Revival - Acts 2 // 6 September 2026

Good afternoon.

So this morning, Scott launched our new sermon series where we're looking at revival, not how we create revival, but looking and trying to understand more about revival.

And this afternoon we're going to be looking at Acts 2.

Now we're a Pentecostal church.

We're a church that believes that the Holy Spirit is part of the Trinity, that He's alive and well, that He's operating in His church, that He gives gifts to believers at His discretion.

So understanding about and being led by the Spirit should be part of our DNA as a church.

We're an apostolic church, we're a Pentecostal church.

And what we see is that every great move of God over the decades, over the centuries, it's the Holy Spirit has been vitally involved in making those things happen.

Now, I'm not sure we can actually say that Acts 2 was revival, because that's really where it all started.

It wasn't reviving something, it was the beginning.

But what it certainly was was a tremendous move of God, uh, and and revival looks like that as we go down through the century.

So if you have your Bibles with you, turn to Acts 2.

It says, When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.

Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.

They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.

All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Now they were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.

When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment because each one heard their own language being spoken.

Utterly amazed, they asked, Aren't all these who are speaking Galileans?

Then how is it that each of us hears them in our own native language?

Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Capodicea, Pontius, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, and the parts of Libya near Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.

Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, what does this mean?

Some, however, made fun of them, saying they've had too much wine.

To save a bit of time, I'm going to skip Peter's address, okay?

So follow with me to 37.

You can read the rest of Peter's address later on if you want to.

When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart.

Peter basically told them the only way to salvation was through Jesus, that he was God.

When people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, Brothers, what shall we do?

Peter replied, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

The promises for you and your children, and for all who are afar off, for all whom the Lord God will call.

With many other words, he warned them and he pleaded with them, save yourself from this corrupt generation.

Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about 3,000 were added to their number that day.

Wow, wouldn't we like 3,000 people today?

Hear us here, wonder what the heck's going on, and come and find Jesus.

What can we glean from this massive message, this passage?

What can we understand about some of the great moves of God?

Well, firstly, it says they were all together in one place.

In the King James Translation, it actually says they were of one accord.

There was unity in the body.

If we're going to experience the fullness of God, if we're going to experience the power of the Holy Spirit, if we're going to see our communities radically transformed, then the starting point has to be unity.

And we need to be of one accord, of one mind, of one vision, of one purpose.

And that doesn't mean that we have to agree on absolutely everything, okay?

We can disagree about stuff, but we need to have a common desire to build each other up, to seek the things of God, the purposes of God, and for those things to be outworked in the place where we are.

Psalm 133, I think explains it really well.

It says, How good and pleasant is it when God's people live together in unity?

It's like precious oil poured on the head, running down on the beard, running down on Aaron's beard, down on the collar of his robe.

In other words, where there's unity, anointing flows.

It's as if the dew of Hermon were falling on Mount Zion, for the Lord bestows his blessing, even life forevermore.

You see, the result of unity amongst God's people is salvation.

It's life everlasting.

That's what unity brings about: anointing and everlasting life.

And Paul, when he speaks to the Ephesians in chapter four, it's a chapter we know and love as apostolics, if you're an apostolic, because it talks about the five ascension gifts of pastor, evangelists, teachers, prophets, apostles.

And it said that those gifts are given to bring us to the point of maturity and unity so that we might do his work of making disciples.

Where there's division in the house, we will not see growth.

It's a fact.

Revival will not happen in that sort of environment because it's painful, it's disruptive, it's exhausting, and it's not of God.

So we're not going to see God move if we don't have unity.

But you know, I believe that God does have a purpose for us.

He's put us here for a reason.

And if he could do with 12 apostles what he did on that day, what can he do with 50 people in deal?

What can he do with another 250 odd in Dover if we're united and if we're concentrating on what it is that God wants?

So if there's anything causing division or a lack of unity, we need to deal with it.

Because we can't move on unless we do that.

We'll never see the fullness of everything that God has for us as a family of believers.

Now, maybe on a personal level, you're hurting as a result of something that's happened, something that someone's done to you.

And you know, unless that wound in your life is healed, then you can never move on and be everything that God wants you to be.

There's a process to healing.

In um in February, I stupidly at the age of 60 decided to play football.

Uh, and the first week went great.

Second week, first 55 minutes went really great.

And then I tore my Achilles tendon, and it wasn't so great.

And um, I couldn't deny that I'd done it.

I could put no pressure at all on the front of my foot.

As I tried to walk off the pitch, I was doing this every time I put my foot down.

And it's taken till now, and even now, I still got a little bit of a limp.

It's taken a long time.

I've had to do exercise, I've had to go and see a physiotherapist to help me with that.

And you know, it's the same with emotional or with spiritual healing.

There is a process that has to take place, and that starts with acknowledging you've you're hurt and that there's something that needs to be done.

Nick Resky, who was here a couple of months back, he puts it like this: that unless you acknowledge that the wound is there, unless you acknowledge the hurt, you can't actually start the process of healing.

And everybody would have known that I I could have denied I'd done my Achilles, but everybody knew they could see it.

And it's the same with us.

If if we're hurting, people can see it.

And then Nick then says that that once you've if you've got a wound, you have to clean the wound.

You know, you have to get the dirt out of it, you have to get the grit out of it, the stuff that's causing uh contamination.

Because if you don't, it just gets infected, and worst case, you end up having your leg chopped off or your arm chopped off or something, having it amputated.

And part of that cleansing, I think when we're talking about emotional or spiritual healing, part of that cleansing it comes from forgiveness.

We have to forgive people, because if we don't forgive people, it just eats away at us.

And uh what Nick says is like it's not like plucking a carrot out of the ground.

You can say I've forgiven someone, and you can pluck a carrot out, and that's okay because it's just like one carrot.

But I don't think forgiveness often works like that because stuff is more like the roots of a tree than a carrot, and so you might forgive someone, you pull out one of the roots, but sometimes you see them again and like you have to forgive them again, and you pull another one of them out.

But Peter said to Jesus, How many times do I have to forgive?

And he said, You have to give 70 times seven.

There might be 490 roots you've got to pull out before you actually really get the healing.

And every time you see that person, you might have to say, Lord, help me to continue to forgive.

You might never get an apology.

Forgiving them doesn't vindicate what they've done to you, doesn't make it right.

But unless you can forgive, you can never know the freedom of moving on.

And God wants us to forgive people, he wants us to move on, he wants us to be people who thrive, people who are able to be everything He's created us to be.

But sometimes that means we have to forgive however hard it feels, however hard it might be.

And you have to, if you have a wound, once it's cleaned out, you have to bandage it, you have to support it.

Emotionally, spiritually, we need the word of God to be our support and our bandage.

The truth of what the word of God says about us, what it says about God, what it says about what Jesus has done for us, what it says about the gifts of the Spirit are for us, we need to fill ourselves with those things, fill ourselves with the word of God.

And we need to have people around us who can support us and encourage us as well, and stop us tripping over ourselves again.

And it takes time, as I said, sometimes these things don't happen overnight, and sometimes we have to keep going back and asking the Lord to help us and to heal us.

But you know, once we have gone through some of those things, once we have forgiven people, once we've been healed of hurt and pain, those things can actually sometimes become real strengths.

It's weird.

With my leg, I've had to be doing these exercises to like go up on my toes.

I've been painting the side of the house yesterday, and uh I was stood up on the ladder.

And if you've ever been on a ladder and you haven't been on it for quite a while, when you get off your calves start to ache because you're not used to standing like that.

The weird thing was my bad calf was fine, it was the other calf that was hurting because I've done the exercise.

This one now is almost stronger than the other one, and it becomes a thing, you know.

Sometimes these things become a thing of strength.

We can help other people when we've gone through some of that stuff.

So, unity.

The second thing that we see here is they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.

In the Old Testament, we read that the Spirit came uh on certain individuals at certain times for purposes that God had.

So you read about Samson or Saul or maybe Gideon, the Spirit of the Lord came on them.

And uh the Spirit spoke through the prophets, uh uh and it and but then it was withdrawn.

I need a volunteer at this point, someone who can come and hold something.

It's not gonna be embarrassing, but I need someone who's gonna come and hold something for me.

And if you don't, I'm gonna have to ask Scott to do it.

So okay, Scott, fine.

Here we go.

Here's a glass, Scott.

Uh, and here's some milk.

Steve didn't leak out earlier on, and I had to run out.

So if you uh we want just to imagine that this is a person, okay?

Glug glug glug glug glug with the milk.

This is a person.

And Old Testament times, the chocolate sauce is the Holy Spirit, okay?

Just for the purpose of this demonstration.

I like when it's scarred.

Yeah.

So the Holy Spirit would come on people for a particular time for a purpose, and and then once that was done, it would go, and then it'd come again on someone else.

Once it actually got to the New Testament, things changed.

You know, Jesus was um the iPad's just died on me.

Let's try that again.

Jesus was fully man and fully God, but because he was physical, he could only be in one place at one time.

And when he went, he said, I'm gonna send the comforter, and the comforter is gonna come, and he is going to empower you to be my disciples.

And what happens then when the Holy Spirit comes rather than it just being on and off?

I'm gonna put a good old dollop in there.

Look at that.

The Holy Spirit comes and he dwells in us.

Rather than it being something that came on, he dwells in us and he changes and he transforms us.

But we sometimes have to encourage each other, we sometimes have to encourage ourselves.

Do you remember a couple of weeks ago we were talking about the psalms?

They're saying something we have to say to our soul, come on.

Well, what the Bible says is we have to stir up the spirit, stir up the spirit within us.

Hello, what happens?

We're transformed, we become something that's full of the Holy Spirit.

Do you want to try it?

It's all right then.

And when we allow the Holy Spirit to do that, to be part of us, to stir it up with them, see, it transforms our lives, it transforms our ministries.

And what we see here is in Acts that these guys were hiding away because they were afraid of the Holy Spirit came on them, transformed them, and that's what caused the the uh the move of God to take place.

You know, even before we become Christians, the Holy Spirit does convict us, he convicts us of our need of God.

I think when we accept Jesus into our lives, there's a deposit of the Holy Spirit put within us.

But there is a time when when for every believer there's the opportunity to have the Holy Spirit, the baptism of the Holy Spirit, to transform us from who we are.

Because you see, if we try and do anything in our own strength, it'll only ever go so far.

We want the supernatural transformational power of the Holy Spirit.

That's what we need if we're going to change Deal and we're gonna change Dover and we're gonna change the surrounding communities.

We need more of the Spirit in our lives, and we see as we go further into Acts, even for what looked like mundane tasks, the distribution of food to widows, the people chosen had to be full of the Holy Spirit because the job was that important.

The job we all have is that important.

God wants to use us, and we need the Holy Spirit.

And then the third thing is this when they received the gift, they didn't keep it to themselves.

You know, there's a temptation if if we're in um we're in great meetings, you know, and the spirit's really moving, and like there's a temptation not to want to leave, isn't there?

It's great.

And Peter's up on the Mount of Transfiguration, he says to Jesus, this is great, let's just stay here.

But that's not what God wants us to do when he baptizes us with the Spirit.

When he gives us these gifts, he wants us to share them.

That's the whole purpose.

You know, it's okay to enjoy those moments and they equip us and empower us for what God wants us to do, but that's not what our job is.

Our job is out there.

It's when we're on the street, it's when we're at work, it's when we're uh in the queue at Tesco's, whatever it might be.

You know?

In Acts 1, it says the disciples were in the upper room.

And um I think traditionally we've maybe thought in Acts 2 they're also in the upper room, and that may well be the case.

But I think there's also quite a compelling case to say they were probably actually in the temple courts.

The temple courts was the place where all nations could go and worship God.

Uh, we read it in the passage, you know, there were people from all the known world in those places.

And uh when they actually um when they actually got together, that it was a uh the wheat harvest celebration called Shavuat.

And uh no self-respecting Jew would not have been at the time of prayer in the temple for Shavuat.

And so it may well be that the disciples were in those temple courts and the Holy Spirit came on them, and that's why so many people straight away recognized what was going on, because they were there where the people were, they weren't hidden away in an upper room, they were actually out there in the temple courts, and the temple courts would have had these um tanks for ceremonial cleansing, it would be quite difficult to baptize 3,000 people in a bath, you know, in a house.

But the pools were there in the temple, ready for that sort of stuff.

You know, we the church is not the building.

Buildings are really helpful.

This school is really helpful, the building we've got in Dover is really helpful, but they are not the church, we are the church, and the time we spend together as church in those buildings is great for maturing us and for equipping us, but our work is out on the streets.

That's what the disciples did.

They took what God had given them, they went out on the streets, and 3,000 people were added that day.

And I believe we've been put here, we've been put in these towns for a purpose.

God has placed us here because he has a work for us to do by the power of his spirit.

But what he's saying, I think, today is firstly we need to strive for unity.

We need to get rid of any division, anything that's stopping us from being in unity with who God is and what he wants us to do.

He wants us to eagerly desire the gifts of the Spirit.

They are for every believer, okay?

It's not just for pastors or people who have been recognized or whoever, every believer, the what the baptism of the Holy Spirit is available to us, and God wants to fill us, he wants to give good gifts to us.

But we have to remember those gifts are for making disciples, they're not for our own benefit.

You know, revival happens over the years, revival happens when there is personal transformation, and then there's collective transformation amongst a group of a group of people, and people are wanting to know what it is that God wants them to do.

That starts with with self-reflection, I think.

Scott touched on this this morning.

It's like there has to be a moment where we look and say, God, what is there in me that is that that needs dealing with?

And then we need to repent and ask for forgiveness for it.

And we need to be as fully submitted to what it is that He wants in our lives.

This afternoon we're going to uh we're gonna have some more worship, we're gonna make space.

I really think it would be great if you haven't had the baptism of the Holy Spirit, or if you have had the baptism of the Holy Spirit, that glass is now drained.

And that's what happens when we minister, and we need refilling sometimes because as we give out, God wants to fill us back up.

So I think it'd be great this afternoon if if if you either not had the baptism or if you feel like you need another filling, that we can just pray for you, that God would just come and don't be afraid, it's nothing to be afraid of.

God doesn't do anything to us that we we're not willing to allow Him to do, He's not going to turn us into some crazy person, but He wants to give you good gifts, you know?

And if you need prayer for anything else, if you need prayer to help with forgiveness, maybe there's there's something still that you're really struggling to forgive.

We'd love to pray for you that for that as well.

If we can get the worship team back up, um, I'm sure the prayer guys will be over in the corner over there.

Please avail yourselves of them.

God wants to do something amazing amongst us.

I know he does.

I know he does, but we've got to align ourselves and allow him to work in us.