Bestowal of the Spirit of Truth

194:0.1About one o’clock, as the one hun­dred and twenty be­liev­ers were en­gaged in prayer, they all be­came aware of a strange pres­ence in the room. At the same time these dis­ci­ples all be­came con­scious of a new and pro­found sense of spir­i­tual joy, se­cu­rity, and con­fi­dence. This new con­scious­ness of spir­i­tual strength was im­me­di­ately fol­lowed by a strong urge to go out and pub­licly pro­claim the gospel of the king­dom and the good news that Je­sus had risen from the dead.

194:0.2Pe­ter stood up and de­clared that this must be the com­ing of the Spirit of Truth which the Mas­ter had prom­ised them and pro­posed that they go to the tem­ple and be­gin the procla­ma­tion of the good news com­mit­ted to their hands. And they did just what Pe­ter sug­gested.

194:0.3These men had been trained and in­structed that the gospel which they should preach was the fa­ther­hood of God and the son­ship of man, but at just this mo­ment of spir­i­tual ec­stasy and per­sonal tri­umph, the best tid­ings, the great­est news, these men could think of was the fact of the risen Mas­ter. And so they went forth, en­dowed with power from on high, preach­ing glad tid­ings to the peo­ple—even sal­va­tion through Je­sus—but they un­in­ten­tion­ally stum­bled into the er­ror of sub­sti­tut­ing some of the facts as­so­ci­ated with the gospel for the gospel mes­sage it­self. Pe­ter un­wit­tingly led off in this mis­take, and oth­ers fol­lowed af­ter him on down to Paul, who cre­ated a new re­li­gion out of the new ver­sion of the good news.

194:0.4The gospel of the king­dom is: the fact of the fa­ther­hood of God, cou­pled with the re­sul­tant truth of the son­ship-broth­er­hood of men. Chris­tian­ity, as it de­vel­oped from that day, is: the fact of God as the Fa­ther of the Lord Je­sus Christ, in as­so­ci­a­tion with the ex­pe­ri­ence of be­liever-fel­low­ship with the risen and glo­ri­fied Christ.

194:0.5It is not strange that these spirit-in­fused men should have seized upon this op­por­tu­nity to ex­press their feel­ings of tri­umph over the forces which had sought to de­stroy their Mas­ter and end the in­flu­ence of his teach­ings. At such a time as this it was eas­ier to re­mem­ber their per­sonal as­so­ci­a­tion with Je­sus and to be thrilled with the as­sur­ance that the Mas­ter still lived, that their friend­ship had not ended, and that the spirit had in­deed come upon them even as he had prom­ised.

194:0.6These be­liev­ers felt them­selves sud­denly trans­lated into an­other world, a new ex­is­tence of joy, power, and glory. The Mas­ter had told them the king­dom would come with power, and some of them thought they were be­gin­ning to dis­cern what he meant.

194:0.7And when all of this is taken into con­sid­er­a­tion, it is not dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand how these men came to preach a new gospel about Je­sus in the place of their for­mer mes­sage of the fa­ther­hood of God and the broth­er­hood of men.