As we continue to celebrate God’s giving of the Holy Spirit to His Church, we read about the Spirit in an excerpt from Lutheran Bible Companion, Volume 2.
Scripture Readings
Isaiah 57:15–21
Psalm 43
Acts 10:34a, 42–48
John 3:16–21
Read the propers for today on lutherancalendar.org.
Introduction
God’s Word is for people of every nation, tribe, people, and language! As we continue our celebration of Pentecost, let us give thanks for this Word, which reaches throughout the world.
Devotional Reading
The Spirit filled the whole Church. The Spirit animated and governed the whole life of the new people of God. It is not only in utterance and in enraptured vision that the Spirit’s working was manifested (though these are found in the life of the Early Church too); the men who spoke in other languages at Pentecost were so far carried beyond the way of normal and ordinary speech that mockers could call them drunken (2:13). . . .
The robust religious health of mind and will that the Spirit gave the Early Church is apparent . . . in the language of the Church. In a sense, the Holy Spirit did create a new language in the last days; as every student of the New Testament learns, a language richly individual, with forces and connotations all its own. But there is nothing strained, far-fetched, or esoteric about it; there is no mumbo-jumbo. It is a perfectly natural and open language, rooted in the life and history of the Jew and Greek to whom the Church bore witness. . . .
To speak of the word that grew on this soil and sped and triumphed in this history as an inspired word, wholly inspired, is not to impose an alien theory upon the word; it is simply a recognition of its character as a part of the history of the New Testament people of God. It is inspired because God the Lord of history made it so; it is verbally inspired because God deals with men on person-to-person terms, in terms of converse with men; it is the product of the Spirit of the living God and vehicle of that Spirit still, inspired and inspiring.
Devotional reading is from Lutheran Bible Companion, Volume 2, pages 389, 392 © 2014 Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.
Prayer
O Holy Spirit . . . keep me and all humankind within the reach of Your miraculous Word. Give me thoughts higher than my own thoughts, prayers better than my own prayers, and powers beyond my own powers so that I may be used in the service of God and humankind; through Jesus Christ, my Redeemer. Amen.
Prayer is from Time to Pray: Daily Prayers for Youth, page 91 © 2011 Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.