The Crisis of Pentecost and the Significance of the Holy Spirit's Coming

We can never understand Pentecost, the advent of the Holy Spirit, until we recognise that it is by the coming in of the Holy Spirit, and only so, that God gets the "man" that He has ever intended to have. The purpose of man's creation was that he should be a child of God, that men should become sons of God. As Paul says: "foreordained unto the adoption as sons, to be conformed to the image of His Son". Pentecost, therefore, takes us right back to the original thought and purpose of God in the creation of man and brings that right up to date. So that when you and I, or any believing man or woman, receives the Holy Spirit within, all that God intended in creation starts up; comes into the first phase of its realisation. It can never be until then. And you can see, as we perhaps shall see later as we go on, the tremendous change in the kind of person that resulted from the Day of Pentecost.