Spiritual Gifts

Brake On, Power Off

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The scene from our property...frozen crabappleI did one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done this week. It may not seem like much at first glance, but it made for a lot of unnecessary work, pointless ponderings, and general angst.

We got hit by a snowstorm, followed by an ice storm, followed by a snowstorm. As we live at the top of a hill, about fifty feet higher than the road that runs by our house, we need to navigate a steep drive. Snow makes this difficult, and we sometimes can’t get up our snow-choked driveway in my wife’s car, a Corolla.

On the other hand, I have a 4×4 pickup that laughs at snow and ice. No matter how bad a mess our driveway might be, I’m up it in a flash.

Which is why this last week was so stupid. I attempted to venture out after the storms had run their courses. I clear the driveway by first running my truck up and down it to create a basic, driveable path, then I spread halite in the treadmarks. In a day or so, the salt does its work and my wife’s car has no more troubles getting in and out.

Imagine my surprise when I turn my truck around to make the uphill jaunt and wind up in a ditch on the side of my driveway. Now imagine me scratching my head as to why, only to discover that I had the parking brake on.

Now a 4×4 is one of man’s greatest inventions, but it’s not magic. Run yourself into a watery, icy, muddy ditch and you’ve got troubles. My troubles amounted to 80 minutes of me pushing on the back end of my truck while my wife spun the wheels a lot.  The truck stayed where it was, and I retreated to our warm house for a cup of coffee with a packet of cocoa dumped in for good measure.

The next morning, after the ground had refrozen, I got in the truck, put it in 4-wheel low, and promptly drove out as if nothing had happened.

None of this madness would have occurred if I’d released the parking brake before I first attempted to drive up the hill. As is wont with me, this amounts to a lesson that goes beyond 4-wheel-drive pickup trucks and icy driveways.

Nothing drives a church into a ditch faster than to have the spiritual parking brake on. How does that happen? When leaders fail to identify gifts in their congregants.

I don’t know when this failure first began, but somewhere in the Western Church’s life we gave up tapping the power of the next generation, leaving talented people unchallenged and underdeveloped. And the blame for this lies entirely on leaders of local churches. Entirely.

When you look at the model of the early Church, its leaders called out gifted people for ministry. The leaders identified the gifts in those folks and worked alongside them to tune those gifts for maximum performance.

Today, we’ve got bupkis in this regard. Instead, we rely on folks’ self-identification of their gifts, on spiritual gift inventories that are little more than wish fulfillment for many, and the result has been a lot of wheel-spinning and ditch-dwelling.

Personally, I think that it’s the role of every pastor, elder, and deacon to keep their spiritual eyes open to the giftings of people within their churches, then encouraging those gifts. This goes beyond just mentioning that so-and-so is needed in the nursery to watch the kiddies when the adults are worshiping. It’s an active one-on-one process that helps others grow into their giftings.

And this is spiritually discerned, too, which, in the end, is what dooms this endeavor in most churches. Too many leaders don’t know how to see with the eyes of the Spirit, instead relying on calling out someone’s natural abilities rather than their supernatural ones.

A church comes packed with people God gifts for service. Too often, though, those people become 4x4s with parking brakes firmly set, their service hampered because no one is there to guide them into the powerful workings of God’s gifts in their own lives.

A. W. Tozer calls this error a tragedy, and I agree. It’s a tragedy that persists through the generations as we fail to meet the obligation to develop our fellow Christians into all God would desire they become. Instead, we’re satisfied with a pittance of the power available to us. So we run off into one ditch after another and fool ourselves into thinking that this constitutes the abundant life.

Please God, give us the guts and smarts to release the brake.

Pentecost, 21st Century

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I have a nagging question that will not go away:

How is it that so many Christians in the West willingly endorse the idea that the Gospel of Grace lay fallow for 1,000 years until “rediscovered” by the Reformation generation (Hus, Luther, Calvin), yet they find it incomprehensible that any other major component of God’s word might lie fallow longer and only find its rediscovery in our generation?

Yet that is what many Christians believe. It is as if the worldwide Church ceased to exist from 500-1500 A.D., flowered in the revelation of the Reformation, but has been on a deaf, downhill slide since. That belief also renders it impossible that our generation may experience any kind of renaissance in Christian spirituality.

I believe that this belief is the primary reason why so many people reject the charismata, not any Scriptural injunction, but an idea that, in essence, “it’ll never be better than Luther’s day.” Therefore, God will never choose to revitalize part of the True Faith during our day.

That’s too bad. It’s awfully presumptive as well.

Lakeland was a huge blow to the charismatic movement. And in a way, I thank God for it. Because it’s time for the foolishness to stop.

But it’s a logical fallacy to conclude that a charismatic reading of the Scriptures is wrong because some unhinged people claim to be charismatics. If one wanted to prove guilt by blanket condemnation, one would have to argue that the Holy Bible is not to be trusted because of the existence of The Book of Mormon or the New World Translation or any of the so-called “mystery books” or apocryphal writings that were supposedly “left out” of the Bible. And who now reading this believes that position?

It bothers me that so few people are able to look at catastrophes and meltdowns and glean anything from them other than polarizing positions. There never seems to be any middle ground, therefore the autopsy of the event thrusts people into starkly held positions. Positions which, when you get right down to it, end up not being the truth at all because prejudices get in the way of objective analysis.

But plenty of people want to dance on the grave of the charismatic movement. Me, I say, “Let ’em.” Why? Because I don’t acknowledge that what is commonly called “The Charismatic Movement” by outsiders and critics defines the genuine expression of the Holy Spirit operating through charismata in the True Church today. That label is far too broad, so it winds up encompassing both legitimate and illegitimate expressions of  the charismata. Critics then look at the invalid expressions and label the entirety corrupt.

No better example of this exists than Pentecostal and charismatic TV ministries. And here’s the rub: I suspect that they dominate the airwaves and present a much broader, polarizing picture of what is deemed charismatic than really exists. What gets put on the airwaves is the flash, the dog and pony shows, that represent the worst, not the best, of what is deemed charismatic or Pentecostal.

If aliens from beyond our galaxy were able to intercept television signals from Earth, yet the only show they could receive was Teletubbies, what kind of whacked-out interpretation of life here would they form? So it is with charismania on TV.  It may make for a wild show, but it’s not reality.

You want to know what is the genuine reality for charismatic and Pentecostal churches today?

Whenever we talk about the persecuted church in the world, those churches most oppressed by dictatorial regimes, those churches are, in many cases, Pentecostal. The first Pentecostal martyr, StephenThe Chinese underground Church so revered here by high-minded Western Christians? Mostly Pentecostal or with a belief that the charismata exist today. In fact, if one were to look around the globe, the revivals we see in developing countries, the thousands coming to Christ in the “backwaters” of the globe, those new Christians are Pentecostals/charismatics. For the far greater part, they are NOT Presbyterians, Nazarenes, Methodists, Lutherans, Reformed, Brethren, Episcopalian, or any other denomination of that type.

This is not some kind of slam on those other denominations. It’s just an acknowledgment that it is easy to bash Pentecostals and charismatics with blanket statements that end up making all us Western Christians look foolish.

What is the common denominator between the televised dog and pony shows fronted by red-faced, Armani-wearing Branham devotees and the persecuted Chinese Church? Not a whole lot. At all. Yet far too many people want to mash them up and label them the same thing.

There’s a word for that: lazy.

So if anyone out there wants to dance on the grave of what was epitomized by Lakeland, be my guest. But be exceptionally careful where else you jig because you may very well be contributing to the persecution of genuine, faithful, humble Christians who just so happen to believe the gifts of the Holy Spirit are still for today.




Strange Fire in Florida?

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And Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer, and put fire therein, and put incense thereon, and offered strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them, and they died before the LORD. Then Moses said unto Aaron, This is it that the LORD spoke, saying, “I will be sanctified in them that come nigh me, and before all the people I will be glorified.” And Aaron held his peace.
—Leviticus 10:1-3 KJV

The sons of Aaron pay for their errorA couple weeks ago in church, I was talking with some small group friends when a woman approached us and regaled us with stories of a massive revival going on down in Florida. She said it was all over the TV (*cough*, TBN, *cough*). Said hundreds were getting healed. (Okay, good.) Said the gifts were operating powerfully. (Also good.) Said people were coming from all over the world to attend. (Not sure what to think about that, since fads can pull in people, too, but okay.) Said God was giving people gold teeth. (Yikes!)

A few bloggers/writers are discussing this “revival” (here, here, here, and here) and all the typically charismatic hoopla that attends it. The descriptions seem all too familiar.

Me? My hackles are up. I’ve been around enough real manifestations of the Holy Spirit to know that something is odd about this “revival.” I was never a big fan of the so-called Toronto Blessing, had a boatload of reservations about the Brownsville Revival, and now this.

Here’s my take on the revival in Lakeland:

1. All true revival is marked by one overarching, indisputable reality: People are driven to repentance. And not “Me too, me too!” repentance, but the kind that soaks the carpeting in tears of holy remorse for sin. Any revival that is not first and foremost preceded by and given over to repentance is not a Holy Spirit-ordained revival. The number one fruit coming out of any revival will always be fruits of repentance. And those fruits remain. They don’t vanish six months after roadies pack up the revival tent; they last a lifetime. Want to gauge who’s behind this revival? Watch for fruits of repentance. If everything but repentance is visible front and center stage, then it’s not a revival from God.

2. There’s no fool like a charismatic fool. And I say that as a charismatic. Too many charismatics drink from poisoned wells only to clutch their guts in pain later, asking what went wrong. What went wrong is that no one was bold enough to test the spirits to see if they were from God. Want a wise foundation for that kind of discernment? Start right here.

3. Whenever the emphasis gets off Jesus, a revival’s focus is off target. The Holy Spirit always pulls people to Jesus. He doesn’t pull them toward angels, canny preachers, or displays of spiritual gifts. He doesn’t need gold teeth, gold dust, and angel feathers to point people to Jesus. (Those are illusionist and occultist tricks.) He just needs himself because He is sufficient to do the pointing. Real revival isn’t about what you or I want, but what Jesus Christ wants.

4. When the sons of Aaron offered “strange fire” before the Lord, their offering was probably close to what it should have been. After all, they knew the formalities. The problem was that close doesn’t count except in horseshoes and hand grenades. God doesn’t put up with close. His worshipers worship Him in Spirit and in truth. And there’s no “almost” in truth. You want “almost” when it comes to truth? Consider Satan; he’s a master of the almost truth. If we’ve got experienced charismatics at a revival with folded arms and scrunched brows saying, “Well, you know…,” then it’s strange fire.

5. Real revival doesn’t just draw one kind of Christian. It draws everyone. It draws Episcopalians, Lutherans, Reformed, Presbyterian, Nazarene, Brethren, Mennonite, Methodist, Baptist—everyone. And not just Christians, either. Real revival pulls in hundreds of the unsaved and the cultists. Real revival spills out of the cup that first held it. It rains down on whomever is near because God doesn’t discriminate. He’s an equal opportunity anointer of those who wholeheartedly seek Him.

That’s what I have to say about this “revival” in Florida. You can take my comments for what they’re worth.