Holy Spirit Power — Acts 1:8

Welcome to a very special day, and as always, a day that the Lord has made for us to rejoice and be glad! In our focal scripture, Jesus promised two things as a direct result of the coming of the Holy Spirit. The first is the saturation of the body with power, while the second is the transformation of the recipient into a witness. A witness is one who saw and experienced an event in detail, and is qualified to retell it. You can't be an effective witness except you saw the event. Witnessing has nothing to do with being told but has everything to do with seeing and participating. I want you to note from that passage that Jesus was specific as to the precise thing the apostles would witness to. In His words, "you shall be witnesses unto me". There's a difference between "witness for me", and "witness unto me". The latter shows that the arrival of the Holy Spirit would allow them to effectively market a Jesus they had seen. I know you would think that the apostles were qualified to be witnesses because they were physically with Jesus. However, if this was so, our focal scripture wouldn't have connected their being witnesses to the arrival of the Holy Spirit. So, in a nutshell, Jesus was saying, "Once the Holy Spirit comes upon a child of God, he or she gets an encounter with the resurrected Jesus and is therefore able to effectively market Him to the world". This is what being baptized in the Holy Spirit should be! This insight helps us understand why many seem to speak in tongues but do not reflect holy fire and power. Do you want it?