To My Fellow Believers on This Election Eve

If we know whom we are for, the right person will live here Most of you know that I don’t write much on politics. This last month has been an exception as I have tried to wade through the hysteria plaguing this election to find an island of sanity. I fear that no sanity is forthcoming, at least not from this year’s angry electorate.

But I wish to write to you, my fellow believers, about a truth that few discuss much anymore. It’s about knowing what (and whom) we are for.

Let’s examine a verse that most Christians believe strongly but you won’t find in your Bible no matter how hard you look:

Finally brothers, whatever is not false, whatever is not unjust, whatever is not corrupt, whatever is not ugly, what is not lamentable, whatever is not dishonorable, if there is no mediocrity, if there is anything not deplorable, think about these things.

Many of you will recognize that as NOT being Philippians 4:8. Yet that is how most Christian think today. We have little concept of what we are for, yet we write what we are against on the lintels of our doors. Everyone and his brother knows what we Christians are against, yet very few know what we are for.

The problem of only knowing what we are against leads to dissipation and confusion. Imagine if the Lord had requested of the Hebrews that they choose this day whom they would NOT serve. Isn’t it much easier to know whom we are for? Doesn’t that exclude all others by definition? Otherwise, the Hebrews could have spent 40 years naming all the people(s) they were not for. Being for something or someone automatically means that we have excluded other options.

Christians are not to operate from the negative. We don’t find truth by exclusion, but by recognizing it straightaway. It is not enough for us to say that we know what is not of Jesus. Instead, we must know Him alone. When they train Secret Service officers to recognize counterfeit currency, they first familiarize them with the real thing. It makes finding the bogus bills so much easier. So it should be with us when we look for truth.

But as I noted, very few Christians know whom or what they are for.

A pertinent case in point…

I’m sure that a few of you, myself included, attended church this last Sunday and witnessed others sporting some sort of sticker, button, or label declaring allegiance to the GOP presidential candidate. Many are saying this candidate is the last hope for America. They cite him for his strong moral convictions. Some even claim he is God’s own candidate.

I find this curious because of the hypocrisy behind it. How so? Well, if we remember back to 2000 (and I would hope most of us might remember back that far!), that same GOP candidate was vilified by Evangelicals as some sort of hellspawn compared to the eventual GOP winner and future president. When I ask evangelicals today why they now support this once loathed man so vigorously, inquiring when this man experienced the born again conversion that has resulted in this wave of sudden support, I get blank looks.

Truth is, most of the people supporting this GOP candidate are doing so not because they are for him (though they pretend they are), but because they are so vehemently against the Democratic challenger.

Folks, positive outcomes never come out of siding against. They come out of demonstrating what we are for.

Well, conservative Christians are most definitely prolife, right? Not really. What we are is antiabortion. We are by no means prolife. If we were truly prolife then orphanages would be relegated solely to Dickens’s Oliver Twist, and nursing homes would be empty, instead of filled with our elderly parents. Again, what we are against and what we are for are not the same thing. We have to stop pretending they are.

If we were to stop pretending, I think things would improve. For instance, we would start electing politicians who state what they are for, not what they are against. And we would vote accordingly and stop lying to ourselves.

They say the definition of insanity is to keep repeating the same action while expecting different outcomes. By that measure, much of the American electorate is insane because we keep voting in the same two parties who are running our country into the ground, each time expecting a different outcome from voting the status quo.

This is because we have forgotten what we are for.

George Barna has repeatedly shown that Christians no longer know the basic truths of the Bible. And any history teacher will tell you that Americans are woefully ignorant of the founding documents of our country. Again, we have no idea what we are for. It is why our country is in the woeful state it is.

If Christians understand what we are for, then we will vote for born again candidates who are led by the Spirit of God and the Scriptures. If we understand what our country is for, then we will also vote for representatives who are for the preservation of the principles found in our Constitution.

Now, ask yourself this: Which of the two major party candidates is a born-again believer who is also a strict constitutionalist?

Again, this is a question of what we are for, not what we are against. If you answered that neither candidate meets the criteria, then you are on the way to understanding what you are for.

There are candidates running who are strict constitutionalists and born-again believers. If Christians knew who and what we were for, we would be throwing all our support to those candidates.

Many Christians will claim this election is about morality. But morality is little more than God’s rules with God excised from the picture. This is not what our nation can be for. We are either on God’s side or we are not. This is not about morality but staying true to Christ.

President John Quincy Adams said it well:

Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.

When we know what we are for, then we will know how to vote, even if in doing so we choose the less traveled road. We are not responsible to men but to God alone for the choices we make in this life.

Remember this: When we do not know what we are for, God fills in the blank. Oftentimes, what fills that blank is judgment.

In the end, come Wednesday morning, no matter who the next denizen of the White House will be, Christians are charged to pray for our elected leaders. That is something each us us should always be for.

Discernment, Revivals, and Godly Common Sense

He will judge us... I’ve received further e-mails asking for more of my thoughts on discerning what is truly of God when signs and wonders and revivals break out. This comes on the heels of two posts I wrote last week (here and here) discussing events at the Lakeland “revival” down in Florida.

At a time when discernment appears lost on vast portions of Evangelicalism and the charismatic movement, basic, biblical principles are needed to discern truth from error. While I believe that the spiritual gift of discerning of spirits cannot be condensed into a set of tips, I also believe that basic rules for discernment CAN be derived from the biblical text and from plain, old common sense. God gave us a brain smart enough to avoid eating obvious poison, and so we should use the brains He gave us to make wise choices about truth and falsehood.

What follows below frames my own set of rules for discernment. You may disagree or have better rules. And to those friends of mine who will most certainly be hurt by what I say here, I can only ask that you consider these things and take them before the Lord.

Always begin with healthy skepticism.

I always come to the miraculous with a healthy dose of skepticism. This is not the same as faithlessness because I wholeheartedly believe that God can do miraculous works. I also realize that the Enemy can mimic those works. God will not deny blessings to people who test the spirits to see if they are of Him. It’s a little like having a spam filter up all the time. The good stuff will get through and the rotten stuff won’t. And even if a piece of good stuff gets caught, God is not so weak that He won’t continue to do a good work in us. If that means He has to reattempt what got trapped in the filter, He most certainly will because He loves us enough to do so. He never punishes people who remain vigilant because they love Him and His pure works. On the other hand, people who open themselves up to everything wind up filled with garbage, a mess that can take a lifetime to undo.

God has a way of proving Himself true in time, but the Enemy never does.

By their fruit we will know them. Their fruit will remain, too. A little water under the bridge is a good thing because it allows us to test what is happening against Scripture, just as the Bereans did in Acts. One of the rotten fruits of phony miracles and revivals is that they open people up for even more error. A pinch of yeast leavens the whole lump of dough. Lies breed confusion, and “miracles” that come from the Enemy or from the hand of tricksters will only bring confusion in the long run.

Consider the past fruits of anyone or any group working the miraculous in the name of Christ.

Look at their theology closely. Also realize that words matter, and that some people confuse terms on purpose or twist them so that they look right even though they aren’t. Oneness Pentecostals may not seem antitrinitarian on the surface, but attempting a 1:1 analysis of their terminology with orthodox Christian doctrine ultimately reveals their error. We must also realize that a group with odd theology may continue to spawn odd theology even if they attempt to distance themselves from the past error. In charismatic circles, far too much deviant doctrine and practice has come out of the Kansas City Prophets of the late 1980s and early 1990s. One can trace all manner of craziness since 1990 directly back to that group, including the recent Lakeland “revival.” Anything “birthed” out of that movement should have an automatic red flag attached to it, as should any former leaders connected to it. This includes organizations and ministries such as IHOP, The Elijah List, MorningStar Ministries, Passion & Fire, and a whole host of others that looked favorably upon Mike Bickle, Bob Jones, John Paul Jackson, Rick Joyner, Paul Cain, and anyone else who came out of the Kansas City Prophets movement. In fact, since the entirety of the modern prophetic movement in charismatic circles is inextricably linked in a tangle to those groups and individuals, it may be best (and I say this with a heavy heart) to avoid the prophetic movement altogther as a national entity until God purges the corrupted seed.

Real miraculous works from God are often imitated by the Enemy.

Moses threw down his staff and it transformed into a snake. Pharaoh’s two magicians threw down their staffs and they turned into snakes, too. We must never forget this. Just because a miracle occurs doesn’t mean it came from God. The difference is that God’s miracles prevail and the Enemy’s never do. We must also consider the character of those who are present at the miracle. We know Moses was God’s man. But who owned Jannes and Jambres? We must apply that same thinking to discerning the source of miracles.

Any appeal to spiritual beings apart from the members of the Trinity is dangerous.

God created the heavenly hosts, including His messengers, the angels. A third of the angels fell and became demons. These spiritual beings are real. The error of Evangelicalism is that it tends to ignore them. The error of charismatics is that they tend to fixate on them. God commands the angels, we don’t. He has, though, given us authority over demons by benefit of the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit living in us. However, we dabble with spiritual beings at our peril. The demonic comes as an angel of light remember. When I hear people appealing to angels or talking about them the way they are discussed by Todd Bentley of the Lakeland “revival,” I’m instantly alarmed. You can’t go to the Scriptures and find the apostles talking about angelic beings the way some charismatics do. That kind of talk is not there in the Bible, our source of truth. When we pray, we can ask God to send His angels to minister to us, but we should always test spiritual entities and go to the Lord to request them, not ask them directly. We may attract the wrong kind of spiritual entity if we bypass the Lord and His will concerning the sending of angels for assistance.

The whole counsel of Scripture matters, not just a verse here and there.

I am increasingly convinced that chapter and verse markers are one of the worst things to happen to the Bible. Because we added them, too many people pick and choose verses to contruct their theology rather than considering the whole counsel of Scripture. Charismatics do this more than anyone, creating elaborate fictions out of disjointed strings of verses. The old joke about the man who randomly opens his Bible to “Judas hanged himself” and then to another verse that said “Go and do likewise” applies here. I can guarantee that the vast, vast majority of Christians dashed on the rocks of phony revival and fake miracles wind up there because they don’t understand the whole counsel of Scripture. Sadly, our atrocious understanding, especially in those circles hellbent on mountaintop experiences at the expense of study, leads to error and heartbreak. The Bible cautions that God’s people are destroyed for lack of knowledge, and that knowledge comes from His word. Get wisdom; understand what the Bible says from cover to cover!

God’s revivals and miracles are not chintzy.

Real revival takes the worst people possible and transforms them into God’s people. Real miracles take the most desperate situations and conditions and alleviates them. God never settles for cheap. Read the miracles and revivals in the Bible; the miracles force entire cities to stand up and take note, while the revivals have thousands coming to Christ. While it might seem like a great thing that the tennis pro had his tennis elbow cured by the laying on of hands, if that’s the extent of the miraculous, something’s wrong. God does much bigger (and much more documentable) works. If we come back from a revival with a healthy glow, but a couple weeks later we’re just as ornery as we were before we went, that wasn’t real revival.

Novelty is not of God.

Yes, the Bible says that God does new things, but He only does them from a basis of what is old and established. God is not into tricks. He does not use flash to enhance His workings. He doesn’t have His servants dance jigs around someone they’re praying for, doesn’t have His people wave their arms and act like bad magicians. There’s no “Alakazam!” and no need for it. God isn’t into show. Preachers, prophets, and revivalists who make a big deal of novelty are supplementing. And God needs no one to supplement His power.

If a movement, revival, or series of miracles “feels off,” the Holy Spirit may be trying to warn us.

The Holy Spirit confirms truth, and all true believers have the Holy Spirit in some measure. If we’re around a miraculous event and we feel wrong about it, there’s a good reason to believe that’s the Holy Spirit talking. We better listen. Unfortunately, too many people who supposedly have the Holy Spirit living in them have turned a deaf ear to the Spirit’s warnings. Also, too many people have no ability to discern the voice of the Spirit in the midst of the background noise of life. That’s a terrible loss because the Bible explicitly states that we’re to be guided by the Holy Spirit. If we fail to listen to Him in situations that call for discernment, how will we be able to discern those difficult situations that normal Christians encounter? For instance, Paul and Silas were followed by the slave girl who announced that the two were from God and were proclaiming the way of salvation. On the surface, how many Christians would love to have such an ardent helper? But Paul, by the Spirit, saw the demon controlling their “assistant” and cast it out. That kind of discernment only comes by the Spirit of God.

We Christians are to seek Jesus, not signs and wonders.

We must remember this passage of Scripture:

For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience—by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God—so that from Jerusalem and all the way around to Illyricum I have fulfilled the ministry of the gospel of Christ; and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, “Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.”
—Romans 15:18-21

The entirety of Paul’s context above is evangelizing the lost. Do we understand this? Signs and wonders are largely for the lost as a confirmation of God’s power. As Christians, we already know about signs and wonders; they should not shock us. We know Christ, and isn’t He greater than signs and wonders? He is our sufficiency, not signs and wonders. He is the source, and the source is always greater. Yet look how many people flock to so-called revivals just to see signs and wonders. This is a mockery, frankly. It detracts from Jesus, and the Holy Spirit always points to Jesus, not to signs and wonders. This is not to say that Christians cannot come to Jesus for healing or for a miracle, but that these are by far secondary to Christ alone. If anything, we Christians should not be surprised at miracles, but by the lack of them! They should be second nature to us, not to the point of us being blasé about them, but that we understand them as the inherent outworkings of the normal Christian life.

Real revival breaks out only among the humble.

Revival breaks out where God moves, not where some Christian celebrity moves. Any Christian preacher or revivalist who claims that revival follows him or her is operating out of spiritual pride. Genuine revival breaks out among people who have no names to make for themselves, around ministries that are local and less well known, and in backwater places with no marketing arm to promote them. It breaks out through the long-travailing prayers of humble servants, not the boasts of fly-by-night Christian celebrities who line their pockets with sales of cheap Christian trinkets or “pray for pay.” Remember, the Enemy loves to boast and loves the limelight. The people God uses to bring genuine revival are often the very people who were once scorned for their piety, humility, and singleminded devotion to Christ.

Christ Himself warned that genuine faith would become a rarity.

I am continually shocked that so many in the charismatic movement keep believing for some massive revival right before Christ returns. In many branches of the charismatic movement lurks an almost post-millennial frenzy that finds people believing we Christians will hand over a perfected world to the Lord at His second coming. Yet the Lord Jesus Himself asked whether He would find faith on earth at His return. Mark 13:20 says that if it were not for a cutting off of the chaotic days of tribulation, no one would be saved. We are heading into dark, dark times where even the elect might come close to falling away. So whenever I hear calls of worldwide revival, I’m leery. Revival to whom and by whom? Is this what the Bible teaches? If so, I’ve been unable to find it in the pages of Scripture. This is not to say that genuine revival will not come to this place and that dotted across the globe, only it probably won’t look like the kind of revival that some modern revivalists are trumpeting.

For more thoughts on this, please see the following previous posts:

Of Godblogs & Gobbledygook

As of this last month, I’m convinced that information overload is hurting our souls.

A common factoid spread around the blogosphere tells us that a single edition of the New York Times contains more information on its pages than the average person in the 17th century accumulated in a lifetime. Whether true or not, it doesn’t take a sociology degree to know that we’re bombarded with increasing amounts of data we must process daily. I think about the sheer amount of medical knowledge today and wonder how any doctor can possibly do his job without becoming irrelevant in only a couple years. Or consider how high-tech spawns and kills off new technology almost every day.

We don’t have to be doctors or IT specialists to know that the average person today must not only process local events, but happenings on the other side of the world. It’s not enough that a local teacher was killed in a car accident over the weekend, but a bus full of nuns holding babies in their arms went off a cliff in Outer Pradesh. It’s difficult enough to know the pain of our neighbors, but now the whole world is our neighborhood, and the newspaper screams the entire planet’s misery. Add in the Web, e-mail, TV, radio, and some new media yet to be produced, and you’ve created a litany of laments few rational adults can process.

Estimates vary widely, but some claim that publishers put out as many as 300,000 book titles last year alone, up from the year before, which was an increase over the year previous—and so it goes. Each book comes packed with information we must process, facts we must consider and digest. Data, data, data.

Many of those titles come from Christian publishing houses. Into that mix we add Christian magazines, music, curricula, television and even Bibles. And now we have the new phenomenon of the blogosphere, complete with its own Christianized blogs.

I used to skim through about 100 Christian blogs via Bloglines. I dropped that to about fifty. Now I’m down to about the same dozen. And I might need to trim even those.

I can’t speak for you, but I look at my own soul and see confusion. I can no longer process all the information hitting me daily. I cut my blog diet down simply because I’d come away from reading with an itchy scalp that required constant scratching. Too many opinions. Too many contrary facts. Too many discussions of esoteric theological minutia. Too many book reviews of too many “must-read” books guaranteed to make me a better servant of Christ.

But what I’m discovering, contrary to the pervasive wisdom of educating oneself, makes me wonder if this information deluge might be hindering the discipleship process God created rather than boosting it. One book tells me how to pray, but another claims that other book has it wrong. This blog here discusses the finer points of infralapsiarianism, with several blog participants yelling at each other. After a while, everyone is simultaneously right and wrong. I can’t possibly give any of it much deep thought. What I tend to do instead is build a wall around myself to keep the facts from demanding too much of me.

The restlessness many people feel in their souls may be due to an inability to handle this data deluge. I consider myself a fairly competent processor of info, but I can’t do it all anymore. When Paul tells Timothy to study in order to show himself to be an approved workman, I highly doubt he wrote of what you or I contend with daily. As the foremost book says:

Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
—Ecclesiastes 12:12b

Consider how many books the average person in Solomon’s day might encounter. There’s not a person reading this now who doesn’t own more books than a hundred households even a hundred years ago. Did Paul advise Timothy to sit down with a stack of systematic theologies? Was he advocating collecting the complete works of this rabbi or that and poring over them until their wisdom filled every nook and cranny of Tim’s noggin?

We know about Pavlov’s dog, but do we know about Seligman’s? That dog, placed in a wire pen, received an electric shock whenever a tone sounded. After a while, the dog sat helplessly whimpering in the corner of its cage on hearing the tone, even without the shock.

I believe that one reason the Christian Church in America continues to struggle with meeting the demands of the Kingdom comes from an overload of data, a sort of constant mental electroshock. Every time someone dumps another factoid on us, we run cowering to the corner, afraid of whatever inevitable damage must afflict us for the knowing. We live in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance that sends us begging for it all to stop.

People beg for it to stop in different ways. Some throw themselves into one source that they hope might stem the noise from other sources. Information overload Others go searching for even more info, without knowing they’re using more to keep from dealing with the consequences of truths they already grasp. Others simply go into a self-imposed shell. Some avoid anything that smacks of more information, but they don’t know how to ultimately turn off the noise, growing frustrated.

And it has become noise, hasn’t it? Even the genuine signal gets lost when it’s pumped up to ear-splitting volumes. In a world hellbent on getting this message or that through the noise, life’s volume knob comes preset at eleven.

Who can blame people for failing to respond? With all that shouting, even from Christian sources, who can tell what’s right? Better to not risk doing the wrong thing based on conflicting info than to look stupid. And who knows what’s right and what’s wrong with everyone shouting?

It seems unbelievable to think that buying one more Christian book to read might be the wrong thing to do, or that perusing a respected Godblog might be a hindrance to growth. Or consider that Sunday’s sermon might be yet one more set of commands we can’t possibly live up to simply because it must contend with all the other data we don’t have time for. Lately, when I look at all the input, I don’t have any other way to think of it.

Listening to too many voices, even when those voices are good, is still the sign of a schizophrenic life.

I don’t know that that means for Cerulean Sanctum. I don’t want to add to the turmoil. I don’t want this blog to join others in numbing people to the Gospel. Whenever life gets reduced to a anesthetized blur, all meaning is lost. God never intended for us to dwell in a perpetual state of information overload.

I’m thinking. What are you thinking?