Pentecost is the day that the early believers left the comfort and security of its sequestered prayer meeting and took the gospel to the streets of Jerusalem. Pentecost represented a new beginning, a new birth, in God s plan of salvation. God s grace and forgiveness and mercy was seen in a marvelous new way in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And now the gospel of Jesus Christ was going forth proclaiming the love of God in a way that the world had never known before. Birth describes the first Pentecost experience, but it also is intended to describe the experience of the church today.
Birth happens today in the church.
It happens every time a person comes to faith in Jesus Christ. It was Jesus, not Billy Graham, who first said, You must be born again, or perhaps better, born anew or from above. The Fundamentalists don t have a corner on the term born again. We, too, experience new birth, are born again when we give our lives to Christ, when we decide to live as disciples of Jesus. The experience of birth is intended, I think, to describe the experience of the church in 1999.