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Our text for today tells us of the birth of the Church, the beginning of the Christian Church where on the day of Pentecost the work began, the first day of the week, and that is why we celebrate the first day of the week as our church day.

We know that the Apostles had been given a commission, but they had no idea how they would be able to fulfil this until the power of the Holy Spirit came upon them and they were then able to testify to all of those people who had gathered there for the Jewish festival, Jews from every nation of the world and they heard this wonderful message in their own tongues. This was already foretold in our text. That man was our Lord Jesus. So, the work began, and we can look back today, and we can see how far the Lord of the Harvest has extended that work within the world. Sometimes in the history of the church this work was frustrated and tried to direct to new foundations, and that was the foundations of men, but through the power of this Spirit all of these things were overcome, and we see today how this Gospel message of salvation is being taken into the world in various ways by the Lord of the Harvest.

It can be in a grand scale as we have witnessed recently with a Royal wedding where millions of people viewed that, and all were told very clearly what a Christian wedding was all about and how we need to take Christ into that marriage. It can be a simple conversion of one person where in an isolated place, but the work goes on, and the fulfilment that this would happen was brought about through the words of the prophet’s years before.

The prophet Hosea saw and witnessed that this would happen 800 years before the event took place. The prophet Hosea was sent to the children of Israel to tell them that the Lord was not pleased with them, that they were prostituting His ways and His laws. He was told to go and marry a prostitute as a symbol, which was what God thought of the Jewish nation at that time, and as he had children he was told to name them certain names which was a signal to the Jewish nation of what God thought of them, and we find written in Hosea Chapter 1 verses 8-11 as follows: “Now when he had weaned Loruhamah, she conceived, and bare a son. Then said God, Call his name Loammi: for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God. Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered; and it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God Then shall the children of Juda and the children of Israel be gathered together, and appoint themselves one head, and they shall come up out of the land: _.for great shall be the day of Jezreel.” We see that it was prophesied that where the children of Israel were being told they were no longer God’s people, it would also come to pass that they would be told and given the opportunity to be the sons and daughters of God, and that place was the very place, a street called Strait in Jerusalem, where both of these events took place. We see that all the tribes of the Jewish nation forgot about who should be their king and who should be their leader, and they appointed Christ to be the head over them for the future. Great shall be the day of Jezreel it was recorded.

If we follow that hundreds of years before we will find that there were two kings, one in Judah and one in Israel, and they both wanted to vie for the throne but they had both begun to follow Baal the false god, the one more than the other. God had spoken to the one and said that he should agree with the other one, that there should be a great national day where all the people who believed in Baal should come together and he should then exercise vengeance upon them on his behalf. We can read in the Scriptures, where thousands of people gathered at a temple of Baal and they went in to worship these false gods, and the king who had been commissioned with the way to stop this and bring about the vengeance of God had his soldiers wait outside and when everyone was in he ordered them to go in and slay all of these believers in false gods. It was termed the valley of blood. There was so much blood there at the time, but now the prophet Hosea said that that would come to an end, that now there would not need to be the slaying of people who followed after false gods, that now the Spirit would come within the world, this Holy Spirit that would go out into the world and would convert their hearts so that they too could see the futility of worshipping a false god, and they too could be converted and become sons and daughters of God. What a blessing! No longer does blood have to be spilt to bring about this conversion. It now comes about through the working of the Holy Spirit.

We all at some time in our life begin to worship earthly items, but we are blessed that the Holy Ghost intervenes and corrects us. This is a blessing granted us from the Lord.