This sermon emphasizes the importance of returning to the foundational teachings of the Bible, focusing on repentance, baptism, and being filled with the Holy Spirit. The speaker challenges the modern church to align with the practices of the early apostles, highlighting the need for radical obedience, surrender, and a revival of apostolic Christianity. The message calls for a transformation in lifestyle, values, and a return to the powerful manifestations of the Holy Spirit seen in the Book of Acts.

Father God, we just pray that Your Holy Presence will just fill this place, Father. We just pray that You will be at the centre of everything, Father. And we just want to glorify and honour You, Father. And we just pray that tonight this Word will be from You. Just establish or re-establish foundations in our hearts, God. And we want to be true servants of Yours and faithful preachers of full Gospel, Father. Thank You, and we just pray that You'll show us Your truths from Scripture in a very powerful way tonight. In Jesus' Name. Amen. OK, if you can just turn to Hebrews chapter 6. Now, just to set the scene a little bit, I recently put this book out. And the reason I did was because I think a lot of us in our circles have heard that the sinner's prayer method is quite an inadequate way of getting people saved. And I guess the question that arises when you say things like that is, OK, then what exactly should we be doing? And the answer, I think, is more profound than what we're used to thinking about. So, the thing that I guess we need to get back to, and I believe still in the circles where we would call ourselves Bible believers and we believe in being spirit-filled and we believe in truly following Scripture and we want to be like the New Testament, I want to put it to you that we are still some way from apostolic Christianity. We're some way from walking through the streets and seeing demons crying out and leaving people. We're some way from shadows passing over people and them getting healed. I don't know that we have the Gospel in its fullness or in its power back yet. And I'm hoping that most of us in this place will feel that that's not good enough. Because I don't see any reason why Jesus would come and go through what He went through and raise up the Church in order to have the Church not in its fullness at the end of the age. I believe that we cannot settle for anything less than the fullness. And if we don't have apostolic Christianity, there's got to be a reason for it. And I tell you what, the reason isn't God, it's got to be us. The standards and patterns are all laid down, they're actually fairly evident. I often think that we read the Bible, even those of us who think we've got some knowledge, seriously I think we read the Gospel with one of our eyes closed. And we're still not seeing things that to an apostolic person of that time would be so obvious they couldn't believe that we missed it. And it's important that we dig these things up because at the end of the age, despite the growing darkness, I believe that God wants a glorious Church. I believe that at the end of the age, a bride should be shown forth that Jesus would be proud to marry. Amen? You know, what's the reason that that wouldn't happen? We know that darkness will increase, we know apostasy will increase, but that doesn't mean that there should not be a glorious bride in the earth. In fact, as the darkness increases, the glory that is upon the true Church should be amazing. Don't you think? I would love to see that before the very end. And I believe that many of the pioneers and guys like Wilkerson and those kind of guys were very strong that they believed that this was going to happen. And it's a huge thing in the Pentecostal. It has been from the start of the Pentecostal movement, a hundred years ago, that there will be a great last days move. We also know that apostasy is increasing at the greatest rate we've ever seen in Church history. So those two things seem to me to be coinciding. But I want apostolic Christianity back. I really, really believe in that. So here we are, Hebrews chapter 6, verse 1 and 2. So I wrote this book, The Sinner's Prayer, Fact or Fiction. It's obviously talking about the salvation method that we have got used to using. And it says here in this scripture, Therefore leaving the principles of the doctrine of Christ, let us go on unto perfection, not laying again the foundation of, and it lists six things here. So the foundation of repentance from dead works, faith towards God, the doctrine of baptisms, laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. And it says, you know, in verse 1, it said that those were the principles of the doctrine of Christ. That's how basic those things are. Now you notice that the Church is not even adequately preaching many of these foundations anymore. In fact, you can go from church to church, you won't hear repentance preached anywhere in modern days. You won't hear eternal judgment preached ever in many, many churches. Baptism, they'll get round to it one day. And, you know, laying on of hands, what's that? You know, many churches. None of this stuff is happening as the apostles would preach it. Now we're talking the six foundations, the principles of the doctrine of Christ. So if those six things are not happening correctly, we're about to look at what the apostles were doing. So if you can turn to Acts chapter 2. Now, you know, the good thing about Acts is that we can immediately test how important things were by looking at the Acts of the apostles and say, OK, this is what they were doing. It's the only record we have of exactly what they did. We have thousands of people getting converted in the book of Acts. So surely we're going to see in there what the apostles were doing. And I want us to see something very significant. And we see it so clearly in this passage. So Acts 2 verse 37 says, Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their heart, or in many translations it says cut to the heart, and they said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, men and brothers, what shall we do? So Peter was preaching, and they were so cut to the heart, they were so convicted of sin, they were so convicted of what they'd been doing, he'd actually been preaching about resurrection of Christ and eternal judgment in this, in what he'd been saying to them. They were cut to the heart, they cry out, men and brothers, what shall we do? In verse 38 Peter says, Now I don't know about you, and we're going to see this pattern again and again, but you know what we're not seeing there, we're not seeing that he's telling them, oh just pray this little prayer after me. So the sinner's prayer method that we use, which was invented about 70 years ago basically, as a convenient method to get people converted, that's simply not there, and we find actually that we never see it. It's completely absent from the New Testament. So the question arises, why have we gone around the world getting people saved in a way that doesn't exist in Scripture? Now that's a pretty phenomenal thing to get wrong, don't you think? And you'd have to ask the question after that, of course, it becomes obvious. If we had got that, the most basic, simple thing right, you know, what have we got right? What have we got right? Because if the foundations aren't correct, I'm sure you'll agree, if you're in the building trade, every builder knows that unless your foundation is absolutely correct, let's say you've got six foundation points in a building, and the council guy will come around, the building inspector will come around, he'll check that those are correct. Why? Because if you build on that and the foundation is faulty at the end of your building project, you'll have to tear the building down because the foundations are completely, you know, you can't build, you can't live in a structure that has faulty foundations, and you certainly can't build on it, and nothing will ever be right about it unless that is fixed. Amen? So if the foundations, our six foundations are either lacking or absent, we've got a big problem in the church. What did these guys just do here? They just used the foundations in converting people. So Peter is saying, repent, get baptised, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. When we remember back to what our foundations were, what were they? Repentance, faith, baptisms, laying on of hands, resurrection of the dead, eternal judgement. Those are the six foundations. And what I want to put to you is that these guys didn't get people saved, anything like what we do, which is pray this little prayer, ask Jesus into your heart, give your heart to the Lord, whatever it is, whatever you say. Nothing like that ever happens. What do they use in converting people? They use the foundations. Again and again and again, what we see is that they use repentance and baptism. Laying on of hands was throughout the book of Acts for the impartation of the Holy Spirit. Amen? That's what we see over and over in the book of Acts. So, and they're preaching faith and they're preaching on eternal judgement and so on. They're using the foundations to get people converted. Now, which begs the question of this. If I went around the world and went to every church denomination, you know, I'll give you an example of this. We were involved for quite some time with the Salvation Army. It was quite a good spirit filled type Salvation Army where we were living and we liked their outreach into the poor and we got involved with them and we really enjoyed it. So, the problem came, of course, in the fact that the Salvation Army doesn't believe in baptism at all. You can go to the Salvation Army, you'll find they haven't baptized anybody and all the officers and leaders in the Salvation Army, nobody's been baptized. As a matter of fact, they went right out of the way on this particular Salvation Army and had a huge baptism one day down at the river. But that's so unheard of, you know, in the Salvation Army. They had to do it quietly so nobody would hear about it and all that sort of stuff. You imagine the thousands and millions of people who are completely lacking parts of what the Bible would term foundations. And a lot of people say, well, isn't baptism just symbolic? So, you know, does it really matter that much that people haven't got baptized for years and years or they got sprinkled as a baby or whatever it is? My view of baptism is this. I want to have a biblical view, not a made up modern view. The biblical view of baptism is found in Romans chapter 6 where it says, don't you know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ were baptized into His death. We were therefore buried with Him by baptism into death. Amen? So if we take it by faith, baptism is supposed to be the death of the old man. That's what it's supposed to be. If I'm filled with faith and I'm going to actually believe Jesus for what baptism is supposed to be, and this is what I explain to people whenever I'm baptizing someone, I say, today is the death of the old you. It's the burial of your old life. That's what Romans 6 says. It's not, do not take it as just some symbolic thing. Take it by faith as being what Jesus says it's going to be for you. Amen? And that's what I do. And then it becomes a very powerful thing and they really know, yes, this is the burial service of my old life. And it becomes very powerful. That's what it should be. Amen? Alright, so there's nothing that the apostles are doing that's by chance. There's nothing written in the book of Acts, especially if we see the pattern over and over again, none of this is by chance. Everything is in there for a reason. A lot of times, we're just not seeing it. So we can look at it, we can read the book of Acts 50 times and not see something that is to them totally plain and obvious. How important is baptism to the apostles? Well, we can tell because when Paul was blown out of the prison by the angel and the jailer was going to kill himself because he said, my prisoners have escaped. My life is forfeit. I'm going to kill myself. And they cry out to him saying, don't kill yourself. And they preach the gospel to him. It says, when he believed it says, that same hour of the night they baptized both him and his household. So they didn't even wait until morning. They actually, here was a man who was repented and believed the gospel obviously, even though it's the middle of the night, they take him, find some water somewhere, baptize him in his whole household. They must have preached to everybody. Isn't that amazing? That's how important baptism is to the apostles. Is baptism important like that to the modern church? No, it's not. Does any of us treat baptism as being as foundational as that? As essential to get these things happening straight away? No, we wouldn't dream of doing that. Who's wrong? It's us. We're wrong. Our understanding of a lot of basic things I believe, are completely inadequate. This is just one example. You know, what we should be doing is going out and finding believing people, church people who haven't either repented, a lot of people haven't, or been baptized in water, or been filled with the Holy Spirit. It seems these are all foundations and we should actually be saying to them, listen, do you know that your foundation is not complete? Do you know that according to Scripture the apostolic, the New Testament way of becoming converted, which happened on day one in here, has not occurred with you yet? My view of that is, that would be a highly alarming statement. If somebody came to me and could actually show me in Scripture, Andrew, the foundation in you, you know, has not been laid or whatever, I'd be really alarmed about it. Why isn't this happening? Why don't we do things like the apostles? Let's just flip the page here. So we're just still in Acts chapter 2 verse 41. Here's a good example of this going on. It says, so this is again the same day. It says, Then they that gladly received His Word were baptized. And the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls. I don't know about you, I don't know how many people you might have baptized at once. I can remember one time baptizing like 23 or 26 people. I got a phone call, Andrew, can you come and baptize all these people? Now that took me pretty much all afternoon, you know, praying over people and this and that, to baptize that many people. You're talking 3,000 people getting baptized in one day. That's an enormous task. But they went ahead, they didn't delay any of it, bang. That same day they were baptized, they were added unto them about 3,000 souls. Okay, we're starting to just get a bit of a picture here of something different that these guys did that we don't do. Please turn with me to Acts chapter 8. I just want to go through a few big conversions here. Now that was 3,000 getting saved right there on that day. The next major people group that they evangelized was the Samaritans. Samaria was only 40 miles or 45 miles or so from Jerusalem. It was not far at all. That's why you see Jesus ministering to the Samaritans. So here is Philip the evangelist going to Samaria and Acts 8 verse 12 says this, But when they believed Philip, preaching the things concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized both men and women. Again, you know, no ask Jesus into your heart or that kind of stuff there. They were baptized both men and women. And then Simon the sorcerer, Simon himself believed also when he was baptized he continued with Philip and wondered beholding the miracles and signs which were done. Now listen to this. Now when the apostles of Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John who when they would come down, prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit. For as yet he was fallen upon none of them only they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. Then he laid then they laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit. So again we see what's happening here. This conversion looks almost nothing like a modern church conversion of today. This looks like a book of Acts conversion. What is prominent in this conversion? They are believing. They obviously are repenting and believing in that first beginning part. They are baptized straight away. They get hands laid upon them. They get filled with the Holy Spirit straight away. What we find actually throughout the book of Acts is that there aren't any occasions where this stuff isn't happening. It was always immediate. You think for instance of the Ethiopian eunuch. Remember they were driving in the chariot along the road? Ethiopian eunuch when he hears the gospel asks Philip such an unusual question. He says he's just heard the gospel being preached he asks a question that would never be asked today because we don't preach like Philip preached obviously. Here's what he says. He says Sir, what is stopping me from being baptized? Here is water. What's stopping me from being baptized? And Philip says to him, nothing. Nothing. They jump down off the chariot, baptizes him straight away and Philip is caught away by God to his next appointment and on goes the Ethiopian eunuch having believed the gospel, having been baptized straight away. Probably, but it doesn't tell us having been filled with the Holy Spirit. We don't know in that case. Now what are we seeing? We're seeing patterns. Here's what I want to know when I'm reading the book of Acts and when I'm reading the Bible these days. I don't just want to know what they did. I want to know why they're doing it. I want to understand what the apostolic mindset is. I want to know because these guys were with Jesus and then they have a Holy Spirit, massively inspired Holy Spirit ministry and they really do have the keys of the kingdom. They have the knowledge that we have lost. You think of what's happened since then. The church was already losing stuff. If you ever study church history and you start looking at what we lost and when we lost it, you can already see decline setting in from the writings about 100 years after the apostles. We don't even have many of those writings left. But there's church writings and you start reading them and you go wow, these guys are already losing stuff. And by the 200 and 300 A.D. they're almost an apostasy. 300 A.D. Constantine comes along, officially makes Christianity the religion of Rome and it just becomes a basket case. Then after all of that the Roman Empire falls apart. We go into 1,000 years of complete darkness. You know, the Dark Ages. 1,000 years of complete darkness and then comes the Reformation and Renaissance where we've been building back for the last 500 years up to where we are now. And you kind of go I wonder in that 2,000 year period much of it filled with absolute darkness what have we lost? What have we yet to regain? What is there that the apostles thought was basic and we don't even know what it is? How did those guys preach? What was their aim in their preaching? One thing I can tell of course conviction of sin was a huge aim in their preaching. That's why it says they were cut to the heart and then they cried out what shall we do? So conviction of sin was enormous for these guys. There's so much that we've lost and we gain it back in little tidbits bits and pieces. You know, John Wesley brings back the concept of the new birth or Charles Finney brings back some aspect of preaching which hasn't been heard for hundreds of years. Etc, etc. We've had revivals and reformations and hopefully we're getting back to the point we've had the pouring out of the Holy Spirit, people speaking in tongues, people doing miracles and things like that. That has occurred only in the last hundred years. Prior to that time nobody spoke about things like that. Nobody even thought about it. Pentecostals a hundred years ago kind of rediscovered that and started praying for one another that they'd be filled that way with the Holy Spirit. So what's God want to do with us? You know, the question is are we going to pay the price to be an apostolic people? I think if we knew what that price was a lot of us would say no. If we knew what the price was to be apostolic and to be New Testament I think a lot of us might say no. You know, let me give you an example of that. Let's turn to Acts chapter 2. What a description of the early church we get here but I think a very costly one. It's a very costly group to belong to. So this is the 3,000 that have come in now, the beginning of the early church that is here. So Acts 2.42 says they continue steadfast in the apostles' doctrine, in fellowship, in breaking of bread, and in prayer. Fear came upon every soul. Many wonders and signs were done by the apostles. We already are seeing things that are not happening really with us. And all that believed were together and had all things in common, and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men as every man had need. They continued daily with one accord in the temple, breaking bread from house to house, to eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those that should be saved. There's a whole lot of things that go on in the early church, and the way they lived, and the power they walked in, and the purity that they had, the gospel they preached, that I believe we simply haven't recovered. But we like to think of ourselves that we have. You know, one of the problems that we've got, I believe, in the groups that I guess I end up preaching in, one of our biggest problems is that we think that in hearing truth, and if we're constantly surrounded by good truth, we've got something. The fact is, unless we're walking it out, we don't. We can be surrounded by truth, and we can be aware of the fact that, hey, you know, we've got truth around our lock that these guys aren't preaching. But none of it matters if we're not walking out, because after all, Jesus didn't come making truth hearers, he came making disciples. He told us, he told his disciples to actually go out and make more disciples, and he said teaching them to obey whatsoever I've commanded you. So it's not just a matter of hearing truth, and it's not even just a matter of me being converted on the inside. That life is supposed to bring forth fruit, and the fruit is supposed to bring forth is obedience to the commandments of Christ. The obedience to the commandments of Christ are so radical and drastic that in the modern western world, you'd be considered almost a fanatic for going along with them, because they're so incredible. And this church, in obeying the commands of Christ, which is what it's doing there, became incredibly radical, and it says people didn't dare join themselves to them. Remember that. People didn't dare join themselves to them. Why? Because they're under such persecution, and they're so radical. How is it possible to live in a comfortable society and get back to this? I don't know. Most comfortable societies that I've been in all around the world, it's impossible. It's virtually impossible. The only places I can see this kind of thing going on is in the third world, where everybody's so poor that they can actually do that realistically, and people will feel great. People will actually want it. When you're in the western world, where everybody's comfortable, materialistic, including the church, comfortable, materialistic, got our own lives to lead and our busy schedules, I look at that and I just say, I don't think we can go there. I just frankly don't think we can go there. I've never seen it. I've never seen New Testament Christianity. Not in any western country. It's not a moment. There's times where we've entered into it for a time. There's times where ministering amongst the poor on Skid Row and seeing miracles start happening and this and that, we've seen touches of it. Baptizing people straight away in water fountains in the middle of the street. Seeing that kind of stuff go on. Praise God, it's great. And lived in it for little dashes of time. But if you're talking about New Testament style Christianity that we see every day in the book of Acts, no, we haven't got it. And so, what has to happen to us? What has to shake us up? What has to change amongst us? Are we willing to go there? What is the price that you pay to do that? These become incredibly important questions. You know, the Christian life is not to be just lived out internally. I do preach a lot on the internal state of a real Christian's heart. I preach on that subject a lot. And I know full well how important that is, because everything works out from that. But you know what? That's not it. And even corporate life of just meeting together and enjoying nice fellowship together, that's not what they had in the New Testament church. That's not all they had. They had the life of Christ at work in itself, out there in the world. Now, we're talking about a whole different ball game there. They didn't just meet inside and gather together in their own little groups. They were Christ, so to speak, the body of Christ to this fallen world. They walked around corporately with the apostles leading the way and the evangelists leading the way, powerfully showing Christ with his miracles and his words and his everything about him to this world. Amen? To go back to that, to go back to that in a culture like what we have. I don't know, well, I kind of do know that Australian culture is very, very similar to what I'm used to living in New Zealand or having lived in Canada or the United States or the UK. It's the same all around the world. We're comfortable and don't think a thing about it. You know, we all live in our little empire and we're all brought up this way. We're incredibly independent people. We're just Westerners. We've lived that way for years. Our parents lived that way. They brought us up that way. We don't think or act in any way like those people had to. Sorry. So even me preaching the gospel to people on the trains and even when I went on the holidays, I had the opportunity to preach to the gospel when I went to Perth and when I went to Sydney and Melbourne. Melbourne, would I be deemed radical, like preaching the gospel to people on the planes or in the streets or somewhere? Probably, but that's not, you know, that's not what I'm trying to get at necessarily. I guess what I'm trying to get at is Christ's church is supposed to look like Him. Christ's church is supposed to look like Him and sound like Him. And the challenge of that is incredibly vast. And I haven't actually seen, like I say, I've been around the world. I've been amongst some of the best Christians you can meet. I've been amongst guys that are involved in homeless ministry. They just live that life. I've been amongst guys that spend their whole life traveling around orphanages and raising money to help orphans and stuff like that. You know, these guys all challenged me. They all, really, the things that they were preaching smacked me right in the face and said, you know, Andrew, you haven't been Christ-like. You know, this is a big area that you don't even think about it. Start thinking about it. There's so much of this that I believe we've lost and I believe God's challenging us and calling us as people that really want to be Bible believers and really say we want to be disciples, not just churchgoers. None of us want to be just churchgoers. We want to be disciples. How do we live that out? What is the fruit that's got to come out? What are the radical changes we might need to make in our lives to see that happen? So, in starting with the foundations, let's just kind of get back on that track again. I'm trying to preach on more than just the foundations tonight. I'm trying to give us a general challenge that hopefully will make us go in directions in our lives that otherwise we wouldn't go. I want us to start looking at Acts as though it's something that we should be living in, not something that we should just be reading about. So, just turn with me to Acts chapter 19. You'll see another example of foundations being laid down. You know, I once did a comparison of kind of listing out the components or the characteristics of the early church and I basically found that there was no similarity at all with the modern church, and I mean none. So, everything's different. Now, you think about that for a minute. We actually are supposedly, and really, I'm talking about kind of the modern church out there, I guess, the global evangelical churches. You know, if you think about that for a minute and you kind of think, aren't we supposed to be representing this? Aren't we supposed to represent what Jesus stood for and the Apostles stood for? Isn't that really... Otherwise, if we're nothing like that, haven't we just started another religion and we've slapped the name Christianity on it? You know? Really, isn't it? If we're nothing like it, our lifestyle, our values, how can we tell our values because of the way we live? Our whole way of living, our whole way of thinking, everything ... So, our gospel is different, everything. And God wants to actually have these questions, I believe, churning inside of us because, do you know what? These things will never be recovered unless we start asking these questions. All of the recovery so far has been because of guys that went way out on a limb in their day and asked really hard questions and started finding answers from God. God's calling us to do the same in our own lives and in the corporate life here. Acts chapter 19 verse 1. It came to pass that while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul, having passed through the Upper Coast, came to Ephesus. And finding certain disciples, he said to them, Have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed? That's an interesting question to ask. Obviously he saw something lacking there. And they said to him, We have not so much as heard. Would there be any Holy Spirit? And he said to them, Into what then were you baptized? And they said, Into John's baptism. You notice the course that this conversation is taking. This conversation is all about the foundations. So he's met these disciple people at Ephesus, but he notices a lack. He says, Have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed? And then in verse 4, Paul said, John very baptized with a baptism of repentance saying to the people that they should believe on him, which would come after him, that is on Christ Jesus. When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came upon them and they spoke with tongues and prophesied. Okay. You know, when I was 17 years old, that's when I had that experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit, which totally, totally changed my life. I'd had four years as a teenager. Remember, you know, I was brought up for years in the assembly of God and in Baptist. And I was so depressed and I hated one of my parents with such hatred and I was so absolutely depressed every day wanting to end my life. You know, that was an everyday existence for me. I would drag myself off to school and drag myself home. I lived that way maybe for four solid years wanting to end my life just about every day. So when I was 17, I was involved with the Baptist Youth Group and some of the Baptist Youth Group people, some of the leaders in that, it was just a holy presence of God, just something about them when I would be near those people and get talking to them, something about them. And they, I would get talking to them and they'd say, yeah, we got filled with the Holy Spirit, so and so laid hands on us and prayed for us and we got filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues and all that and it kind of freaked me out because I'd been aware of it and I'd always kept my distance from that. I was scared of it. I also knew that it would involve a total and utter surrender of my life. So I didn't want to absolutely surrender like that. I wanted to keep parts of my life back because I wanted, you know, at the end of the day I had an utterly miserable existence but at least I was king of my own life or so I thought. So it went on for some time like that but I couldn't ignore this, when I was around those guys it was almost like there was a hunger for spiritual reality and for closeness to God and I could feel that I was being drawn in by that. And the day came when I truly and fully surrendered completely to God and I went around to the same guy that there was a YWAM guy that had been going around and seeing who would pray for them one by one that they'd all get filled with the Holy Spirit. So I went around and saw that same guy and he prayed the most simple prayer, just honestly, about as simple as you can imagine. And bang, that depression that had dominated my life for four years and that hatred for one of my parents that completely was wrecking my life, just literally vanished. It's like it just lifted, bang, it was gone, as fast as that. And, you know, the next day I spoke in tongues for the first time. Now, I'm not sure if every single person here speaks in tongues or not. A lot of people say, well, is that really necessary and how important is that? If you look through the Old Testament and the New Testament, you'll find that the Holy Spirit coming upon a person is almost always connected with the Word of God starting to flow out of them. In the Old Testament it would happen to the prophets, so the Spirit of God would descend upon one of the prophets and they would begin to speak forth the words of God. So there's a huge connection between the Holy Spirit descending and the Word coming forth. And I believe, you know, that's what tongues is. To me, I just pray in tongues now all the time. But what God is wanting to do with these foundations is, if you think of the global churches that we know, I think, for instance, of the Baptist Church that I was raised in a lot of the time. So many of those young people, apart from those people that I got to know, but so many were dedicated, wanted to follow Jesus, never ever that I ever knew filled with the Holy Spirit. And I could tell the difference. You know, the difference in power over sin. The difference in loving Jesus with all your heart. The difference of being filled with the holiness of God. That's what I experienced when it happened to me. It was instant bang. I was totally different. Never have been the same again. I was so changed. Dramatically changed. And if we think about the global evangelicals of the world, you know, I've even been in Africa preaching at so-called Pentecostal church where nobody was filled with the Holy Spirit. They did that Pentecostal in the title. I got to kind of the last session. I'm preaching to over a thousand people. I get to the last session and I'm sort of starting to talk to and I find that maybe the four top guys in that church are filled with the Holy Spirit and virtually nobody else is. And they never teach on it. So I had to spend my time teaching on baptism in the Holy Spirit. What does it mean for us? I guarantee you that we know people that are missing foundations. I guarantee you I already know this for a fact that repentance is not taken literally by a lot of the church people anymore. Certainly many have never been baptized in water. Certainly many have never been filled with the Holy Spirit. What's our job? Well, if we want to be real disciples of Jesus, what do we send us out doing? Here's what he said. Go into all the world, preach the gospel to all creatures, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey whatsoever I command them to do. So we're supposed to be baptizers. Many times I've actually spoken to groups of young people and I've said, do you know who's called to baptize? If you're a disciple of Jesus, that's you. If you're a follower of Christ today, you're called to baptize. If you find some of your friends have not been baptized and yet they really want to be believers, you're there. Go and baptize them. And sometimes I hear stories back that they met some homeless guy down by the river and they've gone and baptized the guy and prayed for him and cast demons out of him. Because what happens when you start going back to the foundations of the Book of Acts? The Book of Acts stuff starts happening. The first time I noticed it happened to me, I need to head towards a close. I was 23 years old and it was my first ever trip overseas and I was just going with another guy just to back him up. I was just a young 23 year old guy. We were in Fiji and ended up in this house meeting and a whole lot of New Testament-ish stuff was going on including he was casting demons out of some girl in this other room and there were seven people there that night that wanted to be baptized. Now this is in Suva, Fiji and it's black as coal outside because there's not as many streetlights as what we're used to. And he said, Andrew can you go down and baptize these people? And it was getting towards midnight I guess and I said, yep. Laughter So we walked down to the harbour in the pitch darkness virtually, walked all down to the harbour and everybody had just baptized everybody one by one and I thought this is the first time I've had this feeling. I'd never felt this feeling before and the feeling was I feel like I'm living in the Book of Acts just for this night, just for tonight I feel like I'm living in the Book of Acts and Book of Acts things are happening and maybe tomorrow it'll stop but tonight we're living in the Book of Acts. The sad thing is that that is so rare in the modern church because we are just not like that we're not spontaneous we're not foundational we don't do things straight away like they do we live a different life in a different world and if we want to start heading towards that we have to be aware of it, we have to start asking these questions, we have to get outside our comfort zone we have to start being Book of Acts people if we want to see Book of Acts results Amen? Amen. Sorry it's just been a bit of a teaching time tonight you know, I just wanted to bring out a few kind of teaching foundations it's nothing dramatic but it can make a big difference at the end of the day so please stand with me, let's just pray together Father God I pray for those of us we're just here before you Father God we want to be totally and fully surrendered to you God Father we don't want to be ordinary people, Father we don't want to live like the world, Father we don't want to have values that we could have just borrowed from our friends and neighbours around the countryside we want to just have your values God we want to be disciples of Jesus, we don't want to be we don't want to be anything less than that God Father we want to be not just hearers of the word but doers of God we want to bring forth the fruit that is 30 fold and 60 fold and 100 fold God we want to be welcomed into the kingdom with just jewels and crowns everywhere God because Father we want to serve you with all our heart so Father make us a real book of acts make us corporately to shine forth in this world Jesus Father change whatever needs to be changed amongst us God that we might become a real manifestation of what Jesus is in this earth and what he can be through his body let us be the body of Jesus Christ walking around this place Father pour out your Holy Spirit upon us God change whatever needs changing whatever the cost and price God we go after you as disciples and we say Father take us where you will and do with us as you will oh God and fill us all with your Holy Spirit in the fresh way we pray over and over again fill us to fullness of your spirit Father in the mighty name of Jesus Christ we pray for all these things Amen