Adrian Warnock posted an outstanding excerpt from D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one of my favorite authors, detailing how Christ’s love through the Holy Spirit changes people and does so in a way the mystics of old understood, but we have discredited in large swaths of Evangelicalism.

There are, unfortunately, even many evangelical Christians who deny that God has any direct dealings with men today, and who hold feeling and emotion at a discount. They frequently substitute for true emotion a flabby sentimentalism. They are afraid of the power of the Holy Spirit, and so afraid of certain excesses which are sometimes found in mysticism and in certain people who claim to have unusual experiences of the Holy Spirit, that they ‘quench the Spirit’ and never have any personal knowledge of Christ. Indeed, they often go so far as to deny the possibility of such a knowledge….

(HT: Rick Ianniello)

As they say in the blogging biz, read the whole thing. It’s great stuff.

Considering that Lloyd-Jones said this decades ago only shows how entrenched the malaise has been. Even in a charismatic age, too many of our churches want to hold the Holy Spirit at arms length, fearful of how He might change us and draw us to a more intimate knowledge of Christ that is, dare I say it, mystical.

My question then is, how do we who believe as Lloyd-Jones does go about eliminating that fear in our churches of the Holy Spirit and of that deeper place of intimate, mystical love for Christ?