The Mission We Buried
Every Gospel Introduces Jesus With Fire. We Replaced It With Programmes.
There is a question that ought to unsettle every honest reader of the New Testament, and it is this: if you were to ask a thousand Christians to summarise, in a single sentence, the mission of Jesus, how many would answer with the words the Gospels themselves use to introduce Him? The answer would be very few; perhaps almost none. We have been catechised to speak of the cross, the empty tomb, the forgiveness of sins, the gift of eternal life; and each of these glories is real, biblical, and beyond price. Yet none of them is the answer the four evangelists give when they first place Jesus in front of us. The first thing each Gospel says about His mission is something else entirely, and it is something the contemporary church has quietly, almost unconsciously, allowed to slip out of its central proclamation.
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all introduce Jesus through the witness of one man, John the Baptist; and that witness, in every account, converges on a single, identifying phrase. “I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matt. 3:11). Mark records the same testimony (Mark 1:8); Luke records it almost word for word (Luke 3:16); and John, who arranges his Gospel around theological signs rather than chronological order, still preserves the Baptist’s confession as a foundational identifier: “He who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit’” (John 1:33). Four accounts, four authors, four different audiences, one unbroken introduction. The Spirit-and-fire baptism is not a peripheral feature of Christ’s ministry; it is the headline, the banner, the inaugural definition. To miss it is to misread the opening page.
A Mission We Have Tamed
Why, then, does this proclamation occupy so small a place in modern preaching? Part of the answer is cultural; part is theological; and part, we must confess, is institutional. The modern Western church, formed in the wake of the Enlightenment and the long shadow of revivalist excess, has grown comfortable with a Christianity it can manage. Doctrines that can be systematised, sermons that can be outlined, programmes that can be scheduled; these we know how to handle. But a Christ who baptises in fire is a Christ who refuses domestication. The Greek verb baptizō means to immerse, to plunge, to submerge entirely; it is not the language of a polite religious ceremony. To be baptised in the Holy Spirit and fire is to be submerged in a presence that reorders the personality, reorganises the will, and refuses to leave the believer’s interior architecture in the shape it found it.
Furthermore, secular scepticism has not retreated; it has hardened. The cultural moment in which we now minister is one of intense spiritual exhaustion. Traditional religious routines carry very little weight; passive church attendance has become unintelligible to those outside its walls; and the gospel, when reduced to theory, is dismissed as one ideology among many. Modern audiences are not impressed by religious vocabulary, however well rehearsed. They are looking, however unconsciously, for something tangible, something demonstrable, something that the natural eye cannot easily explain away. Paul understood this when he wrote, “My speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor. 2:4–5). The mission Jesus declared is precisely the mission the present hour requires; and yet it is the mission we have most thoroughly muted.
Fire Unharnessed and Fire Channelled
Fire, when left to itself, is a chaotic force. We see this every Australian summer when wildfires devour grasslands, homes and bushland with terrifying indifference. Yet the same element, channelled and contained, becomes the engine of civilisation. Once harnessed, fire performs four distinct functions; it generates power, it produces light, it provides heat, and it purifies precious metals. Each of these natural outputs answers to a spiritual reality that the baptism of the Holy Spirit produces in the believer. The Spirit and fire that Christ promises are not metaphors for vague religious enthusiasm; they describe a specific transformation that releases four identifiable dimensions in the life of His witness. The remainder of this article will trace each one in turn.
The First Dimension: Power
The Greek word the New Testament uses for spiritual power is dunamis, from which we derive the English words “dynamic” and “dynamite”. In an internal combustion engine, raw combustion is converted into explosive energy, and that explosion is then harnessed into downward force and forward momentum. The parallel is exact. “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Jesus did not commission His disciples to attempt witness in their own strength; He explicitly forbade it. “Behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). The verb endusēsthe, “clothed”, carries the sense of being arrayed in something that envelops the whole person; it is the same word used elsewhere for putting on a garment. Until the disciples were so clothed, they were not yet ready to be sent.
When the early church proclaimed the gospel, this dunamis followed; the lame walked, the demonised were delivered, the dead were raised. These signs were not optional accessories to apostolic preaching; they were the physical validation that the kingdom announced was real, present and operative. Philip went down to Samaria and proclaimed the Christ to them; “and the crowds with one accord paid attention to what was being said by Philip, when they heard him and saw the signs that he did” (Acts 8:6). The hearing and the seeing belonged together; the proclamation and the demonstration moved as one. In a culture exhausted by religious theory, the recovery of this dimension is not a luxury. It is the spiritual combustion that gives witness its forward momentum.
The Second Dimension: Perception
Raw power, however, is catastrophic without direction. An engine without headlights at midnight is not an asset but a liability. The second dimension that the Spirit produces is perception, the spiritual capacity to see what cannot be seen by the natural eye. “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14). Discernment is not cleverness; it is illumination. The Spirit acts as light, exposing what is hidden, identifying what is counterfeit, distinguishing between voices that sound similar but originate in different realms.
This dimension has never been more urgently needed than now. We live in an hour saturated with counterfeit spirituality; deceiving spirits, Paul warned Timothy, will increase in the latter times, accompanied by teachings that bear an outward form of godliness but deny its power (1 Tim. 4:1; 2 Tim. 3:5). A deceiving spirit can masquerade as a righteous leader; it can quote Scripture, deploy theological vocabulary, and present a public face that is, to the natural assessment, entirely respectable. Without divine illumination, the believer is left to navigate this landscape by sentiment, intuition or institutional reputation, none of which is reliable. The Holy Spirit, by contrast, provides what Paul called “the eyes of your hearts enlightened” (Eph. 1:18). Such eyes pierce through facades; they see motives the natural mind cannot detect; they recognise the kingdom in unlikely vessels and detect compromise in venerated platforms. Momentum is useless if you are driving toward a cliff; the witness who carries power without perception will, in the end, expend that power on the wrong targets.
The Third Dimension: Passion
The third dimension is passion, and its natural correlate is heat. A machine may possess every mechanical component in perfect order, yet if the fire goes out the entire system grows cold and stationary. The early church understood this; the Romans were exhorted to be “fervent in spirit” (Rom. 12:11), where the Greek zeontes means literally “boiling”, a temperature image drawn from a pot at full heat. Spiritual fervour is not emotional theatre; it is sustained interior combustion that drives the believer’s service even when circumstances would extinguish lesser fires.
The historical church in Ephesus stands as the primary warning here. They had flawless doctrine; they had tested those who claimed to be apostles and found them false; they had laboured tirelessly without growing weary. Yet the risen Christ, who walked among the lampstands, delivered to them one of the most searching indictments in the New Testament: “But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first” (Rev. 2:4). Mechanics without heat eventually degrade into dead religion; orthodoxy without zeal becomes a museum of correct ideas. The Lord’s prescription to Ephesus was not a refinement of their doctrine but the rekindling of their first love; “remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first” (Rev. 2:5). The witness who would penetrate this generation must remain consumed by an internal fire that is contagious; for what is not burning cannot ignite anything else.
The Fourth Dimension: Purity
The fourth dimension is purity, and the metaphor moves from the engine and the furnace to the refiner’s crucible. Ancient metallurgists understood that gold and silver, in their raw state, are bound up with impurities; only intense heat will separate the precious from the worthless. As the metal liquefies, the dross rises to the surface and is skimmed away; and a long-standing teaching tradition holds that the refiner continued this process until he could see his own reflection in the molten surface. Malachi described the coming of the Lord in precisely these terms: “He is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the LORD” (Mal. 3:2–3).
The fire of the Holy Spirit performs this same refining work in the believer. It burns away the dross of selfish ambition, private compromise and concealed motives, until the believer’s character increasingly reflects the image of Christ Himself. This is no peripheral matter; it is the seal of credibility. In any court of law, the testimony of a witness whose character has been compromised is dismissed regardless of whether the facts of his account are true; credibility, once forfeited, cannot be reclaimed by argument. So also in the spiritual realm: a witness whose public proclamation is not backed by a private reality has nothing to offer that the world will receive. “Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14). Purity is not optional decoration on the apostolic life; it is the substrate on which everything else stands or falls.
The Reversal of Sinai
These four dimensions, when held together, are not innovations introduced by the New Testament; they are the restoration of a connection that was severed at the foot of Mount Sinai. When God descended upon that mountain in fire, smoke and trumpet blast, His original intention was the establishment of a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, a people who would hear His voice directly, without mediator, without filter (Exod. 19:5–6). Yet when the people heard the thunder and saw the lightning, they drew back in terror; “you speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, lest we die” (Exod. 20:19). They chose mediated religion over immediate relationship; they preferred a man to stand between them and the voice of God; and that single choice shaped the next fifteen hundred years of Israel’s covenantal history.
The day of Pentecost was the divine reversal of that ancient refusal. When the fire came again, it did not descend upon a mountain that the people were forbidden to touch; it descended upon the people themselves, resting in cloven tongues upon each one of them (Acts 2:3). What Sinai had withheld at the people’s own request, Pentecost restored at the Father’s own initiative. The Holy Spirit, given without measure, was the mechanism God used to fulfil at last the original plan: direct, personal, unmediated access to His presence for every son and every daughter who would receive Him. “And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh” (Acts 2:17).
This is why the New Testament refers to the Spirit using the Greek word koinōnia, “fellowship”, “communion”, “shared life”. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Cor. 13:14). The Spirit is not an impersonal energy source to be tapped, nor a functional tool to be deployed; He is a Person, an intimate friend and partner, with whom the believer shares a continuous, conscious life. To know Him as koinōnia is to be released from the weight of religious obligation; what was once duty becomes shared activity, what was once striving becomes participation, what was once performance becomes presence.
The Mark of the Witness Sent to the Ends of the Earth
We return, then, to the place we began. The Gospels introduce Jesus as the One who baptises in the Holy Spirit and fire; and we have seen that this baptism produces four identifiable dimensions in the believer: power that demonstrates the kingdom, perception that pierces deception, passion that refuses to grow cold, and purity that establishes credibility. These four together constitute the witness that Christ promised would carry His name to the ends of the earth.
The modern world will not be won by religious theory, however accurate; it will not be drawn back to Christ by institutional refinement, however polished; and it will not be persuaded by argument alone, however eloquent. It will be confronted, and ultimately convinced, by ordinary people walking in the unordinary reality of Spirit and fire. When such believers appear in a generation, the kingdom is no longer a doctrine to be debated; it becomes a presence to be reckoned with. This is the mission Jesus explicitly declared; this is the inheritance the Gospels explicitly announce; and this is the church the Spirit is even now raising up in our time.
Let the prayer of every reader, then, be the prayer that the early disciples were commanded to wait for and refused to move without: that the fire would fall again, that the Spirit would come in fullness, and that the explicit mission of Jesus would become the unmistakable identity of His people in this hour.
Glenn Bleakney is the Founder of Awake Nations on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, and Dallas Texa, USA. He is also the President of Sent College. Together with his wife Lynn, he leads Awake Nations Global Network and has ministered across more than forty nations. His writing centres on Kingdom theology, apostolic reformation, and the recovery of a Spirit-empowered church for this generation.
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