Pentecost Sunday sermon on the Holy Spirit by Finn Chirnside at Sumner Redcliffs Church
Finn Chirnside preaches on Acts 2:1–21 at Sumner Redcliffs Anglican Church, with a brief addition from Rev Harry Newton.
Summary
Finn Chirnside, Associate Vicar at Sumner Redcliffs Church, delivers a Pentecost Sunday sermon on Acts 2:1–21, exploring the theology of the Holy Spirit and what it means for Christians to be filled with the Spirit. He argues that the Spirit makes believers God's temple and the beginning of a new creation — themes rooted in Genesis and the Old Testament — and that the primary work of the Spirit is not dramatic signs but the transformation of character toward love, humility, and Christlikeness. He warns against treating the Spirit as a source of personal power or spectacle, citing recent church scandals as examples of what happens when power is sought above character. Rev Harry Newton closes with a brief reflection on the Hebrew word ruach (breath/spirit) and shares a personal account of someone experiencing the Holy Spirit for the first time during an ordinary, unperformative church service.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and Opening Remarks
Finn Chirnside: Good morning, everyone. My name's Finn. I am the lay minister here. I've had so many comments this morning about how tired I look, so let's just get that out of the way. I decided it would be a real sick idea to, after 17 years, go and play football again without really preparing my body. Last week went fine, and yesterday was just game over — 30 minutes in, I completely stuffed my thigh. I didn't sleep very well. But yes, there's a reason. It's not just general tiredness — though maybe that's just how I normally look.
Anyway, I've got a note here that says Harry's away, so lucky you — but he's here, so it's a bit awkward. Clearly I wrote this sermon a while ago.
The Question of Power
So I was talking to a friend recently who doesn't go to this church — and that's a good thing to preface, because I'm about to roast him. There are no identifying markers for this individual, because some of you will know him. You will in no way be able to work out who I'm about to talk about.
He's a new Christian — amazing. And he said to me the other day, paraphrasing: "Hey, so there must be more to Christianity than loving your neighbour, going to church, and telling people about Jesus, right? It just seems a bit boring." His current thought was that Christianity has been intentionally pacified by the church, and that the call to violence and brutality that should have been in the Bible has been erased to rob Christians of our power and influence in the world. That's kind of where he's at. Actually a pretty common thing if you spend too much time online. Just to make that clear — it's not Christian theology. But I understand how he got there.
We are all obsessed with power. Humans inherently desire to have power, to serve our agendas. We accumulate power in small or large ways, whether in our families, our workplaces, sports clubs — or we turn to religion, or to tarot cards, new age practices that make us feel as if there's power channelling through us. Power can be misused, and often is. And abuse of power is probably the main reason people stop going to church.
Christianity, if it is truly the religion of religions — the one whose Lord is actually the way, the truth, and the life — must have an answer to the question of the desire for power. And we do. Power that comes from the Spirit, who is the master of all spirits. Power that all other powers try to emulate, contort, and plagiarise. Power that transforms lives and generations. And power that was poured out onto the church on Pentecost.
Context: The Book of Acts
For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, that's fine — I'll provide some context. This text is found at the beginning of the book of Acts. Acts is a companion piece to the Gospel of Luke — the same person wrote both of them. It carries over many of the themes developed in the Gospel of Luke into Acts. Luke focuses primarily on the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and Acts focuses on how the early church lives out the implications of that.
Prior to this chapter, in chapter 1, Jesus has ascended into heaven. Now that sounds pretty weird, straight up, because we know that heaven — or the spiritual realm — isn't probably just literally up. But the ascension is signifying something important that is rooted in Old Testament theology, and it's worth just taking a moment on this.
The design of the text and the language used evokes a passage from Daniel 7, where a character called the Son of Man ascends into heaven and sits next to the Ancient of Days, who is Yahweh. The Son of Man then receives the worship and authority that Yahweh alone is due — and Yahweh doesn't object. Somehow, this Son of Man is also Yahweh. The phrase "Son of Man" essentially just means human being — it means Adam, basically. The Son of Man has ascended to become ruler of heaven and earth, and once again, Yahweh doesn't object.
This was a real problem for Jewish theologians for a very long time, because there are passages throughout the Old Testament where you have this kind of — oh wait, Yahweh's here, but he's also here — and they didn't really know what to do with it. So they came up with different ideas, like the two powers in heaven and various other things, which are kind of pre-Trinitarian thoughts. Christians then say we found the fullness of that in the Trinity. Anyway, that's just a fun fact.
What Acts 1 is saying, when Jesus ascends with the same language of ascending into the clouds, is that Jewish readers at the time would have heard loud and clear that Jesus is the Son of Man who has now taken his seat as King of all creation. Before his ascension, he actually tells his disciples to wait for him to give them power to announce the news — this gospel that Jesus is the King, that he has defeated death itself, and that one day he will come back and bring complete healing to the world and to anybody who chooses him.
Theology of the Holy Spirit
So, the Spirit. What are the themes in this text? This text — oh my gosh. Rabbit holes galore. Every verse could be six weeks of preaching. It's that complex. But let's just do some overviews.
I want to start with a hopefully robust theology of the Holy Spirit, because it's helpful. Because the moment people hear "Spirit," they might instantly jump to the Force, or chakras, and so on. It's not any of that.
The Spirit makes believers God's temple
The first proposition of the text is this: the church — in particular the believers in Jesus, individually and communally — now become the temple, the place where God dwells. The use of the phrase "tongues of fire" is a clear reference to when the presence of God descended in fire on the tabernacle after Israel had escaped from Egypt. The tabernacle, and the temple that followed it, were marked-out places which were holy and where God himself dwelt. So when the fire descends on the believers, it is clear that through the Spirit, God has chosen to make his dwelling amongst Jesus' people. Christians are little mini-temples walking around the world. And just as the temple was meant to be a place where life and hope would flow, so too are Christians — and then the church itself — called to be a place where the hope and life of God would flow into a dying world. Big claim, but it's kind of what it's saying.
The Spirit makes believers new creation
This moves into the second idea: that Christians and the church are new creatures, or new creation. If you're new to the Jesus stuff, I want to say something that's hopefully helpful. Literally everything in the Bible eventually goes back to Genesis 1 and 3. Very easy paradigm. Every idea, every bit of theology — if you keep jumping back, it's all rooted in creation and fall. Every little parallel, everything, ultimately goes back there.
Here are the first two verses of the Bible: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
One of the key ideas in Scripture — if not the key theme — is that creation itself has been marred or compromised by wrong human action in the world, which is what we would call sin. Humanity was given creation to steward, to care for, under God's lordship. The tragedy of the story is that humans decide that their own way is better than the way of the one who made all things. When we choose to go our own way, sin enters the world, and creation itself becomes increasingly corrupted as a result.
In response, one of the great promises of the Old Testament is that God would one day renew creation itself. This is Isaiah 65:17: See, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.
Here's the parallel. Just as the Spirit descended on the waters and rested in Genesis, the Spirit then rested on Jesus at his baptism in the same manner, and then it rests on the new believers. And it's making a pretty audacious claim: the new creation is here. It was first found in Jesus, and it is now — paradoxically — amongst the church, amongst the Jesus people. And Paul echoes this, if you think I'm crazy, when he says: If anybody is in Christ, the new creation has come.
So if you combine these ideas together, you get this comprehensive picture. Christians are the temple and are the beginning of the new creation. And the reason this works is because they are ultimately the same idea. The temple structures of the Old Testament are evoking the imagery and the relationship that is present between humanity, creation, and Yahweh in the Garden of Eden. The temple actually is the Garden of Eden condensed. This is a rabbit hole — so many different things. Just take my word for it. If you doubt me, Bible Project.
So when Christians are the temple, we also claim to be little walking, talking mini-Edens. At Pentecost, we see in action the beginning of the reversal of the consequences of Genesis 3, when humans fall.
What the Spirit Does in People
So that's all nice, but it's Pentecost. What does it look like when the Spirit meets and fills someone?
Probably the most obvious inference from the text itself is that the Spirit gave believers power and courage to proclaim the way of Jesus. This confidence is part of what Jesus promised. In Acts 1:8, just before his ascension, Jesus says to his followers: "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth."
The key point here is that confidence and power don't come from our own strength, our own big brains, or our own egos. Instead, it is the Spirit who gives us true and proper confidence and power — a confidence in the love and the goodness of God, based on the reality of his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, and that the gospel actually might be good news for the world.
All other works of the Spirit serve the primary point: to call people into the kingdom of Jesus. The Spirit is a gift to us. It brings us into union with Jesus and the Father. It brings us closer to Jesus, and it makes us more like Jesus.
Becoming like Jesus does not mean — quick clarification — we're not Mormons, so we're not literally becoming God. The journey of being a Christian is one that takes a deeply broken person and transforms them into something truly beautiful, something who is like Jesus — not in deity, but in character and holiness. You look like Jesus because you smell like Jesus because you've been following him. But you don't literally become another eternal creator. That's the distinction, because that's often where people can jump to. That's not at all how the early church read it. No Christian in history has ever read it that way.
And this is why the best people you will ever meet in your life are like 70-year-olds who have been so formed and shaped by the love of God that you can't help but want to be like them when you're older. Think of Andrew and Denise at the 9 a.m. — I just want to be Andrew. That guy's a flipping hero. He's spectacular. And that's because the Spirit has been transforming him from the inside out, to make what is true within him — that he is a new creation, that he is a mini-walking-talking Eden — visible externally. Paul phrases it like this: we are being changed from glory to glory.
So, as we've already established, the Spirit has chosen to dwell inside us. Which, by the way — insane thought — that God himself has gone, "Yeah, you're a weirdo, but I'm going to dwell in you." It doesn't mean that God's not everywhere — he is — but the Spirit living inside a believer is a special gift and manifestation of his always-and-everywhere presence.
One of the running jokes is that I love to try and bring Dante into every sermon, which is going to annoy some people, but I found another way to bring Dante into this one. This is at the very end of Dante's Paradiso, and he says:
"But like unto an ever-turning wheel, my will and my desire are revolved in harmony with the love that moves the sun and the other stars."
The point Dante is making here is that now that he has come into the fullness of the presence of God — fully enveloped in the Spirit, the love of the Father and of Jesus — his will and his desires themselves have been conformed into something that is truly transcendent and wonderful. So what the Spirit does in people, and what the discipleship journey does in people, is it takes our wills and desires over time and changes them from ones that serve ourselves to ones that align with the good — the true good.
Corrie Ten Boom: The Spirit Supplying What We Cannot
To give a great example of this — Corrie ten Boom, who was sent to a concentration camp in World War II by the Nazis. Her father and sister would die in that camp. And after the war, she went to church. Many of you will have heard this story, but I think it's worth reading in full. These are her own words:
"It was at a church service in Munich that I saw him — the former SS man who had stood guard at the shower door in the processing centre at Ravensbrück. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there: the room full of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsy's pain-blanched face.
He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing. 'How grateful I am for your message, Fräulein,' he said. 'To think that, as you say, he has washed my sins away.' His hand was thrust out to shake mine, and I, who had preached so often to the people that they need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man. Was I going to ask for more? 'Lord Jesus,' I prayed, 'forgive me and help me to forgive him.' I tried to smile. I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing — not the slightest spark of warmth or charity.
And so again I breathed a silent prayer. 'Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness.' As I took his hand, the most incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand, a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our own goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on his. When he tells us to love our enemies, he gives, along with the command, the love itself."
What I would say to that is: it is the Spirit who does that within us. Galatians 5: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.
Encounters with the Spirit, whatever form that takes, must lead us to more and more fruit of the Spirit — which is another way of saying becoming like Jesus and doing as he did.
Warning Against Misusing the Spirit
One of the traps that can happen within certain circles of modern Christianity is treating the Holy Spirit like a stunt. You get your jacket out, you wave it, and suddenly you're like the superhero who's in control — you're the centre of it. That's not at all what it is. And I know some people in here may have been burned by those forms of Christianity. I just want to say that's not actually the way of the Spirit. The Spirit points us to Christ.
One of my concerns with this particular practice is that people tend to come to love the feeling of power above all else. In some weird way, it becomes this thing of: I am the one controlling the Spirit, I am the one controlling the power, I am the hero. That's not at all what the deal is here. And it can make people arrogant. Sometimes people even use the fact that the Spirit — or what they claim is the Spirit — has worked within someone to justify utterly horrific behaviour. Think of so many of the church scandals that have happened in the last few years, where people have come along and said, "Oh, but remember that this thing happened." It's like — no. That's not the way of Jesus.
If the fruit of the Spirit is not within someone's life, then — this is the primary thing. The text is clear. People who are genuinely filled with the Spirit embark on a trajectory of humility. And yes, it's a trajectory — it's not a straight line, it's a duh and a kadonk, a duh and a kadonk — but you're going the right way. And you develop a deep love for God and for the world.
1 Corinthians 13 — I'm quoting this all the time at the moment: If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
In seeking the Spirit, we cannot just seek him for his power and signs. That is treating him like a vending machine. Those are good things to seek, but they are utterly void if we first do not seek the heart and character of God — described in the fruit of the Spirit — which is the primary thing the Spirit gives above all else. Because that is what makes people look at Christians and go, "Oh, maybe they're serious."
Summary of What the Spirit Does
So, what have we established? The Spirit makes us God's temple. The Spirit makes us a new creation. The Spirit is a gift to us. The Spirit is God with us now — so when Jesus says, "I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you," he's talking about the Spirit. The Spirit makes us bold and confident. The Spirit brings us closer to Jesus. And the Spirit makes us more like Jesus. And if it wasn't already incredibly clear: any work of the Spirit will unavoidably point us to Jesus, and through Jesus to the Father. It must do.
How the Spirit Meets People
So what does an encounter with the Spirit actually look like?
It can look like physical healing. It doesn't always, but that is a reality. It's a sign of new creation breaking through — so it's actually very theologically rich. It's not just some kind of thing that God does to show off, but it's entrenched in this new creation theological idea.
Or he can encounter us through what I've heard described as "liquid love" — just the overwhelming presence of God upon someone. When I was trying to work out whether I was going to go and study theology, I got up one morning — I've shared this before, but I think it's helpful again — and I was in prayer, just sitting there, and then the whole room just went kaboom. And then I'm just like — I don't know how to describe it — it just kind of starts shaking a little bit. And then boom. Like I can't even describe it. The presence of God just smacking me down. Powerful, like waves of the presence of God just utterly overwhelming me. I've had that happen to me once in my life, and it happened about eight years into being a Christian. It wasn't the first thing that ever happened to me. But it was just this thing — the love of God was so rich, and I was crying and stuff. And eventually I had to go, "You need to stop, man. This is too much." It was like a home-brand Isaiah 6, you know, when Isaiah freaks out because of the presence of God. A home-brand version of that — just, oh my gosh, I actually can't handle this anymore. But that is a way that God meets people.
Emotional healing is another one — particularly from trauma, particularly from church hurt, which I'm finding is a big one at the moment. People have been hurt by things that have happened in the past 20 or 30 years. They've come from different places. A lot of people at the moment need healing from church trauma. That's a real thing. God doesn't want you to sit there with this little bugbear about the church. If you don't like me, that's fine — I don't care. But if you don't like the church, that's a different thing. That's what God wants to transform and heal.
He can meet us through prophetic words — and some of you instantly go tense, but hear me out. Prophetic words don't alter Scripture. People who come along and start going, "I saw that Jesus actually, if you speak in tongues enough, you'll make more money than everybody else" — sorry, mate, not in the Bible. But prophetic words can confirm God's direction for someone. Here's an example from my own life. When I was about 20, I'd been a Christian for about a year, and I was probably the most anxious person you've ever met. No one would have looked at me and gone, "He'll be a really good preacher one day." I came to faith in Vineyard Church, so Vineyard altar calls — it's a whole thing. I'm in the corner of a Vineyard altar call, and this guy who's got tattoos galore comes up to me. I hadn't told anyone about this, and he goes, "Hey, I feel like God's telling me that just as Samuel was set aside for the temple, God has set you aside for the church." And I just went, "Oh heck." Because I'd been thinking in my brain — do I go study theology? What do I do with this thing? And it wasn't new revelation. It was just confirmation of a direction rooted in Scripture itself. That's the distinction.
We see in Scripture people empowered to speak in tongues — in this context, it's actually other languages, the ability to speak different languages they couldn't previously speak. I was at a worship gathering somewhere, and a girl just started speaking in Māori, and she couldn't speak Māori. And then someone else in the room was translating it because she could speak Māori. That was wild. But it's a thing.
And probably one of the most important ways the Spirit meets us in this day and age is just a profound sense of peace and assurance and comfort. We live in such an anxious world. I don't even need to list the events going on in the world right now. Francis Schaeffer had this idea of the non-anxious presence — the most effective witness for Christians in an anxious world is to be non-anxious. That's what the Spirit does within people. And that doesn't magically mean you switch overnight, and that's not a condemnation of anxiety as a real medical thing — I'm talking about a different form of non-anxiety, an ever-growing trust that God actually has the best intentions for the world and that God is making all things work together for good, in spite of how things look.
Closing Thoughts and Invitation
Two final thoughts. Jesus said it's better to have the Spirit than to have him. He did. Pretty awkward, but it's a thing. He said it himself, to his disciples. And being filled with the Spirit was just a routine part of Acts. And once again, I'm not then linking that to "come to the front for an altar call and get shaken down." That happens to some people, but it's not for everybody. Some people — it's just that they come to faith and someone prays for them in a room somewhere. Beautiful. That's the same thing. But it was an expectation — there's that story where Peter runs across some blokes who've had the baptism of John but not the baptism of the Spirit, and Peter's like, "Well, you need the Spirit too, mate." It was just an essential part of the deal.
So what I want to do is create a space for people who want to receive prayer. We're going to have the prayer team in the corner. We're going to have some worship going. It's not meant to be manipulative. The worship solely functions as a way of making it less awkward — genuinely, that's the idea. It means that if someone wants to come forward and get prayer, not everyone's going, "Oh, okay, Murray's going to get prayer — I wonder what that's for." That's not what's going on.
And also — music is good, right? It's not inherently manipulative. David's not sitting there, and God's not going, "Well, actually, I think you're manipulating Saul when you're playing the harp to him." That's not what's happening. It's the Spirit of God moving through.
So, rant over. We're going to open the floor. We're going to do some worship. If you would like prayer, you can come chat to me. There are going to be people in the corner. I'm not expecting that we're all going to get bowled over, but I do want to open the floor of — actually, God does kind of want to meet us. So let's just see what happens. And if nothing happens, that's cool. No biggie. But as it's Pentecost, if there's any day to at least give it a shot, let's do it today.
If you want to receive prayer — particularly for healing, for trauma, for church hurt — I think that's a really profound and important thing right now. Even just tapping the person beside you — no one's going to look at you and go, "Hmm." The people over there are trusted. They're not going to do something weird. They're not going to hit you with a prophetic word that's going to throw you for six. They're trusted people. And it's a place of love and not fear.
The final thing I would say is: if people are receiving prayer, and you're kind of going, "This is all a bit too weird for me" — can I please encourage you to take your conversations to the foyer, so that people who are receiving prayer aren't at the same time hearing about what you did yesterday when you went to Little Brew to get lunch. I'm glad you went to Little Brew, but I don't need to hear about it when I'm getting prayed for. Sounds really mean, but it's just true.
So I'm going to invite Harry up.
Rev Harry Newton's Addition
Rev Harry Newton: Hey, thanks, Finn. The only thing I'd add is this. In the original Aramaic, and before that in the Hebraic text that we have available to us in the Scriptures, the word used for Holy Spirit comes from the Hebrew word ruach, which means something like a breath. The idea is that there is a God — there is what Thomas Aquinas, the theologian, described as a subsistence — this essence that underpins our reality. And this essence is not knowable. It's completely strange and other to our lived experience. That's God. And that's why we have so many religions and spiritualities in the world, because they're all reaching for the same thing — what Augustine referred to as the divine spark. And what Christians say is that in Jesus we find that other made knowable to us. And as Finn said, Jesus himself said, "It's better for you that the Spirit comes, because when I leave, the Spirit will come and be with you." And what is the Spirit? It's ruach. It's God's Spirit. It's God's breath.
Now, sometimes when we get prayer, it can be quite emotional and intense. Other times when you get prayer, nothing happens. And sometimes we just really don't want to get prayer because it's a bit awkward or it's just not our cup of tea. And that's absolutely fine — it genuinely is.
But last year, I'll be honest — I've had some health issues. Last year I was having a bad health day. I have a heart condition. It was just a bad day. I turned up feeling like absolute crap. I got up and I just read my sermon. And afterwards, someone from our church came forward and got prayed for. Nothing dramatic. And afterwards they came to me and said, "For the first time in my life, I experienced God's Holy Spirit. And I've always wanted that."
Now, it wasn't because I preached an amazing sermon. It wasn't because the musicians did an awesome job. The point is that there was nothing performative. It was just that God is real. And God was made knowable in that moment to that person, and it's changed that person's life.
So, with that in mind, we're going to stand together in a moment. Our youth group is going to reappear shortly, so if they come through, please ignore them — they're loud, they're smelly, but they're good kids. And we're going to spend some time just worshipping God. There is prayer ministry available over there. They are lovely. They are super cool. They love to pray with you. If it's not your cup of tea, you're welcome to sing for a while, and if you also want to float out into the foyer, I'll be out there making coffee. You're welcome to come join me.