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So far we've learned that Jesus, while fully God, was also fully human. He put aside His divine powers and allowed Himself to be filled with the Holy Spirit and empowered by Him. Jesus did not begin His ministry until the Father gave Him the Holy Spirit to empower Him. Once this happened, everything Jesus did was empowered by the Holy Spirit. He did not do anything through His divine Second Person of the Trinity power. Instead, He was empowered in the same way that He desires each of His followers to be empowered. Through the power of the Holy Spirit, He discerned God's will, He spoke God's word, He healed the sick and He cast out demons. And He has given that same power to us through His Holy Spirit.
Luke 5:17 says, "And it came about one day that He was teaching; and there were some Pharisees and teachers of the law sitting there, who had come from every village of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem; and the power of the Lord was present for Him to perform healing" (NASV).
Was the power always present for Jesus to perform healing? If it was, then why did that phrase even need to be there? The reason is because the power for healing was not always present. Why? Because Jesus did only what He saw the Father doing.
Remember the first man we spoke about, the one who waited around the pool for someone to get healed? Why did Jesus heal only that one person? That is the only one the Father was healing. How do I know that? Because Jesus did not heal anybody else. Once again, for emphasis, Jesus did only what He saw the Father doing. If He had seen the Father healing more people, He would have healed more. At other times, everyone was healed.
The reason that phrase is put in verse 17 is to tell us that sometimes the power for healing is present and sometimes the power for healing is not present. If we are to walk by the Spirit of the Lord and in the anointing of the Lord, that is how we should operate. We need to be discerning and call upon it, and recognize it when it is there and know when it is not.
Bill Johnson told a story about a month ago about a guy who was in a grocery story and all of a sudden he looked at his hands and realized, "God wants me to pray for somebody." So he walked around the grocery store asking people, "Do you need prayer?" You can imagine the reactions he got from most of them. Finally he walked outside and someone coming in responded, "Oh yeah, I need prayer." This man had a major physical problem and God healed him - right there! They were both so excited! The man gave his life to the Lord, and they both began telling everyone how God had healed the man. Why did that happen? He recognized that God was healing and he responded. We must do the very same thing - see what the Father is doing, hear what the Father is saying. That is the anointed life.
For a lot of us this sounds foreign, but this is the language of how we are to live.
Let's look at why Jesus modeled the anointed life. He did it because it is how we are to live. He would say to His disciples in John 20:21, "In the same way that I am being sent, the Father is going to send you." How did the Father send the Son? Anointed by the Spirit, seeing what the Father was doing, listening to what the Father was saying, and then doing it and saying it.
Jesus also told His disciples, in John chapters 7, 14, and 16, about the Holy Spirit that would walk alongside them.
Acts 1:4-8, "And gathering them together, He commanded them not to leave Jerusalem, but to wait for what the Father had promised, 'Which,' He said, 'you heard of from Me; for John baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.' And so when they had come together, they were asking Him, saying, 'Lord, is it at this time You are restoring the kingdom to Israel?' He said to them, 'It is not for you to know times or epochs, which the Father has fixed by His own authority; but you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth' " (NASV).
Notice some terminology that is being used together:
The word "coming upon" is a key word. The power is the anointing of the Holy Spirit. The power is the "coming upon" of the Holy Spirit.
The other promise of the Holy Spirit is in the Old Testament, Jeremiah 31:33, quoted in Hebrews 8:10. This speaks of the new covenant in which God is going to write His laws on our hearts and our minds, and that He will be our God and we will be His people. It talks about this as He describes the new covenant. In the old covenant it is a lot different because in the old covenant the Holy Spirit would come and He would go. He would land on this king, or that person. What he is describing here is regeneration. Then we see the promise in Joel 2 that is fulfilled in Acts 2.
John 7:37-39 says, "Now on the last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, 'If any man is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. He who believes in Me, as the Scripture said, From his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water.' But this He spoke of the Spirit, whom those who believed in Him were to receive; for the Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified" (NASV).
In other words, when Jesus was glorified, then the Spirit was given. Now we have something to look for. When He was glorified, the Spirit would be given. The glorification would come after the resurrection, but not necessarily before His ascension. The glorification is when He is in His glorified, resurrected body. That is glory.
When did the disciples receive the Holy Spirit? This is going to mess with some of you. I had problems with this because I had taken these same scriptures, to wait for what the Father had promised, as the literal immersing. That is what baptism means, immersion. Remember the key phrase - the Holy Spirit would "come upon" you. The Holy Spirit did not really have a part in the lives of the disciples until Pentecost. I was walking in what I had been taught. But then I came upon John 20.
John 20:20-22 says, "And when He had said this, He showed them both His hands and His side. The disciples therefore rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus therefore said to them again, 'Peace be with you; as the Father has sent Me, I also send you.' And when He had said this, He breathed on them, and said to them, 'Receive the Holy Spirit' " (NASV).
I always thought that the disciples did not receive the Holy Spirit until the day of Pentecost, but this verse looks pretty present tense to me. He breathed on them. The word "breath" is pneuma. The word "spirit" is pneuma. Can you see the relationship? The word breathe here is the verb form. It is the same word from which we get our word emphysema. Vine's Expository Dictionary of the New Testament says that it is the symbolic act of the Lord Jesus in breathing upon His disciples the communication of the Holy Spirit.
Jesus breathed first, and then He said, "Receive." Does that sound like breathe, then receive later on the day of Pentecost? That waiting is not in there. Doesn't the word "receive" look like a command in that verse? An immediate instruction? He breathed and said, "Receive." He did not say, "Receive later," or "Receive at another time." He simply said, "Receive."
When I had difficulties reconciling the word to what I had been taught, I would bring my questions to my "scholars" or my "people in the know" and ask what it meant. They would explain that it was talking about the later event, that they would receive something that would not come about until the later event. My response was that they were seeing something I did not see. I do not see that later-on stuff.
So, when did the disciples receive the Holy Spirit? Clearly, in John 20. The only reason we don't accept that truth is if it doesn't fit our theological understanding and we refuse to change our way of thinking. Why would Jesus breathe on them if He didn't want them to receive it? Who had the Spirit to impart? Jesus did. So when did the disciples actually initially receive the Holy Spirit? It was right there in John 20.
As we look into the book of Acts, the disciples were going to begin to understand the relationship between the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and the anointing and the "coming upon." What you will always see is a "coming upon" of the Holy Spirit, not a "coming in." The terminology is very important.
When we look at the role of the Holy Spirit in salvation in Titus 3:5, we can see that what the disciples received in John 20 was the regeneration of the Holy Spirit in the inner man. That is what this is talking about. II Corinthians 5:17 talks about becoming a new creature when we are saved. When I Corinthians 12:13 says that by one Spirit we are baptized into one body, it is talking about salvation. Because the same word, baptize, is used, people often mistakenly want to equate the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the baptism of the body, but there are many baptisms mentioned in the word of God.
Hebrews 6:1-2, says, "Therefore leaving the elementary teaching about the Christ, let us press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward God, of instruction about washings, and laying on of hands, and the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment" (NASV).
"Washings" is baptismo in Greek, which is literally the instruction about baptisms, plural. Once again, the word baptism always means immersion.
Romans 8:9 says, "However, you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. But if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him" (NASV).
If you do not have the Spirit of Christ living in you, you are not saved. So, in John 20, when Jesus breathed on them and told them to receive, there was a regeneration that occurred on the inside of them.
In Acts 1, Jesus tells them to wait for the "coming upon" of the empowering of the Holy Spirit. Jesus Himself is a model of this picture. Before Jesus was baptized, was He saved? Of course! He was still the second Person of the Trinity. He had the full measure of the Godhead in Him. He was not going to go to hell, but He also was not anointed. He was God, but He was not anointed. He did not have that anointing upon Him. You can be saved and have the Spirit of God in you. You can be regenerated and not have the anointing of God on you. We are talking about two separate acts of the Holy Spirit.
We will discuss the significance of the two separate acts in our next lesson.