Key Life Network

Guest (Male): Welcome to Key Life and to day three of a sermon we're listening through called "Is Pentecost Reproducible?" Steve gave the sermon back on July 16, 1974. Yesterday, Steve was talking about how the apostles were committed. I mean, committed, not playing games. He also touched on the vital importance of knowledge and obedience.

We're going to have a good time today picking up right where we left off. All of this is brought to you by The Vault Project, our effort to rescue and preserve vintage sermons from Steve by digitizing old tapes and reels. We release a new sermon series at the start of every month, and we just made available the entire TV series Steve did with Tony Campolo back in the mid-90s called "Hashing It Out."

Access all of it and learn how you can play an important role in this ongoing project at keylife.org/vault. For now, let's rejoin Steve in a sermon called "Is Pentecost Reproducible?"

Steve Brown: Obedience. One of the great things about this church is the way that everything that's ever said or mentioned from any pulpit, any teaching in this church, is always taped. We have a record of every sermon ever given in this church and every teaching on the Word of God. I've just had a delightful time.

I've been scooping back into boxes that are so dusty you have to peel the dust off before you get down into the box and get out sermons to listen to. Gladys Aylward was here a number of years ago, and this past week, I've been listening to her sermon. There were a lot of good things in it, but the thing I remember most about her was her obedience in her testimony.

Secondly, the statement that she made about the disciples. "Jesus said, 'Come,'" she said, "and they came." She repeated that over and over again. "Jesus said, 'Come,' and they came. They didn't call a committee meeting; they came." Obedience. Sometimes you ought to get to hear that tape. It's just a tremendous woman of God.

Let's move on. Fourthly, I want you to notice, not only commitment, not only knowledge, and not only obedience, but something I bet you haven't picked out: flexibility. Flexibility. Peter didn't know that he was going to preach that sermon, but he did. The disciples didn't know what was going to happen when the wind started stirring, but they sat there and they waited.

When God sent these men and women out on the streets, they had never had a training session on how to witness on the street. They didn't have an institutional structure to train them and to bring them up, but they went because they were flexible. Do you know the difference between institutionalism and institutions?

Institutions are necessary. Institutionalism is the hardening of ecclesiastical arteries. Anytime two people get together to do anything, you've got an institution. You can't avoid that. No matter what the anarchists say, you can't avoid that. It's necessary. There's going to be an institution as long as two people get together to do anything.

But when it develops into hard and fast rules that we always do it this way because we've always done it this way, then it becomes institutionalism, and that's a sin. If Jesus were to come in the flesh walking down the aisles of this church today—and I know we have kind of an ecumenical gathering on Wednesday evening—if Jesus were to walk in here and tell us something to do, do you know what would happen?

Presbyterians would say, "I'm going to go check Calvin's Institutes." The Episcopalians would get out their trusty old prayer book. The Nazarenes would get out their manual, the Methodists their discipline, the Catholics would call the bishops, and the Baptists would wonder if it was doctrinally pure.

You ought to get to know these three young men. Just great fellows: Guy, Bill, and Steve. They came in the other morning to talk, and they had been over at that rock concert at the Orange Bowl. They had been witnessing, handing out tracts, and talking to people about the Lord. It was just beautiful. They asked me a question that I thought was rather funny at the time.

They said, "Pastor, would it be all right if we brought some of the kids to the church?" I said, "What do you mean 'be all right'? Of course! Bring as many as you want." I think it was Steve who said, "Well, they may be a little bit motley. They may not look the way that you think they ought to look." And I said, "Bring them anyway, because we're flexible enough."

Or we ought to be. If we aren't, they'll make us that way. In a church that I once served, I saw a woman who was a racist sit in a congregation where a young Black girl came to know Christ. With tears streaming down her face, she testified to what God had done in her life. This white woman, who just had refused to have anything to do with Blacks, went up to this Black girl's mother and just hugged her.

The laughter of heaven fell over onto our church. There's a book that I have in my study that ought to burn, except that it has such a good title: "Surprised by God." Sometimes we forget that God is a God of surprises and that He surprises often.

Fifthly, I want you to notice that prayer is central to Pentecost, to the filling of the Spirit. Back in that first chapter of Acts, you see some of the things that were going on in that upper room. The 14th verse of the first chapter of Acts, flip back and look at it. What does it say? "All these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer."

In another church that I once served, the youth program was falling apart. A young fellow we felt had been given the gift of youth ministry volunteered by the grace of God to work on the youth ministry. The first thing he said is, "I'm going to call a meeting an hour a week of every youth advisor in this church." What we needed more than anything was another meeting, so people began to rebel about it.

They said, "What are you going to need for us to meet one hour a week with you?" He said, "We're going to talk for 15 minutes and we're going to pray for 45." I want you to know the young people in that church were on fire. The Great Awakening in America happened not so much because of the great preaching of George Whitefield, but because of the great praying of Jonathan Edwards.

The Asbury Revival, maybe you've read about it. There's a little book published by Revell called "One Divine Moment." It was a tremendous revival at Asbury College not too long ago, maybe four or five years ago. One of my friends was a student there. He came to my study and I asked him what had happened. He said, "Because for months and months and months, a group of students had been led of God to covenant together and to pray for a revival."

When Billy Graham was in Boston the first time in the late 40s or maybe early 50s, what God did was just magnificent. There are so many people who are pastors and missionaries in some aspect of full-time ministry all over New England as a result of that one week. He came for a week at Park Street Church and then the crowds just overflowed.

This was before Billy Graham was so widely known. They had to go down to Mechanic's Hall and thousands and thousands of people came to know Christ. So many people went into the ministry as a result of that. Do you think that happened because Billy Graham was so great? Somebody was at Park Street Church during that time, and they happened by mistake to open the door of the study of Harold John Ockenga.

The pastor was on his knees with tears streaming down his cheeks, crying out to God to bring revival. When John and I were talking this afternoon, he's done some study this year in awakenings and movements of God's Spirit. John said that as they've looked at it, they've found there isn't hardly a single awakening in history that God didn't, maybe years before, call a few people together, covenanting together to pray that God's Spirit would move.

If you aren't praying for this church daily and this church bombs, it may be your fault. If you aren't praying for the ministry teams, the music ministry, Key Life, and the people in the women of the church and the prayer groups—if you aren't praying for all of these things daily and they bomb, it may be your fault. Francis Asbury was one of the early Methodist circuit riders in America.

He had a tremendous, hard job and rode thousands of miles on horseback. He studied with a little desk that he put up on his horse. When he became so busy that the workload was just driving him down, this is what he wrote in his diary: "Henceforth, resolve to pray seven times each day instead of five as formerly."

Finally, not only was commitment, knowledge, obedience, flexibility, and prayer present, but in the first Christian Pentecost, we find fellowship present. Acts 1:14 again: "And all these with one accord devoted themselves to prayer together with the women." In Acts 2:43 through the end of that chapter, we're going to talk about the biblical doctrine of brotherhood the next time we study Acts.

We're going to see how brotherhood flows from relationship with Jesus Christ. Fellowship is so important. God's work is teamwork. There are no individual Christians. Nobody can do it by themselves. Somebody told me recently about a ship that was anchored in Boston. Unless you've lived in Boston, you don't know how really pagan sailors can be.

This ship was anchored in Boston and on that whole ship, there were two Christians. About three or four weeks later, there were some 35 Christians. What happened? Well, these two Christians didn't know each other. They'd been sailing on this ship for a long time and they just didn't know each other, so nothing happened.

Then they met, and the sparks began to fly. Why is that? Because God's work is teamwork. When Young Life moved into New England, it moved with one person and it bombed. The next time they went, they went with the team, and what's happening there is exciting. God's work is teamwork. Pentecost and fellowship are inseparable.

Guest (Male): Thank you, Steve. Tomorrow, we will wrap up this timely sermon and I hope you will join us for that. As I've mentioned, you can find this sermon and the other 59 sermons in this Acts series right now at keylife.org/vault. That's V-A-U-L-T. Thanks to your financial support, we are able to digitize these old tapes and reels, preserving these timeless messages of grace for us and future generations.

I hope you'll join us in that effort. So, hidden agendas. We pretend that they're just for politicians, but we all have them. We're phony, afraid, sinful, and frankly, the pressure to act like we're okay is killing us and hurting those we love. In his book "Hidden Agendas," Steve invites us to drop our masks and discover the depth of God's love and grace.

We created a special booklet based on that book, and we would love to send it to you for free. So call us right now at 1-800-KEY-LIFE. That's 1-800-539-5433. You can also email Steve at steve@keylife.org to order that booklet, or go to keylife.org/contact for our mailing address. Again, ask for the booklet called "Hidden Agendas."

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