‘The very first evidence Luke mentions of the Spirit’s presence in the church is that *they devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching* (42). One might perhaps say that the Holy Spirit opened a school in Jerusalem that day; its teachers were the apostles whom Jesus had appointed; and there were 3,000 pupils in the kindergarten!
We note that those new converts were not enjoying a mystical experience which led them to despise their mind or disdain theology. Anti-intellectualism and the fullness of the Spirit are mutually incompatible, because the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth. Nor did those early disciples imagine that, because they had received the Spirit, he was the only teacher they needed and they could dispense with human teachers. On the contrary, they sat at the apostles’ feet, hungry to receive instruction, and they persevered in it. Moreover, the teaching authority of the apostles, to which they submitted, was authenticated by miracles: *many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles* (43). The two references to the apostles, in verse 42 (their teaching) and verse 43 (their miracles), can hardly be an accident (cf. 2 Cor.12:12; Heb. 2:1-4).
Since the teaching of the apostles has come down to us in its definitive form in the New Testament, contemporary devotion to the apostles’ teaching will mean submission to the authority of the New Testament. A Spirit-filled church is a New Testament church, in the sense that it studies and submits to New Testament instruction. The Spirit of God leads the people of God to submit to the Word of God.’
–John R W Stott, The Spirit, the Church, and the World: The Message of Acts (Downer’s Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity, 1990), page 82, quoted by yours truly in today’s late service sermon
“The Feast of Pentecost or the Descent of the Holy Spirit, also called Rosalia, is the feast of the founding or establishment of the Church of Christ.”
– Patriarch Daniel#Pentecost2023 pic.twitter.com/HTjdFM4T23— Basilica.ro (EN) (@BasilicaNews) June 4, 2023