Messy Revivals or Clean Cemeteries?

In Matthew 13 Jesus tells the parable of the weeds and the wheat. In this parable Jesus describes the wheat and weeds growing side by side. The workers want to pull the weeds but the master forbids them to do so. He tells his workers to let the weeds and the wheat grow side by side, for if the workers pull the weeds they will also inadvertently pull some of the wheat as well. Jesus says the wheat which represents his work and the weeds which represent the devil's work will be separated by his angels at the end of time.
I believe this parable has real application to revival and Holy Spirit manifestations which have happened throughout church history and are happening today. In western Christianity there is a strong preoccupation with neatness and order and a real disdain for the messiness of revival. We have a rationalistic tendency to categorize anything we can’t understand as being of the flesh or the devil and try to tame it or put a stop to it. Even in churches that are ‘open to the Holy Spirit’, (I have learned to dislike that phrase) we only allow so much. In doing this we quench the Spirit and damage the wheat in our zeal for a weed-less church.
About six years ago the Holy Spirit broke out in a new, exciting and messy way in the church I was pastoring. Some people loved it, some people disliked it and left and many endured it without much enthusiasm. But I learned some things. First, Holy Spirit likes to have reign in the church and He is not obligated to us to explain what He is doing. It is not our church and He is not our pet to do our bidding. The church belongs to Jesus and His Spirit brings Him to us and us to Him as He sees fit. Our job is to go with Him, not to tame Him our control Him. Second, we often use the word discernment as a mask word for control and control always has its root in fear. We are afraid of looking strange, we are afraid of God being totally in control of our lives and bodies, we are often bound by the opinions of others and what they might think. Third, when God touches people powerfully He intends it to bring fruit but that fruit is often conditioned by people’s responses.
I think I learned two important things during that time to maximize fruitfulness. First, ignore the weeds. This is hard for western Christians to do, we want our revivals pure, but Jesus cautions us that in our zeal for weed pulling we destroy what He is trying to do; we quench the Spirit and actually pour water on revival fire. Second to get the full fruitfulness from people’s encounters with God we need to marry powerful encounters with discipleship.
Two examples taught me this. One of the examples is from church history and the other one from my own history.
During the early 1800’s the Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists came together on the American frontier and held a series of communion meetings in Kentucky. The most famous of these was at Cane Ridge in 1802. The Holy Spirit fell powerfully at these meetings, conversions, healings, deliverances and strange manifestations abounded. The description of these meetings makes the wildest of today’s revival gatherings look mild. After these meetings the Presbyterians were the most critical of the manifestations and tried to calm things down, the Baptist were a little more accepting and the Methodist embraced just about everything that was going on. During the following decade it was the Methodists who spread most rapidly and powerfully along the borders of the American frontier; the Baptists grew, but not as much; and the Presbyterians brought up the rear. All three groups were powerfully touched but the ones who did the least weed pulling got the most wheat.
The other thing the Methodists did was they rigorously followed up on their converts, put them in small groups and discipled them. The early Methodists got their name because they had a method of bringing people beyond conversion into discipleship and they applied it. Better than anyone else the early Methodist married powerful God encounters with discipleship and it bore maximum fruit.
In my own history, when God moved powerfully on our church He especially moved upon some of our youth. We had young people falling out in the Spirit, crying, laughing, shaking, spinning, prophesying and experiencing dramatic touches and calls from God. Looking back at the fruit of all this I noticed that the boys did better than the girls over the years of living out these experiences in positive and fruit bearing ways. The girls were equally, and in some cases more powerfully touched and don’t get me wrong many of them are still going strong, but some fell away and to this day are not living out the calling that was placed upon them when they were encountered. But to a greater degree the boys have done better to this time. There was one big difference. Many of the boys who were encountered were a part of a discipleship group we called Baalam’s Donkeys. This group met weekly to eat, study, hold each other accountable and pray. In other words they were discipled. It wasn’t until much later that we tried to start such a group for the girls. To this day I can’t think of one of those boys who aren’t excelling in their Christian walk. They are helping plant churches, preparing to go on the mission field, leaders in their schools and churches, going to seminary, working as youth pastors, they are doing great. Again the marriage of powerful Holy Spirit encounter and discipleship grew good wheat.
We spend way too much energy weeding in church. I want the wheat. I want revival, I don’t care if it is messy and there are fleshly indulgences, I would rather have messy revival then a clean cemetery for my church experience. But I have learned that God encounters don’t replace discipleship, they are the point of discipleship. We study, pray and hold each other up not as religious duties but to get the maximum harvest from the encounters we have with God. There is no dichotomy between revival encounters and discipleship, but when married together there is great fruitfulness.

God is a God of Power

Recently I was reading a profile to a “Bible School”; they were very interested in letting their inquirers know they were serious and dedicated to following the word of God, the Bible. They also were very intentional in stating that they were non-charismatic and believed that the sign gifts of the New Testament were not normative for today’s church. I was struck by the obvious contradiction. You see the Bible they so enthusiastically uphold is a book chalk full of signs and wonders. And nowhere in that Bible does it say, or even insinuate, that signs and wonders where meant for a specific age and not the ongoing operation of a wonder working God. It is sad that people so deeply committed to the truth of the Bible are so blind to the clear teaching of the Bible. God is a God of power. Christianity is based upon the miraculous. Jesus’ conception was a miracle. His ministry was one miracle after another. His resurrection was the great miracle upon which we build our hope. The early church grew upon the testimony of miracles done by Christians. Good Bible believing Christians affirm all this, but they stop short of believing God is still God by denying He is still regularly doing miracles today. Much of western evangelicalism believes in the Great I Was and the Great I Will Be, but they deny the Great I Am. God did it back then; He will do it again in heaven, but don’t expect much from Him now. The sad thing is we get what we expect. Not believing in the miraculous becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Jesus taught if we don’t have faith for miracles we won’t get miracles. In fact because the church is a unit, because we are all connected, the unbelief of some Christians becomes a ball and chain upon all Christians. The stated unbelief of the above Bible school makes miracles harder to do in Africa and harder to do for you and me. Jesus could do very few miracles in Nazareth because of their unbelief.Paul said, “The kingdom of God is not a matter of talk but of power.” We have turned it into a matter of talk instead of power. If you say you believe in the Bible then believe in the whole Bible and believe in the God of the Bible. Start pressing into the miraculous, start believing God for miracles, start praying for miracles and don’t stop. It is time for our culture to see that the kingdom of God is still a matter of power and then they may listen some to our talk.

Double Predestination

One of the worst doctrines to ever hit the church is the doctrine which came in under the Reformed label and it is the doctrine of double predestination. Basically this doctrine says God chooses who goes to heaven and who goes to hell and people have no choice in the matter. There is no such thing as human freedom to choose whether or not to follow God, repent, believe in Jesus and receive eternal life. This doctrine is held up to uphold the notion of God’s sovereignty and is usually bandied about by semi-academics. This doctrine is thought by some to be the high watermark of the Protestant Reformation and the strength of the church in the 17th and 18th centuries. The doctrine and the historical analysis are both untrue. First for history, the strength of the Protestant Reformation came from three other doctrines, not double predestination. The great energy which changed Europe and the world came from three rediscovered truths by the early reformers. The first truth was justification by faith, the second was faith in Christ alone as necessary for salvation and the third was the authority of scripture over church tradition. The rediscovery of these three doctrines rocked the world and they are still rocking the world. The truth is the doctrine of double predestination killed the momentum of the reformation and is the main doctrinal reason the church is nearly dead in Europe today. This is because double predestination is nothing more than fatalism with Christian language attached to it. Double predestination cuts the heart out of evangelism and purpose for the church and renders the church listless and uncaring. The worst part about double predestination is that it makes God responsible for evil. If humans have no free will then God is the one who set Adam and Eve up to fall, God is the one who created and destined Hitler to kill 6 million Jews and set the world to war. It would mean that it is God who created the rapist to rape and the murderer to murder all for some sovereign plan we are told we can’t understand. We are told to be quiet in our ignorance because His ways are higher than our ways. Well His ways are higher than our ways, but this doctrine makes His ways lower than our ways. It makes God out to be the author and orchestrator of evil. Abraham said “will not the judge of all the earth do right” because he knew he couldn’t worship an unjust God, and neither can we. If double predestination is true we may fear God and serve God but we will not love and worship Him because we will see Him as less fair than we are, and if we don’t see God as all good we will not be able to give Him our total worship. Double predestinarians say their doctrine is scriptural, relying a lot on Romans 9, but nearly the whole rest of the Bible refutes this position. Not only does the Bible tell people to choose one way over another, time and time again, (see Genesis 4, Deut. 28 and Joshua 24 as examples) but the Bible is full of commands or imperatives. Every command, every imperative implies a choice. God is saying do this, or don’t do that. Commands make no sense without choice. It’s not that there is little evidence for human volition in the Bible, but the whole Bible is about God acting with humans with volition. The Bible is a book about how God works out His salvation with people who are free. He implores, invites, judges, corrects, woos His people but never overrides their choice to love and follow Him or leave and reject Him.

How bad do we want the next level?

We want to go to the next level of intimacy with God and fruitfulness in God. We want revival in the church and transformation in our land. What Christian would argue with those statements? But the truth is we don’t want those things if they come with a price tag. And they do come with a price tag and it is a price we are seldom willing to pay. It is not the price we normally hear about, pray more, give more. In fact the price will be different every time. But almost always the price will be offensive, costly and unexpected. The Jews wanted their Messiah, he came, but he was from Nazareth, came from an unwed mother and didn’t look at all like King David. God had answered their prayer but in a package they didn’t recognize, He was offensive. I have been in situations where we have been praying for healing and one person gets healed and another doesn’t. It’s confusing and awkward, it leaves unanswered questions. Many would rather not have healing if it comes in that package, better to back away from it then have confusion. I have heard pastors say I want more power but I don’t want people to fall in church. God send it, but send it my way. And whatever happens don’t let attendance and giving go down. What if God sent revival and it meant you had to travel a long way and have a preacher you found offensive lay hands on you? What if it meant leaving a secure job and moving somewhere where you had to trust God to provide? What if it meant being misunderstood by family and losing some friends? The owner of the field sold everything to get the pearl of great price. Proud Naaman had to submit to Elisha’s direction and dip seven times in the dirty Jordan to be healed of leprosy. God wants to know do you want the answer to your prayers enough to pay the price. Are you willing to embrace the offense, whatever it is, and go and do things he says without having all the answers and surely being misunderstood. The price tag will be different every time but three things are sure, it will be costly, it will be unexpected, and it will in some way be offensive. How bad do we want the next level?

Will not the judge of all the earth do right?

The second way to answer the question of God’s fairness is to look at our sense of justice. Unless we had a sense of justice, of right and wrong we would never question the fairness of God. Our questions come from our sense of what ought to be done. But where does our sense of justice come from? The Christian answer is that it comes from God. If this is true then we can be sure that our sense of justice is not higher than His. Water does not rise higher than its source. God cannot give us a sense of fairness that is superior to His; therefore we can always trust God to do the right thing. In the end there will be no one in heaven or hell who will be able to say, ‘God wasn’t fair’. There is a great illustration of this in Genesis 18. God is letting Abraham know about His plans to judge Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham questions God’s fairness by asking God if He would kill the righteous with the wicked. Abraham barters God down to find out if He is fair. At one point Abraham asks, “Will not the judge of all the earth do right?” This is a profound question. Abraham becomes satisfied that God will not judge the righteous with the wicked, in fact he will spare the wicked for the sake of the righteous. Until we become convinced like Abraham that the judge of all the earth will do right we cannot trust, worship and love Him. But if we know that God is not less fair then me, He is more fair. And God is not less merciful then me, He is more merciful. Then we can freely worship Him and know in the end He will be fair and more then fair, He will be merciful. The judge of all the earth will do right.

Is God fair?

The issue of hell raises questions of God’s justice. Is God fair? The question arises how eternal punishment is fair for someone who stole a nickel from their mom’s purse. This question is answered in two ways: First, it is not the nickel that is the problem it is the bent in a person to steal, to take something for themselves that belongs to another. Stealing is selfish as are all sins. It is the bent in us all that tries to make the self the center of the universe that is damnable. Unless this bent is repented of it will keep us away from God simply because He is the center of the universe. We need to deal not so much with sinning as with sin. If sin is at the center of our lives we will not want to go to heaven, we can’t be in control there, we cannot be the center, God is the center. The only way to enjoy heaven and to enjoy God is to let Him kill that bent in us so that we can be at peace with the truth, He is the Creator we are the creature. He is the center, it is all about Him, and we orbit around Him and find ourselves in Him. Heaven is the place for people who accept the truth, want the truth and willingly submit to the truth. Hell is the place for everyone who still wants to be the center. That is why stealing the nickel and mass murder can both send a person to hell, they are both imposing the self over others and God and are both a symptom of self-centeredness instead of God centeredness. The way to kill that self-centeredness is to repent, surrender our wills to His, invite His Lordship over our lives and receive His gifts of forgiveness of sin and new life in the Spirit that come by faith. The next ramble will deal with the second way to approach the question of God’s fairness.

Locked from the Inside

Eschatology is the study of the last things, and the ultimate last thing is heaven or hell. Clearly the doctrine of hell is the most troubling of all doctrines for Christian people, if it is not something is wrong with us. How can the God we have met as Father and Savior send people to hell, if He is good and powerful why not save them all? If it wasn’t for Jesus teaching on the subject I would probably be an universalist, for make no mistake about it, it is not Paul or the Old Testament writers who make the case for hell, it is our Lord Himself. As always the answer lies in the heart of God. God gave us choices, freedom, and our freedom is real. God’s ultimate value seems to be love and love is one of those choices. We choose to love people and we choose to love God. Romantic love, infatuation, simply seems to happen, it is not hard to fall in love. But real love is a choice we make. So to love God we must choose to love God, we must seek Him and find Him and follow Him. God has made this possible through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. So far so good, but there is a problem and the problem is us. We don’t want to follow God, we don’t want the universe on His terms we want it on our terms. This is sin and it is no small problem. It is so deeply ingrained in us it stops us from seeking, loving and following God. It is only when God’s grace reaches us and woes us that we awake to the reality that our lives are in Him. At this point we have a choice, we can repent of our self centeredness and believe upon Jesus or we can insist upon our own will being done. That choice is the choice between heaven and hell. Hell is not the place people go for not having correct doctrine or for any particular sin, hell is the place people choose to go to keep God out of there lives. I think it was Calvin Miller who said, “The gates of hell are not locked on the outside to keep the damned in, they are locked from the inside to keep God out.”