The Abiding Meaning of Pentecost # 4

Pentecost Linked with all the Old Testament Scriptures (continued)

Now as to the Person, life and teaching of the Lord Jesus in the days of His flesh:

Pentecost was a recognition and a proof of all Christ came to be, and all He taught, and all He did.

All the spiritual value of that comes by Pentecost into its full vindication.

His claim to sovereignty is established by the moral and spiritual results of the Holy Spirit coming into the life of a child of God and transforming it, by causing it to know in experience (not by intellectual argument) the life of His sovereign triumph, that inward reigning in life by Christ Jesus. All that the Lord Jesus taught and did is vindicated by the Holy Spirit in working into the life of the believer the victory of that resurrection life of the Lord Jesus!

The Lord Jesus was vindicated by a mighty experience of the Holy Spirit! It is the spiritual and moral value of the Person, and the bringing of the fruits of that by the Holy Spirit into the life; it is the change the Holy Spirit makes in the moral life that is the vindication of the Lord Jesus. You cannot divorce moral responsibility and spiritual experience, there is no vindication thus, but chaos and contradiction. Pentecost is the climax to the Person, work, and teaching of the Lord Jesus in the days of His flesh, as it gives spiritual and moral value to those in whom He dwells; i.e., proved in experience by the Holy Spirit.

Why did the Holy Spirit come? To make experimental in the life, by the same Holy Spirit, all that Jesus is for the believer. This is the progressive and constructive work of the Holy Spirit, the transforming of men and women.

Pentecost was a climax in relation to the training and preparation of an instrument.

The first  chapter ends with the presentation of that instrument; the completion of the Apostolate with the inclusion of Matthias. An instrument had been trained and prepared for the continued work of the enthroned Lord. This preparation is in three parts: 

1. In the days of His flesh;
2. The forty days after His resurrection;
3. The ten days after His ascension.

~T. Austin-Sparks~
(continued with # 5)