Luke 24:49 The Promise Of The Father
And behold, I send the promise of Father upon you: but tarry ye in the City of Jerusalem, until ye be endued. ruth power from on high -Luke 24:49
I wonder if you have ever thought of the origin of the phrase Jesus used here. Why did He call it the Father’s promise? He didn’t say “mi.ne.” He said, “The promise of my Father.” This takes us back to Joel 2:28,29:
‘And it shall come to pass afterward that I will Pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old, men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: and also uPon the seruants and. uPon the handmaids in those days until Our out spirit.”
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In fulfillment of all this, there were three periods discernible in the New Testament: (1) The period of the promise; (2) The period of the preparation, and (3) The period of the realization-all this having to do with the promise of the Father and the intention of the Son toward His people.
The Promise Of The Father – The Period Of The Promise
The period of the promise extends from John the Baptist, roughly, to the resurrection of our Lord Jesus. The marks of it were this: that there were disciples, and they were commissioned and instructed, and they exercised their commission and the authority granted them by the Lord.
They knew the Lord Jesus; they loved Him. They knew Him living, they knew Him and saw Him dead, and then they saw Him risen again from the dead. All the time our Lord was with them He was busy creating expectation in them.
He was telling His disciples that despite all they had and all the blessings that God the Father had given them, they were still to expect the coming of a new and superior kind of life. He was creating an expectation of an effusion of outpoured energy that they, at their best, did not yet enjoy.
The Promise Of The Father – The Period Of The Preparation
Then our Lord rose from the dead and we have what we call the period of preparation. That was the short period that intervened between our Lord’s resurrection and the down-coming of the Holy Ghost.
They had stopped their activity at the specific command of the Lord. He said, “Tarry! You are about to receive that which has been promised. Your expectations are about to be fulfilled, your hopes realized.
Therefore, don’t do anything until it comes,” I might add here that sometimes you are going further when you are not going anywhere; you are moving faster when you are not moving at all; you are learning more when you think you have stopped learning. These disciples had reached an impasse.
Their Lord had risen, and they had seen Him, and with excitement and joy, they knew He had risen from the dead. Now He had gone from them. There was He They gathered together, as you and I might have under like circumstances, waiting, all of one accord. That is more than they had done during the period of the Promise. But there were 120 of them, and they had a oneness of accord.
The Promise Of The Father – The Period Of The Realization
That period of realization came upon them when the Father fulfilled His promise and sent the Spirit. Peter used a phrase describing it which is one of the fullest, finest phrases I know.
He said, “He hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear” (Acts 2:33)-the shedding forth like a mighty down-coming of water. The expectations were more than met fully met, but more than met. God always gives us an over-plus. They got more than they expected.
Now what happened here? What did they receive that they had not had before? Well, first, they had a new kind of evidence for the reality of their faith. You see, Christ talked about four lines of evidence of His Messiahship.
He said, “Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life; and they are they which testify of me,” (John 5:39) so that the Scriptures were proof of who Christ was. That is one line of evidence.
Another line is the witness of John the Baptist who pointed to Jesus and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.” (1:29) Jesus gives us another line of evidence. He said, “The Father himself… hath borne witness of me,” and there was the third proof of His Messiahship, an authentic proof of it.
He gave a fourth. He said, “The same works that I do, hear the witness of me, that the Father hath sent me… Believe me for the very works’ sake.” (5:36; l4:1 1) Have you noticed there is one serious breakdown there, a breakdown which our Lord recognized and which He remedied when the Holy Spirit came?
That breakdown lies in the necessary external of the proof. In every instance the proofs which our Lord adduced to His Messiahship were external to the individual. They are not inside of the man. He has to open the book and read. That is external to the man.
When I hear that the Church of Christ has gone through our the whole world carrying the torch of civilization, healing, and giving hope and help, I conclude the Christian Church must be of God because she is acting the way God would act. When I hear that she has founded hospitals and insane asylums, I say surely she must be of God because that is what God would do, being what He is.
When I hear that she has emancipated woman and has taken her from being a chattel slave and an object of some old king’s lust to being equal of the man and the queen in his home, I say surely that must be of God.
You can go down the corridors of history, and you can adduce proof of the divinity of the Church from what the Church did.
You can show she brought civilization here and she brought help there. She cleaned r’rp saloons in this town, and she delivered this family from breaking up, and she delivered this young fellow from drink. They say that must be Cod. But that is external proof and it depends upon logic.
The Promise Of The Father – The Internal Evidence
There is another kind of evidence. It is the immediate quid,ence or the inner life. That is the evidence by which you know you are alive.
If I were to prove that you weren’t alive, you would chuckle and go home just as alive as you are now and not a bit worried about it, because you have the instant unmediated evidence of internal life.
Jesus Christ wanted to take religion out of the external and put it into the internal and put it on the same level as life itself so that a man knows he knows God the same as he knows he is himself and not somebody else.
He knows he knows God the same as he knows he is alive and not dead. Only the Holy Ghost can do that The Holy Spirit came to carry the evidence of Christianity from the hooks of apologetics into the human heart and that is exactly what He does.
You can take the gospel of Jesus Christ to the heathen in Borneo, or Africa, people who could never conceive the first premises of your logical arguments so that it would be impossible for them to decide on logical grounds
Whether Christianity was of God or not. Preach Christ to them and they will believe and be transformed and put away their wickedness and change from wickedness to righteousness and get happy about it all, learn to read and write and study their Bibles and become leaders and pillars in their church, transformed and made over.
How? By the instant witness of the Holy Ghost to their hearts. That is the new thing that came since God took religion from the realm of the external and made it internal.
Our trouble is that we are trying to confirm the truth of Christianity by an appeal to external evidence. We are saying, “Well, look at this fellow. He can throw a baseball farther than anybody else and he is a Christian, therefore Christianity must be true.”
“Here is a great statesman who believes the Bible. Therefore, the Bible must be true.” We quote Daniel Webster or Roger Bacon. They wrote books to show that some scientists believed in Christianity; therefore, Christianity must be true.
They are all the way out on the wrong track, brother! That is not New Testament Christianity at all. That is a pitiful, whimpering, drooling appeal to the flesh. That never was the testimony of the New Testament, never the way God did things! You might satisfy the curious intellects of men by external evidence, and Christ did, I say, point to external evidence when He was here on the earth.
The Promise Of The Father – The Witness Of The Holy Spirit
But He said, “I am sending you something better. I am taking Christian apologetics out of the realm of logic and putting it into the realm of life. I am proving My dairy and My proof will not be an appeal to a general or a prime minister. The proof lies in an invisible, unseen but powerful energy that visits the human soul when the gospel is the Holy Ghost!”
The Spirit of the living God brought evidence that needed no logic; it went straight to the soul like a Hash of silver light, like the direct plunge of a sharp spear into the heart.
Those are the very words that the Scriptures use when it says “pierced (pricked) to the heart.” One translator points out that the word “pricked” is a word that means that it goes deeper than the spear that pierced Jesus’ side. That is the way God does.
There is an immediate witness, an unmediated push of the Spirit of God upon the spirit of man. There is a filtering down, a getting down into the very cells of the human soul, and the impression on that soul by the Holy Ghost that this is true. That is what they had never had before, and that is exactly what the Church does not have.
That is what we fundamentalist preachers wish we had and don’t have, and that is why we are going so far astray to prove things. That, incidentally, is why this humble pulpit is never open to the man who wants to prove Christianity using appeal to external evidence. You can’t do it to begin with, and I would t do it to end with, We have something better.
Then, also, the Spirit gave a bright, emotional quality to their religion, and I grieve before my God over the lack of this in our day. The emotional quality isn’t there.
There is a sickliness about us all; we pump so hard trying to get a little drop of delight out of our old rusty well, and we write innumerable bouncy choruses, and we pump and pump until you can hear the old rusty thing squeak across forty acres, But it does t work.
Then He gave them direct spiritual authority. By that I mean. He removed their fears, their questions, their apologies, and their doubts, and they had an authority that was founded upon life.
The Promise Of The Father – The Spirit Comes Today
There is a great modern error which I want to mention: it is that the coming of the Spirit happened once and for all, that the individual Christian is not affected by it.
It is like the birth of Christ which happened once and for all and the most excellent sermon on the birth of Christ would never have that birth repeated and all the prayers in the wide world would never have Christ born again of the Virgin Mary.
It is, they say, like the death and resurrection of Christ never to be repeated. This error asserts that the coming of the Holy Spirit is a historic thing, an advance in the dispensational workings of God; but that is settled now and we need to give no further thought to it.
It is all here and we have it all, and if we believe in Christ that is it and there isn’t anything more. All right.
Now everybody has a right to his or her view if he thinks it is scriptural, but I would just like to ask some questions. I won’t answer them; I’ll just ask them, and you preach your sermon.
Is the promise of the Eather, with all its attendant riches of spiritual grace and power, intended to be for first-century Christians only?
Does the new birth, which the first-century Christians had to have, suffice for all other Christians, or is the new birth that they had to have that which we have to have?
Does the new birth have to be repeated in each Christian before it is valid, or did that first Church get born again for us? Can you get born again by the story?
The fact that those first 120 were born again, does that mean that we don’t have to be? Now you answer me.
You say, “No, certainly we agree that everybody has to have the new birth for himself individually. All right, if that is true (and it is), is the fullness of the Spirit that those first Christians received enough? Does that work for you and me? They had the fullness; now they are dead.
Does the fact that they were filled avail for me? You answer that question. Again, I want to ask Iou, would a meal eaten by Saint Peter in the year A.D . 33 nourish me living today? would a good meal of barley cakes and milk, and honey spread on the barley cake-a good meal for a good Jew in Peter’s dy-nourish me today? No, Peter is dead, and I can’t be nourished by what Peter ate.
Would the fullness of the Holy Ghost that Peter got in the upper chamber do for me today, or must I receive individually what Peter received?
What value would the fullness of the Spirit in the church in Jerusalem have for us today if it was done over there once and for all and we can’t have the same thing here? We are separated by 5,000 miles of water and by 2,000 years. Now what, what happens to them, avail for us if we don’t have the same as they had?
I want to ask you some more questions: Do you see any similarity between the average one of us Christians buzzing around Chicago and those episodes?
Are you ready to believe that we have just what they had and that every believer in Chicago who accepts the Bible and is converted immediately enters into and now enjoys and possesses exactly what they did back there? Surely you know better than that!
This modern fundamentalism, as we know it and of which we are a part-Is it a satisfactory fulfillment of the expectations raised by the Father and Christ? Our Father who is in heaven raised certain high expectations of what He was going to do for His redeemed people.
When His Son came to redeem those people, He heightened those expectations, raised them, clarified them, extended them, enlarged them, and emphasized them.
He raised an expectation that was simply beyond words, too beautiful and thrilling to imagine. I want to ask you: Is this level of Christianity which we fundamentalists in this country now enjoy what He meant by what He said? Listen. brother.
Our Lord Jesus Christ advertised that He was going away to the Father and He was going to send back for His people a wonderful gift, and He said, “Stay right here until it comes because it will be the difference between failure and success to you.”
Then the Spirit came. Was He equal to the advertising? Did they say, “Is this all He meant! Oh, it is disappointing! No. The Scripture says they wondered. The word “wonder” is in their mouths and hearts. He gave so much more than He promised because words were the promise and the Holy Ghost was the fulfillment.
The simple fact is that we believers are not up to what He gave us reason to expect. The only honest thing to do is admit this and do something about it. There certainly has been a vast breakdown somewhere between promise and fulfillment. That breakdown is not with our heavenly.
Father, for He always gives more than He promises. Now I am going to ask that you reverently ponder this and set aside time and search the Scriptures, and pray and yield, obey and believe, and see whether that which our Lord gave us reason to think could be the possession of the Church may not be ours in actual fulfillment and realization.
