Pentecost: God's Birthday Gift 2025

"Come Holy Spirit. Breathe new life into me. Fill me with your power; fill me with your love…..”

I will pour out my Spirit on all people…..

What does this mean – to be filled with the Holy Spirit? 

There’s a story about a man who owned a sheep ranch in Texas during the great depression. Life was tough. He did not have enough money to pay his mortgage – and like many others, struggled to make ends meet. Each day, he worried about how he would pay his bills. By and by, a seismographic crew turned up and said there might be oil under his land. Could they do a test drill. A lease was signed, and they went ahead. 1100 feet down, a huge oil reserve was struck. The sheep rancher owned it all. He owned the oil and mineral rights. He had been living on handouts - yet had been sitting, all his life, on a fortune. Now he was a millionaire. He owned all that oil with its tremendous potential, yet he had never realized it, never even known that it was there.

Maybe that story says something to us. We might feel helpless  - unaware of the extraordinary power that we have  - a power that is lying just below the surface in our minds and hearts; the power that comes from the Holy Spirit.

How easily we fail to appreciate the resources that God has given to us; we are unaware of the tremendous source of power that resides inside us. 

Each of us has been given by God our own personal Pentecost - a day on which God has imparted to us the gift of the Holy Spirit.

It is this indwelling, this personal day of Pentecost, which we pray for, every time I pour water over someone and baptise them. It is this same indwelling that we pray for every time we go forward to receive bread and wine and ask that God will feed us and strengthen us for service. When we pray, at the end of a service, ‘Send us out in the power of the Spirit to live and work to your praise and glory’, do we really believe that the Spirit will equip us and strengthen us to do great things for God? 

When God gives us his Spirit, it means more than comfort and peace – important though those things are. God urges us to look forwards. One of the titles that Jesus gives the Spirit is ‘the Comforter’. Comforter suggests that the Spirit is there to support us in times of trouble – there to take care of us. And whilst that is undoubtedly true, it’s not the whole story. The Greek word used for Comforter has about it, in addition, a sense of being The Provoker, the Challenger. The Spirit urges us to step out of our comfort zone, and take on new challenges. 

The Spirit calls us to bold and radical action. But, in calling us to action, He promises to be with us. With the calling comes the gifting. The Spirit equips us for all that we need in order to work with Him:

   gifts designed for the building up of the body of Christ,

   gifts designed for the individual ministries to which we each are called,

   gifts to deepen and grow or our spiritual lives.

The prophet Joel, in his prophecy of the last days, mentions some of these gifts that have been granted by God through his Spirit (Joel 2:28):

   gifts of visions and dreams

   gifts of prophecy - poured out upon our sons and our daughters, young and old alike.

And Paul - who offers us our most systematic teaching on the gifts of the Spirit, lists some of these gifts that God gives and explores with the Corinthian congregation how those gifts can be used and abused (1 Corinthians 12).

It’s quite a list:  

   - teaching, discernment, exhortation, hospitality, intercession, words of wisdom, prophecy, an extra helping of faith, administration, helping others, and the gift of mercy.

That’s quite a list, but notice – when we talk about spiritual gifts, we’re not offered personal gifts to use for our own self-gratification. The Holy Spirit is not some great Santa Claus in the sky who asks us, ‘and what toys would you like to have, young man?’ The gifts of the Spirit are intended to build up the body of Christ. They are spiritual gifts to use for the benefit of other people and to build God’s Kingdom, not merely to indulge ourselves in, selfishly. 

These spiritual gifts can be distinguished from the natural talents that we’re born with - they are gifts of our second birth - and give us the ability to minister to others.

What gifts do you have? Make that a focus for your prayers – ‘Here I am Lord, use me!’

Allow God to speak to you and identify within yourself what God has given to you - to use in His work. And then, step out in faith. Trust in God; seek to use your spiritual gifts.

What gifts has God given to you?

Discovering our gifts is the best way of ensuring that we get the most out of life. There can no better way of achieving fulfilment than to discover our God-given potential for living. 

It may be that we’re not very good at discerning our own gifts. Sometimes, it feels much easier to see the gifts in other people than to appreciate that we ourselves have gifts. That’s why the gift of encouragement is so important. It’s good to encourage others by helping them to discover their own gifts and abilities. 

That is kind of what happened in the story of the sheep farmer – the oil was there all the time – he simply didn’t know it. It took someone else to see what lay beneath the surface - and then, he discovered that he was a rich man - his life of poverty was transformed into a life of abundance. He found what had always been there - and he used it - and it changed his life.

That is what the Spirit is longing to do for us. 

The Holy Spirit gives us what we need to build the church: a work to which each of us is called, and which, when we use our gifts as we are meant to - transforms us, our church, and our world - into what God intends us to be.

PRAYER:  

Dear Lord – thank you for the gift of your Holy Spirit. Help me to identify the gifts that He has given me, to share in your work,to help my brothers and sisters and to build up Your Church. May I be a stronger and better light to the world.  Help me to celebrate these gifts and to use them...  Come Holy Spirit, fill me..... fill me over and over again.