A person who is Spirit-filled is a witness for Jesus Christ. Prior to Pentecost in Acts 1:8, Jesus promised His disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The Day of Pentecost saw the fulfillment of Christ’s prediction, when Peter, now filled with the Holy Spirit, preached the gospel powerfully and boldly. In Acts 4:8, we see him “filled with the Spirit” and preaching the gospel to Israel’s leaders. In Acts 4:31, following a prayer meeting at which the disciples asked God for boldness and for the power of signs and wonders to accompany their preaching, we read, “the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the Word of God boldly.”
I like the word audacity. This word means fearless daring, bold,heedless of restraints. Since the Holy Spirit gives us the audacity to witness effectively for Christ, let me propose to you that He is The Divine Audacitator. The exciting thing about this is the great exhilaration and empowerment the Holy Spirit gives us while we are witnessing. We may not feel very powerful at the outset, but as we step out in faith, the Holy Spirit fills us, enabling us to rise to the occasion. We find ourselves saying things we didn’t know we knew, and saying them in very persuasive and effective ways. Could this be because the Holy Spirit is a Person, and as a Person, He gets excited when we step out and share our faith? I believe so. I believe our obedience so delights and energizes Him that that He leaps to action and fires us up.
One day the Holy Spirit leaped to action in our daughter Hannah’s life. At the time she was a nineteen-year-old student at a university known as a hostile bastion of Christian-bashing. On this occasion she was in her drama class. Depicting an auto accident, students ran around as if panic-stricken, screaming all kinds of obscenities. The director, a 25-year-old male student, paused the scene briefly to ask if the language offended anyone. Hannah spoke up: “I could do without it,” she said. Staring at her hard, he sneered and said mockingly for all to hear, “Well, what do we have here? One of those born-again Christians?!” Hannah looked him squarely in the eyes and spoke back just as forcefully, “Totally!”
This one word so unnerved this young man that he immediately backed off and resumed the play. The next day, he spotted Hannah on campus and came straight to her. “I’ve got to talk to you about your relationship with God,” he said. After listening to him pour out his heart, Hannah shared her faith in Christ with him. She then put her hand on his shoulder and prayed for him for quite some time, right on the campus with other students walking by. It’s hard to believe that Hannah was once very shy — shy, that is, until The Divine Audacitator took hold of her. Now, she sings the Lord’s praises all over the world. For some amazing footage of a spontaneous outpouring of the Holy Spirit through Hannah and some friends at Disneyland, visit www.youtube.com/hannahfordmusic!
In addition to preaching the gospel, this power to witness for Christ is demonstrated in many ways. The gospel can be proclaimed powerfully through music and singing, through dramas, and writing. When a group of Christians genuinely loves and praises God, when they show love for one another, when they demonstrate compassion for those in pain or in dire need, and when they make sacrifices for the One they love, these all can be Spirit-empowered witnesses for Christ. A clear fruit of the life of the Spirit-filled community described in Acts 2:41–47 is this: “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”