Firestorm

After the 6.30 Perth Prayer meeting last week my David mentioned how the Lord was surprisingly connecting him to zealous people across the city. I felt moved to lay hands on him and pray that God’s purposes be fulfilled through these links. As I prayed I started to see something very unusual from a well-known Pentecostal text.

“When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. 2 And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3 And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.” (Acts 2:1-5)

I saw the heavenly wind and the fiery tongues entering into all the believers as they “met together…united in prayer” (Acts 1:14). This event was far more extraordinary than you have been taught. In this sense we have been sold very short.

Acts 2:1 speaks of God’s perfect timing, because a better translation is, “When the day of Pentecost was fulfilled” (Acts 2:1) All that the old covenant feast was meant to prophetically indicate was about to happen. The first fruits of the end time harvest, the inaugurated new covenant, the coming of kingdom power, the birth of the new people of God, the Church.  But heavenly wind and fire meant much more than this. When fire fell on the sacrifices at the opening of Solomon’s Temple (2 Chron 7:1-3) Israel knew at-one-ment with God. The Pentecostal fiery tongues proclaimed reconciliation for all creation had been secured through the sacrifice of the cross (Col 1:20). The Spirit who brought order to the first fallible creation (Gen 1:2) now comes from heaven beginning an imperishable new creation (1 Pet 1:4). His fire will consume all earthly impurities leaving only a home for righteousness (2 Pet 3:10, 13). Through the Spirit the disciples at Pentecost became God’s new home, new temple and the inaugurated new creation on earth. “Baptised in the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16) they are the end-time apocalyptic community sharing in the “restoration of all things” and “regeneration” of the cosmos (Acts 3:21) They experienced the beginning of the End.

Purified within by celestial wind and fire they couldn’t compromise with this world. “All things were shared” (Acts 2:44) and corrupting influences were slain by the Spirit as alien to a colony of heaven imaging the world to come (Acts 5:1-11; Phil 3:20). Unattached to this present time, fearless witness was the norm, whatever the physical cost (Acts 4-5).

Whether such glorious things mean anything for the Church in Perth depends upon a core of folk serious willing to lose all things for the sake of Christ (Phil 3:8). Popular praying for revival is nothing more than a desire for miracles, conversions, megachurches and a Christianised society. This is not the substance of what arrived by wind and fire in hearts and lives at Pentecost. “Pentecost” today means the restoration of new creation life in the Church. Is there a remnant who will gather to pray for such wind and fire? It will come.