Acts 1:8

THE HOLY GHOST HIMSELF, THE POWER

8. “But you shall receive power of the Holy Ghost having come on you.” The English version gives this very incorrectly, “you shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost has come upon you.” You find it beautifully corrected in the Revised version. I have heard and read many sermons from this text exhorting the people to seek power after the Holy Ghost had come on them. All this leads to superstition and fanaticism. The plain revelation is that the Holy Ghost Himself is the power, and there is no other. So never seek power, but seek the Holy Ghost Himself. When you have Him you have all the power you need to do anything that God wants you to do. So you have nothing to do but to get thoroughly sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost, abide in Him, obey, and be true. So long as you thus abide, responsive to the gentle voice of the indwelling Comforter, verifying His will revealed by His Spirit, Word and providence, you will have all the power you need to do your whole duty, because you have Omnipotence to check on at will. After we are filled with the Holy Ghost we grow with paradoxical rapidity, and thus, with spiritual enlargement, become more and more capacious of God. Consequently, we should be always reaching for a more copious enduement of the Holy Ghost, ever seeking Him and depending on Him alone to impart the needed power. The word translated “power” here is not identical with the word “power” in the preceding verse. There it is exousia, “authority”; here it is dunamis, “dynamite.” Hence, the literal reading: “You shall receive dynamite of the Holy Ghost having come on you”; i. e., if you will receive the Holy Ghost as a personal, indwelling Sanctifier and abiding Comforter, He will supply you with all the dynamite you need to blow all sin out of you and to qualify you to blow up the Devil's kingdom wherever you go, and enjoy an everlasting victory in your heart and life.

TESTIMONY

“And you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost of the earth.” Here we see the beautifully defined and ordinary phenomena of the indwelling Holy Ghost. Such people are saved from false modesty and tormenting cowardice, so they are always ready to testify anywhere and everywhere. They have faith in the Holy Ghost to give them words. So they do not wait to study up something to say, but are always ready to open their mouths and meekly witness to the mighty works of God in their souls. The fallen churches are dumb like graveyards. The Pentecostal churches are vocal like graveyards on the resurrection morn, when tombs are bursting and saints leaping into the air with roaring shouts of victory. Dumb religion is the devil's counterfeit. God's genuine opens the mouth and keeps it open.