Ingredients:  Acts 2:46-47   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, 47 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.

 

Meal Name: Pentecost, Deux Façons

 

 

  The Holy Ghost’s first move isn’t to make us shout or dance in church, but it is to pull us out of our vacuums, those isolated, curated, spiritually sealed version of faith that promotes individualized and lonely spirituality. If you feel alone, the Spirit dismantles that feeling by removing every barricade that keeps us from other believers and rituals that remind us who Jesus is and who Jesus keeps becoming in our lives.

The Holy Ghost doesn’t allow you to be alone. It pushes you to belong to Spirit and community. Belonging is not a feeling; it’s a spiritual practice with emotional and psychological fruit that requires showing up and breaking bread with other believers. The Holy Ghost makes SoulFood possible.

But here’s what we keep skipping: the same Spirit that draws you to the table and turns you towards your neighbors should make you praise God and share goodwill.

Luke wrote praising God and sharing goodwill to others in the same breath because they happen in the same Spirit. Siamese twins that cannot be split without losing the power and impact of both. The church that shouts on Sunday but ignores the suffering of people on Monday isn’t Spirit filled. Unfortunately, it’s just loud and void of honest value.

This is how congregations fill up with people who are spiritually acrobats in the building and socially dangerous outside of it. This is how so many believers can be mean, arrogant, selfish, publicly anointed, yet privately destructive. That’s not the Holy Ghost. That’s ambition wearing a spiritual costume. The real thing, the real Spirit looks different. It promotes goodwill and care through the power of love.

That’s the power of Pentecost. That’s the power of  SoulFood.

-Rev.Eddie Dowdy II 5.26.26