THE OUTPOURING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

From within the pattern of God’s purpose, by which He works all things according to the counsel of His sovereign will, God gives His Holy Spirit.  Simply put - it is God’s sovereign disposition.  Thus whatever said on the human side about the situation, context, and atmosphere of receiving the Holy Spirit is altogether secondary to God’s sovereign action.  In this sense, God gives when He wills, not according to human condition, but according to His overall design and purpose.  Therefore, there is a continuing mystery and humanly speaking, unpredictability about the giving of the Holy Spirit.   This was true of the first Pentecost in Jerusalem.  God had long purposed (and promised) the outpouring of His Spirit, and when the divinely planned time had arrived the Holy Spirit was given.  The disciples “tarried” to reach God’s timing.  This was God’s timetable, not man’s.  It dealt with God’s overarching plan in history.  It was an event of “the last days” according to the divine promise.  Likewise, it is important to emphasize that the movements of the Holy Spirit through history to the present day are grounded in the sovereign purpose of God, the ebb and flow of the Holy Spirit, and in particular the crescendo of the Spirit’s outpouring since 1900, points to divine intention.  God is doing it again and with such universality (“upon all flesh”) that we may surmise that “the last days” are being fulfilled before our very eyes, and that history is reaching its consummation. The critical point, the primary concern, is that it is not a matter of human concern but God’s concern.  Like the original disciples who participated in the coming of God’s Spirit because it was God’s time, so do we participate in our own day.  We are privileged to be alive in what may be the climactic outpouring of the Spirit at the end of the age.  Our concern is not unimportant, neither is our readiness to participate in what God is doing, but the basic matter again is God’s sovereign purpose.  Further, since it is a matter of the gift of the Holy Spirit, there is nothing anyone can do to earn it.  By definition a gift is freely bestowed; it cannot be worked for or bought.  It would be a serious mistake to think that while forgiveness is by grace, the gift of the Holy Spirit is by works.  And, however true it is that God sovereignly grants His Holy Spirit, it is only to those believing in Jesus Christ, those who are on The Way of Faith which leads to the constituents of faith, the observable expressions within faith that demonstrate the faith context in which the Spirit is given: prayer, obedience, yielding, expectancy. It is these attitudes of the heart and mind that herald the outpouring of God’s Spirit at any time in any age.