Empowered for Ministry

Everyone who is born again of the Spirit of God is also empowered by Him for the work of ministry. In this brief clip, R.C. Sproul considers how a prophecy of Moses was fulfilled in the church at Pentecost.

Transcript:

Now this isn’t a prophecy. This is a plea, a prayer from Moses, when he’s saying, “I wish that God would not simply anoint seventy from our group, but that God would put His Spirit upon all of them.”

Now that desire, that plea of Moses did become a prophecy later on, as it was written by the prophet Joel, where Joel said that in the last days, God would pour out His Spirit upon all flesh, not meaning upon all animals or everything, but upon the whole body. And that’s one of the grand differences between the Old Testament church and the New Testament church. In the Old Testament, only special people were given this work of the Holy Spirit in their lives, this empowering for ministry. But after our Lord comes and is the supremely anointed One, the supreme Mediator, and He ascends into heaven together with the Father, They send the Spirit that was upon Him, and They anoint the whole church, so that every believer now in the new covenant has been empowered by God the Holy Spirit for ministry.

Now Paul elaborates that in First Corinthians when he explains that every Christian, every believer, is gifted by the Spirit of God, but not every person has the same gift as every other person. There are a wide variety - there is a wide variety of gifts, according to Paul, but every Christian receives the Spirit, not only in terms of being reborn or indwelt by the Spirit, but everyone is also empowered by the Spirit for ministry, so that now the church in the New Testament is truly a charismatic church - that is, a gifted church that has been empowered from on high to fulfill the mission that Christ gave to His people before He ascended.