As Pentecost Sunday approaches I've been preparing to preach on Acts 2 and reading through the wider book. I was particularly struck by this verse: And he said to them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” And they said, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” (Acts 19:2) For a disciple not to have heard about the Holy Spirit seems to be Not A Good Thing. For those of us who are concerned to emphasise (I think rightly) the priority of preaching Christ and him crucified and who see the Spirit’s role mainly as (to use J.I. Packer’s expression) a ‘ spotlight ministry ’, drawing the attention to Christ not himself, this stress on the Spirit in Acts is important to reckon with. Is there a danger that those of us who would think of ourselves as ‘conservative evangelicals’ might be so keen to distance ourselves from the excesses of hyper-Pentecostalism and unhelpful (or downright non-Christian) pneumatologies, that we might leave people with no...
Living and preaching at the foot of the Cross