Welcome to this week's Things Unseen.

Today is actually Pentecost Monday.

You'll know what I mean if the day of Pentecost was celebrated in your church yesterday or marked in some way.

Perhaps I should begin by saying that all true churches are Pentecostal churches, even if they never say so. Because Pentecost belongs to all true churches, or it actually belongs to none.

Because without it, there wouldn't be a worldwide church. If we lack the Holy Spirit our Lord sent at

Pentecost, then essentially we also lack the gospel. Anyway, yesterday was Pentecost. And it's another

day in the year like Christmas Day and Good Friday and Easter Sunday and

perhaps Ascension Day when Christians remember and celebrate the mighty works of God in His Son

Jesus Christ.

That's probably the first thing we need to remember.

Pentecost is a day we remember and celebrate something

that happened in the past. Like the cross and the resurrection, it's not an event that keeps

on being repeated. There is ever only one day of Pentecost. Before his ascension, Jesus told the disciples to stay in Jerusalem

until he baptised them with the Holy Spirit, when they would receive power to be witnesses to him

to the ends of the earth. And that was what happened. There was the sound of a mighty rushing wind, something like tongues of fire

came on the disciples. They began speaking in languages other than their own local Aramaic.

And you remember how Peter then explained to the astonished crowds what it all meant

in a very remarkable sermon in Acts chapter 2, and several

thousand people were baptized.

I said that Pentecost, like Christmas and Easter, was an event that happened.

And I also want to emphasize again that, like Christmas and Easter, it happened only once.

We shouldn't think of it as happening again and again, any more than we believe the death of Christ happens again and again.

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