have in Christ Jesus, because the less of you that is getting in the way, the more the Spirit of the Father can be working through you.   And believe me, I am talking as much to myself, if not more, than I am to you!  And please don’t go fossicking around inside yourself on your own.  Leave that to the New Age.  It is a work of the Spirit of God within you to reveal these things.  I will say it again – conviction is a gift from God.  Condemnation isn’t – that comes from another source – ‘there is now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.’ (Rom 8:1)

You see, the goal is ‘on earth as in heaven.’  And the only way heaven comes to earth is if you and I bring it back.   That is, barring a sovereign work of God, and I don’t discount that.  And in order for us to bring heaven back we need to take to the cross all those things that prevent us from holding it, that the Spirit reveals to us.  That is the other aspect of repentance.  That is the other aspect of the cross.  When the Spirit reveals something, take it to the cross, and leave it there.  That is why when we have formal prayers in church we usually include a prayer of confession and repentance.

Those of us who know the work of the Spirit in our lives tend to pray ‘more, Lord, more.’  ‘Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.’  I believe God has been showing me, recently, that we can’t have any more of God than we already have.  God is indivisible.  God doesn’t come in quantities.  If we have God in us at all, we have all of God.  What we can do is to experience more of him.   We experience as much of God as we want to.  We experience as much of God as we make room for.  So, the question is ‘how much room are we prepared to make for him?’

What interests me about Pentecost is what the disciples were up to in those ten days before the day itself. 

We read in Acts 1, “All these [his disciples] were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers”.

I don’t think Pentecost happened out of the blue, like some divine thunderbolt.  It was brought down by a group of people praying.  By a group of people who were serious about staying in the Father’s presence.  And I have a suspicion that that prayer included them repenting, so they were able to hold more of God’s Spirit when it came.  Pentecost was a Kingdom thing.  Kingdom things happen when the purposes of God are met by the prayerful expectation of the church.

If you want a one-line summary of what I’ve said this morning, it is what John, the evangelist, records John the Baptist as saying: ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’ (Jn 3:30)

So now the question remains, are we willing to pray that most dangerous of all prayers.  “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Amen.