Godhead

An Ache for Awe

2024-04-08 total eclipse, photo by Bill Killgallon.
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Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and signs were being performed through the apostles.
—Acts 2:43

The mainstream media has discovered the empty pew. Everywhere I turn online, publications weigh in to explain dwindling church attendance in the United States. The pile-on of doom has been so intense of late, you wonder if the reporting verges on glee as one more despised institution crumbles into dust.

To every article I encounter, I post the same comment. It’s a quote from British/American revivalist Leonard Ravenhill:

You never have to advertise a fire.

This past week amplified the truth of that quote as people around the United States flew, drove, bicycled, and walked, sometimes hundreds of miles, to dwell in the shadow of the moon. The April 8, 2024, total eclipse captured the imagination of millions seeking a rare experience, an awesome thrill irreproducible via AI, CGI, Apple Vision Pro, or a vivid imagination. It was a cosmic event too big, too wondrous to ignore.

Call it a “fire in the sky.”

At the risk of alienating fellow believers. I’m going to state what I believe is the obvious. No one is banging down the doors of our churches because, in far too many of them, the glory has departed. Whatever fire of God burned brightly within the church walls has dimmed or departed.

What has remained after this Ichabod event is whatever human beings can substitute. Manmade experiences fill the void. You get a rock band, a million dollar sound system of epic decibels, a half-million dollar lighting rig of retina-frying lumens, attractive people on stage, special effects to empower the sermon message, and voila! You have the average megachurch meeting. Ramp that up now and then for a “special event” to pull in the lost, and now you’re cooking with FIRE.

Except none of this is the fire of God, the Spirit He promises to all who believe. The Spirit whose presence in their midst stirred the early Church to awe.

Too critical?

I wonder how long it took the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem to realize something was amiss. They’d killed that troublemaker Jesus, so they must have thought their troubles were over. Except some vandal tore the temple curtain that restrained the overwhelming glory of God’s Presence, exposing sinful men like themselves to the Shekinah, which at one time was instant death for the unprepared.

Except nothing. Nothing happened because, at the death of Jesus, the barrier that separated God from the unwashed masses disintegrated and the Shekinah glory of God no longer dwelt in temples built of stone but in sanctified hearts made by God Himself in His image. (More on this here.)

Do you think the priests noticed? Was the Temple colder? Emptier? Do you think they changed their rituals after God left? Or did they go on like nothing happened, sewing the curtain, and reverting to business as usual, unaware that they had become superfluous?

Do you think the priests felt the old fire return when Spirit-filled believers began to meet in the Temple? Did the presence of those born-again, fire-filled souls ignite in them a desperate thirst for what they had lost?

People need awe. People are desperate for the fire of God made manifest in their lives.

Are we failing this lost generation because we ourselves have lost the fire? Would we know if we had? Or would we go on substituting manmade experiences in an effort to keep the masses from missing the genuine fire that once burned brightly?

I ask this because rekindling that spiritual fire is the only answer to dwindling church attendance. And it absolutely boggles my mind that I can go into the comment section of any of these “Why is the Church in America losing attendance?” laments only to find a million excuses and countless solutions, and yet the answer given is NEVER “We need a reinvigoration by the Holy Spirit.”

Why? Because too many church leaders today have never had the Holy Spirit fall on them in that fire-filled way. They’ve never seen a genuine revival, the kind that would at one time sweep the world now and then. They’ve never seen the charismatic gifts of the Spirit in genuine operation (in fact, many have misguidedly crusaded against them).

So all or our offering of awe becomes manmade. We’ve substituted manmade smoke and mirrors for Spirit-sourced signs and wonders. We read the second chapter of Acts, and our response is “More strobe lights.”

People are dying for the kind of movement of God in their lives that the Bible holds up as the normal Christian experience. They’re desperate for healing for their diseases. They’re desperate for deliverance from their afflictions. They’re desperate for a move of God in their impossible situation, whatever it might be. They’re desperate.

Where is the fire of God? Church leaders need to start asking this and doing what it takes to answer it. Because when someone finally figures this out, we won’t need a church marketing campaign anymore because people will be beating down the doors to experience true, Spirit-filled fire.

Eclipse image © Bill Kilgallon. Used by permission.

Many reading know that Cerulean Sanctum has been moribund since I signed off about seven years ago. I wrote about my wife’s illness and its impact on our lives. We later had a terrible 2019 where she spent most of the year in and out of hospitals, only for us to finally find some calm as 2020 started. We all know what happened next.

But, praise God, my wife is coping better and is moving into new horizons helping others with mental illness. Our son is grown and graduated college. I find myself with more free time and more opportunities to think and pray deeply.

So, perhaps I will blog now and then on issues facing the Church in the America, because God knows they are piling up and the solutions some are offering are truly whack-a-doodle.

Father God, bring your holy Fire. Maranatha!

Real Salvation: How to Be Freed from Religions Filled with Rules

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One of the effects of multiculturalism amid globalization is that more and more people are exposed to the often strange belief systems of others. And regardless of what others may say, everyone has a belief system. You may insist you don’t believe in anything or anyone—no gods, goddesses, gurus, or guides—but that very lack of believing is itself a belief.

The problem with most belief systems: almost every one of them has a core understanding that to be a faithful believer in that belief, one must do something to be shown acceptable or holy. And in almost all cases that means one must keep doing that holy practice. In those few cases when a practice may be done once, it is simply replaced with another practice to perform, ad infinitum.

In short, almost all the world’s religions consist of little more than sets of rules.

Sometimes, those rules become headscratchers. Take, for example, this one:

 
So, the religious rule is never to carry items on the Sabbath day or else that is considered work and not God-ordained rest, although carrying inside the house is OK. So make your house larger by erecting walls in the wider community and call them part of your house. And then when upkeep on masonry or lumber gets too burdensome, convert the wall into a string. Presto, you have an eruv.

Doesn’t it seem sad to you that your standing or mine with a deity would depend on whether or not we are carrying a package on a certain day on the correct side of a piece of string? Doesn’t the mere idea of this fill you with a sense of despair that we amount to so little in that deity’s eyes that we must keep jumping through such hoops to please him? Or that he would be so easily fooled by our clever loophole? (Or 18-mile, loop-of-string-wall, to be perfectly holy in exactitude.)

Jesus ran into that kind of man-made holiness and was not impressed.

Then some Pharisees and teachers of the law came to Jesus from Jerusalem and asked, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!”

Jesus replied, “And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, ‘Honor your father and mother’ and ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is ‘devoted to God,’  they are not to ‘honor their father or mother’ with it. Thus you nullify the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:

“‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.’”

Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen and understand. What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”

Then the disciples came to him and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?”

Religious rulekeepers get offended easily. In Jesus’ day, He drove the rulekeepers batty. They tried to pin down Jesus by their rules, but Jesus would tolerate none of it. He countered by quoting the prophet Isaiah and noting the rulekeepers had made a scandalous “holy” rule that if they devoted their stuff to God, they had no responsibility to use it to help their parents.

Jesus called these men “hypocrites” not because they were violating their own rules but because they thought their rules were making them holy—when those rules were actually doing the opposite.

Most religions are rules made by men. They trap adherents in a maze of do’s and dont’s that only lead people into despairing pits of precepts and farther away from God. Rules upon rules, and men and women trying desperately to keep an endless string of them, almost always failing, if not by the letter of the law then by its spirit.

The Christian faith is utterly different. The Christian faith rejects any idea that anyone can abide by enough rules or keep them well enough to be seen as holy in God’s eyes, to be good enough to merit God’s favor. We might as well try to blow out the sun as ever get to a place by our own works and religious efforts where we can stand before the presence of a holy, spotless, perfect God.

But a Way exists, and it’s not by following rules but by faith in a person, Jesus Christ. He WAS perfect. He kept all the holy rules. He never erred, never sinned. And in dying on the cross, He imparts to all who receive Him that same holiness, through grace. Jesus finished all the holy work so that we will never have to. By grace, through faith, we can be covered for all responsibilities for holy works through the finished work of Christ alone.

That is what Jesus meant when He uttered His final words on the cross: “It is finished.” He completed the religious tasks. He met all the goals. He checked every checkbox so that those who place their faith in Him can be freed from rules made by men, and even those rules made by God to show how impossible it is for a human being like you or me to keep those rules and be holy by our own efforts. Thankfully, Jesus DID keep them all, and the requirement on us has been satisfied by Him forever. This is the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

To learn more about the Gospel—how Jesus has satisfied all the rules of the Law on your behalf, freeing you from religious rulekeeping—please, please, please take 15 minutes to listen to this life-changing truth:

We Are All Wrong–And That’s OK

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Recently, the Phil Vischer Podcast had an episode with a Bible expert, and the team talked about the many ways people mishandle the Scriptures and how not to. It was a good show.

 
More than anything, what God drove home to me from that episode is that all of us, in some way, mangle our use of the Bible. Further, that’s OK.

Well, maybe it’s not OK that the Bible gets used wrongly by people but more that everyone is going to do it at some time. Because people are fallible, broken, wrong, stupid, selfish, and just plain messed up. How then can we expect them to always handle God’s words perfectly?

If you asked me what one piece of wisdom I could contribute to the vast collection of human understanding, I’d offer this: Every person you encounter in your life you see a slice of only. You don’t see their whole life, their joys, their failures. You don’t see what molded them for good or for ill. You just see that slice. And like a core sample from arctic ice, that person’s life consists of multiple layers of events and realizations that can only be interpreted after careful and prolonged study. And truthfully, some of it may never be understood by you because the person himself/herself doesn’t understand it either.

There is no growth in the Christian life without starting from a place of error and moving to a place that is less error-filled. You and I don’t get to decide whether the person before us now is in that error-filled place or not. Sometimes, that person is the one we see in the mirror.

This is why grace exists. Remember grace? It’s meant by God for us to use when we encounter flawed people who are in the process and on the journey. And frankly, that’s every person on earth.

God’s promise to us:

The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD saying, “Arise and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will announce My words to you.” Then I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was, making something on the wheel. But the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make.
—Jeremiah 18: 1-4

That verse applies to Israel, but what it says about God is what matters.

We are all spoiled vessels. We are all mistaken, wrong, off. And if you catch any one of us in the process of being remolded to the potter’s ideal, we will look ill-formed, ugly even.

But God as potter is faithful to mold us into something beautiful.

So when you come across someone who is wrong or “stupid” or acting ignorantly by your standards, realize that he or she is in that molding stage. It is unfair to judge an artistic work mid-stream, by that slice of life that you see now but which is not the entire creation story. The best thing we can do is to be as faithful as we can to stick around and see how that half-finished vessel will turn out. To the potter at least, it will be gorgeous in His eyes. And ultimately, is not the Author of beauty its best judge?