Scripture: Acts 2:37-42; Luke 17:20-21; Acts 2:43-47; Matthew 7:13-14; Romans 14:17; Galatians 5:22-23
The reign of the Holy Spirit, begun at Pentecost, is an embarkation point whose milestones are the ordinary, inward fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace—present here and now rather than in observable externals or judgment of others.
Illustrations: milestones-road-markers, preachers-birthday, english-railroads-coal, wesley-whitefield-1744, pascal-you-would-not-seek-me, frost-road-not-taken, gift-on-the-shelf
October 19, 2025
The Reign of the Spirit
Acts 2: 37-42
Luke 17:20-21
“Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” ” - Acts 2:37-42
Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” - Luke 17:20-21
 I recently had a birthday. It wasn’t one of the big ones. It wasn’t one of those birthdays that people call milestones. You know, when you turn 40 or 50 or pretty much any birthday that ends with a zero. That’s a milestone. Or your 10 year, or 25 year, or 50 year wedding anniversary. That’s a milestone.
Or when you move to a new town, get a new job, have a kid, lose a kid, have a divorce, lose a spouse, Milestones.
I find it so amusing how this metaphor of Milestone has turned into major events in someone’s life. Oh, that’s a real Milestone for you. Major event in your career. You win this national award. What a milestone. You’re elected to a special body. What a milestone.
The irony is that in places that use actual stones to mark the miles, or milestone, the milestones themselves were incredibly average and normal things. If milestones were only set in eventful places, they would not function as they were intended. People would get lost.
In England in the early 19th century, very few roads were paved. Most travel was by river or by boat, sailing around the island. The first railroads in the world were installed because a cart of coal was so heavy that a team of mules couldn’t pull it across the muddy, washed out roads of England.
The same issue happened for milestones. After rainstorms, roads could easily be washed away, but the stone would not. The milestone would mark where the road should be so that when travelers started back up after the ground dried, they would know the proper path to take. Milestones weren’t put down to mark significant moments of the road, but to mark the road,to help the traveler not be lost. But in order to find a milestone, you’ve got to start somewhere and be going somewhere. That’s the real key of it. In the literal way, when you hit a milestone, it means you’re going somewhere; you’re on a journey, which means there also has to be an embarkation point.
Series Intro
My friends, we are finishing our series on the stained glass windows at Covenant. With this window over here, the reign of the Holy Spirit. The reign of the Holy Spirit marks an embarkation point for the Christian faith. It’s not the last window, but it sets us on our way. It sets us out on our way to the Kingdom of God, but also in the Kingdom of God. As Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, Seek and you will find. He doesn’t say this to tell us to stop seeking, but that in seeking we find.
As the French philosopher Blaise Pascal put it through the mouth of Jesus, you would not seek me if you had not already found me.
Jesus describes this partially in the reading from Luke 17. The Kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed. Look, it is already here. The Kingdom of God is among you. Now this is an act of faith. Think about your own life. Think about the people in your life, think about how you spend your time, does it look like the kingdom of God to you right now? Does it look like completed thing right now?
In 1744, the Methodist movement was struggling. There have been a number of controversies over the previous few years. Controversies between John Wesley and a man named George Whitfield had originally been friends but started to get into a big controversy about faith. Whitefield was a very popular preacher, much more popular than John Wesley. He preached up and down the Colonial America. Some scholars have argued that the unity of the 13 colonies in the American Revolution was in large part due to the revivals led by George Whitfield across colonial boundaries. But Whitfield was very reformed and predestinarian. He believed that God predestined some to salvation and some to damnation, and John Wesley could not stomach this scripturally. The Methodist movement split in part between those who followed Whitefield and Wesley.
There was also a controversy for Wesley with the Moravians. Moravians were a group of German Christians who had heavily influenced John Wesley early on his journey to Georgia as well as when he came back to London. They had helped guide him toward his experience of Aldersgate when his heart was strangely warmed. But John started to disagree with the direction that movement was going, as well.
So we are back to 1744. John Wesley and the other ministers and preachers who made up the Methodist movement came together in London to start talking about what it meant to be a Christian. What did it mean to be justified by faith?
One of the things he wrote about that time
We are not to think that the work of grace is finished it when it begins. Grace is a growing thing.
Grace grows because of the reign of the Holy Spirit, because of what happened at Pentecost, because the kingdom of God is not only what we are seeking but is present here. We grow by grace in seeking it.
As Jesus says in our gospel reading:
The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”
We don’t seek what is external to ourselves but what is deeper than ourselves because of the Holy Spirit. The third person of the Trinity, sent at Pentecost, to inaugurate a new way of life on earth revealed by Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.
Pentecost
The reign of the Holy Spirit began at Pentecost. Folks asked Peter what they should do. And this is how he responded:
“Brothers, what should we do?” Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand persons were added. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” Acts 2:37-42 NRSV
They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles, to eating together and to praying together. It went deeper.
“Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.” Acts 2:43-47 NRSV
This is the starting point for the church. It is not an end point, that is different, but it is a possibility, thanks to the Holy Spirit. God is greater than the sin that keeps from this sort of life. The Reign of the Holy Spirit is the reality that we are offered a portion of the kingdom-building God is doing now. We are not just given a free pass after we die, we are included now. And seeking Grace, we find it, and it grows with us.
The church is a place to check the milestones on this journey, the markers which let us know that we are on the right path.
There are so many roads we could take, some more and some less traveled. Robert Frost’s famous poem of two roads diverging is a paraphrase of the words of Jesus from the sermon on the Mount:
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.- Matthew 7-13-14
Here is the beginning of the Frost poem:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;
What Frost helps us see is the desire to go down both roads. The desire to be two travelers at the same time. This, though, is an impossibility. We can’t be in two places at once. The ordinary mile stones of faith help us take note of which path we are on. The path that leads to life or the path that leads to destruction. The milestones are the visible markers of the path.
In the time of Jesus and up through today, people have looked for markers of faith. Jesus says that a good tree bears good fruit. What is the fruit produced by faith? Is it looking a certain way or acting a certain way? Is it eating the right things and dressing the right? Is it having the right job, the right spouse, the right kids? As Paul would say, By no means.
It is so easy to fall in the traps of seeking this sort of assurance, but these externalities do not mark the reign of the Holy Spirit. As Paul says in Romans 14, “For the kingdom of God is not food and drink but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” - Romans 14:17 Justice and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. These are the milestones. It doesn’t have to be cosmic justice or world peace to be a milestone of the kingdom of God.
In Galatians, Paul goes deeper into the fruits of the spirit by listing nine: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There are a number of ways to hold these together, but I want us to connect them all back to the Gospel passage.
“The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”
Here and now, dear brothers and sisters, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control is possible thanks to the gift of the Holy Spirit.
We receive this gift at our baptism. Sometimes, though, we can receive a gift and say our thank yous, but really put it on the shelf and forget about it. We may think love and joy and peace are not for us. The thing about a true gift is that we never deserve it. Nobody deserves a birthday gift or a Christmas gift or an anniversary present. Deserve has nothing to do with it.
We don’t deserve the Holy Spirit. We don’t deserve the third person of the Trinity coming to us, and yet we are still given the gift.
The mile stones of the reign of the Holy Spirit is not found on mountain tops or ecstatic manifestations. It is not coming with things that be observed, no matter how often we wish that it were so. We want to be able to judge someone else’s path, but that is a different kingdom all together. No matter how many churches have been built on judgment, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.” Look for love in your life! Look for joy. The simplest of joys act as milestones. Look for peace. That moment of peace. That encounter with peace, when your heart is at rest is a mile stone of your path.
We should also expect the milestones of the kingdom of God to change in our life. The joys of our youth are not the joys of our latter years. and yet we grow in Grace by seeking it. As Peter says an Acts, “repent convert, forgive, be forgiven, receive the Holy Spirit in humility. The Kingdom of Gods in you. You are already loved. You are already forgiven. You are already worthy. Do not try to see the milestone of others. Look for the milestones of the path that God has for you; your peace your joy, your love, your self-control.
As you enter this holy place and see this window. As you see all this windows, may you remember Christ’s love for you. May you remember that the Holy Spirit reigns in this world. Even in the midst of darkness and doubt and lies. And the mile stones of our life aren’t found in the externalities and judgements of others.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen