Gospel Notes

God’s Spirit makes it possible to change

A few years ago I was leading a camp for teenagers. Over the weekend we had a look at the promise Jesus gave his disciples, “I will send you the Holy Spirit, who will be your encourager, your helper, your strengthener.” We looked at the fruit of the Spirit. “God’s Spirit makes us loving, happy, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self-controlled.”

When I asked one group of boys what they would like the Holy Spirit to help them with, they didn’t have to think too long. The night before two of them had competed in a pizza eating competition - one eating 26 pieces, the other 27. Their stomachs were ready to learn about self control. Another boy was thinking about the way he related to his sisters at home. He needed to learn about gentleness, and self control. One talked about the struggle he faced as he tried to focus on getting his homework done each day. The last boy talked about his struggle with ADD - he wanted to stop hitting out at people and talking at inappropriate times. I talked about needing to spend less time on the computer and more time with people. I needed self control as well.

And so we prayed for one another, that God’s Holy Spirit would help us where it really mattered. Did it work? Not overnight. But it did start to happen. That group of young people started to demonstrate the character of Jesus in their life together. Parents commented on the changes as well. God’s Spirit made it possible for those boys to change for the good.

This Sunday, May 15, is celebrated as Pentecost Sunday in churches around the world. The day when an unruly group of Jesus followers experienced the life-changing arrival of God’s Holy Spirit. Pentecost was the Greek word for the festival that came 50 days after Passover. A group of men and women, children and youth, were gathered together in Jerusalem, wondering what Jesus had meant when he promised the Spirit. And then something happened. They had a spiritual experience that seemed like flames of fire.

Did the experience change them? Yes! Over time they started to take on the character of God - fearless, loving, taking initiative, looking for opportunities to serve and connect with their community. They also learnt how to forgive when they were mistreated, and how to persevere in hard times. God was working inside them and among them to move them from being self-centred people to being life-loving people.

What would you like the Holy Spirit to help you with?

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Up up and away

Jesus Is Taken to Heaven
While the apostles were still with Jesus, they asked him, “Lord, are you now going to give Israel its own king again?” Jesus said to them, “You don’t need to know the time of those events that only the Father controls. 8But the Holy Spirit will come upon you and give you power. Then you will tell everyone about me in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria, and everywhere in the world.” After Jesus had said this and while they were watching, he was taken up into a cloud. They could not see him, but as he went up, they kept looking up into the sky.
Suddenly two men dressed in white clothes were standing there beside them. They said, “Why are you men from Galilee standing here and looking up into the sky? Jesus has been taken to heaven. But he will come back in the same way that you have seen him go.”

Acts 1:1-11 Contemporary English Version

I don’t know about you but I have trouble with the cosmology of the ascension story. The idea of Jesus floating up into the sky just doesn’t fit the round earth theory. I can see why many of my friends just dismiss the story as a contrived story that expresses theologically the truth of Jesus body not being part of this world anymore.

The way I see it is that Jesus could well have pulled off an ascension. It is consistent with a resurrected body that is real but beyond the limits of the previous mortal version. I like the way C.S. Lewis describes it in his book, The Great Divorce. He describes the next dimension as more solid than this dimension. The post-resurrection stories indicate a Jesus with a body that defied the limits of time and space.

Jesus would have known that his followers had a flat earth cosmology. They weren’t the lucky recipients of an imagination developed by reading science fiction. The most effective way of getting them used to the idea of leaving this earth for the next would be to ascend into the clouds. I wonder how he’d do it now? “Beam me up”?

What do you think?

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