My Pentecost Sermon topic was : “Come Holy Spirit”
My longer Sermon topic was “Heart-felt Rivers of Living Water at Pentecost” (John 7:37-39)
Have you noticed that there is a growing interest among many Christians in the Jewish feasts, including the Day of Pentecost/Shavuot? Liturgical churches, like ours, use the red colour to symbolize the fire of the Holy Spirit. Ironically, many Pentecostal churches don’t celebrate the day of Pentecost, though that seems to be changing.
Janice and I just wrote an article on our hero entitled E. Stanley Jones on the Power of Pentecost. E. Stanley Jones loved the day of Pentecost, dealing extensively with Pentecost in many of his twenty-eight books. The 2026 Book of the Year Christ of Every Road by E. Stanley Jones is specifically called “A Study in Pentecost.” Jones was very big, like Bishop Peter, on the surrender of the will.
Jones wanted each us to experience the life-changing power of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit, by the way, is not an impersonal force like with Star Wars, but rather God himself. The Holy Spirit, having more personality than we do, can be grieved by our selfish, hurtful behaviours. The Holy Spirit can be resisted, quenched, and vexed. The Holy Spirit is a gentleman. He will often just sit there in the back of the room waiting for us to actually welcome him. The Holy Spirit waits to be received rather than force himself on us. This is particularly true with the gift of tongues. If you want to receive that gift, you have to ask.
E. Stanley Jones, who founded the Christian Ashram retreat in 1930, started each Ashram with three questions during the time of the Open Heart. Why did you come? What do you want? What do you need? Let me ask a few of you to briefly answer this on our Day of Pentecost.
The Day of Pentecost is celebrated fifty days after Easter/Passover. That is why it is called Pentecost, which literally means ‘fifty’ in Greek. The Jewish feast of Shavuot/Pentecost is based on the moon’s lunar calendar rather than the Gregorian solar calendar. While they occurred on the same day in 2022 and 2025, the Jewish and Christian Pentecost can sometimes be weeks apart.
Shavuot in Hebrew means “Weeks”, referring to the seven weeks of time from Passover to Pentecost. Exodus 23:16 calls it the Festival of Harvest, referring to the offering of the first fruits (two loaves of bread) from the spring wheat Harvest
Rabbinic tradition links Shavuot to the giving of the Ten Commandments/Torah to Moses in Exodus 19 on Mount Sinai. The giving of the Word/the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai is paralleled by the giving the Spirit on Mount Zion.
Shavuot is seen by Jews as their spiritual birthday as the nation of Israel. For Christians, Pentecost is the birthday of God’s people the Church when we were, as Romans 11:17-24 puts it, grafted into the Olive Tree, Israel by faith in Jesus/Yeshua the Messiah. Speaking of birthdays, our granddaughter is having her eleventh birthday this afternoon. I know this because Janice has spent much of this last week getting ready for it. Janice is an amazing cleaner. As they say, cleanliness is next to godliness. The Holy Spirit, being holy, loves to cleanse us and remove the idols of our heart. We are going to have an opportunity at the end of this sermon to renounce our idols and receive a fresh filling with the Holy Spirit.
Pentecost/Shavout is one of the three biggest Jewish festivals as well as Passover and Sukkot/Tabernacles in the fall, all of which required travelling to the temple in Jerusalem three times a year. Imagine if everyone in BC had to travel to Victoria three times a year to listen to the latest speech by our latest BC Premier (Maybe not). Or if everyone in BC had to come to downtown Vancouver to BC Place three times a year for a major sports event, like the 2010 Winter Olympics in which I was a community chaplain, or FIFA? They estimate that an extra 350,00 people will be visiting Vancouver for FIFA. In Jesus’ day, Josephus said that up three million people would pack into Jerusalem, a city of only 50,000 residents, similar to the size of Vernon.
Can you imagine the difficulty of getting a good parking spot right by the Jerusalem temple, or a decently-priced hotel? The Vancouver Olympics involved 7,000 police. This FIFA event from June 13th to July 7th will have the largest police presence in Vancouver’s history.
The destruction of the Jewish Temple in AD 70 required 48,000 Roman troops. The Roman soldiers were always nervous when three times a year all the Jews gathered in Jerusalem. Anything could happen. How many remember the 2011 NHL Stanley Cup drunken riot in Downtown Vancouver? I heard yesterday that the BC beer industry is worried that people are not drinking as much, but are putting their hopes that major sports events will increase people’s consumption of alcohol, all for the good of BC’s economy, naturally. Is it a coincidence that Paul in Ephesians 5:18 contrasts getting drunk leading to dissipation, with being filled with the Holy Spirit on an ongoing repetitive basis? You need to be full of something. Will it be booze and BC Bud or worse, or will it be the Holy Spirit? The choice is yours.
In today’s John 7:37 passage, Jesus said, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this he meant the Spirit.
This imagery is paralleled by Jesus in John 4:14 “The water that I’d give you would be a fountain of water in you, springing up into eternal life.”
How many of you have ever attended an Alpha Course? Each Alpha Course has a Holy Spirit weekend, which Nicky Gumbel calls the engine of the Alpha Course. Preparing for today’s sermon, I watched Nicky Gumbel give the Holy Spirit talks in English, Spanish and French. I would like to invite Sally Start, the former founder and Ambassador of Alpha Canada, to share her testimony about being filled with the Holy Spirit.
James 3:3-12 teaches that part of our surrendering of our wills is surrendering our tongues so that God can cleanse our tongues. Have you ever cursed rather than blessed someone with your tongue? Have you ever regretted something that you spoke with your tongue and wished that you could take it back?
Has your tongue ever been a restless evil, full of deadly poison as described in James 3:8? Is your language ever salty? Is it more like the salty Dead Sea or the fresh waters of the Sea of Galilee in your speech? As James 3:11 -12 says, can both fresh water and salt water come from the same spring? A Salt spring cannot produce fresh water.
Would you like the fire of the Holy Spirit to cleanse and tame your tongue today, not with physical soap and water, but with living water bubbling up like an artesian well?
If you don’t want to speak in tongues, God will not force you. Nicky Gumbel says that there are no first-class and second-class Christians. You can be filled with the Spirit without speaking in tongues. Nicky also teaches that any believer in Jesus can potentially speak in tongues. You have to want this experience though in order to have it. It all comes down to the surrender of the will and even of the tongue. Speaking in tongues is actually a free speech issue. You are giving the Holy Spirit the freedom to speak through your tongue.
They say that initially speaking in tongues is easier for artists than accountants and engineers. It is really about letting go and let God being in control, even of our tongues.
I have privately spoken in tongues daily for forty-seven years, and have helped hundreds of others break through. Speaking in tongues is no guarantee of spiritual maturity, but it can help your prayer life, especially when you just don’t know how to pray in English. Romans 8:26-27 calls this ‘groaning in the Spirit.’ When you first break the sound barrier and start speaking in tongues, the devil will likely say that’s not it or that’s just you speaking. Of course it’s you speaking. God doesn’t speak in tongues. You do. It is under your control.
When you first speak in tongues, I recommend that you try not to listen to yourself. Focus instead on Jesus. Some receive their prayer language while taking a shower, vacuuming, or driving their car. My predecessor at St. Simon’s North Vancouver Fr Bill Ferris had just had a heart attack and was forced by his doctor to start exercising which he hated. After swimming at the Ron Andrews Rec Centre, he went to the sauna where he received the gift of tongues.
Canon Dennis Bennett in his amazing book How to Pray for the Release of the Holy Spirit, cautioned us to never ask people to imitate your tongue. We don’t believe in formulas. Sadly, many Pentecostals rarely speak in tongues after the initial experience. Dennis Bennett, who helped 25,000 break through in this area, recommended that we use it on a daily basis in our daily quiet time.
I would like to invite our treasurer and elder Bruce Jackson to share his experience about being filled with the Holy Spirit.
Being filled with the Holy Spirit is not meant to be a one-time experience that we nostalgically remember. How many have been filled with the Holy Spirit at least once? Five times? Ten times? Fifty times? One hundred times?
To be filled with the Holy Spirit, you can’t be filled with your idols. You have to renounce them and make room for the Holy Spirit in every room of your spiritual house. We often don’t want to renounce our idols as they have become attached to us and we to them. How about the idol of security, especially financial security?
John Calvin insightfully said, “Every one of us is, even from his mother’s womb, a master craftsman of idols.”
Rev. Canon Dennis & Rita Bennett emphasized the priority of renouncing our sins and idols before receiving the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. I would like to invite Wendy Crowther to share a prayer about idolatry.
Nicky Gumbel often said: No one likes to be pressurized. On Alpha weekends, Nicky often quoted Luke 11:11-13 says that if we ask God for a fish, he won’t give us a snake. He longs to give us good gifts, to pour out his Holy Spirit like living water on us. As Nicky Gumbel often says, shall we ask? I would like to invite people who want to surrender their will to the Holy Spirit to come up and receive prayer. There will be four prayer stations: two in the front and two in the back.
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