The Breath of God

I do bear with our technicians as they try to tease out this little wind that we're getting on our PA system. It's as a result of complications because of the program we put on last evening and will be on again this evening as we celebrate Pentecost in a musical fashion. And that gives me the opportunity to invite you to be with us this evening for a grand presentation of the Pentecostal message.

John chapter 20 and verse 21. Actually, we'll take the reading from verse 19 as that gives you the context. On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together with the doors locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, Peace be with you.

After he said this, he showed them his hands and sighed. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. Again, Jesus said, Peace be with you.

As the Father has sent me, I am sending you. And with that, he breathed on them and said, Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven.

If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven. Now, let's go to the Acts of the Apostles and chapter two. When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.

Suddenly, a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be the tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Now, I was thinking earlier this morning about the concept of the breath of God, the breath of God. We've been singing that little song, Breathe on me, breath of God, fill me with life anew. I wonder what does it mean in your understanding when you pray that prayer, breathe on me, breath of God.

The word which we translate as spirit in the New Testament is the word pneuma, and it has the idea of a breath, breathing out. Some of you who are knowledgeable about the New Testament know that there is a verse which speaks concerning the authority of Scripture. How did Scripture come to be given? Well, it was as a result of the out-breathing of the Holy Spirit.

When you take the word spirit from the New Testament and go to the Old Testament, it's no longer the Greek pneuma, it is the Hebrew ruach. And very often in the Old Testament, the Hebrew ruach is translated as breath. Sometimes it is translated as wind.

When God sent the wind after there had been the flood, the waters were divided. In the aftermath of the natural force of wind, the earth returned to its normal borders and men and women were benefited by the work of God in a sort of recreation. Well, here I bring you to John's gospel, and here is our beloved Lord, and with Him are His disciples, all of them with the exception, of course, of Judas, who really doesn't deserve to be called one of Jesus' disciples, and Thomas.

It's a resurrection experience. They, these disillusioned men, suddenly find themselves in the presence of none other than Jesus. They can hardly believe it, and Jesus, always speaking to the needs of ordinary people, talks to His disciples and He says, peace.

The very thing that they've not known for 72 hours or more, peace be with you. And then He breathed on them the Holy Spirit. These men who'd had a return of peace and also joy, because before you can go out to serve God, you've got to know the peace of God and you have to know the joy of God.

The joy of the Lord is your strength. So, our Savior again speaks to His disciples, and as He does so, He enacts in something which is quite remarkable, though not quite unique. He breathes on them.

He allows the air from His lungs to be released and He directs it towards these disciples. Now, the idea of breath is a release, a force of wind being directed to something, to someone. And here is our Lord, and He's got this group of men just like you and me in front of Him.

And maybe, as was prayed in the prayer that we just heard, you identify yourself to some degree with some of the difficulties that were mentioned, as did these disciples. And the only way these men are going to know their joy and their peace restored, the only way in which they're going to be able to do what the Lord God wants them to do, is as they respond to the creative power of the Holy Spirit. So, Jesus directs His gaze to these men and He breathes His Spirit.

Not quite unique in Scripture, because if you go back to the book of Genesis, you'll find that in the second chapter of the book of Beginnings, almost the foreplay of what John chapter 20 becomes the replay. For there we discover in the seventh verse that the Lord God takes a handful of earth and He breathes into it. You may remember from the addresses Tim and I were bringing to you, and privileged to preach on from 1 Corinthians 15, I taught you that the word Adam actually comes from the Aramaic, which speaks of earth.

Yes, as God takes a handful of earth and breathes on it, so this handful of earth becomes an animate being, fashioned in the very image of God. Now, hold that for a moment. I put a question to you.

Who is the principle behind creation? How did men and women come to be? Well, the Bible will tell you in the first book of Genesis, of course, in the beginning, God. God created the heavens and the earth. Ah, yes.

But move forward to the first chapter of John's Gospel, and what do you hear told you about Jesus? He is referred to theologically as the Word, the Word who became flesh. By that is meant the babe of Bethlehem, the man of Nazareth, the preacher of three years who went up and down the streets of the villages of Judea and Galilee and spoke like no other man ever spoke. But we're told in John's Gospel that he, the Word, was the one who spoke and the worlds came into existence.

Without his authority, there would have been no earth. Without his dominical power, there would have been no heavens. So, here is a remarkable thing, that in the beginning of the Bible, you hear of God creating the heavens and the earth.

You get a replication, you get a duplication of that comment in John's Gospel chapter 1. And when Jesus, on His resurrection appearances, is, when He encounters His disciples, He uses exactly the same language as was used at the beginning of Revelation, and He breathes upon these men. What does it mean? Well, of course, before Adam was breathed upon, he was inanimate. He was as the earth.

And now the Bible says this, if any man is in Christ, he is a new creation. There are those who say that this particular incident was actually prophetic. In other words, what our Lord was doing was anticipating what would happen in a few weeks' time.

Here is our Lord projecting that the disciples on the day of Pentecost will indeed be filled with the Holy Spirit and brought into His body. They will become members of the church. And yet you're in difficulty if you take that line.

For what reason? Well, for this. I've been a little technical this morning in taking you to the Greek and to the Hebrew. Let me continue the habit just for a little while.

When our Savior says here in verse 22, receive the Holy Spirit, He uses what is known as the aorist tense. Now, that's not a future tense. It's a tense which gives the indication that what is being said is being done there and then at that particular moment.

So this is what I am arguing, that when our Lord Jesus said to the disciples on this resurrection appearance, receive the Holy Spirit, He was at that point joining them, so to speak, to His body. They were at that point being assured that they had partaken of His nature, that they are linked unbreakably to Him. Receive the Holy Spirit.

And you see, what I am arguing is made, I dare to suggest, irrefutable by you continuing on into the following verse, verse 23. If you receive anyone his sins, they are forgiven. If you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.

Again, look at the language. Look at the text. This is tense.

This has nothing to do with the future. This is the present. What does it mean? Well, it means simply this, that as these men went and told others about what they knew of Jesus, and as a response to this information being imparted, the hearers gave their lives to Jesus Christ, then they had the authority to say, Well, as a result of this, your sins are forgiven.

As a result of this, you have absolution. This had got nothing to do with some future experience. It was part and parcel of what our Lord was giving to the disciples, consequent on them receiving the Holy Spirit at this moment in this remarkable resurrection experience.

Now, I can understand this as being an argument, but it needs to be qualified, that after the day of Pentecost, these men were remarkably endued. They have a boldness. They have an authority.

They are able to tackle the great challenge given to them by our beloved Lord of going into the world and preaching the gospel. They start in Jerusalem, you remember. They target the priests.

They target the influential people and the ordinary people, and after a while, you read of great numbers that are being converted, the church growing from strength to strength. Ah, yes. But remember, before the day of Pentecost came, what had happened to the disciples? I mean, here they were.

They had taken leave of our Lord Jesus. He descended back into heaven, and they, with one purpose, with one accord, not as a disparate group, no longer quarreling as they had before, they make their way to the upper room. And Peter is bold enough and the rest of them to look into Old Testament Scriptures and to begin to appreciate what they are to be about in terms of waiting on the Holy Spirit, this whole idea of unity and concord.

They began to appreciate something of the death and the resurrection of Jesus and what it all means. You see, you can't attribute their knowledge just to this mighty baptism of the Spirit. In Acts chapter 2, they are changed men.

Certainly, they are in the process of transition from John's gospel and chapter 20. So this is what I'm saying, that though it is right to commemorate the empowering of the church on Pentecost Sunday, it is also accurate to say that this remarkable experience that the disciples knew was in some ways a follow-on as to what happened to them when Jesus revealed Himself and breathed on them His Holy Spirit. Now, I made reference a little while ago to the dominical authority of Jesus.

What do I mean by that word, dominical? Well, it gives you the Latin dominus, and from that you get the concept of master. Our Lord is known as master by the disciples. There is something magisterial about Jesus.

There is no one who can compare with our Lord Jesus. He is the Son of Man, yes, He is the Son of God. He is the Lord of creation.

However close you may come to Him, however full you may be with His Spirit, there will always be a distinction between Him and you. There will always be things that He could do on this earth and can do now that you cannot do. You are but a pale reflection of Him.

Thank God that you are a reflection. Thank God that you have partaken of His nature. But there is that in Him essentially which will always differentiate Him from you.

So, you see, the utter nonsense behind the illustration I brought to you last week, and I bring it humbly, but I bring it because I think a corrective needs to be made of someone today arrogating to themselves the authority of being able to breathe the Holy Spirit on an individual. I can understand the sincerity behind the action, but I say it's a clumsy action. I say it's an inaccurate understanding of Scripture.

There is only one person who can do this. It is the beloved Lord. He returns to glory.

Why does He go there? So that His disciples will be improved. How can they be improved? Well, He will come with them in a remarkable fashion. In a spiritual way they will know Him and they will be empowered by Him.

But He is the one who dispenses the Holy Spirit. He is the one who makes Himself known to the disciples. I remember years ago in London battling with the original New Testament language, trying to come to grips with its syntax and the difficulties in some measure of its grammar, making my way through Romans and realizing because nobody had ever told me about this, about Reformed theology and John Calvin and this sort of thing.

I knew nothing. But suddenly it leapt out from the page that this great God had chosen me. And I wrote in the flyleaf of my Bible, "'Twas not that I did choose thee, Lord, for, Lord, this could not be, this heart would still refuse thee, hadst thou not chosen me.'" What had happened to me? Well, years ago in the northern city where I was brought up, Jesus had come along.

I perhaps couldn't have articulated it, have described it like this. And He breathed His Spirit on me. He made me one of His, as He did to you.

Now it may be that this was non-experimental. I mean by this that it may not have had some emotional overtone. I mean there was some emotion here as far as the disciples are concerned.

There is the peace and the joy to which I make reference, and presumably you've got to put those in the categories of the emotion. And yet compared with the sort of volcanic eruption of emotion on the day of Pentecost, this seems to be almost experiential, almost non-experimental, rather, without an overplay of emotion. And now you see, here I think the church is in difficulty, because it seems to me that sometimes the church is quite comfortable with John chapter 20, but she's not quite so comfortable with Acts chapter 2. Now archbishops at the moment are not the best people to quote, but it wasn't always like that.

And there are occasions when archbishops have said some rather remarkable things. And if I could find the place that I carefully put my notes in, then remove my notes and therefore have lost the page. Here is Archbishop Runcie, and he was talking some while ago about the Holy Spirit.

I beg his pardon, Dr. Coggan, I shouldn't have quoted Runcie. That would have been an impossibility. I hope the tape wasn't working at that point.

Dr. Coggan, preaching at the Lee Abbey Reunion in St. Paul's Cathedral in 1964, spoke of the wind and fire of the Spirit in these words. How very alarming, nature's two most devastating agents, wind and fire. Have you ever been in the path of a hurricane? Have you ever seen a beautiful structure raised by fire? If you have, you will not easily sentimentalize about these elements.

And maybe you will think once again before you sing, and here's that gentle voice we hear, soft as the breath of even, that checks each thought, that calms each fear and speaks of heaven, gentle. It was a gale, soft. It blew to pieces their old and most cherished patterns of life, checks each thought.

It stimulated them to such furious thinking that they could scarce get them down on papyrus. The ideas that came rushing to them, speaks of heaven, maybe, but first of earth with its pain and sin and ignorance. They found themselves blown into a perfect vortex of problems to share them, to wrestle with them, to master them in the name of their Lord.

True, the wind renewed, revived, freshened, but it also blew away the cobwebs and broke down the barriers. There was pain as well as joy in the experience of Pentecost. You see, the Archbishop is quite right.

What you are confronted with, and if you don't like a two-stage theology, then I think you're in difficulty because here in the Bible it's made perfectly clear. Here the disciples have an encounter with the Lord who seals to them the knowledge that they have been building up down the years, down the three years that they belong to Him. He breathes on them the Holy Spirit.

They are welded to Him. There is no force on heaven or on earth which will break that bond between them and Him. And yet, and yet there is need for more.

What more? Well, there is need for these energizings of the Holy Ghost, need for them to have released within their spirituality something of the power, a faint resemblance of that power which our Lord Jesus Christ had when He was on earth. And thus, you see, the breath of the Spirit becomes the precursor of the wind. That sometimes happens in nature.

I dare to suggest that maybe it was there in Genesis chapter 8 when the waters had to be pushed back. First of all, the breath, the weak wind of the Spirit, and then it becomes more and more emboldened and the waters divide. You remember how in Ezekiel 37 that great prophet is given a picture of bones, obviously dead, dried bones that have bleached under the Middle East sun.

And the Word of God comes to the prophet, go, prophesy to those bones. And as he prophesies, so the Word tells you there is the breath of the Spirit, and then the wind of the Spirit, and then the valley of death is animated. The prophecy is of Israel, of Israel reborn through the spiritual working of the dynamic of the third person of the Trinity.

And now don't you see that figure of Israel is also a figure that anticipates what will happen in the church. Here are these men, and after the death of our Lord Jesus they're in such great difficulty, but He brings them together. He breathes on them His Spirit.

And then on the day of Pentecost, He comes with the wind. And these men, they come together, bone upon bone, sinew upon sinew, flesh upon flesh, and they're federated into a mighty army, and they become the unstoppable force that Judaism and Rome combined together cannot prevent, and they go around the world and they proclaim the great and glorious gospel of Jesus Christ. And it's all as a result of them first receiving His Word, and believing it, and receiving from Him that assurance that they belong to Him, perhaps non-experimental, but nonetheless dear and precious.

And then there is the release of power, that assurance of which the Apostle speaks when he talks in Romans 8 about the Spirit groaning within us in unutterable groanings, confirming the fact that we belong to Him. Don't you know this? The breath of God, the wind of God coming in on you. Do we know it as a church? Do we know it in our quiet times? Do we know it in our ministries as parents, as mothers and fathers towards our children? Do we know the animating power of the Holy Spirit in every department of our lives? The church is born by the Spirit, sealed by the Spirit, energized by the Spirit.

So He sends His disciples away, and they come back together again, more than 120, and they receive this energizing power of the Holy Ghost. I conclude with this. There was a great Methodist by the name of Fletcher, who was a colleague, therefore, of Charles Wesley and John Wesley.

Wesley was very much a proponent of this doctrine. He saw this very clearly from Scripture, as indeed did George Whitefield. And on one occasion, when Fletcher was preached in a similar, though in a more wonderful fashion than I this morning, he said to his beloved congregation, well, there we are, there's a theory.

Now let's go upstairs and know the practice. Let's move into what we see from God's Word. May we know this blessed sealing and this blessed baptism of God's Spirit on us now and on the church universal in these days.

Jesus breathes. Jesus outpours His Spirit in all His fullness. Let's stand and sing that, shall we, all I once held dear.

Coming up on the overheads. All I once held dear. When I am gone.

All is well. Bring me into your bosom, Lord. For I was so deep.

I am now. It is the grace. To protect my faith.

For thy good water. Also God's healing water. Jesus, we enthrone you.

We proclaim you our King. Standing here in the midst of you. We raise you up with our praise.

Three eight eight. Three eight eight. Jesus, we enthrone you.

We proclaim you our King. Standing here in the midst of you. We raise you up with our praise.

Come, Lord Jesus, and take your place. Unaccompanied. Jesus, we enthrone you.

We proclaim you our King. Standing here in the midst of us. We raise you up with our praise.

Come, Lord Jesus, and take your place. Praise to the Lord, and the smelly of praise. The city of the Lord, the holy place.

The joy of the whole world. Praise to the Lord, and to His glory. He aids us in everything.

We bow down our knees. And Lord, we want to lift your name up high. And Lord, we want to thank you for the work you've done in my life.

And Lord, we trust in your unfailing love. For you alone are God eternal. You are death and heaven above.

Praise to the Lord, and the smelly of praise. The city of the Lord, the holy place. The joy of the whole world.

Praise to the Lord, and to His glory. He aids us in everything. We bow down our knees.

And Lord, we want to lift your name up high. And Lord, we want to thank you for the work you've done in my life. And Lord, we trust in your unfailing love.

For you alone are God eternal. You are death and heaven above. And Lord, we want to lift your name up high.

And Lord, we want to thank you for the work you've done in my life. And Lord, we trust in your unfailing love. For you alone are God eternal.

You are death and heaven above. And your blessings, Lord, they won't begin to measure. You're great, I cannot count the times.

You have forgiven me. And changed me by your Spirit from the world. How I worship you, my Father, you are wonderful.

How I glorify you, Jesus, you my Lord. How I praise you, Holy Spirit, you have changed my life. And your love has worked in me to change the world.

When I was blind, you opened up my eyes to see. When I was dead, you gave me life anew. When I was lost, you found me and you rescued me.

And carried me, rejoicing, home with you. How I worship you, my Father, you are wonderful. How I glorify you, Jesus, you my Lord.

How I praise you, Holy Spirit, you have changed my life. And your love has worked in me to change the world. I cannot count your mercies, Lord, they're vast.

I can't begin to measure your great grace. I cannot count the times that you have answered me. Whenever I have prayed and sought your place.

How I worship you, my Father, you are wonderful. How I glorify you, Jesus, you my Lord. How I praise you, Holy Spirit, you have changed my life.

And your love has worked in me to change the world. Whenever I consider what I am to do. My heart is filled with wonder, love and awe.

I want to share with others that you love them too. And tell the world of Jesus more and more. How I worship you, my Son, you are wonderful.

How I glorify you, Jesus, you my Lord. How I praise you, Holy Spirit, you have changed my life. And your love has worked in me to change the world.

We still call the presence of the Lord. The Holy One is within us. We stand on our feet.

We still call the presence of the Lord. We still call His shining order. Round His splendor He is proud.

How awesome is the sight. How radiant is the light. We still call the glory of the Lord.

His shining order round. We still call the power of His name. He comes to cleanse and heal.

The greatest of His grace. No word too hard for Him. In heav'n we sing of Him.

We still call the power of the Lord. His glory in His name.