It is a historical fact, that men only became Christians, when and where the disciples of Christ went to preach the Gospel after that they were filled with the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, then a hundred and twenty disciples of the Lord were filled with the Holy Spirit! Then, in obedience to the Lord’s command: ‘They went everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed His Word (the Gospel) by the signs that accompanied it. (Mark 16:20) This is happening to this very day, by various preachers which Jesus fills with the Holy Spirit, prepares them for the task and sends where He want them to! 

The Pentecostal principle, if not visible, is still the way by which Jesus sends His servants. By Pentecostal principle I refer to what happened to the disciples of Jesus Christ on the day of the feast of Pentecost, ten days after His ascension. One is not a preacher when one has had the hands of a bishop, of whatever Christian confession, laid on one, not even if it is the Pope, the head of the Roman Catholic Church! A real servant of Christ does not have to have any degrees, although if He has any, he will still hold his credentials from His Master Jesus Christ, and enjoys the power and anointing of the Holy Spirit! Thus, it is the Holy Spirit that fits Him for whatever ministry He has received from Him! (Ephesians 4: 11-13) We must note that Jesus did not start His public ministry until He too was filled with the Holy Spirit. We shall return to this statement and deal with it more fully.

The importance of what I tried to express thus far, is that Jesus, the Son of God, was the first apostle, appointed and sent forth by His Father! The Oxford dictionary tells me that an apostle is a ‘messenger’, hence a man with a message; Jesus’s message to the world is the Gospel which He received from His father! In His prayer, which He prayed in the upper room, on the night of His betrayal by Judas Iscariot, He said to His Father: ‘For I gave them the words you gave me and they accepted them. They knew with certainty that I came from you, and they believed that you sent me!’ There is this unique manifestation of God’s power in the words of the Gospel, Jesus was careful to state publicly that the words He preached, came directly to Him from the heart of His Father. During three years His disciples heard the Gospel and it got rooted in their hearts, so, when they took over the evangelisation of the world, after that Jesus ascended to heaven, they were careful to preach nothing else. Jesus was careful to tress to them the importance by the command He gave them: ‘Then Jesus came to them and said: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me! Therefore,go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely, I am with always, to the very end of the age’. (Matthew 28:18-20)

I mentioned this statement previously, but it needs to be mentioned again, for we can never say it often enough, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was sent from heaven to earth by God His Father, with a message and this message came to Him from the very heart of God. Hence to save men is the work of God from beginning to the end. Unless a man is sent of God and preaches the same message that Jesus, His Son preached, that man has no mandate to do so from the maker of heaven and earth, the Most-High God! To do this, Jesus left Nazareth where he grew up to be a man of thirty years of age, waiting years for the day when, in the will of God, He was revealed to the public eye! Soon after he was baptised and filled with the Holy Spirit, Luke mentions that went into the desert of Judea where he spent forty days in the desert being tempted of the devil. Everything Satan threw at Him was of no avail! Following His victory over Satan: ‘Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the countryside. He taught in their synagogues and everyone praised Him.’ (Luke 4: 14-15) It is to be noted that He did it in the power of the Holy Spirit; for we shall return to this important statement!