We read yesterday about a key moment in the unfolding story of what God was doing through his Spirit in the first decades of the early church; the moment when the gift of the Holy Spirit was given even to the Samaritans, the traditional enemies of Israel. God was showing that he is willing to favour everyone without distinction. However, immediately after this, we have the only account of a person who was expressly denied the gift of the Holy Spirit: Simon Magus. He offered the Apostles money to receive the Holy Spirit and Peter retorted that he could not receive the Spirit because his heart was not right (8:21). Simon was an ambitious man, he had some extraordinary abilities and used them to become very influential. He wanted to simply add the ministry of the Holy Spirit to the foundations of his present ambitions. He wanted to build an empowered Christian life as though it were another storey on top of what was already there. But God does not build his new life on the foundations of our old life. He does not want to empower your old attitudes and ambitions. God gives us his Spirit to instil in us a new heart. That is the promise (Ezekiel 36:26). We therefore must be willing for God to excavate and remove the old foundations. This feels like digging down rather than building up; it feels like destruction rather than construction. But all this is necessary for laying a new foundation which in turn is necessary for the new empowered life in Christ.
Ask God to show you what ‘old foundations’ (e.g. old motivations) he is trying to get rid of.
Read Acts 8:18-25
