When the Room Shook: The Holy Spirit, Pentecost, and the Work We Keep Trying to Do Without Him
Pentecost Sunday — Concentric Global
I want to tell you about a particular drift in my life — one that didn’t announce itself with sirens or a dramatic fall. It crept in quietly, the way fog does. The calendar was full. The ministry was moving. People were being helped, or at least I was fairly certain they were, which is not quite the same thing. I had goals and metrics and a vision statement I could recite with great conviction.
I was praying. I want to be clear about that. I have been fairly regimented in my times with God for most of my adult life — in the scriptures, in prayer, keeping the disciplines. This is not a story about a man who stopped praying.
It’s a story about a man who was sometimes doing prayer rather than being in prayer.
The difference is subtle and devastating. My body was in the chair. The Bible was open. The words were going up. But my mind was already out the door — running through the day, rehearsing the meeting, cataloguing the needs of the ministry, composing emails I hadn’t written yet. I was praying at God from a distance rather than waiting on Him in the room.
Henri Nouwen named this with uncomfortable precision: “One of the tragedies of our life is that we keep forgetting who we are.” We are not the managers of God’s mission. We are beloved children, called into intimacy first, and fruitfulness second — and never the other way around. The moment we reverse that order, we are busy but not alive.
A.W. Tozer said something similar, with his characteristic sandpaper gentleness: “We have become so engrossed in the work of the Lord that we have forgotten the Lord of the work.”
I have lived inside both of those sentences more than I would like to admit.
The Early Morning Rooms
There was a season early in my ministry — I was a young youth pastor in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania — when I stumbled into something I didn’t fully understand at the time.
A group of the older men of Prince Street Church gathered in the early morning hours, Monday through Friday, to pray. I joined them. It was not glamorous. The hours were not glamorous. The church was not, if I’m being honest, a thriving, vibrant congregation in the conventional sense of the phrase.
But we prayed. For revival. For our community. For the needs of the world and the church. For thirty to sixty minutes each morning, a small group of ordinary men leaned in together with hungry hearts.
I was young enough to think this was mostly about the larger church body. Thirty years of hindsight has given me a different view. Because in those same years, hundreds of young people came to a saving knowledge of Jesus through the youth ministry I had the opportunity to lead. I spent a long time attributing that fruit to programming and strategy and the obvious charisma of a twenty-something with a van and a guitar.
I think I was wrong. I think the rooms where the older men prayed in the dark, before the world woke up, had more to do with it than I knew.
The Greek Word Nobody Talks About
Acts 4:31 is one of those passages that can slide past us too quickly. The disciples are gathered together. They pray. The place shakes. The Spirit fills them. They speak the word of God with boldness — the Gospel goes forth.
Easy enough. Moving on.
But stay with me for a moment in the Greek, because this is where it gets interesting.
The word Luke uses for what they were doing in that room — the praying — carries a specific texture the English doesn’t quite catch. Luke’s language and the context together create a picture of earnest, persistent prayer — not a perfunctory religious exercise. It’s not the word for a casual, heads-bowed, polite-religious-activity kind of prayer. It carries the weight of earnestness, of urgent pursuit, of people who have cleared the decks because they believe this matters more than the thing they’re going to do next.
There’s a longing baked into it. A lean-in. The posture of people who are not performing prayer but pursuing the One they’re praying to.
And notice: this wasn’t a one-time event. The disciples were in the regular habit of gathering to pray like this. Before the room shook and the Spirit showed up, there was a pattern — gathered, earnest, fervent pursuit of God.
Which tells me something important: the miracle didn’t fall out of the sky at random. It arrived into a space that had been prepared by people who kept showing up, together, with hungry hearts.
Three Things That Happened (And Why the Order Matters)
When the Spirit shows up in Acts 4:31, three things happen in rapid succession. Luke — the careful historian and physician he was — notes them with precision:
The place shook. They were filled. They spoke the word of God boldly.
I want to gently suggest that the order is not incidental. They didn’t decide to speak boldly and then ask God to help them pull it off. They weren’t running a communications strategy meeting about how to more effectively advance the Gospel. They were praying — really praying — and the Spirit came, and then the boldness came, as fruit of the filling, not as an achievement of their effort.
This is the sequence the church has been accidentally reversing for centuries.
We are very good at Step 3. We are deeply committed to speaking, strategizing, communicating, launching, and activating.
We are considerably less practiced at Steps 1 and 2.
And I say this with all the gentleness I can muster, and also with the self-awareness of a man who has made exactly this mistake more times than he would like to admit publicly — and a few times that are now unfortunately part of the public record of his life.
The Philadelphia Years and the Drift That Doesn’t Announce Itself
Years after Shippensburg, I found myself in Philadelphia — planting a church with young people in a city where churches were closing and their sacred spaces were being converted into retail and apartments. It was the kind of work that generates Philadelphia Inquirer articles and makes you feel like you’re on the right side of history. We bought a historic building. We renovated it. We opened new ministries, started a counseling center, a nonprofit, planted a second campus, coached others doing the same across many more locations.
Seven full years. Real fruit. Real grace. I am genuinely grateful for every moment of it.
But somewhere in those years — gradually, almost imperceptibly — the work for God began crowding out the work in God.
I kept my disciplines. I prayed daily. I read scripture. I did not, as far as I could tell, slide into rebellion or hidden sin. This is one of the things that makes the drift so insidious: it doesn’t look like failure from the inside. It looks like faithfulness. It looks like productivity. It looks like you are serving God with great dedication.
What it feels like, if you pay close enough attention, is a kind of low-grade spiritual dehydration. The motions are there. The results are even there, sometimes. But something has gone quiet in the interior.
I started asking men to join me for early morning prayer in our Hagia Sophia-style sanctuary. Not many came. But we prayed. And looking back, I recognize that impulse for what it was — a soul trying to find its way back to the room where the Spirit fills people.
The capacity to drift from being into doing is always subversively below the surface. I can get caught up in all that needs to be done for God out there in the world and in others, and forget all that needs to be done in me. The irony is that ministry, of all things, can become the distraction from the very Source that makes ministry possible.
The Uncomfortable Question About Who We’re Really Working For
Here is something I have observed in myself, and I suspect I am not entirely alone:
Sometimes the work “for God” has a suspicious amount of me in it.
The vision is genuinely Kingdom-oriented. The mission statement is appropriately God-centered. But down in the engine room, where the real motivations live? There can be — if I’m honest — a fair amount of ego. A hunger for recognition. A subtle conviction that my particular expression of ministry is quite important and perhaps even slightly more important than other people’s expressions of ministry.
I am not proud of this. But the Holy Spirit, it turns out, is not particularly interested in being an accomplice to my personal brand. And time and time again, with great gentleness and occasionally with some force, He has brought me back to center — all because of His love for me and for the people He has entrusted to my care.
And here is the tender mercy in that: humility is not a character defect to be overcome on the way to Spirit-powered ministry. Humility is the door.
The disciples who gathered in Acts 4 had been through the crucible. They had watched Jesus die. They had experienced their own profound failures of nerve and loyalty. They were not arriving at that prayer meeting as men flush with self-confidence. They arrived as people who knew, at the cellular level, that they could not do this on their own.
That’s the posture the Spirit fills.
C.S. Lewis observed that pride is the central sin — the one that makes all other sins possible — precisely because it puts the self on the throne where God belongs. If pride is the great blocker, then humility is the great opener.
The room that is cleared of self is the room the Spirit can fill.
What the Spirit Actually Does
I want to say something carefully here, because the conversation around the Holy Spirit can go sideways in several directions, and I’ve watched it go sideways in most of them.
On one side, there’s a kind of Spirit-talk so focused on dramatic phenomena — shaking rooms, miraculous signs, overwhelming experiences — that ordinary faithful Christian life starts to feel like a spiritual consolation prize. Like you’re at the wrong party if the chandelier isn’t vibrating.
On the other side, there’s a respectable, educated, slightly embarrassed Christianity that has quietly filed the Holy Spirit under “things we believe in theory but don’t discuss in polite company,” and gets along just fine with good theology, sound preaching, and competent organizational management.
Both miss the point of Acts 4:31. Both miss the point of Pentecost.
The Spirit is not a parlor trick. But He is also not a metaphor.
He is — as Paul wrote to the Galatians — the One we are meant to walk in step with (Galatians 5:25). The image is of two people walking together, matching stride for stride. Not one person charging ahead while occasionally glancing back to see if God is keeping up. Not one person standing still waiting for a supernatural encounter before taking a step. Two people. Walking. Together.
The Spirit gives us faith when ours runs dry. He gives us focus when the noise of the world has scrambled our attention. He gives us love for God and neighbor that we cannot manufacture through sheer moral effort — and anyone who has tried to manufacture it knows exactly how well that goes.
And yes — He does miracles. Let me be specific, because vague spiritual testimony is easy and costs nothing.
As a child I had a stutter so pronounced that my parents — my mom an English teacher, my dad a prolific writer — worked with patient persistence to help me find my voice. Moses, famously, had the same complaint before God. That stutter disappeared before adolescence. I don’t take that for granted. I also had severe asthma that gradually came under control in ways that still feel like grace.
As a teenager, my mother was nearly taken from us by a crippling staph infection. It was devastating to our family in ways I’m still unpacking. But in the wreckage of that season, something else happened: I became a Christian. So did my sister. So did my dad. Answers, I believe, to the prayers of a mother who never stopped asking.
Teresa and I have raised three children, and if you are a parent you already know that parenting is one long sustained act of desperate intercession. Bullying. Rebellious choices with consequences that could have been far worse. Moments where the grace of God was the only thing standing between our kids and outcomes I can’t bring myself to write in a blog post. We prayed. God moved. Not always the way we expected. But He moved.
And then, when I left my last post as a local church pastor to step into the president’s role at Concentric, I was hit — within the first six months — with a ruptured disc that put me flat on my back for a month. New role. New mission. Incapacitated. I remember lying there thinking that this was a spectacular time for my body to stage a revolt. God used a gifted neurosurgeon to restore what needed restoring, and today I sit on long international flights, ride in rickshaws through remote villages, and walk into places where the Gospel is being carried to the hardest-to-reach people on earth. That back has held. That is the hand of God.
These are a fraction of what I could tell you. There are far too many for one blog post. But they give you something to hold — a thread of testimony that runs from a stuttering child in upstate New York to a man watching ordinary disciples lead friends to Christ, who lead friends to Christ, who plant churches that plant churches, in movements that now number in the hundreds of thousands in house church movements and disciplemakers. You can read more about that work in other posts here at Concentric.
I am not inclined to wave any of it away with nervous laughter. He is real. He moves. He moves with people who are walking with Him — not people who have decided to sprint ahead and occasionally send back updates.
I suspect, if you stop long enough to look, you have a list of your own.
The Mission Is His
This brings me to the thing I most want to say on this Pentecost Sunday.
The mission belongs to God.
I don’t mean that in the polite, theologically-correct, say-it-in-church way that has almost no practical impact on how we actually operate. I mean it in the Acts 4 way — the way that means we are not the main characters. We are not the heroes of this story. We are people who have been invited into a work that was already underway before we arrived and will continue long after we are gone.
The disciples didn’t invent the mission. They received it. The power for the mission didn’t come from their considerable passion and conviction. It came from a Spirit they had been pursuing in prayer — together, earnestly, with fervent hunger.
The church is never more effective, never more genuinely alive, than when it knows this. And it is never more exhausted, conflicted, and spiritually hollow than when it forgets it.
A Word for the Worn-Out and the Skeptical
If you are a believer reading this and you are running on fumes — doing the work, showing up, trying to hold it together — can I say something gently?
You might be doing prayer rather than being in prayer. You might be working for God rather than with Him. And the fix is not better time management or a more sustainable ministry rhythm, though those things might not hurt. The fix is the thing the disciples were doing before the room shook: returning — again — to earnest and fervent prayer. Not as a technique. Not as a spiritual discipline to check off. As an actual, honest, leaning-in pursuit of the God you love and need, and who loves you far more than you know.
He fills the people who come hungry. He meets the people who clear the decks and actually show up.
And if you are a skeptic, or someone who finds all of this Holy Spirit language a bit much — I understand. I really do. The history of “Spirit-talk” includes enough manipulation, excess, and embarrassing spectacle to make thoughtful people deeply wary.
But here is what I’d ask you to sit with: there is something that happens to ordinary people who genuinely, humbly, persistently seek God together. History is full of them. The disciples in Acts 4 were frightened, ordinary, recently-failed people. What happened to them was not the result of charisma or clever strategy. Something came into the room.
I don’t think that something has stopped coming.
Pentecost is not just a historical event. It’s an ongoing invitation.
The question is whether we’ll show up to the kind of prayer where God shakes the room.
Happy Pentecost Sunday. May the Spirit fill you, shake whatever needs shaking, and send you — with great boldness — into the work that was always His.
