The Church Triumphant: How 2,000 Years of History Prove God Is Not Finished Yet

Today is Pentecost Sunday — fifty days after the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the day the Holy Spirit was poured out on 120 faithful, waiting believers in an upper room in Jerusalem, and the church was born. They had no idea what they were waiting for. Jesus had said, "Stay until the promise comes." And so they stayed — praying, expecting, trusting. And when it came, it changed everything. Not just for them. For every single generation of believers who would follow, right down to this one, right down to today.

The book of Acts was never really closed. The Holy Spirit is still doing acts — through His people, in His church, in our hour. And today I want to take you on a journey through two thousand years of history to show you something that should shake the discouragement right out of you: the Church Triumphant is not a future hope. It has been an ongoing reality since the day those walls shook and those flames appeared. And it is alive and well right now.

Pentecost: The Church Triumphant Is Born

The church did not emerge from a well-funded institution or a carefully orchestrated campaign. It was born in an upper room, out of obedience and prayer, among ordinary people who had been told to wait for something they could not fully describe. Acts 2 records what happened: the sound of rushing wind, tongues of fire, and 120 people suddenly speaking in languages they had never learned — and 3,000 people coming to Christ before the day was out.

John 1:33 had already told us what this would look like. When John the Baptist described Jesus, he said: "He is the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit." Jesus was not only the Savior who died for our sins — He was and is the Baptizer who fills His people with divine power for divine purpose. That is our Pentecostal theology, and it is as old as the church itself.

The Holy Spirit has been moving in His church ever since that first outpouring. The rest of Acts is proof of it. And so is the rest of church history, which is not a boring footnote to spiritual life — it is the testimony of God's faithfulness, written in the lives of men and women across twenty centuries. When you understand where you came from, you gain the courage to press forward. History is not a lullaby. It is a battle cry.

The Creeds That Kept Us

When we recite the Apostles' Creed at our men's meetings, we are not performing a ritual — we are rehearsing a hard-won inheritance. That creed traces its roots back to the Old Roman Creed of around 200 AD. And the Nicene Creed — hammered out at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD — was the result of church leaders gathering under intense pressure to settle once and for all the most contested question of the era: Is Jesus actually God?

There were voices saying He was merely a great teacher, a prophet, a divine-ish figure who fell short of fully being God. And a gathering of the brightest theological minds in the world convened, argued, prayed, and referenced Scripture until they produced a doctrine that has anchored the church ever since: Jesus Christ is God. Not almost God. Not God-adjacent. God of very God — one with the Father and the Spirit, fully divine and, as the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD would confirm, fully human as well. Both natures, complete and unconfused, in one Person.

We think nothing of this today because it has been settled for us. But it was forged in a fiery crucible by people who paid dearly to get it right. The Church Triumphant stands on their shoulders. Every time someone confidently confesses "I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son," they are drawing from a well those early church fathers dug at tremendous cost.

Then came 1054 AD — the Great Schism — when the Christian church, which had been one body, split into the Eastern Orthodox tradition and the Roman Catholic tradition. It is a wound the church still carries. And in 1517, a German priest named Martin Luther walked up to the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg on what the church calendar calls All Hallowed Eve — October 31st — and nailed a list of 95 complaints against the abuses and unscriptural traditions he saw in the Catholic Church.

That act ignited the Protestant Reformation. Protestantism was born. And every non-Catholic, non-Orthodox church on earth — including ours — traces its lineage through that door. God used an angry priest with a hammer and a list to reshape the entire course of Christian history.

A Moment to Reflect

Pause here. Think about the faithfulness it took — the men and women who refused to back down, who defended the truth of Scripture at great personal cost, who sparked reform even when the institution resisted them. Now ask yourself: what would the next chapter of church history look like if this generation had that same tenacity? What would it look like in your life? In your city? You are not a spectator of church history. You are a page being written in it right now.

The Great Awakenings: When Fire Falls on Cold Wood

The Westminster Confession of Faith in 1643 helped establish doctrinal clarity for the growing Protestant traditions. But clarity alone does not produce life. And by the early 1700s, the church on both sides of the Atlantic had grown cold, rigid, and liturgically lifeless — going through the motions without the fire.

Then God sent the First Great Awakening (1730s–1740s).

Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield, John and Charles Wesley — these names should stir something in every believer. Edwards preached his famous sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," in 1741, and the Holy Spirit's conviction fell so powerfully on the congregation that people grasped their pews fearing they were about to fall into hell. Not because Edwards was theatrical — he was famously reserved — but because God was present. The phrase you must be born again began echoing across the colonies and the British Isles. Methodism was born. Abolitionism was sparked. Literacy spread because people wanted to read the Bible. The gospel always lifts people higher than where they were.

The Second Great Awakening (1790s–1840s) moved through the American frontier, breaking into the so-called "burned-over district" of upstate New York — our own region — where people said revival could never happen again. Charles Finney, a lawyer who had a decisive encounter with God in a woodland grove, swept across Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo. Buildings still stand today that mark where God moved. The fruit of that awakening included missionary societies, Bible societies, prison reform, and the antislavery movement. Spiritual awakening always produces social transformation.

The Third Great Awakening (1850s–1900s) brought D.L. Moody, William and Catherine Booth, and the Salvation Army — Fire and Blood was their cry, meaning the fire of the Holy Ghost and the blood of Jesus. They took the gospel into the cities, to the addicts and the poor, to those society had written off. Urban evangelism, international missions, and the holiness movement all surged forward in this era.

And then it happened. The earthquake that sent a tsunami still reverberating around the world today.

Azusa Street: The Church Triumphant Catches Fire Again

312 Azusa Street, Los Angeles, 1906. God chose the most unlikely instrument — a largely unknown, visually impaired, Black holiness preacher named William J. Seymour, the son of formerly enslaved parents — to start a fire that would envelop the world.

The meetings began in a barn-like building. People started speaking in tongues, just as they had at Pentecost. Word spread. The crowds grew. And what emerged was utterly unprecedented for 1906: a multiracial, Spirit-filled community where whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians worshiped together in passionate unity — at a time in American history when that was almost unthinkable. Someone said it then: "The color line was washed away in the blood."

Services ran late into the night because no one wanted to go home. Spontaneous prayer, prophecy, healings, tongues, and testimonies erupted throughout. Missionaries and visitors came from around the world and carried the fire home. Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia — the Pentecostal explosion spread to every continent.

Out of Azusa Street came the Assemblies of God, the Church of God, Foursquare churches, Pentecostal holiness churches, apostolic movements, and the broader Charismatic Renewal. One scholar has called Pentecostalism "the most significant development in Christianity since the Reformation." Today, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity numbers hundreds of millions globally — with its greatest growth in Africa, Latin America, and South Korea.

And this fire came close to home. Billy Sunday — the 1920s baseball player turned fiery evangelist — came to Elmira. Over forty churches hosted his campaign. A tabernacle was built nearby, and tens of thousands of people from across New York and Pennsylvania came. Thousands found Christ right here in our city. Sunday said it best: "One spark of fire can do more to prove the power of gunpowder than a whole library written on the subject." You can read about the Holy Spirit, and you should — but when the spark hits you, you will know.

The Church Triumphant: From Nero to New Age, Still Alive

Here is what twenty centuries of history teaches us, if we are paying attention: the Church Triumphant has outlasted every empire, every ideology, every persecution, and every attempt to extinguish it. Rome tried. Communism tried. Gnosticism crept in. Arianism twisted doctrine. Medieval corruption nearly buried the gospel under tradition. Secularism has assaulted it from outside while materialism has diluted it from within.

And yet. Here we are. Still gathering. Still preaching. Still worshiping. Still baptizing. Still filled with the Spirit of the living God.

Ephesians 3:21 declares: "To Him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end." Not despite the church's imperfections. In the church. God has staked His glory to His church. And Jesus, who died for the church and calls her His bride, has never abandoned her — not once, not for a moment, through all of it.

The church has gone underground when forced to. But as it has been rightly said: the purest water is the stream that bursts crystal clear into the sunlight after it has forced its way through solid rock. Pressure does not destroy the church. It purifies it. The church, historically, grows strongest under pressure and weakest in seasons of comfort and ease. We would do well to remember that.

God has always had a people. Many a conqueror has driven the church out of sight and thought he had silenced its voice. He had not. He never does. There have been charlatans who sought to barter the power of the Spirit. There have been seasons when the church's message was nearly diluted into social acceptability, gold-plated and jewel-encrusted, more interested in institution than in the living God. But God has always had a people who could not be bought. Men who would not bow. Women who were beyond purchase. And through them, the march continues.

Be Steadfast, Immovable — Your Labor Is Not in Vain

Here is where history becomes personal. 1 Corinthians 15:58 is the verse I want to leave echoing in your heart from this Pentecost Sunday:

"Therefore, my beloved brothers and sisters, be steadfast and immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, always doing your best and doing more than is needed — being continually aware that your labor, even to the point of exhaustion, in the Lord is not futile nor wasted. It is never without purpose."

Your labor in the kingdom — even to the point of exhaustion — is never wasted. Not one prayer. Not one act of service. Not one Sunday you showed up when you did not feel like it. Not one honest conversation about Jesus with a coworker who looked at you strangely. All of it is being woven into something larger than you can see from where you are standing today.

God is painting on a canvas the size of eternity. You can only see the few square inches in front of you. But He sees the whole sweep of it — the master strokes He has been making for twenty centuries, and the ones He is making right now, and the final revelation of what this all looks like when the trumpet sounds, when the church rises, and when the Son of God returns with great fanfare to claim His bride.

The master plan is still unfolding. And whatever God is about to do next, I want to be a part of it — and I believe you do too. Saints, it is not over. The church is still alive. There are still some volleys of heaven's cannon yet to be heard and to echo around the world.

The Church Triumphant is alive and well.

A Prayer and a Next Step

On this Pentecost Sunday, as we celebrate the birthday of the church and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, I want to invite you to pray this together:

"Lord Jesus, You are the One who baptizes with the Holy Spirit — and I ask You to do that in me, fresh and deep and full. Fill me with Your Spirit for the work You have called me to. Make me steadfast and immovable in a generation that desperately needs to see a church that is alive. I am not just a spectator of what You are doing. I am a part of it. Use me for Your glory and for the advance of Your kingdom in this hour. Amen."

If this sweep through history stirred your faith today — if you felt the fire of knowing you are part of something two thousand years old and still burning bright — share this post with someone who needs to be reminded that the church is not dying. It never was. Leave a comment below and tell us which moment in this history hit you most powerfully. And if you are looking for a Spirit-filled, Word-grounded community to be part of, we would love to have you join us. The church is alive — and you belong in her.

Preached on May 24, 2026 — Pentecost Sunday | Horseheads, New York

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You can also watch the full sermon on our Youtube page below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpwe7pfW8nI