Daily Bible Reading 13th April 2026 // Luke 3:7-18
7 He said therefore to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8 Bear fruits in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham. 9 Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”
10 And the crowds asked him, “What then shall we do?” 11 And he answered them, “Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise.” 12 Tax collectors also came to be baptized and said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?” 13 And he said to them, “Collect no more than you are authorized to do.” 14 Soldiers also asked him, “And we, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and be content with your wages.”
15 As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Christ, 16 John answered them all, saying, “I baptize you with water, but he who is mightier than I is coming, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. 17 His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
18 So with many other exhortations he preached good news to the people.
Take, for example, our Lord's words to the disciples, 'Wait for the promise of the Father' (Acts 1:4). This is an instruction to wait for the Spirit. But, if we did not understand the ambiguity we referred to in yesterday's Note, we could easily misinterpret and misunderstand His meaning and take it to mean that the reception of the Spirit was an additional experience to the experience of conversion or of becoming disciples. And, of course, this misinterpretation is often made. But, the Holy Spirit could not yet be given at this point in the story, because Christ's 'work' was not yet complete - the Ascension was yet to take place. And therefore these men could not as yet have the Spirit. But we today are not in that kind of position, standing on the threshold of a new dispensation, and therefore their experience cannot be taken as normative, valid or relevant for us. And it is idle to try to decide whether they were true believers or not before the Spirit could have been given. For they both were, and they were not. They were true believers of the old dispensation, but they were not yet believers of the new, for the new had not yet dawned, but was only about to; at Pentecost indeed, the experience of the first disciples was not even regarded as normative as an example for the later disciples of the early Church, let alone for us. They did not wait, nor did they have to wait, for the promise of the Father after the days of Pentecost. The Spirit came upon them on their reception of the gospel. Definitive doctrine of the Spirit is to be found in the epistles of the New Testament, not in Acts. And there, in the epistles, we find that the baptism of the Spirit is the initiatory work of grace by which we are brought into Christ (cf John 3; 1 Corinthians 12:13; Ephesians 1:14).