If this were an isolated occurrence it would be one thing; regrettably, this does not seem to be the case. If one were to summarize the crisis of evangelicalism in America today, he could probably do so best by saying that its internal struggles arise because its institutions do not represent the vast majority of its people, and that their actions do not put into practice the beliefs or preferred actions of those people.

In a previous article I responded to a claim published at byFaith, the official magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), which stated that “gun violence” is “the leading cause of death among children in this nation.” I referenced CDC cause of death data by age which showed this is false, and in a subsequent article requested that readers contact byFaith and urge them to retract. An unclear but apparently significant number of people did so, for which I am grateful.
As of this writing byFaith has not retracted the original claim, however. Their reason? Per the response to my complaint from some of their leadership, they maintain the original claim’s accuracy. They appeal to a study by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that discusses how “firearm-related deaths” are the leading cause of death “among children and adolescents,” a group it defines as “persons 1 to 19 years of age.” That is an insufficient defense.
Problem one is that infants under the age of one are children, and that 18 and 19 year old adults are not. To give an idea of how much this statistical sleight of hand skews the results, consider that infants under one accounted for about 56% of child deaths in 2020, while 18 and 19 year olds had more firearm homicide deaths between them than the entire 0-17 age group (1,435 v. 1,376), and nearly as many suicides (~79% as many). One can only claim that firearms-related deaths were the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in 2020 by denying the majority of child deaths, in other words, and by also including many adults of an age particularly prone to criminal violence and self-harm.
Problem two is that “firearms-related deaths” and “gun violence” are not synonymous, as the former appears to include accidental deaths, whereas the CDC distinguishes between unintentional and violence-related injuries when it categorizes causes of death.
Problem three is that there is an implicit denial of the personhood of infants in any study that talks about children’s deaths that intentionally omits them from its findings. If one truly cares about children’s wellbeing and wishes to empirically study causes of its destruction, one must include all children. As the NEJM study did not do that, we can only include that they either do not regard such infants as truly being children, or else that they are more interested in pursuing a political agenda than in handling the data in a dispassionate manner. Neither of those commends the study in question as reliable, and yet byFaith has hedged its defense upon it.
Now let us trace the sequence of events up to this point. First, byFaith published an inaccurate claim. Second, it was publicly contradicted and was publicly and privately requested to retract the claim. Third, it refused to retract and attempted to defend its original statement by appealing to a source that speaks of a different category of deaths among a different group of people, and which seems to espouse sentiments – i.e., that infants under one do not count as children – that could be used to justify infanticide.
There is no gentle way of putting this, but suffice it to say that such actions do not constitute good journalism. It is one thing to make a mistaken claim of fact, though editors ought to verify the accuracy of articles before publishing them. It is another thing, and worse still, to try to justify one’s mistake by appealing to sources that do not, by their own description, purport to discuss the same thing or the same group of people as one’s own claims. Again, “children” are a different group than “children and adolescents,” and the proper definition of the former is people in the 0-17 age range, not the 1-19 age range that the NEJM uses (inaccurately) for the latter group. (Actually in common parlance children means either pre-pubescent people, but I am using it in its widest sense to refer to what the law typically calls minors.)[1]
It is worse still to justify all of this on the ground that the original article was an impassioned pro-life plea, as byFaith’s response to my private complaint attempted to do. Defending life by appealing to a source that has published pro-infanticide material in the past (compare this and this), and that appears to maintain infanticide-compatible notions about the personhood of infants in the particular study to which one appeals is a strange method, surely. And it is all the worse in that it distracts from what is an indisputably worse cause of death among children, abortion. In 2020 the top 20 leading causes of death for children counted by the CDC totaled 27,054 deaths; abortion accounted for 620,327, or nearly 23 times as many as all those others combined.
Two things before I proceed. One, miscarriage appears to be the largest killer of children, though unlike abortion it is not clear that it is directly preventable in many cases. (If anyone with a medical background believes that I am mistaken here, please drop me a line of correction.) Two, my own writings up to this point had the same effect as byFaith’s, in that they ignored prenatal deaths, which are vastly more common than deaths among children after they are born. Insofar as I believe that byFaith erred by distorting the nature of the matters in view, it is a thing of which I also am guilty. Mark that well, reader: Tom Hervey was wrong too, in that he lost sight of the larger picture.
There is a bit of a difference, however, in that I did not attempt to cast my position as being part of a larger, thoroughly pro-life plea as byFaith has done: my concern was with the inaccuracy of the original claim, and of how publishing it risked bringing our denomination into disrepute and played (if unwittingly) into the hands of political agitators who wish to heckle people into doing their bidding by the use of the same original claim about children and gun violence (often verbatim). Now to summarize, the PCA’s denominational magazine has been engaged in poor journalism, and has willfully persisted in that poor journalism in a way that unhelpfully distorts the nature of our thinking about pro-life matters.
If this were an isolated occurrence it would be one thing; regrettably, this does not seem to be the case. If one were to summarize the crisis of evangelicalism in America today, he could probably do so best by saying that its internal struggles arise because its institutions do not represent the vast majority of its people, and that their actions do not put into practice the beliefs or preferred actions of those people. We keep putting up institutions and celebrating, often more than is warranted, various individuals in our midst, and like clockwork they keep turning about and taking their cues rather from our wider society and its discourse and current events than from the people whom they are supposed to serve.
An example of that appears here as well. For some time now many evangelicals have been sorely embarrassed at the suggestion that preventing defenseless children from being murdered in utero is our foremost concern in questions of life and death. Our opponents frequently accuse of us of not caring about human life after it enters this world, and say things like ‘you talk about the sanctity of life for fetuses, but after they are born you are content to let them languish in oppressive and abusive familial and socio-economic circumstances – some love of life that is!’ And so now our prominent people have begun talking about a larger pro-life vision, and shift the focus from the first point of defending life (logically and chronologically), to talking about promoting a culture of life in general. That is not necessarily wrong as such, but it has the potential to become so by a) suggesting as true what is in many cases baseless slander by our opponents; and b) shifting the definition of what constitutes pro-life action.
It is the latter that is entailed in byFaith’s position here. Their original article regards it as imperative to “stop excusing our lack of progress in reducing mass shootings and work on creating and implementing the solutions that will foster a safer society for all,” and deems the present public safety situation for children in America as a “hellish” and “unsustainable” crisis that demands immediate action by everyone (“we must all start working for a safer society”).  In byFaith’s personal response to me one of their staff explicitly connected advocating to protect “elementary school children” (his phrase) to advocating against abortion.
There is no comparing abortion to criminal violence against children in general, or to school shootings in particular, and the attempt to do so is an exercise in moral blindness. Elective abortion is legal murder that is encouraged, protected, and subsidized by our government, and in the last 50 years has accounted for the deaths of tens of millions of children. By contrast, gun murder (and suicide) is in contravention of our laws. Legality and social celebration on the one hand and criminality and social deprecation on the other make the two things, abortion and firearm murder, vastly different in nature; and alas for us, the socially approved one is the more common by far, which is the real crisis that calls for our action.
If we limit our focus to school shootings, which were an important emphasis for byFaith (per the original article and their subsequent response), there is no comparison at all. In the entire 52 year period for which the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) has analyzed school shooting deaths they identified 371 that involved minors (and that includes suicides, accidents, self defense, and justifiable homicides by law enforcement). In that same period probably at least 223 million people have been students;[2] and 371 out of 223,000,000 across half a century is not a crisis, but an extreme rarity (comp. footnote), even granting there is probably some undercounting for the pre-Internet era.[3]
And yet, these things notwithstanding, byFaith would have us “get on with the good work that needs to be done” viz. gun violence and children’s safety in this country, whatever that entails (and neither they nor Cassidy have said, as others have noted). I think I speak for a great many people in the PCA when I say that we expect better from our official news agency, and that it is a point of some embarrassment and frustration that it not only published inaccurate claims that are popular with political factions that are in most respects our enemies, but has persisted in mistakenly asserting their accuracy in a way which draws their journalistic competence yet further into question and which, worst of all, redefines what is entailed in the single most important moral movement with which evangelicalism is involved.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
[1]     Adolescents (ages 13-19) accounted for 2,543 firearm homicides and 1,239 firearm suicides during 2020, out of a total of 2,811 and 1,293, respectively, or about 90.5 and 95.8% of deaths among people in the 0-19 age group in those categories.
[2]     Figured by subtracting foreign-born residents and people over 65 and under 5 years of age from the nation’s total population as estimated by the Census Bureau, an admittedly rough estimate.
[3]     Figures for minors computed from CHDS’s raw data excel file. For comparison of firearm homicides in general among minors, per the Census Bureau persons under 18 accounted for an estimated 22.2% of the population in 2021, or approximately 73,989,838 people. The 1,376 firearm homicides in this group in 2020 (the last year available) represented the death of 1 in 53,772. Nothing which is so rare can be justly deemed an urgent crisis of the utmost importance. Abortion is vastly more common: 620,237 incidences against 3,605,201 births in 2020, per the CDC.
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Written by Forrest L. Marion |
Thursday, July 20, 2023
Given his ancestry and European upbringing, Frontis enjoyed a greater appreciation for the consequences of the loss of the Sabbath day than did most of his American-born brethren. Even so, some American-born Presbyterians occasionally reminded their countrymen of France’s abolition of the Sabbath in lieu of the Decadi (every tenth day) – nearly forty years after the event.

Until the early to mid-nineteenth century, many Protestant ministers who crossed the Atlantic to serve the Lord Jesus in British North America and, later, the American republic, hailed from England or Scotland. One worthy exception was a Frenchman, Stephen Frontis. His mostly forgotten life and ministry are worth considering today, including his contentions for the Christian Sabbath.
In British North America the Christian Sabbath, or Lord’s Day, was a pillar of the new society. This was the case in both spiritual and socioeconomic senses. Although the strict observance of the Sabbath in New England did not carry over to the Southern colonies, one historian of the Puritan Sabbath referred to the day’s observance in much of the South as “an island of rest in an ocean of endeavor.”[1] Colonial Sabbath statutes generally did carry over into the early national period, however, and in the 1820s at least 23 of the 24 states in the Union maintained some form of Sabbath ordinance. Additionally, many towns and villages had their own restrictions covering business as well as recreational activities.
Positively, the day afforded many with the opportunity for corporate worship and fellowship, as well as family gatherings, a degree of bodily rest from secular labor, and it marked the rhythm of community life. For many in that era, Sabbath customs and laws identified “these united States” – the plural was often used – as a “Christian nation.”
The federal government conducted almost no business on the Sabbath. The lone exception was the postal department, the largest department by far. The Post Office Act of 1810 probably seemed innocuous to many at first, but its consequences became apparent as the nation’s population and westward emigration increased dramatically, and as transportation options (macadamized roads, canals, steamboats) and cash-crop markets combined to place a premium on one’s ability to transport goods to market as quickly as possible – including on the Sabbath. Perhaps designed in part to offer protection to those postmasters and mail clerks who already were accustomed to performing secular labor on the Sabbath, the 1810 law required postmasters “at all reasonable hours, on every day of the week, to deliver” any mail or packages to those persons entitled to receive them. That included the Sabbath.[2]
During two brief periods between 1810 and 1830, many Christians as well as citizens seemingly unaffiliated with local churches in communities nationwide spoke out in defense of the day’s traditional observance. That is, they viewed the Bible’s fourth commandment, “Remember the Sabbath-day to keep it holy,” as the standard. They wanted it maintained, and they protested in print by means of petitions (or “memorials”) against that portion of the law which required postmasters and clerks to transgress the Sabbath. In the South – especially Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas – Presbyterians were the denomination most closely identified with Sabbath mails petitions sent to Congress (as well as the group responsible for the bulk of Sabbath-promoting publications in the South).
As occurred throughout the nation around 1830, citizens in a number of North Carolina locales petitioned Congress on the matter. A fair portion of the petitioners were locally recognizable if not prominent men, their signatures augmented by ordinary citizens, who viewed such practices – especially during peacetime – as unnecessary labor and, therefore, a violation of the fourth commandment. Postmasters, clerks, and the contractors who transported the mails, were deprived of their weekly day of rest and worship. (The same basic concern appeared in a recent U.S. Supreme Court case.)[3] In addition, the transporting of mails and opening of post offices appeared disruptive of Sabbath peace, order, and social harmony in communities. In North Carolina, memorials to Congress originated from at least eleven counties.[4]
Mecklenburg County (encompassing Charlotte) produced six memorials against Sabbath mails, more than any other community in the entire South. Two were handwritten documents. The other four were copies of a mass-produced (printed) North Carolina Memorial that also appeared in other counties in the state, indicating an organized petition campaign similar to that found in other areas of the country.
Another petitioning county, where Presbyterians were the dominant religious group, was Iredell, north of Charlotte. Most of the region’s early settlers were Scots-Irish Presbyterians. By the 1770s, Scottish Highlanders joined them as well as emigrants from Pennsylvania looking for good farm land. Many of the newly arrived were Presbyterians. Three of the earliest Presbyterian churches near Statesville, the county seat, were Fourth Creek, Concord, and Bethany.
In 1828, Stephen Frontis commenced his ministry at Bethany. Born in Cognac, France, near the height of the French Revolution’s terrors and reared largely without this father, Frontis survived a lengthy and treacherous trek to Switzerland when his mother, a Protestant from Geneva, decided to travel to her home. A biographer noted with considerable understatement: “She . . . undertook a very fatiguing journey of five hundred miles through a mountainous country with four children, the oldest only seven, the youngest [Stephen] two years old . . . [who was] feeble and sickly.” Surviving the journey and arriving in Geneva in June 1794, his mother brought up her children in the Protestant faith. There, Stephen attended a “singing school,” began his education, and learned the trade of a cabinet-maker.[5]
In 1810 – at a time when Napoleon’s army desperately needed young men – Frontis was allowed to travel to America to join his father who had settled in Philadelphia, while the rest of his family remained on the other side of the Atlantic. There Frontis worked as a journeyman and learned the English language. Walking along Fourth Street one Sabbath morning, he heard the voice of a preacher “speaking very loud.” Stopping to listen, Frontis heard something of the gospel. The preacher, he learned later, was Presbyterian pastor James K. Burch, whom Stephen came to consider his spiritual father. Frontis was to write that upon hearing the message, “I had read in the Old Testament that at the dedication of the Jewish temple, Solomon asked for wisdom and his request was granted. It occurred to me that I would do the same. I knelt down and prayed for wisdom. This was the first prayer I offered, without formality and in sincerity.”[6]
Received as a member of Burch’s church, Frontis accepted his pastor’s recommendation to pursue the gospel ministry. In 1817, Frontis accompanied Burch to Oxford, North Carolina, and assisted him briefly in an academy there, teaching French. Over the next ten years, Frontis taught French in Raleigh, North Carolina, then studied at Princeton’s theological seminary in New Jersey, and served as a Presbyterian evangelist in North Carolina, the Territory of Michigan (preaching in both English and French) and in Delaware, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. (He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1824.)
At the end of 1827, Frontis received an invitation to visit the church of Bethany, in Iredell County. Returning to his adopted state, in the spring of 1828 he began preaching at Bethany. In May 1829, he accepted a call to become that church’s pastor as well as another’s – Tabor Presbyterian – devoting two-thirds of his time to Bethany and one-third to Tabor. During the winter of 1828-1829, Frontis led both churches in joining the nationwide petition campaign against Sabbath mails.[7]
In 1830, he married Miss Martha Dews of Lincolnton, N.C., whose family had come to America from the Channel Islands between England and France. They had three daughters and a son.
Rarely is it possible to identify the author of a particular Sabbath memorial, but the Iredell petition is one exception. The text of the document was penned in Stephen Frontis’ own “beautiful hand,” and his signature appeared just below the last line. That Pastor Frontis was influential in the petition effort – or that his views were in accord with those of other church leaders – was supported by the signatures of no less than eight of the eleven elders in the two churches. The signatures of five consecutive Tabor church members suggested the document was signed during a church gathering; probably on Sunday, February 1, 1829, the day before Frontis dated it below the last signature. Clearly, the Iredell memorial was the work of Presbyterians in the two churches led by Pastor Frontis.[8]
The petition’s text reflected Frontis’ thinking on the Sabbath. He believed the Sabbath afforded “the only adequate means for preserving the fear of God, the sanctity of oaths, genuine personal integrity, the public morals, & our civil & political privileges.” While acknowledging that there were many throughout the country “who practically disregard the Sabbath,” Frontis surmised there were but few “who would willingly see that sacred day abolished” – as the revolutionary government had done by design in his native France. Given his ancestry and European upbringing, Frontis enjoyed a greater appreciation for the consequences of the loss of the Sabbath day than did most of his American-born brethren. Even so, some American-born Presbyterians occasionally reminded their countrymen of France’s abolition of the Sabbath in lieu of the Decadi (every tenth day) – nearly forty years after the event.[9]
Consistent with other petition authors, Frontis believed the transporting of the mails and opening of post offices on the first day of the week “operate constantly & powerfully to bring the Sabbath itself into neglect & contempt . . . & that no remedy can be found, unless the national authority shall interpose to correct the evils.” The ills he alluded to grew tremendously during the period as the number of post offices increased greatly in size. In most communities the postmaster was the lone representative of the federal government, a respected figure. Even though most earned only modest revenues, each postmaster claimed the prestige of a federal office. His example was of considerable influence in the community, including his manner of keeping the Sabbath. Further, open post offices were popular gathering places for those looking for a reason to avoid attending public worship or seeking to escape the domestic circle.[10]
Having addressed spiritual concerns, in his conclusion Frontis emphasized temporal matters including the familiar connection between the Sabbath and republicanism:
The whole current of history & observation is in favour of the influence of the Sabbath upon the temporal prosperity of communities; that wherever this day has been con-secrated to religious instruction, & to the duties of public & private worship, the people have been distinguished for industry, peaceable habits, & especially for that intelligence & personal virtue, that sense of justice, of individual rights, & of the responsibility of rulers & private men to the Sovereign Ruler of all, which are essential to the existence of a free government.[11]
To any reader who may have glided over the above quote, please go back and read it again, slowly. Could there be anything more relevant in the America of the 2020s?
Frontis’ time at Bethany was of moderate duration: eight years, the last seven as her pastor. The main reason for his departure was one of the broad causes of North Carolina’s socioeconomic struggles of the period: westward, or southwestward, emigration, mostly in pursuit of richer, cheaper lands suitable for cash crops. Longings for the West contributed to upheaval in many communities and churches alike.
In Iredell County, from 1828 to 1836 the combined Bethany-Tabor membership lost 72 communicants, mostly due to emigration to West Tennessee. For a church that in 1836 counted 164 communing members, the losses were high. That year the dwindling flock led to a mutual decision leading to Frontis’ departure.
But Frontis was by no means the only local Presbyterian pastor concerned with Sabbath observance. Among North Carolina Presbyterians, the most active church court was Concord Presbytery, of which Frontis became a member in 1829. On four occasions between 1826 and 1836, Concord Presbytery directed her pastors to preach on the subject of Sabbath observance. Although four times in ten years may not appear overly impressive, it was unusual for a presbytery to direct its pastors to preach on specific topics.[12]
Following his pastorate at Bethany, Frontis served the First Presbyterian Church in Salisbury, N.C., for nine years, during which time two of his sisters were received into membership with certificates of transfer from their church in Geneva, Switzerland. Later, Frontis preached at several other area churches in the 1840s and 50s. For several years from 1858 he again taught French, doing so at the Presbyterians’ Davidson College, the precise location of which he had assisted in selecting some two decades earlier (he also served as a college trustee). He died in 1867, remembered as a man of great piety, “. . . deeply interested in everything that pertained to the advancement of the Redeemer’s Kingdom.”[13]
A faithful husband and father, pastor and churchman, native-Frenchman Stephen Frontis’ zeal for the Christian Sabbath may have been stirred by the bloody record of a Sabbath-less France in the 1790s as much as from his Bible and theological training. For Frontis and others of his era, the first day’s observance was an indispensable part of the serious and godly Christian life. Indeed, the Sabbath was a metaphor for the same: not one day a week, but every day. Today, we do well to remember the Sabbath, and the example of Rev. Stephen Frontis.
Requested byline:
Forrest L. Marion is a member First Presbyterian Church in Crossville, Tenn. This article stems from an ongoing study with the working title, “‘Stem the Torrent’: Southerners’ Contentions for the Christian Sabbath, 1815-1840.”

[1] Winton U. Solberg, Redeem the Time: The Puritan Sabbath in Early America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).
[2] Forrest L. Marion, “The Gentlemen Sabbatarians: The Sabbath Movement in the Upper South, 1826-1836,” doctoral dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tenn., Aug. 1998.
[3] Chris Pandolfo and Bill Mears, “Supreme Court Hands Religious Freedom Win to Postal Worker Who Refused to Work on Sunday, Aquila Report [reposted from Fox News], Jun. 29, 2023.
[4] Petitions from the following North Carolina counties are held at the National Archives (NA), under Petitions Received, RG233: Cabarrus, Caswell, Cumberland, Guilford, Hertford, Iredell, Mecklenburg, Nash, Richmond, Robeson, and Rockingham.
[5] Joseph M. Wilson, The Presbyterian Historical Almanac, and Annual Remembrance of the Church for 1868, volume 10 (Philadelphia, 1868), 327-31; J. K. Rouse, “A Gifted Frenchman,” Daily Independent Magazine, Oct. 7, 1962; O. C. Stonestreet III, “19th-Century Minister Founded Area Schools,” Iredell Neighbors, Jul. 9, 1989.
[6] Manuscript, Stephen Frontis, “Memoirs of my Life,” Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[7] As of 2006 the Presbyterian Department of History (PCUSA) at Montreat, N.C., displayed the Bethany church pulpit which was believed “to be the only 18th century North Carolina pulpit now in existence” – and from which Frontis preached.
[8] Petition of inhabitants of Iredell County, N.C., Feb. 2, 1829, Petitions Received, RG233, NA; “Bethany Presbyterian Church” abstract (original session books were penned by Frontis, clearly identifying his “beautiful hand”).
[9] Petition of inhabitants of Iredell County, N.C., Feb. 2, 1829.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Minutes of Concord Presbytery, vol. 2 (1825-1832), vol. 3? (1835), and vol. 4 (1836-1846), PCUSA.
[13] Stonestreet III, “19th-Century Minister,” Iredell Neighbors, Jul. 9, 1989.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
For the disciples, receiving the Spirit was like Jesus was with them again. Except as they travelled around and spread across the earth, as they’ve been told to, he was still with each one of them. He could now be everywhere, including inside each of their hearts and minds speaking tenderly to them and empowering them for the next test.

After his resurrection Jesus gathered his disciples to give them his parting instructions and pass on his mission. Each of the gospel writers summarise his words a little differently but they all include what Luke calls “the promise of the Father” (Luke 24).

Matthew records it as a promise that Jesus would be with them until the end of the age, Mark that their preaching would be accompanied by miracles. Luke speaks about them being “clothed with power” and John tells how Jesus acted out what would happen to them soon after by breathing on them and telling them to “receive the Spirit.” (Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, John 20).
Jesus was reminding them of what he’d already been at great pains to teach them. In order to complete the task he had given them, making disciples of all kinds of people, they needed the Holy Spirit.
He was clear with them that even after he had gone back to be with God, they shouldn’t launch straight on with the task he gave them, but should wait for the Holy Spirit, who he’d called their “helper”.
On the face of it this seems a bit strange. If my manager at work gave me an important task to do and there was a sense of urgency about it, my natural inclination would be to get straight on with it, or at least find out which of the rest of my work I can stop doing so I have time to do what she needs. I would be confused if after giving me the task, spelling out what needs to be done, and impressing the urgency of it on me, she then made it clear that under no circumstances was I to start. I was to sit tight and wait for someone to help me. I’m sure I’d appreciate help, but I’d feel faintly patronised. Surely I can start, at least, even if I need some other resources?
The disciples have been given a really important job to do, with a sense of supreme urgency about it. They have a whole world to tell about Jesus, why wouldn’t they just get on with it?
Jesus was emphatic. “Don’t go yet, you can’t start without everything you need, so wait until you’ve got it all.” He is like a drill sergeant, surveying his fresh—and slightly deluded—new recruits who are raring to race into a mock battle. The sergeant cautions them against rushing straight in, until he’s given them each some basic training and their weapon. We can be a lot like that, eager to surge ahead without picking up the basic equipment we need to be effective.
“Receiving the Spirit” was all that they were going to need. If we want to follow Jesus and fulfil his mission, presumably we need that too.
A couple of years before, Jesus and his disciples were at the Feast of Booths. This was when the Jewish people remembered God providing water for them when there were wandering in the desert, and it was when they looked forward to the Spirit being poured out like water in the future. On the last day of this festival, Jesus stood up in the Temple courts and shouted:
If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, “Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.”John 7
Everyone was dismantling the structures they had built for the festival and getting ready to return home. Jesus was saying “the water you’ve been celebrating is available all the time, and the eventual gift of the Spirit you’re expecting has arrived. You can get it through me.” It’s an enormous claim.
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