Spirit-Empowered Engagement with Scripture | Acts 1:16 | May 17, 2026

Teacher: Jay O'Brien

Scarlet City Church - Columbus, OH

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Transcript

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Acts chapter 1. Well, we've begun this journey through Acts looking at the origin of the church, the Spirit launching this community of God, the church, centered on the kingdom of God and the gospel. And last week we began to explore the power of the Spirit. Jesus has tasked his followers and his disciples to wait on the Spirit. Last week we saw that the Spirit empowers Jesus' disciples to be witnesses and a reminder of what a witness is. A witness is someone who gives a personal testimony about something that they have seen, something they've experienced. And we explored last week the various ways that we can experience God today. And we looked at seven practical ways in the scriptures that the people of God witness God's work. And then how they were called to testify and how we can experience, how we can see and experience and encounter God in our world today. We're not called to share a message of something we've just heard others talk about. We're called to share a message that we've personally encountered. And one of the ways we explored last week was that God witnesses through his word that we can encounter God, his love, and his work through the word of God. And so this morning, that's where we're going. The connection between the Spirit and the Scripture. How God's Spirit awakens God's word in our life. And I think it's important to acknowledge that sometimes the spirit and scripture are pitted against each other. If you've been in churches long enough, you may have been in congregations where they might think of one at the expense of the other. Some churches think of themselves as we're Bible-centered, we're word-centered. And they might think of it in a way that it minimizes the gifts of the Spirit. There can be a distrust to the leading or healing or power of the Spirit at work today. In fact, they might look at the book of Acts as just a transitory book, and that happened then, but we can't expect the Spirit to work like that today. So there can be a disconnect between God's scripture, God's Word, and the Spirit. And then others might think of, oh no, I'm more charismatic. I'm, I believe God speaks today, that God works today. I'm not just someone who, you know, boringly studies the Bible, but how has God awakened us today and working today? It can sometimes minimize scripture study. And these not need not be pitted against each other. These are not as a term that I've I've heard of recently. They're not, you know, frenemies. Anyone have a frenemy? Don't raise your hand, you know. You know, a frenemy is somebody that like you're supposed to be friends. You might hang out in the same groups, you might, you know, cordially uh be at the same things, but really you're kind of competing against each other. They're a frenemy. The scripture and spirit are not frenemies, they are twins that go together and who actually, when centered, inform how we engage engage the other. Throughout scripture, the spirit and scripture are often tied together. In fact, at the very beginning in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, in Genesis chapter one, we see the Spirit, the Spirit of God, the ruch, the very breath of God hovering over the chaos, hovering over the waters. And then God does what? He speaks, his word goes forth, bringing life. The scripture and the spirit are life-giving powers. And we see Jesus connect this in John chapter 6, when Jesus says, The Spirit is the one who gives life. Human nature is of no help. The words, you see, the power of the word, the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. And just a few verses later, as people are leaving, as they're hearing Jesus' life-giving word and going another direction, Jesus turns to Peter. He says, Are you going to leave too? And Peter responds, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. This connection between scripture and spirit, empowering life today and for all eternity. And so the question before us is: how does the spirit and scripture, when operating together, give us life? How does it empower us to encounter God and the life He would have for us today? You see, the first way that the Spirit empowers God's word to bring life for us is it invites us to receive Scripture as the Spirit's testimony of God's redeeming work, to relate to Scripture in such a way that it is an authoritative, life-giving presence for us. You know, getting us connected to the context in which we find ourselves here in Acts chapter 1. You know, we journeyed all of last year through the Gospel of Luke. In the Gospel of Luke, we see the story of Jesus and his disciples and this new community that he is forming. And Peter and the other 12 and other followers of Jesus have been literally following Jesus. They have been apprenticing with him as his learners, as his disciples. Jesus has been their rabbi. And as a rabbi, Jesus is teaching, Jesus is modeling, and as a good rabbi, Jesus is sending them, he's commissioning them. And we saw that in the Gospel of Luke, as these followers of Jesus are sent in pairs throughout the towns to preach, to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God, to heal, and to cast out demons. And then they travel, eventually making their way to Jerusalem. And when they enter the city of Jerusalem, it gets a bit messy. They enter welcoming Jesus as their Messiah, but then eventually Jesus is put on trial on trumped-up charges and they flee. His disciples and followers flee, they're afraid. And Jesus is executed on a cross and he dies. This was not what they were hoping for, even though Jesus has been saying this is what's going to happen. And it happens, and they're terrified and afraid, and they abandon him. And then, even more surprisingly, Jesus rises from the grave three days later and begins to minister and meet with his followers and disciples again. And what has he been doing? And Luke captures this at the end in Luke chapter 24. He repeats it multiple times. Jesus appears to his followers and he begins to teach them the Bible. And he emphasizes that the story of Scripture has been pointing to this, that he has come to actually fulfill the promises of God, that his death on a cross didn't catch God off guard. This is a part of God's story and God's work. Jesus has been teaching following his death and resurrection that it all is fulfilling the story of God and the work of God to redeem all of creation. And this is what scripture is. Scripture is a library of writings, both human and spirit-inspired, testifying to God's work of redeeming his world. And now Jesus in Acts chapter 1, after ministering for several weeks to his disciples and to hundreds of others, he's leaving them. And as I mentioned, he leaves them saying, You need to wait. Wait for the Spirit, who you will receive and who will empower you to be witnesses to all the nations. And that's where we pick up here in verse 14. All these continued together in prayer with one mind. This is these the followers of Jesus, together with women, along with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and his brothers. In those days, Peter stood up among the believers, a gathering of about a hundred and twenty people. And he said, brothers, and we could translate this, brothers and sisters, because we know women are present, and the Greek term can be applied to both genders. Brothers and sisters, the scriptures had to be fulfilled that the Holy Spirit foretold through David concerning Judas, Judas who had betrayed Jesus. Now, again, thinking of our context, Peter is such a good disciple. He's been paying attention. It dawns on him, as Jesus says, you need to wait on the Spirit, and they're there and they're waiting. It dawns on Peter. Wait, hold on. The Spirit has already been working. The Spirit has already been working. Because the Spirit has given us the Hebrew scriptures. So Peter, like Jesus, makes this connection to the Spirit of God, revealing and testifying, bearing witness, we might say, to God's work. And so they engage God's word. Peter puts it this way in a letter he personally wrote, 2 Peter chapter 1, he says, Above all, you do well if you recognize this. No prophecy of scripture ever comes about by the prophet's own imagination, for no prophecy was ever born of human impulse. Rather, men carried along by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. Jesus and Peter connect the Spirit to Scripture, that the Scripture itself is truly the Spirit's testimony of God's redeeming work. And this invites Peter to relate to Scripture through the Spirit by seeking God's heart, to seek God's will, God's way, God's heart through the scriptures. You see, Jesus and Peter incorporated a Jewish method of biblical interpretation that was very prevalent in their day. And it was called Midrash. And it comes from the Hebrew word, which is the Hebrew word for to seek. Midrash was a way of reading the Hebrew scriptures by seeking God's heart, God's way, and God's work through the biblical story. In fact, what it did was it sought to respond to the contemporary issues of their time by making a connection to the unchanging biblical text. It was a way of reading the Hebrew scriptures, the what we call the Old Testament, a way of reading it that saw it play out in their day and age. And there were two main approaches approaches. There was the Midrash Halacha, which is seeking God's work through story. And so they would see cycles of stories happen again and again. And it allowed them to bring the biblical story into their day and age. And there was also the Madrash Haggadah, which was seeking to understand God's law. It was a focus on morality of how they should live. And both God's story and his law and the ways he embodied this truth in the Madrash were at the time of Jesus incredibly prevalent, and they were told through the oral tradition. So when we read the New Testament and we see Jesus critique some of when he says, you've heard that it was said, he's specifically mentioning the midrash, the oral teachings of the law. And this was so prevalent at the time that eventually the midrash was recorded and written down, and you can read it today. In the first through fifth century, they wrote down these oral teachings of the law and the story of God, and they're online, and we can read them. And those teachings shaped everyone in the region. In fact, some of our misinterpretations of scripture, when we read the Bible and we don't read it in its historical context, happen when we fail to see that actually what Jesus is talking about here is directly connected to these oral teachings that have now been written down and now that we can read today. So, for example, a topic like foot washing, or when Jesus says he came not to abolish the Hebrew scriptures, but to fulfill them, he's directly quoting and connecting to these midrash stories. It was a way of interpreting the Bible, seeing it play out in their day and age. And people do it now. There's a way of reading the scriptures that seeks to see how it plays out in our day and age. And Peter does this in verse 16, which reads, Brothers, the scripture had to be fulfilled that the Holy Spirit foretold through David concerning Judas, who became the guide for those who arrested Jesus, for he was counted as one of us and received a share in this ministry. What is happening? It's actually quite confusing for us because Peter is referencing Psalm 69, where David is writing a prayer and a psalm about his enemies who betray him and what will happen to them. Which we would expect that maybe Peter and the community of God, as they're gathering and they're praying, they would have been praying the Psalms. And so probably Peter read this particular psalm and it occurs to him, ah, hold on. What we're reading and praying about right here, this was God's plan. Because this is what Judas has done. You see, that's a that's a Midrash reading of the Hebrew text. Peter's seeing it play out right in their very eyes, and it's going to guide how they're going to relate or understand Judas and wanting to bring on another 12th disciple. So this leads to the question, by the way, if this at all interests you, praise him. Praise the Lord. This is this is like truly next level Bible nerd stuff. But it's important because it's the context in which Jesus and Peter lived and ministered, and it's a way that the Spirit might invite us to relate to God's word because it invites us to seek God and his heart in the scriptures. And one of the ways we do this is literally pretty much every Sunday that we have a sermon is a practice in midrash in seeking. Two weeks ago, Jenny preached on this very passage in Acts 1, and she talked about waiting. This this uh often we experience as a problem in our life. Waiting until we get to somewhere else. And she in the sermon talked about in those places of waiting on our life. What can we do? We can gather with God's people, we can pray, and we can search the scriptures. What she was practicing and what we communally practiced together was Midrash to see the story of God at work in this early just beginning in church play out for us now. To seek God's heart in the scriptures, and then to gather together with brothers and sisters who also seek God's heart in the scriptures. Again, in our context, in verse 14, all these continued together in prayer with one mind, together with the women, along with Mary, the mother of Jesus and his brothers. In those days, Peter stood up among the believers, a gathering of about 120 people. 120 people engaging God's word together. This was a communal Bible study. Now, I just imagine, you know, there's probably around that number here, right now. And if we were just like, hey, let's just everyone open the Bible and let's see what happens. The importance of recognizing the Spirit can work through God's word as we engage it in community. It's not just us and a personal or individual relationship with Jesus, but a communal relationship with Jesus and Jesus' word. The importance of gathering routinely with brothers and sisters to search the scriptures and engage the scriptures. And, you know, one of the things I find that for many of us, we long for that. There might have been a season in your life where that felt really normal, but maybe as we get older, it just feels a little harder because the pressures of our world are such that many of us can become busy. If I said to you, hey, do you want to be part of a community that routinely engages God's word? Most would probably say yes. Some might be honest and say, you know, I should say yes, but no, and I would applaud if that's where you are, your honesty. But most of us would say, you know what, yeah, I aspire to that. But often there's a disconnect between this desire and this practice because we're busy. And I feel that. I feel that. I mean, between the pressures of just life and uh parenting and to-dos, it can be hard to routinely engage in a group that engages God's word. Megan and I are a part of a city group, and almost every day we have a city group. I wonder if I might be sick. Like, did I cough? I think I might have coughed earlier. Now Megan's different. Megan wakes up and she's just eager. She, when we go on a walk in the neighborhood, she hopes the neighbors come outside because she wants to talk to them. Because she's, you know, like really good with people. I hope they stay in their house. And you might be wondering, like, well, why did you become a pastor? I don't know. Sometimes I don't know. Even though I love the people in my city group, and it's truly always a reward when I actually get there because it's so life-giving. It can be hard and distracting, and I'm tired, and it's like, you know, there's things going on. But the cumulative effect of gathering with brothers and sisters, where we're united in God's word, has such a transforming power in our life. And you might not feel it each time you meet. In fact, you pretty much won't. There's rarely a city group where we gather and we open God's word and we engage, and we're like, holy smokes, y'all! I mean, Acts two, right here, like the spirit showed up and we're speaking in tongues, and this is getting crazy. It's just often ordinary, just ordinary conversation around God's word, but the power of that formation in our life. God's Spirit empowers life through community, engaging scripture. Also, God's Spirit can empower God's word to be alive in us when we pray. To pray for the Spirit's wisdom and illumination. In verse 14, what are they doing? All these gathered together in prayer. They are praying the Psalms. Again, a passage we referenced earlier, Peter, how he thinks about the Spirit in Scripture. He connected it to what? To the spirit working in the prophet's imagination. This prophetic imagination. The spirit was so powerful that it worked through people, through flawed, ordinary people, like Moses and David and Peter himself. And one of the ways the spirit worked is it worked in their thoughts and their imagination. Now, growing up for me, I grew up in these word-centered churches, which praise God. I mean, I'm a good old-fashioned Bible-crunchy person. Show me in scripture. That's like, you know. But often the way it was pitted against the spirit's work is we didn't trust our imagination. Or we didn't have space that the spirit could work through our imagination. And the real fallacy in that thought and that way of being is our whole life is motivated by imagination. I mean, what you think about when it comes to your work, what it means to be a boss or employee or a neighbor, or a mother or father, or child, a son or daughter, everything about the way you and I embody life is shaped by our imagination. We have experienced something that has captured our imagination and pulls us in a direction. And what Peter is saying is this that the spirit can capture a person's imagination and pull them toward the heart of God. And I don't know about you, but for me, I want that. I want my imagination, the whys behind the what's of what I do, the values of my life, the things I commit to and I'm about, to not predominantly to be shaped by the imagination of 24-7 news, which sadly it is for many today. Or to predominantly be shaped by what feels good in the moment, or to predominantly be shaped by any film or video game or these things that do shape us, or our phones and YouTube, but how can they be shaped, our imagination to be shaped by the Spirit of God? And one of the ways the Spirit does that is through scripture. And not just through just reading and study and things of that nature, but through praying the Bible. That's what they would have done. They would have not just been studying Psalms, they would have been praying Psalms because they saw the Bible as alive and active in their life. What does it look like for you and for me to actually inject the Bible from our mind into our heart and into our very bodies? To eat God's word, to feast on God's word. One of the ways this can happen is through routinely praying scripture. One um a pastor captures it this way, Walter Brugeman, who wrote a tremendous work called The Prophetic Imagination. He says, questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. Can you feel that? Many of us go to implementation with God's word right away. What do I do? He says, questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. What might it look like for the spirit for us to create space in our life for the spirit to stir and work and reimagine us on what it means to be human, on what it means to be a mom or a dad, a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, or a boss, or an entrepreneur, or an artist? How might the spirit use all of that to stir us toward God's heart and God's vision in life? And lastly, again, we're asking the question: how might the spirit empower God's word to bring life for us today? We can do it by application, applying the scriptures to all of life. Again, Peter and these 120 people, as they're gathered together, they're waiting on the Spirit. And they're like, you know what? Hold up. God's Spirit's already been working, He's been working through His Word. Let's look at let's look at Scripture. Because they viewed Scripture as applying to all of life. It wasn't just something for their Sundays to hear and engage with, but actually, like right now, what is God's word? How might we seek it and see a pattern and a way of living in God's world today? The Apostle Paul captures this routinely in his letters. One real prominently in 2 Peter chapter 3, Paul is writing this personal letter to someone he was mentoring, a young pastor named Timothy, and he says this. Ruch, the breath of God. Present in Genesis 1. The way the Hebrew people conceived of the Spirit was the ruch, the very breath of God, the animating, life-giving presence of God. All scripture is God-breathed. In other words, all scripture is spirited by God and is useful. See, Paul's is just a good old pragmatist. You know, scripture isn't just this stuff from of old, it's actually very, very useful. Makes me think of Thomas Latrain. Any amens? No. Our oldest Bennett, when he was a kid, loved Thomas. And how did that song go? Anyone want to stand up and like sing this? A really there's two, there's four, there's six. All right, well, we'll we'll stop there. Thomas wants to be a really useful engine. Which you know, as parents, we kind of had to help our kids with something like there's more to life than just being useful. But for for Paul, he thinks of God's word as man, this is just really useful. Useful for what? For teaching, for rebuking. For correcting. And for training in things that make us feel really smart. Because that's why God gave us his word, so that we would study it and feel really smart about it. Is the passage up there? Oh, it was. Let's put it back. Okay. For training in righteousness. In other words, the Bible is useful to teach, correct, rebuke, and to train us to embody what? God's way, God's heart, God's vision for life. So that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for a few of the good works God might call now for every good work. You know, if you ever go through training, what's the expectation? It's not to just learn a few things. You know, I have to talk about sports at least once. So here's my time. Spring training for baseball. They gather together, and contrary to the machine pitch baseball team that I teach, there's a lot of different, um, they both they we both are using a base, we're all using a baseball. Um, but for the major leaders, they're like being equipped to be professionals. We're just having fun. You know, if I showed up at the machine pitch softball practice, like, listen up, kids. All right, gather around, look. We're playing the comets on Saturday, and this is important. All right, you need to train, and I can just imagine like Rocky music going in the background, you know, kids are like doing the leg things. You need to train, you need to get it together because this is important. We're gonna, we're professionals. The par the parents, if if if you ever heard me say that to your child, take your children away in fear. Because we're here to have fun. Yes, there is a training component, but this is fun, it's sports, it's baseball. They're really being trained. If you go through something and you call it training, you are expecting, you're being equipped to do something. Paul expects God's word to be useful in such a way that it is training us, it is forming us, it is shaping us. And that's what the Spirit longs to do for you and for me. To give us a vision, to work in our imagination toward a future that feels good and beautiful and compelling. And then as we engage God's word, we begin to be formed and we get to be shaped that we can actually embody God's way toward that vision. We are being shaped today. Our imaginations, our bodies, everything we do, and all the ways we inhabit this world, we are pulled in our direction. God, in his grace, gives us his spirit and his scripture to train us, to form us, and to pull us into his story. As we prepare now for holy communion, we're practicing this. We are, we practice holy communion because Jesus instructed us to in his word. And we take God's word seriously, and so we seek to live it. But we also, in taking communion, are mindful that the Spirit always seeks to nourish us. That God's word and his way isn't just hypotheticals for a pastor to talk about and us to think about, but actually, God wants to nourish us with his very presence. And so communion is a time for us to practice that together. Would you read the underlying portions aloud with me?