We Are Not AloneSample

On the street

If you look at the Gospels closely, you will see that the Spirit came to people in many different places because ‘the Spirit of the Lord’ was upon Jesus and so ministered through Jesus wherever he went. It’s like the Spirit and Jesus were connected 24-7.

The Spirit came upon people in surprising ways and often in busy and very public places. In Acts 2, the first messages coming from the now Spirit-filled followers of Jesus declared ‘the wonders of God’ and were heard on a crowded street in Jerusalem comprising ‘God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven’. They were ‘amazed and perplexed’ that they heard the messages, given by Galileans, in their own language (Acts 2:5-12).

Then in that same spot, Peter stood up with the other 11 Apostles, preached the first sermon of the Acts 2 church, and 3,000 listeners believed and ‘were added to their number’ (Acts 2: 41). Not long afterwards, Acts 3 tells us, Peter and John healed a man who had been lame all his life and who people passed daily as he begged for money at the temple gate called Beautiful.

Blind Bartimaeus received his sight on a crowded thoroughfare in Jericho (Mark 10:46-52). A woman who had been bleeding for 12 years was healed on a Capernaum street when she pushed through a crowd around Jesus and touched his garment (Luke 8:40-48).

The power of the Holy Spirit at work in Jesus and the Acts church was tangible and often very public. In modern times, the Church became reticent to open itself to such transparency let alone the power of God itself.

But times are changing. People in the 2020s are looking for spirit over material, soul care as well as physical fitness. Many believe that the key to the Church’s future, personally and corporately, is a reinstatement of full partnership with the Spirit of Jesus in which all of us can say, ‘the Spirit of the Lord is on me’.

Prayer: Dear Lord, help me not to lose the ability to be surprised by your Holy Spirit; to have an openness of heart and mind to what the Spirit is saying and each day to live in the Spirit’s flow. Amen.