There's more to this world than meets the eye. There's more to your life than meets the eye. There's more to love and success and career and happiness than all the math and science and physics in the universe can describe.

And there's more to your mental health and emotional health than therapists could ever fully understand.

We live in a world of transcendent wonder. I am preaching today to remind you of a Father in Heaven who wants to bring some magic back into your life.

I am so glad you are here today. If you are joining us online, or if you walked through those doors carrying a heavy weight of fatigue, or skepticism or doubt—welcome. If you walked in already full of faith, welcome.

My message today is part of a series called:

 

To discover this birthright of yours, we have to wind all the way back to the third book of the Bible—a strange book called Leviticus.

Leviticus is the place where most Bible reading plans go to die.

It looks like a dusty manual of animal sacrifices, weird dietary laws, priestly activities, and restrictive rules.

But what if Leviticus isn't a list of rules to control you, but a treasure map to free you?

Leviticus is one of the five books of Moses. Together, they are called the Law or the Torah.

The Law of Moses lays out seven annual festivals.

For God's people, these were not empty, boring religious rituals. They were an unbroken cycle of reminders of the love and grace of God. They were three dimensional rituals and routines with powerful symbolic meaning.

All of it was intended to hardwire grace into a person's soul.

You are not defined by your labor. You are not defined by your past. You are defined by the Father as a member of the royal family of God, with rights and powers and privileges nobody else has. This is your birthright.

Once you discover your Birthright and actually start believing it, you have to face a massive, life-altering question:
What miracles would happen in your life if you really believed you are who God says you are, and you really embraced what God says you have?

Today, we are looking at festival number four: The Feast of Pentecost.

Take a look at how this ancient festival is set up in Leviticus:
"And you shall count for yourselves from the day after the Sabbath, from the day that you brought the sheaf of the wave offering: seven Sabbaths shall be completed. Count fifty days to the day after the seventh Sabbath; then you shall offer a new grain offering to the LORD." (Leviticus 23:15-16)

And now, watch what happens when the countdown hits zero fifteen hundred years later in the New Testament. This is what happened on the first Day of Pentecost after Jesus died and rose again:
"And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them." (Acts 2:2-3)

Strange stuff, don't you think.

Don't worry. It gets stranger.

Feast number one on the calendar was the Feast of Passover. That one settled your glorious STATUS as a royal child of God.

Feast number two was the Feast of Unleavened Bread. That one settled your DOMINION as a royal child of God, and invited you into an inner emotional and mental state that we said was UNBROKEN.

That's an invitation to heal and break the chains of a slavery mindset so you can live free, for real, forever.

Feast number three was the Feast of Firstfruits, an invitation to live and think and feel UNREJECTED.

Now, we're at feast number four.

God told Moses to count seven full weeks—forty-nine days—from the morning after the Sabbath that followed Passover.

On the fiftieth day (which is what Pentecost literally means), the countdown hit zero.

This is what God commanded for this specific day:
"You shall bring from your dwellings two wave loaves of two-tenths of an ephah of fine flour. They shall be baked with leaven. They are the firstfruits to the LORD." (Leviticus 23:17)

Two loaves of fine flour, baked WITH leaven. That's a big deal. Yeast, or starter dough.

In feast number two, they had to offer UNLEAVENED bread to God. No yeast. So it's flat bread or crackers. They actually had to purge the whole house of leaven on that day.

But now, now, they're baking bread with leaven and presenting it before God.

Back then, they didn't have neat little packets of commercial yeast. They used a sourdough starter. It was a pinch of yesterday's sour, fermenting, dough kneaded into today's fresh flour.

That dough from yesterday symbolized their 430 year history as slaves.

It represented their past. It represented an unbroken chain of parasitic fermentation passed down through generations.

At the Feast of Unleavened Bread, God said to get rid of it. Make a clean break from it... not just physically but mentally too. Get rid of the slave thinking, the stuck patterns, the broken instincts of your pre-saved days.

But on this day—the Feast of Pentecost—God says the opposite: Bake it with the yeast still in it.

The old, bubbling, fermenting starter stays in the dough.

Why?

Because the loaves of bread represent the real, breathing, unpolished human beings who are already part of the family of God.

You look at yourself and say, I'm a mess.
God says, "Yes, I've noticed."

It's like having a baby who throws up on you and makes snot bubbles on you and you still love them anyway.

Yes, you're still imperfect. You've still got old habits, old patterns. Your freaked out, wounded, angry past self still calls the shots. You still carry the old starter dough from your crazy upbringing. Still carrying your history. Still working through the old neural pathways, the old anxieties, and the raw human messiness of your daily life. You are still fermenting in places.

And this is the first wonder of Pentecost:
God does not wait for you to be perfect before he embraces you as his own.

If you think God's love is conditioned on you purging every single crumb of weakness, anxiety, or struggle from your life before He can save you, bless you, grow you, or use you, you are living in an exhausting psychological prison. It's called "typical religion." You are bartering for acceptance.

But all along, God is saying: "Let's hang out. Just as you are."

The priest waves leavened bread before the Lord. But that's just the start.

The Day of Pentecost
Fast forward 1,500 years. The scene is a mud and stone house with a second floor room. One hundred twenty people sit in a cramped room. This scene is described in Acts chapter 2.

These are the ones who believed in Jesus.

No spiritual giants here. These are uneducated fishermen, outcasts, and ordinary citizens. They are tired, confused, they are probably anxious, and they are waiting.

These are all the known believers in Jesus, in Jerusalem. They are waiting because Jesus told them to.

Just one chapter earlier, Jesus having died, and risen again, is with the believers talking. All of a sudden, he turns on his resurrection-body anti-gravity powers and starts lifting up off the ground.

As a parting comment, he tells the disciples to wait in Jerusalem for power from on high. See, Jesus has a countdown clock running, and when he sits down on the throne of heaven in glory, something big is going to happen on earth.

The clock started 50 days earlier...

Day 1: Feast of Firstfruits. On that day, Jesus rose from the Dead. (1 Corinthians 15:20)

Day 40: the Ascension. (Acts 1:3 explicitly says it was 40 days after his resurrection, and the disciples gathered in that upper room, and talked and prayed and waited).

Then he ascends through the skies, through the clouds, into heaven. Is welcomed into heaven, and is officially seated on his glorious throne.

"But this He spoke concerning the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive; for the Holy Spirit was not yet given, because Jesus was not yet glorified." (John 7:39)

When Jesus sat down on that throne, the choirs of angels sang and the trumpets of heaven blew and the celestial beings gathered round the throne and bowed down, because, for the first time since Jesus left heaven to be born of a virgin, he stepped back into his glory.

Only this time, he stepped back, not only as God the Son but also as the Son of God, born of a woman, born of God.

When that glory happened in heaven, this glory happened on earth:

Day 50: Countdown complete. Fireworks.