MONDAY 18 MAY
Acts 2.1-21
They were all filled with the Holy Spirit

The Day of Pentecost is the most exciting day in the Church’s calendar. It’s exciting because we see God the Holy Spirit acting in a very powerful way. As He came upon the gathered assembly of Jesus’ followers, about 120 people, they experienced a sound like a rushing, mighty wind and then tongues of fire lighted above their heads. When the Holy Spirit filled each one of them, they began to speak in languages they had never learnt. In the church of the Acts, this became a sign that they had received the Holy Spirit. Peter was later convinced that it was okay to baptize gentiles (non-Jews) because Cornelius and his household had spoken in tongues (Acts 10.45-48; 11.15-17).

Tongues, or speaking in other languages, is a supernatural gift of God. Sometimes it is a known language that the one speaking in tongues has never learnt. An example of this happened in India, when in 1993 I had prayed for a priest, Michael Vattahil, to be filled with the Spirit. A few weeks later he was ministering to tribal people and found himself preaching in the Bili language, which he had never learnt!

Sometimes a message is given in another language and someone else interprets it. At other times, tongues is given to us as a personal prayer language which people use when they are on their own. When they pray in tongues, the Holy Spirit prays with them and they are drawn closer to God. As they are drawn closer to God, they experience His power in their lives. The Holy Spirit guides them the way He wants them to go.

Not all who are filled with the Spirit receive the gift of tongues. I believe it’s available for all who want it and seek it. There are counterfeits so not all who have tongues have the Spirit.

Whenever people are filled with the Spirit, they have a tremendous love of God and of others. They have a desire to share God’s love and tell others how great God is. Spirit-filled people are given power in their ministry to bring others to faith for salvation and healing and lots of things. The miraculous becomes normal Christian living for them.

PRAYER: Father, fill us all with your Holy Spirit. Give us the patience to wait and pray with repentant hearts until we overflow with your Spirit. Give us power to love you and love each other and power to bring others to faith in you, through Jesus, the baptizer with the Holy Spirit. Amen.

TUESDAY 19 MAY
Ezekiel 37.1-14; Psalm 104.29-30
I will put my Spirit in you and you will live

We have read the parable of the valley of dry bones coming to life. They represent the people of Israel who have lost touch with God and become spiritually dead. God wants His people to be filled with vitality and life so He says to them, “I will put my Spirit in you and you will live. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken and I have done it!” (Ezekiel 37.14).

This prophecy was fulfilled on the Day of Pentecost. The full life of God that had been absent from the Jews but which had filled Jesus (the Holy Spirit) came fully into the lives of the disciples of Jesus. On this day the Church of Jesus Christ was created and the beginning of the renewal of the world began. This fulfilled another Old Testament prophecy in Psalm 104.30: “When you send your Spirit they are created and you renew the face of the earth.” The Day of Pentecost was the birthday of the Church. It was the day that Jesus’ believers were filled with life. As long as people have obeyed all the teachings of Jesus, they have remained filled with life, but whenever they have disobeyed Jesus and grieved His Spirit, all the life has gone out of them. Satan tries his best to rob the Church of life and often he succeeds. That is why the Church needs constant renewal.

God wants His Church to be alive because He will only add new people to alive churches. The Day of Pentecost is a good time to seek this renewal. Let’s all come with repentant hearts because we have fallen short of obeying all Jesus’ teachings. Let’s pray, ask and believe for Jesus to re-fill us with His Holy Spirit. Let’s pray that He will fill us with the power of His love to renew not only the Church, but the whole world.

PRAYER: Jesus, we confess we are not as active as we should be. Cleanse us with your precious blood and re-fill us with your Holy Spirit, that we may be filled with life and vitality. Enable us to be your instruments in renewing the whole world, through the power of Jesus our Lord and Saviour. Amen.

WEDNESDAY 20 MAY
Romans 8.22-27
The Holy Spirit helps us to pray

Verses 22 to 25 remind us that we are all longing for something we have not yet received – the full free life with God. As we wait patiently for what we hope for and long for, there is a lot of suffering and groaning. God provides us with a wonderful Helper who helps us get through all the struggles of life on earth and who prepares us for life in heaven. This Helper is, of course, the Holy Spirit.

In the story of Corrie Ten Boon, the Dutch lady who suffered in Nazi prisons for hiding Jews and working with the Dutch underground, the only way she was able to get through prison life was to pray and read the Bible she had smuggled in. Prayer is the only way we Christians can survive in a world becoming more and more hostile to God. God recognizes this, of course, which is why He gives us the Holy Spirit to help us when we pray. He helps us by coming alongside us and praying with us. Sometimes when He prays with us, He enables us to pray in other languages we haven’t learnt (tongues) and at other times we just sense His presence and His power and we know He is anointing us.

When we are praying for people in trouble or people who will end up in trouble because they do not know the Lord, the Holy Spirit helps us by enabling us to fully identify ourselves with the lives of His people. We feel all their agonies and concerns. We enter a bit into their sufferings and we groan. As the Spirit groans with us, He opens our eyes to see fully God’s concern for the suffering people; that God is weeping and groaning for all people who do not know Him. The Holy Spirit shows us the mind of God and that it’s not God’s will for the people to suffer. This leads us into meaningful prayer that enables God to bring people to faith and replace their suffering and take away their burdens. Our prayer is so much an important part of God’s plan for the salvation and healing of everyone. Only with the Spirit’s help can we pray effectively.

PRAYER: Father, we thank you for empowering your Church with the Holy Spirit through your Son, Jesus. As we share the Good News with all the world, may we see many miraculous signs confirming that we are preaching the true Gospel, through Jesus our Saviour and Lord. Amen.

THURSDAY 21 MAY.
John 14.15-26
More help from the Holy Spirit

Jesus promises ‘another counselor’ – the Holy Spirit – to all who love Him and obey His command to love everyone as He loves us. The Greek word He uses is ‘parakletos’, which means literally ‘one called alongside to help’. The main help the Holy Spirit gives is to make the Father and Jesus real to us and enable us to experience their presence and their love in our lives. This is fantastic! It really is! He shows us how Jesus and the Father and the Spirit are one and shows us how we can get close to God and link our lives up with Him. We never feel alone when the Holy Spirit is bringing us into God’s wonderful presence.

The Holy Spirit not only enables us to see Jesus and the Father when He is revealed to us, but something much better than Just seeing God – as wonderful as that is. God comes to us and makes His home with us! Think about that – God at home with us! It blows your mind! God becomes more than a personal friend; He becomes part of our family! No wonder we love Him so much. Sometimes we don’t realise that God has made His home with us and how much He loves us. The Holy Spirit keeps us alerted to God’s love. He teaches us so much. He does this by making the words of the Bible, spoken by Jesus, come alive for us. The Holy Spirit makes God so real. He makes Him come down right into our hearts.

PRAYER: Come Holy Spirit, fill us all right now. Show us the Father and Jesus. Enable experience their love and experience God being at home in our hearts. We pray this through Jesus Christ our love giver. Amen.

FRIDAY 22 MAY
1 Corinthians 12.1-13
The Holy Spirit gives us spiritual gifts

When we are filled with the Holy Spirit we are baptized into Jesus’ body. The Spirit enables us to do much work for Jesus by giving us special spiritual gifts. He first makes us sure that Jesus is Lord and Jesus is to be obeyed. He stops us going against Jesus. We all work for Jesus in different ways. The Holy Spirit gives us different spiritual gifts. There is one list of gifts in this passage and another in Romans, Chapter 12, and more in Ephesians, Chapter 4 (look them up in your Bible). Now let us look at these spiritual gifts. They help us develop a better relationship with God.

1. The message of wisdom. This is supernatural wisdom that enables us to make the right decisions in life.
2. The message of knowledge. God gives supernatural knowledge which helps the gifted one minister to people (e.g. in 1974 God told Derek Prince, an American evangelist, that someone in a meeting had had a spinal fusion operation. My wife went forward and her spinal fusion was totally healed – no back pain for years!
3. Faith. Supernatural faith which enables people to believe for salvation and healing for others.
4. Gifts of healing. Some people have special healing gifts with which they pray for the sick and they recover.
5. Miraculous powers. All sorts of miracles, e.g. multiplying food, walking on water, etc.
6. Prophecy. Speaking messages from God.
7. Discerning spirits. The knowledge when people are really filled with the Holy Spirit or are faking or filled with an evil spirit.
8. Speaking in tongues. Messages from God in an unknown language.
9. Interpretation. Interpreting the message in tongues into English or a known language.

All these gifts enable the church to minister as Jesus did.

PRAYER: Come fill us with your Holy Spirit, Lord God. Give us all the gifts of your Holy Spirit that we may as a body minister as Jesus did, through Jesus our Saviour. Amen.

SATURDAY 23 MAY
John 15.26-27; 16.4b-15
The work of the Holy Spirit

For three years the world knew the direct ministry of Jesus. In this passage we see Jesus preparing the disciples for when He would leave them. He promised them He would send the Holy Spirit to take over His ministry. The Spirit first shows the believers all the truths about Jesus. When we are filled with the Holy Spirit, we have no doubt that Jesus is the divine Son of God who came to pay the price for our sins, and to die and rise again so that all peoples can be brought back to a living relationship with God and have eternal life. One of the main works of the Holy Spirit is to keep the people coming to Jesus so that they can be saved. Firstly, He convicts people of their guilt and their sin. The word for convict in Greek is ‘elencho’ which means expose, refute and convince. The Holy Spirit works in people’s hearts to convince them that they have sinned. He exposes their sin and shows them they have to get rid of it through repentance and faith.

The Holy Spirit also convinces people that Jesus died to make them righteous; that is to bring them into a right relationship with God by paying the price for their sins on the cross. The Holy Spirit convinces us all that Satan has been thrown down and defeated by Christ’s death on the cross. Once people have responded to the conviction of their sins by repenting and trusting Jesus to cleanse them, the Holy Spirit guides them into all truth.

He takes all the teachings of Jesus and makes them known to all new believers and enables them to grow holy like Jesus.

PRAYER: Lord Jesus, send your Holy Spirit to work with us. We want to know everything about God. May He convict us of our sins and lead us to get rid of them through repentance and faith in you. May He convince us that we are one with you and our enemy is defeated. May He take all of what is you and make it known to us that we may grow to be like you, Jesus our Saviour and Lord. Amen.

SUNDAY 24 MAY
PENTECOST SUNDAY
THIS WEEK'S MESSAGE

Today is one of the most wonderful days In the Church’s year because we remember when God poured out His Holy Spirit on the church and brought it to life.

One hundred and twenty of Jesus closest followers were gathered together to celebrate the Jewish feast of Pentecost (Harvest Thanksgiving). They had been praying continually since the Ascension of Jesus ten days before.

As they were praying Jesus kept His promise to them. He gave them the Holy Spirit.

They were filled with power as the Holy Spirit came upon them. The power of the Holy Spirit gave them fantastic new life. It enabled them to be like Jesus and to do all the mighty things that Jesus had done.

They had no doubt that they were filled with power from on high. They experienced God working miraculously in their midst. They heard a sound like rushing mighty wind.

Tongues of fire rested above each one’s head and they began to speak in languages they had never learnt. All the fear that they had vanished and they went out boldly proclaiming the Good news of Jesus: that He had died for everyone’s sins and risen again to give them new life.

Because the Church was given new life on that day we often call it the Church’s birthday.

It’s the day when the Church became the body of Christ on earth. WE are the Body of Jesus. He has filled us with His Holy Spirit and has commissioned Us to carry on doing all that He did when He was on earth.

Sometimes we do go wrong and grieve the Holy Spirit and He leaves us and we lose His power. To get back on track we have to repent and be cleansed by the Blood of Jesus and ask Him to fill us again with the Holy Spirit.

Let’s pray that we will receive a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit as we celebrate the feast of Pentecost Today. May God give us miraculous signs and real evidence that He is working powerfully in our midst. May He make us very bold in proclaiming the Good News.

PRAYER Father thank You for pouring out Your Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost .Pour out Your Holy Spirit on us today. Fill us with love and make us powerful witnesses. Through Jesus our Saviour. Amen