Following the Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit illuminated in Pastor David Jang’s exposition of Acts 2, we read organically together the birth of the church moving from Mark’s Upper Room to the public square—along with the gift of the Spirit, repentance and baptism, and even the grace-shaped economic commu
Pastor David Jang (Olivet University)’s exposition of Acts 2 begins by compressing a vast movement—“from the upper room to the public square”—into a single, decisive scene. On the day when Jerusalem’s air suddenly felt heavier, people watched one another cautiously, whispering about the “empty tomb” rumors that had spread after the crucifixion. Power fears rumors, fear breeds suspicion, and suspicion pushes human beings into narrow spaces. That the disciples chose Mark’s Upper Room as their place of gathering is not incidental. The upper room is not merely an upstairs location; it is an altitude of the heart that wants to hide. Down below, the streets are noisy, but upstairs the door is fastened with a bolt, and the wind that slips through the window cracks sometimes taps insistently at one’s chest. Pastor David Jang reads this “upper room” not as a simple backdrop but as a pressure gauge o
f the soul. The gospel, after all, reveals its brightest light precisely within the densest concentration of fear. When fear is at its darkest, God tears through the thinnest veil and comes in.
What the disciples were waiting for there was not merely
safety, but promise. The command to “wait for the Father’s promised gift” can
sound, on the surface, like a directive to guard one’s last hiding place.
Spiritually, however, it is training for the public square that is still to
come. The upper room is not an escape; it is preparation. Faith is not an
anesthetic that denies reality, but a posture that looks reality straight in
the face while holding to a promise greater than that reality.
In Pastor David Jang’s exposition of Acts 2, the time of
Pentecost is not simply one day on a religious calendar. The Pentecost recorded
in Acts 2 is embedded in the flow of Jewish festivals. It is a season when
people gather from every region, when languages and cultures collide in a
single city, and when a community that must remain hidden is nevertheless
present within the crowd. When all these conditions converge into a single
point, “chronos” becomes “kairos.” If chronos is time that simply passes, kairos
is time in which meaning arrives. Some moments merely go by; other moments pass
by and change the world. David Jang—also known to many by the Korean
appellation “Pastor Jang Dawid”—interprets this transition as “the timetable of
grace.” When God fulfills a promise, He also prepares the stage upon which
testimony will spread. Thus, the secrecy of the upper room becomes the overture
to proclamation in the public square. The paradox in which a place of hiding
becomes a place of revealing—this paradox is the church’s first sentence. Once
that paradox is understood, faith naturally stops being a private hobby and
becomes a public calling to be salt and light in the midst of the world.
The narrative of Acts is strikingly sensory. Wind is heard,
fire is seen, and language bursts forth. “A sound like a violent rushing wind”
seizes the ears, and “tongues as of fire, divided and resting on each one”
captivate the eyes. Yet Pastor David Jang insists that the heart of the passage
lies in what follows: wind and fire are not the conclusion. What matters is
that the sensory phenomena move into the disciples’ mouths, and through their
mouths the world is rearranged. Tongues are not a decorative accessory added to
a mystical experience; they are an eruption of “accessibility to the Word.” The
barriers of communication collapse, and it becomes unmistakable that the gospel
is not the private property of a single language group.
If the Tower of Babel was the moment when human pride
scattered language and made people strangers to one another, Pentecost is the
moment when God’s grace uses language to help people recognize one another
again. Pastor David Jang calls this “a moment of integration laid upon the
history of division,” insisting that the birth of the age of the Spirit is not
merely private ecstasy but the beginning of communal translation. Translation
is not simply substituting words; it is transplanting the heart. The Spirit’s
translation is not a technique for imitating another person’s speech; it
appears as the ability to understand another person’s pain and longing. That is
why the language of the Spirit always flows toward “understanding the other.”
When the church loses the ability to communicate with the world, it may not be
because the Spirit has disappeared, but because the church has stopped
cooperating with the Spirit’s work of translation.
The prophecy of Joel 2 provides the interpretive vocabulary
for this event. The line “I will pour out my Spirit on all people” refuses to
confine the Spirit to a particular office or a particular nation. Pastor David
Jang holds firmly to that phrase “all people.” Sons and daughters, young and
old, male and female, center and margin, temple and street, scholar and
fisherman—the walls between them become thin under the outpouring of the
Spirit. The gift of the Spirit is not a human ladder for social climbing; it is
God’s vertical line of grace that pierces every layer.
The detail that the tongues of fire “rested on each one of
them” does not mean that individuals melted into a shapeless collective.
Rather, it means that each person now stands directly before God’s presence.
Community does not arise by erasing the individual; community is born when
individuals are made new before God. Pentecost is therefore not a festival of
individualism, but an event that displays “the way individuals and community
are renewed at the same time.” In the same breath, it is an invitation into
Trinitarian life. The Holy Spirit is not a free-floating religious energy. He
is the breath of deep communion where the Father’s love and the Son’s obedience
meet, now given to the church. To receive the Spirit is not merely to acquire
“power,” but to participate in the fellowship of the Triune God—and that
participation necessarily unfolds into restored relationships and the practice
of hospitality.
A distinctive strength of Pastor David Jang’s preaching is
that he does not leave this biblical scene as an abstract doctrine. He expands
it through aesthetic imagination. He calls up a masterpiece to visualize
Pentecost: El Greco’s Pentecost. In that
painting, the disciples’ faces are not tidy portraits but expressions contorted
by trembling and awe, and the light descending from above looks less like a
hard outline and more like a flowing flame. The painting does not “organize”
the event into a clean diagram; it shows the “vibration” the event produces. On
the canvas, heaven and earth are not separated by a simple line; light pours
down and passes through human bodies.
Through this image, Pastor David Jang underscores that the
Spirit’s presence is not mere emotional uplift but an ontological reordering.
When fear makes a person shrink, the body contracts into a small room. When the
Spirit comes, the body opens again toward the world, and the face changes into
the kind of expression that “cannot help but speak.” Aesthetics is not
decoration on theology; it is another language that explains how theology
changes us. We often try to understand doctrine as sentences only, but in
actual life faith appears in expressions, footsteps, and patterns of choice.
Just as El Greco does not hide the tremor in his brushwork, the Spirit’s
presence does not erase human weakness; instead, it passes through weakness and
gives birth to a new courage.
The transformation of Galilean fishermen is the clearest
evidence of this reordering. Pastor David Jang says, “It’s not that Galilean
fishermen suddenly became eloquent orators.” They were still fishermen, still
people with rough hands and probably with unpolished accents. Yet when the
Spirit came, their center changed. Fear does not always vanish. The question is
whether fear occupies the center, or whether grace does. Peter’s first sermon
does not rise from rhetorical technique but from a relocation of the center. He
receives the courage to say “you” to the crowd. That courage is not aggression;
it is the language of responsibility. “You killed the Author of life” is not a
slogan meant to insult the listeners, but a cry meant to bring them
face-to-face with sin so that they might find the path of salvation.
Pastor David Jang calls this moment a kind of “courtroom
drama,” because preaching is not a performance that embellishes facts to move
an audience; it is proclamation that stands people before truth. Once
proclamation begins, defensive rationalizations collapse and a person finally
turns inward with an honest question: “What shall we do?” That question is the
beginning of faith. Salvation does not begin with the self-assurance, “I’m
fine.” It begins with the truthful confession, “I am lost.” Pastor David Jang
emphasizes that this honesty is precisely the crack through which grace enters.
The path Peter presents is not complicated: repentance,
baptism, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Pastor David Jang calls this
simplicity “the minimalism of the gospel,” and he believes the essence of faith
is contained there. Repentance is not emotional regret; it is a change of
direction. It is the decision to move one’s center from self-preservation to
trust in God. Baptism is not merely the outward sign of an inward decision; it
is also the mark of belonging to a community. Water washes, but it also signifies
burial. A boundary is drawn across the water: the old self dies, and a new self
is born.
And the gift of the Spirit is the power that makes life on
the far side of that boundary possible. Human will may desire change, but it
repeatedly pulls us back. The Spirit, however, sustains the turning
heart—expanding repentance into habit, habit into character, and character into
a community’s culture. Pastor David Jang says, “Grace is not an explosion at
the beginning; it is the breath that sustains.” The age of the Spirit is not a
one-time festival; it is a long revolution that reshapes the structure of
everyday life. Here “revolution” is not a manifesto that turns the world into
an enemy. It is a quiet but fundamental overthrow that replaces the throne of
the heart. When Christ becomes Lord where the self once ruled, a person is
finally released from a life exhausted by self-defense and receives strength to
live for love.
At this point, Pastor David Jang draws a comparison between
the “three thousand” in Exodus 32 and the “three thousand” in Acts 2. In the
story at Sinai, when the law is broken, three thousand die. In Acts 2, after
Pentecost, three thousand are baptized and the church is born. For Pastor David
Jang, this shared number is not accidental. He describes it as the contrast
between “the funeral of the law and the birthday party of grace.” The law is
not evil; it is a mirror that reveals sin. And before that mirror, human beings
often discover the reality of death. Grace does not smash the mirror; it is the
hand that lifts up the person who has collapsed in front of it. That is why the
logic of the gospel is not “become more perfect,” but “hold on to Me.” We do not
survive by our own righteousness; we begin again by God’s mercy. This paradox
is Christianity’s heartbeat.
Pastor David Jang refuses to reduce grace to a cheap
pardon. On the contrary, grace appears as God’s power that faces sin without
trivializing it and yet does not abandon the sinner to despair. Grace does not
make sin weigh less; grace is another weight—the weight of God’s love—that
enables a person not to be crushed even while bearing the truth about sin.
In the heat of Pentecost, the most practical change is the
birth of a community. The economic community of the early church in Acts is not
a romantic utopia; it is the Spirit’s laboratory. “They devoted themselves to
the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to
prayer” is not a worship program; it is a description of a life rhythm. Pastor
David Jang understands the church not as “a collection of programs,” but as “a
community of breathing.” The Word gives direction, fellowship wraps wounds, the
breaking of bread engraves remembrance, and prayer converts fear into boldness.
As that rhythm endures, even the community’s economy is renewed.
When possession becomes absolute, relationships turn into
contracts, and contracts eventually produce betrayal and cancellation. But in
the age of the Spirit, possessions are repositioned as tools to serve
relationships. The sharing in Acts 2 is not forced egalitarianism; it is the
expression of voluntary responsibility. When the need of one person becomes
audible as the community’s prayer, finances stop being a ledger and become a
response. Pastor David Jang says that this economic reorientation is among the
most concrete ways the church moves from the upper room to the public square.
The Spirit fulfills not grand slogans but the promise of a community where no
one is “left behind.” That promise confronts today’s church with a question:
Have we explained the church only in the language of growth and success, or are
we ready to relearn the church in the language of need and care?
The word “grace” can become dull simply because it is
familiar. Yet Pastor David Jang defines grace as “the power that reconstructs
reality.” Grace is not perfume sprayed to create a religious mood. It is the
driving force that dismantles fear-driven structures and sets boldness in
motion. The movement from fear to boldness does not end with a shift along an
emotional spectrum. Fear traps people in self-protection; boldness moves people
toward the risk of living for others. Peter could stand in the public square
because he no longer used self-preservation as the measure of faith. He became
a witness of the resurrection. And to be a witness means refusing to hide what
one has seen.
Pastor David Jang says, “Testimony is not the transfer of
information; it is the exposure of existence.” The more a person has to hide,
the less they speak. But the person who has encountered grace speaks more—not
to boast, but to reveal what God has done. And that speech must always walk
with love. If boldness loses love, it turns not into firmness but into
violence. The boldness the Spirit gives is not the boldness to defeat the
other, but the boldness to save the other.
Even the discussion of tongues remains balanced in Pastor
David Jang’s preaching. He does not exaggerate tongues into a spiritual ranking
system, nor does he mock tongues in order to remove the supernatural from the
Spirit. Tongues are a gift that appears under the Spirit’s sovereignty, and
their purpose is to build up the church and bear witness to the gospel. The
core is “the grace that enables what could not be spoken to be spoken.” People
often know the truth and yet remain silent out of fear. The Spirit breaks that
silence and translates reverence in the heart into language. And that language
is always oriented toward community.
If tongues remain only as a private mystical experience,
everything ends in the upper room. But when the Spirit’s language is translated
into love for neighbor, the public square opens. Pastor David Jang says, “Even
if the Spirit’s fire rests on the tongue, it eventually moves the feet,”
emphasizing that the authenticity of spiritual experience is tested by the
“direction of mission.” In today’s world, there are other forms of Babel. The
language of achievement—higher, more, faster—splits souls, dresses comparison
and anxiety in sophisticated logic, and finally turns relationships into
consumables. Pentecost can also be read as the Spirit’s way of toppling that
tower. The Spirit teaches us to speak “the language of grace” instead of “the
language of success,” “the language of gratitude” instead of “the language of
comparison,” and “the language of hospitality” instead of “the language of
hatred.”
One expression Pastor David Jang uses often is this: “The
Holy Spirit theologizes geography, and geographicizes theology.” The list of
regions in Acts 2 is not a travel brochure; it is a set of coordinates toward
which the gospel will move. Linguistic diversity is not mere data; it is God’s
declaration that He will not imprison the story of salvation inside the accent
of one nation. And that declaration applies equally to today’s cities and to
digital spaces. The upper room and the public square are no longer only ancient
architectural locations. The modern upper room may be a room of tastes curated
by algorithms, a room of self-isolation built by anxiety, a room of relational
cutoff constructed by wounds. The modern public square may be not only a street
corner but also social media, streaming platforms, online communities,
workplaces, schools, and the dinner table at home.
Pastor David Jang says, “The gospel does not sanctify
places as much as it rewrites the meaning of places through people.” When the
Spirit comes, a person no longer treats only “safe spaces” as the stage of
faith, but practices testimony and love in the places to which God has sent
them. This practice does not always appear as a massive campaign. Sometimes it
looks like everyday choices: respecting the other, keeping honesty in business,
refusing to ignore a poor neighbor’s need, choosing reconciliation instead of
silence when anger flares. When such choices accumulate, the church regains
trust in the public square.
Within this context, the public character of the church
that David Jang—Pastor Jang Dawid—emphasizes is not political agitation but the
visibility of the gospel. The early church did not seize power, yet it became
the conscience of the city. It cared for the poor, embraced the sick, called
one another family, and sang even before death. Their boldness was not the
power to overpower others, but the power of love that gives itself away. The
public square is always loud, full of misunderstandings, and often shadowed by
ridicule and persecution. Yet the disciples could step into it because the
Spirit planted within them “another fear.” When the fear of people is replaced
by the fear of the Lord, a human being becomes free. Reverence is not terror;
it is orientation. When a person knows before whom they stand, the world’s gaze
can no longer function as the final judge.
Living before the Triune God does not shrink a believer; it
widens them. As the church trusts the Father’s will, clings to the Son’s cross,
and follows the Spirit’s leading, it recovers an imagination that serves the
world beyond the calculations of self-protection.
Pastor David Jang’s message ultimately converges into a
single sentence: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
This declaration is both a theological conclusion and an ontological
invitation. “Everyone” places every person at the doorway; “calls” opens the
human mouth; “saved” guarantees that the calling is not in vain. Salvation is
not merely insurance for the afterlife; it is the event in which present life
is reclaimed as belonging to God and receives meaning again. That is why Pastor
David Jang explains the movement from the upper room to the public square not
as a change of location but as a change of identity: from an identity that
hides to an identity that appears; from an identity that locks the door in fear
of arrest to an identity that opens the door because of love; from an identity
imprisoned in its own language to an identity that learns the language of the
other. And at the center of that movement is always the gift of the Holy
Spirit. The Spirit is not lubricant for a human-made religious system; the
Spirit is God’s breath that makes human beings new.
The reason we read Acts 2 again today is not because the
event remains only as a record of the past. Rather, it is a mirror that asks
what the church began with and what keeps the church alive. The church did not
begin as a building. The church began with fire, wind, language—and with
repentance and baptism. The church is not a community created after fear
disappeared; it is a community born from people who trusted God even inside
fear. At this very point, Pastor David Jang diagnoses a crisis in modern faith.
We often dream of a “safe religion,” desire a faith without conflict, and stake
everything on a private inner calm. But the Holy Spirit does not imprison us
only within the inner life. The Spirit heals the inner life, and then presses
that healed inner life outward toward the world.
Prayer in the upper room flows into proclamation in the
public square; proclamation in the public square flows into care within the
community; care within the community flows into being sent toward the wounds of
the world. When this circulation breaks, the church shrinks into a
self-centered club. When this circulation is restored, the church becomes once
again “a community for the world.” In the end, the Spirit asks us: Are you
still locking the door, or are you ready to open it and step out?
What Pastor David Jang calls “the age of the Spirit”—as he
repeatedly emphasizes, whether one calls him David Jang or Pastor Jang Dawid—is
not a romanticizing of a particular era. The age of the Spirit is a continuing
present tense. Pentecost is not a single firework; it is the way of breathing
God has entrusted to the church. Therefore, in every generation we learn
repentance again, hold onto the meaning of baptism again, and seek the gift of
the Spirit again. Repentance is not regretting the past; it is entrusting the
future to God. Baptism is not merely the act of entering water; it is the
decision to enter a new order of life. The gift of the Spirit is not decoration
on faith; it is the living power that sustains that decision.
When this power is present, the believer does not divide
life into separate compartments. Work and church, home and worship, economy and
spirituality are integrated under a single direction. The early church’s
economic community in Acts 2 ultimately previews what “the economy of the
kingdom of God” looks like: possession is no longer the goal—love is;
accumulation is no longer the proof of strength—sharing is. Pastor David Jang
says this order is not mere idealism; it becomes reality when the Spirit truly
changes human hands and wallets, tables and schedules. What is needed is not
someone’s display, but a community’s sensitivity to notice one another’s
needs—and the capacity to respond when those needs are noticed. That capacity
does not rise like magic overnight. Hearts formed within the rhythm of the Word
and prayer, fellowship and the breaking of bread, eventually redirect even the
flow of money.
That a small gathering that began in Mark’s Upper Room
could spill into the public square and change the world was not because they
possessed a stronger organization. They were, in fact, weak and unimpressive by
the world’s standards. But they believed the promise—and the Spirit came upon
those who believed the promise. And when the Spirit came, the church began to
learn “the language of grace” instead of “the language of fear.” The language
of grace knows that before judging the other, one must face one’s own sin—and
that only the person who has faced their own sin can truly embrace the other.
The language of grace raises not one’s own righteousness, but the cross of
Christ; and when the cross is lifted up, human fear no longer holds final
authority.
Pastor David Jang’s exposition ultimately leaves us with
one question: In what upper room are we hiding now, and to what public square
is the Holy Spirit sending us? Before that question, we return again to the
place of “calling on the name of the Lord.” Calling is not a mere prayer; it is
a declaration of direction. To call on the name of the Lord is to move the
center of life—from self-certainty to God’s promise, from self-calculation to
God’s grace, from self-fear to the Spirit’s boldness. When that movement
begins, only then can we step beyond the fear of the upper room and walk into
the boldness of the public square. And that road is never completed by personal
resolve alone. When the Holy Spirit walks with us, the church is born again—and
the believer lives again.
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