Tag Archives: holy-spirit

Christian Life, Prayer and Spiritual Warfare, Walking in the Spirit

Through a glass darkly

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“And as I began to speak, the Holy Spirit fell upon them, as upon us at the beginning. Then I remembered the word of the Lord, how He said, ‘John indeed baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’ If therefore God gave them the same gift as He gave us when we believed on the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could withstand God? When they heard these things they became silent; and they glorified God, saying, “Then God has also granted to the Gentiles repentance to life.” (Act 11: 15-18)

In this passage, Peter is describing to the church at Jerusalem the events of Cornelius’s house that Luke had narrated in the previous chapter, when the gospel was preached to the Gentiles and they received the Spirit and spoke in tongues (Acts 10 : 44-46). This morning, I happened (happened?) to have been reading a little bit about a very well-known author and preacher who calls himself a “moderate cessationist;” wondering, as I often do, how somebody who talks and writes about prayer (and other aspects of Christian living) can leave out what to me is fundamental to my communication with God. Because I often “don’t know how to pay as I ought,” I am really grateful that ‘the Holy Spirit is helping me in my weakness,’ (Romans 8:26) so in my own opinion leaving Tongues out of one’s prayer life is like not putting the yeast in the bread machine when you are baking a loaf. Something comes out alright, and it is no doubt just as nutritious; but it’s heavy and flat, and just not something you want to go to for sustenance.

The cessationist position in the article I read taught that the whole counsel of Scripture provides a more solid and secure foundation for our Christian life that subjective experiences of the supernatural, be it “prophesies” that are products of the imagination, “healings” that are psychosomatic in origin and not at all miraculous, or “tongues” that are the product of the language centres of the human brain and not utterances of the Holy Spirit, so aware of that I found myself reading the passage that I am studying at the moment with this issue very much in my mind.

This episode in the Book of Acts is of course a frequently used justification for the Pentecostal/charismatic position on speaking in tongues: they got saved, the Holy Spirit fell as at Pentecost, and they spoke in tongues; therefore it follows that the gift of Tongues is there for everyone who gets saved. I fully believe this myself, but what struck me when I read the passage this morning was Peter’s comment that he “remembered the word of the Lord, how He said, ‘John indeed baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit,” and that he related this experience of the Holy Spirit among the Gentiles to “the word of the Lord” spoken by Jesus. Pentecostals and Charismatics make this connection frequently enough, and I remember Reinhart Bonneke preaching on this text many years ago; but this was the apostle Peter. Jesus Himself was the Word, the Logos; and the “word of the Lord” referred to by Peter was the “rhema” word, the “now” word spoken by Him into a specific context. So the baptism of the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands with the evidence of speaking in tongues is as grounded in the scriptural foundations of our faith as it is possible to be: referenced by the apostle  Peter to a rhema word spoken by the Logos Himself.

It is essential that our experience always lines up with the Word of God, and that we always worship in Spirit and in Truth; and because of this our assemblies must be churches of the Word and of the Spirit – whether or not Smith Wigglesworth’s famous prophesy of the great revival based on the Word and the Spirit ever comes to pass. But even if some of our “spiritual” experiences are not supernatural at all, I would embrace them every time for the sake of not missing the ones that are, as long as it is always our trust in the truth of the Word of God, and not our (or other peoples’) personal experience, that is the basis of our faith.

To close, prayer is not often something I find difficult. I often come across articles or book extracts that suggest all sorts of props to one’s prayer life, whether they are Bible study programmes, or pathways through the Psalms, or daily notes whatever else, and I think to myself, “Why?” Isn’t it enough to have the Holy Spirit helping me to pray?” Maybe some of these people are “moderate cessationists” as well, avoiding the gifts of the Spirit for the sake of keeping their faith in the Word unsullied by untrustworthy experiences. Maybe they find prayer difficult at times because they have left the yeast out of the bread mix and find the loaf heavy and indigestible as a result. I don’t know, and it’s not for me to judge. Maybe my own prayer life is full of yeast bubbles and has little substance…

But I know this: when I was a baby Christian in a charismatic church in the 1980s I used to doubt that people who didn’t pray in tongues were even saved, never mind just missing out on one of the God’s many blessings for His children, and by the grace of God I am wiser and less arrogant than that now; but I still think It is better see through a glass darkly than never to look in the mirror at all.

NOTE: Material on the power of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer is (loosely) grouped under “Spirit without Limit.” A useful starting point is “The Name of the Father,” which looks at the baptism in the Holy Spirit in the context of the beginnings of the Ephesian church.

Prayer and Spiritual Warfare, Walking in the Spirit

The Peach

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“ We do not know what we should pray for as we ought…” (Rom 8:26)

Sometimes our prayers can be like a peach: we look at a situation – whether we are praying for ourselves or for someone else – and we pray. We see the peach, we take a bite, and we wait for the Lord’s answer. Nothing changes. We pray again, taking another bite. Third bite: ask and keep on asking; knock and keep on knocking. But the door still doesn’t open to us. We keep praying, trusting God’s faithfulness, until we have devoured all the peach. God still hasn’t answered, and we are left holding a damp red peach stone. So we stop praying, believing that our prayers weren’t in God’s will, and we throw away the peach stone.

But what we’ve done is throw away the answer to our prayers. We have prayed for what we have seen – the flesh of the peach- but that doesn’t mean we have prayed for what God sees. In fact Isaiah tells us:

“He shall not judge by the sight of His eyes,
Nor decide by the hearing of His ears”. (Isaiah 11: 3)

The starting place for God’s creative acts is not in what is seen, but what is unseen:

“By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.” (Heb 11:3)

The life that the peach carries is not in the flesh, and not even in the stone: it is in the kernel that is hidden inside the stone. Paul writes:

“I shall pray with my spirit, and I shall pray also with my understanding.” (1 Cor 14:15)

The New Living Translation renders this as “I will pray in the spirit, and I will also pray in words I understand,” which I  think is how it is generally understood. The Greek word used for understanding is “nous” – the word for human intellect and reason. In fact we use it in English colloquially, in phrases like – “anyone with a bit of nous can see that…”  But I think we can see it another way as well. I think it could also mean that we look at a situation and pray about it with our “nous,” but we also pray in the Spirit about the same situation. The two are connected.  In other words, we understand that, for example, the marriage of a certain couple in leadership is in trouble, so we start to pray about it according to what we know and can see, which is praying about it with our understanding; but when we start to pray in the Spirit we receive revelation about how God wants us to pray, our understanding is then enlightened, and we are then praying according to the will of God:

“The Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.

Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God.” (Rom 8: 26-27)

Let’s remember that when we have prayed through all that we can see, including all the scriptures that we understand to be relevant to the need, we may have devoured the flesh with our understanding, but that is just the beginning of the prayer: it is only by the Holy Spirit that we see the kernel hidden inside the stone, where God’s answer is waiting to bring forth Life.

Holiness: You shall be perfect, Knowing God, Walking in the Spirit

Power Stations

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Christmas is always a very busy time in the church calendar, and January is usually when church leaders look back over those Christmas activities and evaluate them. Or at least, one would hope that is the case. But what do we evaluate our activities (Christmas and otherwise) against? In the business world, we look for a return on investment, and in our Father’s business it is no different. Jesus talks about it in the parable of the talents: the master expected a return on His investment. Jesus invested everything in us when He went to the cross, and the Father who sent him is looking for fruit that endures (John 15:16) as His return. Jesus fell to the ground and died to seed a vine that would bear fruit. It follows that whatever activities we do in the name of Jesus (and Colossians 3:17 exhorts us to do everything in His name) should be directed toward His purpose, which is to bear fruit; to give our Master a return on His investment; to see the Kingdom of God extended on Earth.

As far as I can see, the Bible only defines Christ’s purpose in three ways. Jesus himself talked consistently of two of them, which was to reveal the Father and His Kingdom, and John adds a third strand, which was to destroy the works of the evil one (1 John 3:8). These are most famously and succinctly summed up in the best known of all quotes from the New Testament, John 3:16: God sent His only begotten son into the world, that (i.e. with the purpose of) we should not perish (the work of the evil one) but have everlasting life (in the Kingdom Of God). Jesus also defines everlasting life as knowing the Father (John 17:3). John 3:16 really is the church’s mission statement.

So we have a clear lens through which to view the activities in which we invest time, manpower and money. To what extent are they in keeping with Jesus’s mission statement for His church? Are they, directly or indirectly, manifesting the Father? Are they preaching the Kingdom, taking it by force (Matthew 11:12) and destroying the works of the evil one in doing so? Are they equipping others for this work (Eph 4:12)? If they are, then we’re on mission; if not, we need to focus on what is, “redeeming the time, because the days are evil.” (Ephesians 5:16)

As we well know, the only way we can do the work of the Kingdom is in the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus came to give life and that in abundance (John 10 :10) – everlasting Life. Being vessels for abundant life is always the goal of our mission. We are called to be power stations, individually, and as churches, generating that abundant life, bringing the everlasting energia of the Kingdom of God into this world; bringing Heaven to Earth. Our Father, the vine dresser, is looking for fruit that endures on His vine; He prunes the dead wood, and throws it in the fire. Jesus baptises with the Holy Spirit, and with fire (Matt 3:11). Jesus said “I’ve come to set the Earth on fire; how I wish it were already kindled!“ (Luke 12:49). We can only guess at what Jesus was thinking here, but I believe He was looking beyond the cross to the day of Pentecost, when the tongues of fire came and set the kindling wood of His first church alight. Fire burns the fruitless branches of the vine, and it also brings holiness. In a power station, it is the source of the energy. We can’t have the power without the fire. We can achieve nothing for the Kingdom of God, unless it is by the power of the Holy Spirit, and along with the power of the Holy Spirit comes the fire that sooner or later burns up whatever is not of Him.

So let us always that check that the branches in our part of the vine are bearing the fruit of abundant life, and allow the pruning and the fire if they are barren.