“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Acts 1:8 (NIV)

 It’s a thing of beauty:  a glistening silver 1955 Porsche 356 2-door convertible.  You can almost feel yourself drooling as you look inside and see the plush black interior, and the speedometer that tops out at 140 mph.  The spotlights in the auto museum highlight the finish on the glossy paint and the lovingly applied layers of high-grade wax.  But if you wanted to hear the roar of the 4-cylinder horizontally opposed engine, you would be in for a big disappointment:  there is no gas in the tank.  Nobody intends to drive the car, at least not for a long time, and it would be foolish to put gas in the tank of a car that nobody intends to drive.

Just before Jesus left earth, he told His gathered disciples that they would receive power when the Holy Spirit came on them – power to be His witnesses to the world, spreading the good news of Jesus’ victory over the world, the flesh, and the devil to everybody, and to effectively lead people to the Lord for salvation.  Ten days later, these same disciples were indeed filled with the Holy Spirit during the Jewish feast of Pentecost.  And, as a result of that filling, the testifying about the powerful acts of God, and the testimony of Peter, backed by the other apostles, 3,000 people were brought into the kingdom of heaven and baptized on the spot!  (Acts 2)  A short time later, after a miraculous healing of a man who had been lame for decades, another couple thousand people became believers in Jesus.  (Acts 3:1-4:4)  The power really was doing its job.

Over the next few years, more and more people, including members of the Jewish priesthood, came to believe in Jesus through the Spirit-empowered testimony of His followers.  These filled-to-the-brim believers literally rocked all of Jerusalem with the message of salvation, and then, when persecution scattered them to the surrounding countryside, they rocked the rest of the country as well!  (Acts 8:4)  True to Jesus’ word, they powerfully preached the gospel throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

It is significant to me that we never see a record of the early church conducting evangelism seminars and workshops, or of the folks in the first century church telling the leadership that they would like to be able to witness to people, but they just didn’t feel like they had enough information and knowledge about how to do it.  It really does seem that the Holy Spirit provided all that the people needed in order to be powerful and effective witnesses to the love and grace of Jesus, showing multiplied thousands of people how to come into the kingdom the same way that they themselves had come in.  Of course, that’s not to say that these people didn’t faithfully study the Bible, and pray, and worship together, and devote themselves to the apostles’ teachings, and all of the other things that are vital parts of keeping their relationship with Jesus living and strong on a daily basis.  But when they were filled with the Holy Spirit, the clearest result is that they were empowered to be witnesses, the Holy Spirit powerfully using their own testimony and the knowledge of the Bible that they had gained through faithful study, and aiming it straight into the hearts of their hearers.

These days a lot of people seem to have an entirely different focus on what the Holy Spirit is all about.  As a pastor in a holiness denomination, I read and hear a lot about what the Holy Spirit does in a believer’s life.  And, while the beliefs of a lot of these people are not necessarily wrong, it really does seem, from a biblical angle, to be sadly incomplete.  Many people, especially in the holiness churches, will tell you that the purpose of the Holy Spirit is to purify our heart, removing depravity, so that we can be empowered to live a holy life.  And this side of the equation is not incorrect – it even has good biblical support, such as Acts 15:8-9 (NIV), where Peter is relating his experience with the salvation and Holy Spirit filling of a bunch of gentiles:  “God, who knows the heart, showed that he accepted them by giving the Holy Spirit to them, just as he did to us.  He made no distinction between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith.”

But, as I said before, this viewpoint is sadly incomplete, leading many people to a woefully inadequate view of what the life of a fully sanctified Christian is supposed to look like.  As Jesus told His disciples before He left, the coming of the Holy Spirit into a person’s life would result in an amazing power being unleashed through that person.  But it was power for a specific purpose:  to be a witness.  And, in this context, it makes absolute sense that God would, at the same moment, cleanse a person’s heart of all impurity, of all depravity, of all wrong motives, because God can’t trust that magnitude of power, “like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms,” (Ephesians 1:19-21 NIV) to people who have mixed motives and evil in their hearts.  He can only entrust it to people whose hearts have been made pure and holy.

But if we want to stop at pure and holy, then being filled with the Holy Spirit really makes no sense at all.  If we just want to live a holy life, a life in which we merely don’t sin, then just a small bit of the Holy Spirit will do.  (John Wesley himself wrote in his “A Plain Account of Christian Perfection” that even babes in Christ are able to not sin, because He knew that the Holy Spirit lived within them, and so they had the Holy Spirit’s power to be able to resist the devil’s temptations.)  But the main purpose of the filling with the Holy Spirit, the main purpose of the Holy Spirit’s power in a believer’s life is to give them power to be witnesses.

When the disciples had been warned by the Jewish leaders not to preach in the name of Jesus any more, or they would be punished severely (Acts 4:18), the gathered believers prayed an amazing prayer, that ended with the words, “Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.  Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” (Acts 4:29-30 NIV)  (In other words, make us powerful witnesses!)  And the very next verse tells us that “After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.” (verse 31)  The Lord answered with a fresh filling of the Holy Spirit to empower their witness!

The fact of the matter is that holiness of heart and life only makes sense in the context of being a powerful witness to the unbelieving world about our Jesus.  But, I am sad to say, too many people see a sin-free life as the goal of being filled with the Spirit.  And, if that is as far as we take it, we end up like polished statues of saints sitting on a shelf somewhere:  nice to look at, but pretty worthless when it comes to the actual work of the kingdom.  Like the Porsche 356 in the auto museum, we look good on the outside, but we have no power inside to actually DO anything.  And the fact is, just like it doesn’t make any sense and would be a total waste of a good resource to put gas into the engine of a car that you don’t intend to drive, it is a total waste of time for God to fill anyone with the Holy Spirit who never intends to use that world-shaping, life-creating, evil-banishing power to boldly witness to the unsaved about what the Lord has done in their lives.