What Now? (Acts) | Come Holy Spirit - Week 2

Something unprecedented happens in Acts 2. Not just wind and fire and three thousand baptisms. Someone arrives. And the question this week is not whether you believe in the Holy Spirit, but whether the Holy Spirit is at home in you. At Summer Street Church, we continue our series through the Book of Acts with the moment the Spirit falls on all believers, the church is born, and an entirely different kind of community becomes possible on Nantucket and everywhere else.

Transcript

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Last week we began a new teaching series. Thank you to the worship team, by the way. Thank you so much for leading us this morning. Yeah. I think you know this, but we are very, very blessed to have this worship team. We are very, very blessed to have what God has given to this church. There are churches much, much larger than ours that don't get to experience the kind of worship and and and culture we get to experience together here on Sundays. So thank you. Thank you, Lord, for that. Last week we began a new teaching series through the book of Acts. So this is just week two. You haven't missed much, so don't worry if you weren't here last week. I want to invite you to go ahead now and turn in your Bibles to, or you're on your Bible apps, to Acts chapter two. Acts chapter two. And I'll just go ahead and say, while you're turning there, today's teaching text is a little bit longer. So if you're wondering, where is he gonna stop reading? I might not. We might just keep going all the way through the the end of the book here, but but it is gonna be a little bit longer. So just get comfortable as I begin reading, starting in verse one. Follow along with me in your Bibles. When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be 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 they were staying in there staying in Jerusalem, God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard their own language being spoken. Utterly amazed, they asked, Aren't all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, and the parts of Libya near Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues. Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, What does this mean? Some, however, made fun of them and said, They have had too much wine. And then Peter stood up with the eleven, raised his voice, and addressed the crowd. Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you. Listen carefully to what I say. These people are not drunk, as you suppose. It's only nine in the morning. No, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel in the last days. God says, I will pour out my spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams. Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days, and they will prophesy. I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming, before the great and glorious day of the Lord. And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit, and has poured out what you now see and hear. For David did not ascend to heaven. In other words, Jesus did, but David didn't ascend to heaven, and yet he said, The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. Therefore, let all Israel, all God's people, be assured of this, that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah. And when the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, brothers, what shall we do? And Peter replied, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and for your children, and for all who are far off, for all whom the Lord our God will call. With many other words, he warned them and he pleaded with them save yourselves from this corrupt generation. And those who accepted his message were baptized. And about three thousand were added to their number that day. And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship and to breaking of the bread and prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. The words of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Acts chapter 2 is one of the wildest parts in all of the scriptures. And it's easy to get caught up in the spectacle, so caught up, in fact, in the spectacle of what's happening, that we miss the someone that is happening. Because underneath all of the wind and the fire and the crowds and the baptisms and the birth of the church, which is what we're seeing here, is the one thing that we cannot afford to miss. Someone has arrived. Someone has arrived. See them stop and shop. We don't really know them, so we're not going to go up there and talk to them. I mean, half of us spend half our time ignoring the people we do know in Stop and Shop, right? I think many of us know about the Holy Spirit. But how well do we know the Holy Spirit? That's the question, sort of underneath what we want to talk about this morning. Look at me again. We're going to look much more closely here at verses one through four together. This is what happens. This is what's unfolding in a room in Jerusalem. Suddenly a sound like a blowing of a violent wind came from heaven, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And they saw what seemed to be 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. Here's what's happening. The author of Acts is Luke, the same author who penned the gospel of Luke. Luke here is reaching for language. This wind came from heaven, it was violent, blew violently, filled the house. It looked like tongues of fire. You see, he's like grasping at language, trying to describe something that nobody had ever seen happen before. And now understand that the spirit of God himself is not new. There were, there's plenty of record of the Spirit of God appearing. You go all the way back to the very beginning of the book of Genesis, and we see that the Spirit of God is hovering over the waters. The people gathering in the house knew about the Holy Spirit. There are other parts along the way in the history of God's people where the Holy Spirit comes upon judges to lead them, and the Holy Spirit comes upon prophets to speak through them. The Holy Spirit even comes upon craftsmen to build through them. But in each case, this when the Spirit came, the Spirit came, it was a sort of an occasional thing. It was a partial thing, it was a temporary thing, because in each of those cases I mentioned, after the Holy Spirit comes, for that for that purpose, the Holy Spirit departs. You might remember King David after he sins with Bathsheba. He writes this in Psalm 51. He says, He's calling out to God, he's seeking forgiveness, and he says, Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a red a steadfast steadfast spirit within me. And then he says, Do not cast from Do not cast me from your presence, or do what? Take your Holy Spirit from me. So there is a certain way up into this point in history where people experience the Holy Spirit. But what's happening in Acts chapter 2 is completely different. It's completely different. If you remember going back to last week, before Jesus ascended back to the Father, he makes this promise to his disciples who had gathered there. He says, I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to be with you forever. Actually, this is a promise Jesus made earlier to his disciples, and then he affirms that promise at his ascension, right before he ascends to the Father. I will give you, I will send you another advocate to be with you forever, not temporarily like the Holy Spirit had come in the past, not conditionally for certain purposes or reasons, but forever. Forever. And it's not only the apostles we see in Acts chapter 2 who receive the Holy Spirit, it's the women who have gathered in the room as well. And not just the apostles and the women, but it's also the brothers of Jesus. If you remember last week, many of them did not believe in Jesus until Jesus was resurrected from the dead. His own brothers. About 120 people in the room. They all experienced, they received the Holy Spirit. And so what we're seeing in Acts chapter 2 is something that is remarkable in history. And what we're seeing is that the Holy Spirit is no longer the property of the special anointed few. But rather, the Holy Spirit is now the inheritance of every man, woman, child who belongs to Jesus. This is a powerful moment. And this is the gift that Jesus promised. This is what his followers had gathered in Jerusalem and were waiting for. And while this is all going on, I mean, it's causing quite a scene, as you can imagine, and the crowd outside, they're absolutely bewildered by what's happening. They'd never seen anything or even heard of anything like what was happening in that house. They hear their own languages being spoken by simple Galileans who spoke Aramaic, uneducated, most of them, working in trades. And they have no business knowing multiple languages, but they can hear them speaking in their own language. And some of them think the disciples are drunk. That was probably more likely that they had had too much to drink than the fact that they were actually somehow filled with a spirit that was enabling them to speak. But then Peter stands up and he's like, It's nine in the morning. Even for these guys, like that's that's pretty early, even for these fishermen. And then Peter opens the Hebrew scriptures, quoting from the prophet Joel, who had written these words 800 years earlier, by the way, showing the people that what they had been promised centuries before, in this very moment, is now being fulfilled. And do you see what Peter's claiming here? He's claiming that something very, very ancient has arrived. He's saying that the last days that the prophets spoke about 800 years before are not off in some distant future, but that they're happening right now. That the future kingdom of God promised to that God promised to bring has broken into this present moment, and that what these people are experiencing and the crowd is witnessing is a sign of the in-breaking kingdom of God. And what is that sign? It is the Spirit of God being poured out on all people. After saying all of this, Peter does something pretty bold. He preaches the death and the resurrection of Jesus, and he doesn't soften a word of it. He says to them, This Jesus, remember Jesus whom you crucified? He says, God has raised him from the dead. And we are witnesses, he's saying. We've seen him, and Jesus has poured out his spirit, and that's what you're now seeing, and that's what you're now hearing. And the scriptures say that the crowd was cut to the heart. It doesn't say the crowd was inspired, or that you know, the crowd was moved in a really good way, like when that worship song, your favorite worship song, gets played on a Sunday and it really hit. That's not what the scriptures say that the crowd, the people were cut, cut something sharp, cut them to the heart. You know, some of the people in the crowd that were there that day had called for Jesus to be crucified, no question. And now they're hearing that that man that they handed over is alive. And what do you do with that? I mean, this is not the kind of announcement that can be easily ignored, Kenneth. And then the people asked the question, What do we do now? And this is the question we asked last week, and in some sense, it's the question that the entire book of Acts is written to answer. What now? We killed Jesus, and Jesus has been resurrected from the dead. What now? Jesus ascended into heaven, and now the Holy Spirit has been poured out on all people. What now? That's what they want to know. And Peter's answer to them is one of the clearest passages of instruction in the entire New Testament. Look at it with me in verse 38. Luke 2, verse 38. Peter replied, when there's when they said what now, they Peter said, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins. It's pretty clear. And you will receive the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and for your children, and for those who are far off, for all whom the Lord our God will call. In other words, Peter says, you know, hey, the Holy Spirit has arrived. The people say, What now? What do we do? And then Peter calls the people to respond in three ways. Write these down if you're taking notes. The first response is to repent. When the Holy Spirit comes in the wake of the crucified and risen Jesus, what do we do? Number one, we repent. It's the first call. In the Greek, the word repent is metanoia. It's a change of mind so complete that it changes the direction of your life. That's what the word repent means. It doesn't mean get all sad and cut yourself and put on, you know, ashes on your head and just mourn about your sins. That's not what repent. Repentance is a radical shift in the way that you think about what's going on in the world. So radical that it changes the direction of your life. It's repentance is not primarily an emotion at all, it's a reorientation, it's a turning to Jesus, toward his lordship over your life. That's the first response is to repent. The second response, Peter says, is be baptized. What do we do? Because Jesus has died and been raised from the dead, and the Holy Spirit is a sign of that now being poured out on all these people. What do we do? Secondly, we are to be baptized. Baptism is a public declaration of a private decision, ultimately. It's the moment that you say with your body what you have already said with your heart. That's what baptism is. It's saying, I belong to Jesus. It's the step that says, I'm not keeping this private. I'm not keeping this locked in a little room in my house. I can't, because the Holy Spirit has come. And he's blown the doors off the house, and there's a crowd gathering outside, and so I'm saying, yeah, I'm with Jesus. That's what baptism is. The third response, Peter says, is receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Repent. Be baptized, and receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The gift. The Holy Spirit is not a reward for good, righteous behavior. The Holy Spirit is a gift. It's not a prize for the spiritually advanced. The Holy Spirit is a gift. And the gift is given to everyone who turns. Everyone who turns. Now, who are the scriptures talking about when they say, hey, the promise is for you and it's for your children, and it's for all those who are far off. Who are the far off? Hey, that's us. We made it into the Bible. We're the far off. We got mentioned. Anyone excited about being in the Bible? You can tell your friends this week, did you know I'm in the Bible? And then show them, I'm the far off. The promise of the Holy Spirit was made for me. The promise was made to me. One of the most spectacular things that happens here in the wake of the Holy Spirit coming in Acts chapter 2 is that 3,000 people were baptized that day. I mean, I remember a couple of summers ago, and many of you were there on a hot August Sunday down at Children's Beach when we had a baptism. I think we had five or six people planning to be baptized or something like that. And I think we baptized like 18 people that day. That's like the hour 3,000. That's what it felt like. I mean, the people just kept coming. I want to be baptized. I want to be can you imagine 3,000 people in one day believing and being baptized? So what are we to understand as happening? When the Holy Spirit arrives here in Acts chapter 2, this is the birth of the church. This is where the church begins. This is where we trace our history as a church back to. We don't just go back to 18, whatever. We go all the way back to Acts chapter 2, the day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit arrives and the church is born. Now, Luke gives this beautiful description in verses 42 through 47 about what that church looked like. Read that with me. Follow along. They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship and to the breaking of bread and prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles, and all the believers were together, and they had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Those 3,000 that were added on day one, God just kept adding to them every single day. Nobody organized this. These things didn't happen because a group of great church leaders got together and organized it. The spirit produced it. This description in Acts chapter 2. This is not a hey, take this and do this and you'll have a good church. You can't. You can't duplicate this. It's not normal. This is what the spirit produces. This is not a normal thing. In fact, this community that's being described at the at the end of Acts chapter 2 was unlike anything else in the ancient world in Rome. Anything else, and anything, anything else in the entire world. And and it is unlike anything else in our modern world. The community formed by the Holy Spirit is different. It's different. How is it different? Well, let's just walk through them. One, this community, the people in it devoted themselves to teaching. How is that different from the world that we live in? Well, we live in a world that processes in from more information, in fact, than any generation in history. The problem is we are arguably less informed by any of it, or less formed by any of it. We have more content and it's doing less to us than ever before in history. What made the community of the Holy Spirit different? Well, they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching. You know, we don't, the world doesn't sit under truth today. But this community is arranging themselves, like we talked about on Wednesday at midweek, beneath the scriptures and the authority of the apostles' teaching. They said it is not us to judge over the scriptures. It is it is on us to receive them, to allow them to change us, to transform us. That you can't find this sort of community anywhere else. That's the first difference. Here's a second difference. They broke bread together in the temple courts and in their homes. I mean, I think a lot of you know this, and uh and and some of us have experienced it, but we live on an island of epidemic loneliness. This can be a very lonely place. And it's not necessarily because people aren't connected, because it's because most connections, not all, it's not a judgment, it's an observation, and this is true in lots of other places as well. But but most connection here on this island is transactional, isn't it? We're all trading with somebody for something. I'll do this job if you provide this, right? Even if the this is is money, right? Most of our connection on this island is transactional. But this community, you don't see that. This community is eating together with glad and sincere hearts. The Greek word for sincere, I love this word. It means without wax. What does that mean? Well, it's a term for pottery that had not been filled with wax in order to hide the cracks in the pottery. What you saw was what it was in this community. There was no performance. It was actual people, actually together, actually glad. Here's a third difference between this community, the community of the Holy Spirit, and the communities we're used to. This community sold possessions and they gave to anyone who had need. They didn't sell their possessions and give to anyone who deserved it. They gave to anyone who had need. The logic in most communities, other communities that you and I are a part of on this island and elsewhere, and have been a part of and will be a part of, the logic of every other community is scarcity. Protect what you have. If anything, if you're gonna help, help your own people first. But this community, the community of the Holy Spirit, operated on a completely different logic. Why? Because when you genuinely believe that God owns everything and that his kingdom is breaking in, hoarding stuff makes no sense. It makes no sense to hoard our stuff anymore. Generosity becomes the most rational response in a Holy Spirit-formed community. And here's the fourth and final sort of difference we see between the Holy Spirit community and the communities that we're used to. This community was filled with awe. It was filled with awe. Where it seems like the default register of public life is grievance. It's cynicism. You can't do anything good or advocate for anything good on the island without somebody speaking up. Yeah, but someone's just gonna take that money. Oh, yeah, someone's just gonna hoard that for themselves. Oh, nothing good is ever gonna happen. Oh, we've been talking about that for 30 years. That's this you see that out there? You experience that? In this community, there is gladness. There is, but a lot of our gladness has to be sort of manufactured and kind of lives closer to the surface. But this community was filled with gladness. Not because life was easy, life was much, much harder for them, I'd argue, than it is for most of us. But they were filled with gladness because they had been in the presence of someone who made easy irrelevant. Irrelevant. They'd been in the presence of the Holy Spirit. And I challenge you to find another community like this anywhere on Nantucket, but I'm gonna save you the trouble because it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. Only the Holy Spirit forms communities like this. All right, let's say after the sermon and after communion and worship, after we dismiss, I come up to you, we're having a conversation, and I'm curious how you would respond to me if I said, Hey, today, maybe this afternoon or this evening, I'd like to stop by your house for a visit. Right now, all of you are thinking, what did I leave on the floor? That would embarrass me. What shape is the house in? Have I emptied the litter box? You know, what what's going on in my house? Right? Okay, so hold that. How would how would how would you respond to that question? I would I'd like to stop by your. Okay, now how would you respond differently if I instead, in that conversation, said to you, hey, today, maybe this afternoon or this evening, I'd like to bring some stuff over and I'd like to move into your place. I'm not gonna say that. Some of you are if it feels in this room like you're afraid I'm going to say that. I'm not going to say that. I want you to think about the first question. When you're expecting someone, you tidy up a bit, don't you? I mean, you want to see our house at its cleanest? Just come by right before the other people are scheduled to come by. That's when our house is the tidiest. Because someone comes by, you tidy up a little bit. But when someone actually moves into your house, your whole house gets reoriented. Right? Everything changes in your house. Everything about your house changes. And there will be evidence in your home that someone else lives here. You'll see another car, you'll see their stuff, or whatever it is. And please hear what I'm about to say next from a true place of love. Zero judgment. I love you so much. You're my family, you're all I got. All right, just remember that. I think a lot of us in this room have tidied up for the Holy Spirit. I think we've tidied up for the Holy Spirit. What do I mean by that? I I think we've made space in our thinking, particularly about God for the Holy Spirit. By tidying up, I mean I think we would say, most of us in this room, yes, I affirm the existence of the Holy Spirit. I mean, historically, the idea of God, a Christian God, is that there is a God who is one in nature and three in persons, and that's a mystery. But we hold to the third person of the Trinity, being the Spirit, and we ex we we affirm the Spirit. We even talk about the Holy Spirit. Uh sometimes we invoke the Holy Spirit when we pray, or we even sing songs too and about the Holy Spirit. So, in that sense, is I think we've tidied up for the Holy Spirit, but I'm not sure we've let him move in. It's not a judgment. I say this as someone who grew up in the church. There have been seasons of my life where the truth is that I was relating to the Holy Spirit as an idea, a concept, a teaching rather than an individual. I kept a certain distance from the Holy Spirit. Why do we do that? Why do we keep the Holy Spirit at arm's length? Well, the honest answer is because if the spirit is truly a person, and if that the spirit is truly at home in me, then I cannot control what the spirit does in the rooms that I've worked so hard to keep locked in my life. And the question put to us here in Acts chapter two is not, do you believe in the Holy Spirit? We could just end now and say, Yeah. We believe in the Holy Spirit. Great, good talk. Have a great week. That is not what the point of Acts chapter 2 is. It's not the question that this chapter is putting to us. The question is, is the Holy Spirit at home in you? Is the Holy Spirit at home at Summer Street Church? This is the question for this morning. Let me speak to two groups of people. We're just kind of rounding third and moving towards home baseball analogy. First, let me speak to anyone who has not said yes to Jesus. We're all at different places on our journey. Some of us in this room have said yes to Jesus and some haven't. And maybe you've come today because somebody invited you to come, or maybe you come often, or you've come before and you've come back because something keeps drawing you, even if you might not know what that thing is. The crowd gathered outside the room in Acts chapter 2 was not a crowd of believers. They were curious, they heard some noise, some ruckus, and they showed up. And maybe that's why you're here. You've heard some kind of noise in your heart and you're and you've shown up. Some of the people in the crowd, as we mentioned earlier, might have even had blood on their hands. So it's an interesting group of people who've gathered together. And when Peter, sorry, when they asked Peter, what do we do? What are you even doing here? Like, come on. I know where some of you were last night. I know how some of you think. I know what some are you up to and who you live with and what you're doing. I know that. I know some of you are in the crowd yelling for Jesus to be crucified. Peter doesn't answer them that way. He just simply says to them, Man, just turn. Just turn to Jesus, man. Just turn. Because when you turn to Jesus, Jesus welcomes you home. The gift of the Holy Spirit is not for people who have figured it out or arrived or gotten their life together. It's for people who are simply willing to turn to Jesus. And so if that's you today, here's what I would encourage you to do don't leave here this morning without turning to Jesus. Don't leave without saying, Yes, Jesus, I'm choosing to follow you today. Say, how will I do that? Look, in just a minute, we're going to come to the Lord's table. This table, this bread and this cup, Jesus established for those who confess him as Lord, who believe in him, who come to him as the source of their life, who are learning day after day to yield control of their lives over to Jesus. So one of the ways you can say yes to Jesus this morning, turn to him, is not only to come and take communion, but literally in your heart and mind, as you're in line, waiting to take communion, just say, Jesus, I say yes to you today. Jesus, I'm turning to you today. I'll be available after the service for a bit. Come find me. Let's talk about that. I'd love to pray with you and celebrate what God's doing in your life today. That's the first group of people who haven't maybe said yes to Jesus yet. But the second group of people I want to speak to real quickly is anyone who has said yes to Jesus. And some of you in this room have followed Jesus for years, maybe even decades. And the danger for you this morning is not unbelief, it's just familiarity. Most Christians I know are familiar with the Holy Spirit. And the ones who are familiar with the Holy Spirit tend, like I have, over much of my life, to try to manage the Holy Spirit. To manage them. Like the Holy Spirit. We like for the Holy Spirit to visit. We don't want it moving in, but it's cool. And so we try to manage. And so we pray about things, except the one thing we actually don't want to hear what the Spirit has to say about. Or we stay really busy doing good work so that we never have to sit down quietly and allow the Holy Spirit to speak. Or we we bring the Holy Spirit into our decisions after we've made the decisions. Like this is some of how we attempt to manage the unmanageable, to manage the one who wants to move in and take up residence in our life. The danger here is when we manage the Holy Spirit, instead of welcoming the Holy Spirit, we don't just close the door on a spiritual experience. We close the door on our only source of life. What we refuse when we don't allow the Holy Spirit to move in with us, according to the scriptures, we learn this about the Spirit. The Spirit is the one that adopts us into God's family. That the Spirit is the one who pours God's love into our hearts. That the Spirit is the one who guarantees our salvation. That the Spirit is the one who instructs us and guides us into all truth. That the Spirit is the one interceding for us. That the Spirit is the one empowering us. The Spirit is the one helping us in our weakness. The Spirit is the one who gives us the life of God. And so when we close the door on the Holy Spirit, we're not closing the door on some sort of emotional, you know, reaction or experience with God. We're closing the door on the source of all things. All that God wants to give to us, He gives to us through the Spirit. So attempting to manage the Holy Spirit diminishes our life. And this is not what Jesus had in mind when he said, I will give you another advocate. He's not describing a helper that drops by for an occasional visit, he's describing a person that moves in. Moves in. Okay? 60 seconds. And I want you to sit quietly and put your hands out like this. Would you just do this right now? Can you just put your hands out? Like palms up and just showing you, look, you're halfway there. You're so good at this practice already. Okay. This is what I'm going to invite you to do each morning. And in this posture, just in the quiet, the silence with you and God, I want to invite you to pray the single most powerful and life-altering prayer anyone can pray. I want you to memorize it. Are you ready? Come, Holy Spirit. That's it. Three words. Come, Holy Spirit. And just wait. And just wait. Because what we're praying, this these three short words is shorthand. And God knows the rest of it. He understands it. Come, Holy Spirit, is shorthand for come into the parts of my life that I think I've already figured out. It's shorthand for come into the parts that I'm still trying to manage on my own. Come into the relationships that I've been navigating or trying to. Come into the fear that I've not confessed to anyone. Come into the decisions that I've already made but haven't included you in. Come into the room that I've kept locked. Come, Holy Spirit. Church, the Spirit is not an idea or a concept that we want to know about. The Holy Spirit is a person we want to know. And that spirit is most at home in you and in us. This community of the Spirit who is being formed by the Spirit. And to one like the one we read about at the end of Acts chapter 2. Let's invite the Holy Spirit in. Let's all stand together.