Acts Community Group Guide // Part 2

The Spirit's Sermon: "Breaking Heart Barriers"

Begin with prayer (5 minutes)

Gather together as a Community in a comfortable setting. Have somebody lead a prayer asking the Holy Spirit to lead and guide your time together.

Intro (10 minutes)

This week's teaching from Acts 2 on "The Spirit's Sermon" focuses on breaking barriers to our hearts. The power of Pentecost led to the first sermon of the church, a message that "cut to the heart" of every listener. We seek to know why it cut them to the heart + what the barriers are to our hearts being renewed by the Way of Jesus. The fruit of their repentance was profound yet simple... Day by day devotion, worship, learning, communion, generosity... in a radical, cultural shaping community that had favor in their city as they multiplied(Acts 2:42-47).

We looked at the barriers to our hearts and how hearing the gospel renews our hearts, and how it is that this passage invites us to communicate Jesus to the hearts of others.

Peter is breaking the barriers to their hearts by breaking the barriers that the people had experienced in the cultural and religious practices of the day. Suddenly, Peter is declaring that the Holy Spirit is now available to everyone.

Reflect on one or all of the following topics:

  1. BROKEN BARRIERS + PERSONAL EXPERIENCES. All the theological issues and differences that kept the original Pentecost audience from the Presence + Power of God were broken... EVERYONE could now have the same Spirit of God and prophecy as God's "witnesses"... have you experienced something like that personally? (Perhaps the first time you realized that you could be intimately connected to God, hear His voice, etc?) Share some of these experiences with each other briefly.

  2. IMPACT ON IDENTITY. What the audience in Jerusalem thought about themselves- their worth and identity, were being completely renewed... how has your worth and identity been impacted by the Way of Jesus?

  3. YOUR HEART + YOUR IMPACT. Are there any barriers of your heart that you can still sense that challenge your closeness with God? How does that impact your confidence to impact others?

Read this overview (5 minutes)

SCRIPTURE: Acts 2:14-18; 22-24; 32; 37-38; 41-47

This is a long passage, so we've given you pieces of it so that you can get the main ideas.

More than half of American Christians believe that the Holy Spirit is a force, not a person. We generally understand the Father and we get the Son, but for many of us the Spirit is more abstract. On top of that, regardless of maturity, commitment, gifting or education, most, if not all of us are a bit underwhelmed with the experience of the very promise Jesus got so excited about. 

But this staggeringly contrasts what we read in the pages of Scripture. From creation, to the Old Testament, to Jesus and the early Church in Acts, we find the Holy Spirit central to life in the Kingdom. Moment after moment we see the Spirit present, active, and essential. In fact, in the Gospels Jesus tells the disciples that the Holy Spirit is an incredible improvement to direct, face-to-face, conversation with God in the flesh. That God’s indwelling presence trumps God in human form. 

Which brings us to the church. Put simply, the Church led by the Holy Spirit looks like a continuation of everything Jesus started. And even though the expression is imperfect and flawed (because the Spirit was given to ordinary people), the work of Jesus still carries on.

At the end of the day, the Holy Spirit is a person to know, not a force to capture. You cannot know a person by simply learning about them. You have to experience them. And so the invitation today is to welcome, experience, and get to know the Holy Spirit. Every single one of us. You are qualified. Every barrier is removed except the ones we refuse to surrender.

Work through these discussion questions together as a Community (20 minutes)

Regardless of whether or not you grew up in the church, we all come to the conversation about the Holy Spirit with different perspectives, experiences, and understandings. Some of us had really beautiful encounters with the Spirit in the church, while others didn’t really ever hear about the Holy Spirit or had more negative experiences within their church community. This means that some of us will bring a deep hunger for the things of the Spirit to this conversation and others of us will bring hesitations and maybe even some fear. And some of us will bring a mixture of both.

With all of this in mind, spend some time discussing the following questions together:

  • In one or two sentences, how would you describe what you were taught or understood about the Holy Spirit? What misconceptions did you have about the Holy Spirit?

  • What are some of the obstacles/fears you have when you think about inviting more of the Holy Spirit into your life?

  • What hopes stir in you as you consider a life with more of the Holy Spirit?

Discuss the coming week’s practice (5 minutes)

As we start out this Practice, we want to take some time this week to look at our daily rhythms and schedule. The invitation is to look for opportunities to engage and follow the promptings of the Holy Spirit. It could look something like this:

  • Each morning, before you look at your phone, you take 2 minutes to breathe in deeply and say, “Come, Holy Spirit,” and then pause to receive from him — a feeling of peace, a prophetic word, a passage of Scripture, or simply the gift of quiet.

  • It could also look like posturing yourself in scheduled moments throughout your day to notice where the Spirit is moving, working, and speaking in and around you.

  • You could end your day by celebrating the ways in which you saw the Spirit work and inviting him to reveal to you the ways he was working that you didn’t notice.

Whatever it ends up being, take time to be with the Holy Spirit and begin to invite him into more of your life.

Close in prayer (10 minutes) 

*This guide was revised from the work of Bethany Allen & Gavin Bennett