“As the Father has sent Me, I also send you.” When He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” (John 20:21-22)
A good subtitle would be “What It Means to Be a Christian.” You may think you already know what it means, but when you compare what you know to the teachings of Christ and the church in Acts, you may find that you are a long way off and there’s a vast difference between what you think a Chrisian is and what a Christian is, according to the Bible, and only the Bible can tell us what a real Christian is. To some it simply means you “Accept Jesus as your Savior and you go to heaven when you die.” But there’s more to it than that.
A family drove about 16 hours to spend a couple of weeks with us. When the couple and their two daughters left, about halfway there the man pulled over to a rest stop without saying a word, got out of the car and went walking around about a stone’s throw away, and started crying out loud to God. After about two hours of this the lady called me to ask that I pray for him because she had no idea what was going on. I did pray and then a few minutes later she called me and said, “He got back in the car, wiped the tears from his eyes, smiled at me and said, “I just got saved. I just gave my life to Christ.”
Later he called me to explain. He said that in all his years growing up his family never missed church. He thought this is the Christian life. But he said they laid our Bibles down when they went in the house and never picked them back up till they headed out the door to church. And he said they never talked about the Lord all week. His father had been a deacon for over 20 years. Then when he spent two weeks with our family, he said he saw what real Christians were and got under conviction that he wasn’t saved at all, and so he had to pull over and work this out with God. He did. I think many people and families in our churches are like him and his family. They think they know what a Christian is, but really have no idea what it means to be a Christian.
Many Christians don’t know who they are “in Christ,” what God has called and commanded them to do, or anything about the power needed to accomplish the God-given task He has given to every Christian. They live ignorant, purposeless, and powerless lives on this earth. They don’t know who they are or why they’re here. I have good news for you. I intend to answer those questions for you in this chapter of our study of Acts two.
This is yet another prequel to Acts chapter two. A very important one. It’s about something that happened that prepared the disciples for what took place on that first Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit. This is a preparation for all who will ever experience the fullness of the Holy Spirit. This is not mentioned in Acts chapter one, but it is mentioned in our text where Jesus was preparing the disciples for this momentous event in history and in our lives. Jesus breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
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