Faith

The Spirit Has Left the Building—More Thoughts

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So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.
—John 5:19

Last Friday’s post, “The Spirit Has Left the Building,” needed more analysis, so I hope to provide that today. I noted in that post that much of the problem we have with the twin church killers of entertainment-based worship and dull routine is largely due to a lack of the Holy Spirit working in those churches. They either try to make up for the missing Spirit by substituting dog-and-pony shows, or they just make do with emptiness (and call it the norm).

I believe one of the greatest mistakes we make in our churches is to assume. In this case, too many churches fall under the assumption of “Here’s our church program for this Sunday, Lord, now bless it!” That’s highly presumptive on our part. Worse, it tells God that whether He blesses our service or not, we’re going to do it with or without Him. What a sad reflection on our churches that we feel we can get along just as well whether God is there or not!

The fix to this is to structure our church meetings along the lines of “Lord, we are not blessed unless we hear what you wish to do this morning.” That humble, godly openness to receiving what God intends differs greatly from the presumptive, “arm of flesh”-based format so many churches adhere to.

This is not to say that a meeting can’t be planned, only that the plans should never stand in the way of what God ultimately desires to do in and through us on any given Sunday. It instead offers an environment of reception, where the church as a whole anticipates what God will do in and through them.

This is the church that makes a difference in the world. It mirrors Jesus’ understanding that the only work worth doing is the work God is preparing for us to do. We do what the Father is doing. As we all know, God is a spirit, so He blows where He will. And that will may not conform to our own. This requires that we be discerning, able to draw near to the face of God to know what He is doing.

Are we daring to draw near? Not always. We Christians talk a good game, but whenever I’ve pressed people in the past, the truth comes out. We’re really not all that interested in seeing what the Lord is desiring to do. It takes time to draw near, and who has that kind of time anymore?

So we should not be surprised when we fail to discern the Lord’s leading, to be deaf to His voice. For all our talk of prayer, I would dare say that few of us pray more than an hour a day. In fact, I suppose that we spend less than ten minutes a day pressing into God to see what He is doing.

Some of us are just lazy. We’ve told ourselves that God doesn’t speak like that anymore, so we toss off a few prayers and go blithely on our way. Although I suspect that if most of us read a book on prayer by E.M. Bounds, we’d get a far different picture of what it means to travail in prayer.

Others only seek their answers in the Scriptures, but—as controversial as it might be to say this—we’re not necessarily going to find a specific word from God in the Scriptures to the need at hand. Jesus knew the Scriptures better than anyone, but he withdrew for prayer for hours at a time in order to receive power for ministry and for seeing what the Lord was doing in the situation at hand. Yes, we will see the face of God in Scripture, but we must also seek His face in prayer.

Here’s one reason why we need to diligently seek God for our raison d’être as a church:

Now in these days prophets came down from Jerusalem to Antioch. And one of them named Agabus stood up and foretold by the Spirit that there would be a great famine over all the world (this took place in the days of Claudius). So the disciples determined, everyone according to his ability, to send relief to the brothers living in Judea. And they did so, sending it to the elders by the hand of Barnabas and Saul.
—Acts 11:27-30

The church that actively seeks the working of the Spirit is the church that receives revelation for service. Again, that openness for hearing God direct us toward specific works in the here and now is critical to the functioning of the church. Otherwise, what we are left with is what God has done, not what God is doing. And we need to know what He is doing now.

The church of entertainment and the church of solemn contentment go stale because the Spirit is not there to guide them. In fact, I suspect they don’t really wish to hear from the Spirit because He might ask something difficult of the people gathered there. He might very well tell the people in a wealthy church to sell all they have and give to the poor. Or He may not. But how will we know if we’ve closed off the Spirit?

The church God uses is the one that lives in a state of openness to the leading of the Spirit, no matter the cost. But when we support churches that don’t want any of “that stuff” or are too busy buying disco balls, then we’ve shut down the very conduit of Christian life.

See also:

The Spirit Has Left the Building

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I hear some folks decrying an entertaining worship service. If “entertaining” means “filled with distracting cultural hoopla that keeps the masses opiated,” then I agree that’s a bad trend. Some of those decriers will maintain that a solemn service is the way to go, even if solemn becomes somnolent at times.

I hear other folks saying that people are bored in church, a major reason why men can’t engage traditional church meetings anymore. Those same people may very well be the ones seeking more cultural hoopla. Obviously, that’s not a popular response to those on the “entertainment in church is bad” bandwagon.

I hear the wrangling between those two sides and I wonder how they can possibly miss the third way.

If a church is compelled to be entertaining, then something is missing.

If a church is satisfied with being boring more often than not, then something is missing.

Or should I say someone.

If we have churches that feel compelled to be entertaining or are satisfied with being boring, then one thing is true: The Spirit has left the building.

The problem here is that churches on both sides of the argument don’t wish to face that reality because it only shows their spiritual poverty. And we all know to admit God’s not showing up on Sundays in what is supposed to be the gathering of His Children makes for bad marketing.

What’s most tragic about our willingness to make do without the profound presence of the Spirit is that we make peace with the emptiness. When I say that’s a little psycho, I mean the movie. Norman Bates kept believing mom was still alive and kicking even though her corpse moldered in the basement. Needless to say, no outsider thought much of Norman’s sanity.

It’s to our shame that enormous numbers of Christians have never attended a church meeting where the Spirit showed up in palpable presence so that the entire congregation knew it. Oh, those dozing disciples!That’s a tragedy of untold sorrow. Yet it’s what too many Christians face each Sunday in either their dead churches or their dog-and-pony-show excuses for a live one.

So people settle. And they do it with profound gusto. They’ll tell themselves this is the best it will ever be and embrace the lie simply because they’ve never experienced the Spirit dwelling in power.

Are we spiritually hungry? Or are we status quo? Are we afraid? Are we embarrassed? What explains our settling for what too many of us settle for?

Repent. Then gather your church together and don’t stop seeking the Lord until He sends His Spirit in power.

Because a church that doesn’t regularly experience that kind of divine presence of the Lord in their meetings in a palpable, unmistakable way isn’t a church at all.

And yes, I mean that.

And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.
—Acts 4:31

More:

The Intimate, Faraway God

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You had to be living under a rock to miss the brouhaha over Mother Teresa’s confessionary book detailing the profound absence of the presence of God in her life. Not only did the secular media sources jump all over that news, but so did the Godblogosphere.

While I apologize for being late to this news story due to situations here at home, I feel the need to comment nonetheless. Perhaps in the wake of this story’s looming obsolescence (as is common in today’s frenetic media environment) people have had a chance to ponder it a bit more—or forget it completely. No matter the case, I hope to add grist to the mill or refresh your memory.

You can read the original Time article here.

I appreciate Mother Teresa’s work in India to the extent that she cared for the dying. Few of us would be so dedicated in such a hellhole as the one she ministered in. In that regard, she’s a far better person than I am.

On the other hand, no evidence exists that she told dying, hell-bound people how to be born again in Jesus Christ. To have ephemeral earthly comfort without eternal spiritual comfort is no comfort at all.

So in the end, I have strongly mixed feelings about Mother Teresa.

If you cruise the Christian blogosphere, you’ll find all sorts of opinions about the state of her soul. Some would damn all Catholics to hell, saying Teresa’s crisis of faith was due to a complete lack of saving grace; she didn’t feel Christ’s presence because she wasn’t born again. Others sympathetic to the Catholic cause are more lenient, claiming she partook of Christ’s sufferings by enduring an incredibly long, God-ordained “dark night of the soul.”

I’ll let readers decide where they stand on that continuum. Seeing as Teresa ministered in one of the bleakest spots on the planet, the slums of Calcutta, I can see how she might tend toward that dark night. Still, for the purposes of this post, I want to make the issue less about Teresa and more about you and me.

The longer I’m a Christian, the more people I encounter who put on a brave face concerning their own encounters with Christ. If I had to choose a side, I would say that I know far more Christians who would confess in secret that they never experience the feeling of God’s presence in their lives. In that way, they understand what Mother Teresa endured because they feel the same disconnection. That experience nags at them daily.

Can we be honest here? For every one Christian who claims an intimate, uniquely personal encounter with the person of Jesus Christ, I suspect there’s ten who have not.

That’s not a figure we Christians like to trumpet. I think it’s the dirty secret we don’t wish to discuss–ever. Why? Because it calls one’s salvation into question, at least by the standard that some Christians use.

When we talk about having a “personal relationship with Christ,” how many people can claim that this relationship resembles in every way (and better) the kind of relationship one has with a spouse?

To some people, to even ask that question is nuts. “Of course a person doesn’t have a relationship with God, a spiritual being, in the same way as a flesh and blood human being,” some would say. Others would argue, “Anyone who doesn’t have that kind of kind of relationship isn’t really filled with the Spirit and may not be a Christian at all!” Still others would say, “The truth lies somewhere in-between.”

I’ve had some interesting conversations with men of late. More than once I’ve heard them say that God responds to their wives’ prayers in a way that they themselves do not experience. One even went so far as to say that when something he’s been praying for happens in his favor, he has to check to see if his wife was praying the same thing. If she wasn’t, then he can rest knowing that God answered him alone. A dry weary land without waterOtherwise, he fears that his prayers go unheard if they don’t overlap his wife’s. (I may unpack that fear in a later post.)

If I polled men here, I would suspect that some of them are squirming in their seats over hearing this revelation.

Given this, I suspect that a lot of the Godblogosphere’s most vocal proponents of the Gospel harbor a real dryness on the inside for that voice of God they never seem to hear. And given how readily some talk and talk about the little two-sided chats they have with God every day, you won’t hear those dry folks fessing up.

In the case of Mother Teresa (or those of you out there who share her lot), I can say without hesitation that no matter what we might say about her spiritual state, she did one thing right: she pressed on.

One of my favorite passages in Scripture puts it this way:

“Come, let us return to the LORD; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know; let us press on to know the LORD; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.”
—Hosea 6:1-3

Most of us know the last sentence, v. 3. I like the other two as well, for they are Messianic prophecies that also apply to us Christians. Sometimes it takes two days out of three before God revives us. In a life of 80 years, that may be a long time to be dry. But His promise is sure if we press on, isn’t it?

I know plenty of atheists who gloated over Mother Teresa’s dryness. “See, see!” they shouted. “If Mother Teresa can’t touch God, there’s no one’s up there in heaven.”

But the thing about atheists is they know nothing about pressing on. They gave up before the second day, before the rains came.

I know a little about the rains. We’re officially at 19″ of rain for the year in my part of Ohio. The normal? Oh, about 30″. Now combine that with the hottest August on record around here, with five days over 100. Folks, it doesn’t get drier than that. My property looks like a moonscape with all the craters of dead, scorched grass. But as someone who fancies himself a farmer, I don’t give up. Because I know some day the rains will come. Maybe not tomorrow or the day after that, but some day.

So we press on.

As the Scriptures say:

I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently find me.
—Proverbs 8:17

I believe that. I hope everyone reading this does.

I don’t know about Mother Teresa. I know about me, and I’m not always a fountain of refreshment. Still, the faraway God comes in intimate times and I find Him. Sometimes I find Him when I’m not pressing on. And sometimes I don’t find Him when I am. But He’s still there, and I take comfort in that knowledge.

I pray that you’re finding Him. If you’re not, know that you’re not alone. So don’t be discouraged; press on. If you simply can’t press on by yourself, enlist someone to press on with you. And don’t be surprised if you see in the one who helps you the very person of God.

Be blessed. And bless others.