John Wimber was a product of the Jesus movement in the 60’s. He met Christ in a dramatic way, and began reading the New Testament, beginning with the Gospels and then on to the book of Acts. He was excited about what he was reading, but when he went to a church he was disillusioned. The polite and tidy service was over exactly on time. Wimber looked at some of the people around him and said: “When are you gonna do the stuff?” “What stuff?” they wanted to know. He said, “You know. . . the stuff!” He had been reading about the conversions, healings, deliverance and other miracles that took place in the early church recorded the book of Acts. But instead of signs and wonders, he saw no sign of anything that would make him wonder, except the deadness of the ritual he had just sat through.
I have been rereading the book of Acts recently myself. I am seeing again that signs and wonders were not the exceptions, they were the norm of the early church. Healings and supernatural happenings were expected and occurred regularly. Now some explain this by saying we are living in a different dispensation and that the age of miracles is over. That was for a specific time and place to authenticate the message of the apostles, but we no longer need that today. Realllly!! Does God really divide history up into neat little segments where he acts one way with one generation and a totally different way with another? If so, then God is not, “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). If he does respond differently at different times, then he is one kind of God at one point in history and an entirely different God at another.
The church today needs to discover once again that we have an unchanging God and an unchanging kingdom. We need once again to discover the power of Pentecost. We need to become a Pentecostal church — and I am not talking about a denomination — I am talking about an Acts 2 church. We need to be filled with the Spirit. We need to be operating in
the gifts of the Spirit. We need to see people’s lives turned around. We need to see people healed physically, emotionally, relationally, socially and spiritually. We need to experience the unity of the Spirit as the early church did. We need to be living in genuine love for each other, and when we fail at that then we need to seek reconciliation. We need to have the fire fall and the people of God to rise up.
Rick Kirchoff says, “When God sends forth the Spirit amazing things happen: barriers are broken, communities are formed, opposites are reconciled, unity is established, disease is cured, addiction is broken, cities are renewed, races are reconciled, hope is established, people are blessed, and church happens. Today the Spirit of God is present and we’re gonna’ have church. So be ready, get ready. . . God is up to something. . . discouraged folks cheer up, dishonest folks ‘fess up, sour folks sweeten up, closed folk, open up, gossipers shut up, conflicted folks make up, sleeping folks wake up, lukewarm folk, fire up, dry bones shake up, and pew potatoes stand up! But most of all, Christ the Savior of all the world is lifted up.”
If that is going to happen in our church certain conditions need to be met and certain perceptions need to be changed. We need a major paradigm shift. First of all, Pentecostal power comes when you realize: The Christian life is not about keeping rules, but about knowing Christ. As I was growing up in the church I heard a lot about being nice and how important it was to be a good person. We were told to be kind and to love everyone. If there was ever an opportunity to come to Christ, or an altar call in the church in which I grew up, I am unaware of it. In fact, I met the pastor’s son several years after our time in my childhood church. He is working for a Christian mission agency overseas. But he told me that even though he had grown up in a pastor’s home, he had never come to know the Lord until his high school chemistry teacher led him to Christ. His father was a very good man, a Christian man, but like his congregation, his faith had become privatized.
In our church, everyone dressed their best and acted their best on Sunday. The service was predictable and formal. Don’t get me wrong, the Bible was read and the preacher said all the right things I am sure. But there was no passion. I’m sure the words of the responsive readings were meaningful, but they seemed like they came from another time and place. Much of the service never connected with many of the people, or if it did, they were careful not to show it. Excitement was not exactly how you would have described the service in my home church. No one ever gave a testimony. Certainly, no one raised their hands or clapped during the music. And no one ever, ever said AMEN. As far as I knew, Christianity was about keeping the rules and being a good person. If you loved God you did it quietly and never spoke of it. The only disruption I can remember was the Sunday my sister and I started laughing in the middle of a woman’s solo who was warbling so badly that it sounded like she was in pain. The twisting of ears did not help much to squelch our giggles.
In churches all across the United States the gospel of being good is being preached. In some places it is translated as becoming politically active for social causes, or at least becoming concerned. In still other places, the measure of a person’s Christianity is in how tolerant or inclusive they are in their acceptance of other people and ideas. But until we renew our commitment to preaching that Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life, and that no one comes to the Father except through him, we will not experience the presence of the Holy Spirit or know the zeal of the early church. Until the people who call themselves the people of God renew their commitment to knowing Christ on a daily basis and living faithfully for him, we will not experience the power of Pentecost. Until we live by repentance and faith we will always be going through the motions of religion without knowing the person of Jesus Christ.
As long as we think that Christianity is something that WE do, we are missing the point. It is not about what we do, but what God does in us. Being a Christian is not doing the right thing or believing the right doctrines, it is knowing the right person. It is not about being a member of the church or reciting creeds. It is not about baptism or communion, although those are important parts of our life together. It is about surrendering my life, my body, my mind and my heart to Jesus Christ and asking him to take up residence in me. It is about confessing my sin and turning from it. It is about banking everything I have and am on God and loving him with my whole heart.
The Christian faith is not a feeling. It is a reality. It is a real relationship with a real person — Jesus Christ. Christianity is about the most powerful and wonderful person in the universe who desires to know us intimately. This experience is not tame, it is wild and powerful. Paul said, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection” (Philippians 3:10).
The second point I would like to make is that Pentecostal power comes when you realize: The Christian life is not just about salvation, but transformation. There are many churches which are very different from the one in which I grew up. They faithfully preach about salvation and the necessity of new birth. In fact, that is what you hear almost every Sunday. The scripture changes, but the message is basically the same: “You need to be born again.” And that is good as far as it goes. It is a necessary first step. But if our faith only consists of a single event where we repented of our sin and came to Christ, then it is an incomplete faith. What if a baby was born and we all celebrated the new life, but the baby never took in nourishment, was never nurtured, never grew, never developed. As wonderful as its birth was, it would not survive. Pediatricians call it “failure to thrive.”
If you think that the Christian life is only about being born again, think again. It is not just about salvation, it is about transformation. To hear some people talk you would think that once we come to Christ we just wait around to go to heaven. We are just putting in time until Jesus comes. If that is the way we think, we will never experience Pentecostal power. We will never understand that Jesus Christ has come to establish his kingdom “on earth, as it is in heaven,” and we are his agents through whom he works to make that happen. We are to grow in holiness, and be salt and light in a tasteless and dark world. We are to become transformed on a daily basis, through the spiritual disciplines, and then become agents of transformation in the world.
It is sort of like this. You can take ten gallons of gasoline and release a tremendous amount of power and energy by just dropping a lighted match into it. It makes a dramatic onetime impact. But there is another way to release the energy in that gasoline. Place it in the fuel tank of a new Honda, designed to get 30 miles to the gallon. The high tech engine will use that ten gallons of gasoline to take a person 300 miles or more. Explosions may be spectacular, but the sustained, controlled burn has staying power. You don’t want to be a flash in the pan, you want to make a difference in this world over time. You want to last for the long haul. You don’t want the Holy Spirit to just save you for heaven, you want him to use his power to transform your life. You want him to use you in this world for kingdom purposes. The kingdom is not far away in time and space, it is here and now. And to be a member of this kingdom, you need the power of the Holy Spirit operating in your life every day. The apostle John, in the book of Revelation, talks about all the things we have to go through in this world and says, “This calls for patient endurance on the part of the saints who obey God’s commandments and remain faithful to Jesus” (Revelation 14:12).
The third point I would like to make is that Pentecostal power comes when: You overcome apathy with zeal. You can’t try to be good and think that you are a Christian. You cannot just point to a past experience of being “born again” and say that you are a Christian. You have to grow. You have to want to be transformed into the image of Christ and want to be made like him. You can’t be apathetic toward the things of God and his kingdom and experience Pentecostal power. A true transformation results in a transformation of the heart that loves God and desires to know him better every day. When we are delivered from the bondage of sin and ushered into the kingdom of God where there is freedom, we delight in the things of God.
The more you know God, the more you will love him, and the more excited you will be about the his kingdom. The more you love him, the more you will want others to know him. The more you experience his presence and power, the more of it you want. This is the way to live. We have been forgiven. We have inherited eternal life. We have experienced eternal love. We are holding nothing back because we have discovered life. We have found the pearl of great price, and it is worth more than everything else we have seen or possessed. Because of this we are excited about life and we are excited about the wonderful God we serve. We are willing to do whatever it takes to have more of him.
Chuck Colson reports that columnist Jonathan Rauch believes that America has made “a major civilizational advance” in recent years. Colson says, “Rauch, a longtime atheist, is thrilled about a phenomenon he calls ‘apatheism’ [apathetic theism]. It’s not that people don’t believe in God anymore, Rauch writes in the Atlantic Monthly — the majority will still say they believe. . . . On the whole, the people Rauch describes haven’t been putting much thought or effort into their faith. They’re looking for comfort and reassurance, not for a God who asks anything of them. Hence the rise of ‘apatheism,’ which Rauch defines as ‘a disinclination to care all that much about one’s own religion, and an even stronger disinclination to care about other people’s.’” Colson goes on to talk about writer David Brooks who noticed a trend a few years ago and coined the term flexidoxy [flexible beliefs]. Flexidoxy describes the form of religion practiced by many educated young Americans as opposed to orthodoxy. Basically, it means that people have become flexible in their belief system and look at religion as a giant smorgasbord from which they can pick and choose the beliefs that most suit them. They become the center of their own faith and adapt it to what they see as important.
Many of you heard or read about 27-year-old Aron Ralston who had his right arm pinned by an 800-pound boulder in a climbing accident. He had gone hiking in Bluejohn Canyon, adjacent to Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. He was an experienced climber, for he had already climbed 49 other peaks in Colorado which were over 14,000 feet. He thought about what it would be like to die on the mountain and have his family find his body, or perhaps never know his fate. Ralston, a former engineer for Intel and an avid outdoorsman, thought about his options. After five days of being pinned, and having run out of food and water, he decided to apply a tourniquet and amputate his arm below the elbow with his pocket knife. He then rigged anchors and rappeled to the canyon floor with his one good arm. He walked downstream until he was spotted by a Utah Public Safety Helicopter. What the news did not say much about was that this Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Carnegie Mellon University credits his faith in God for ability to do what he had to do. He is a deeply committed Christian who often plays the piano in the United Methodist Church in Greenwood Village near Denver, Colorado. Because Aron wanted to live, he was willing to cut away everything that was holding him back. It is that kind of commitment and zeal that will enable us to experience Pentecostal power. When you are willing to cut away everything that is holding you back and walk out of the canyon of bondage, then the Holy Spirit will come to you in new ways and you know a life that you did not know was possible. The Bible says, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily hinders our progress. And let us run with endurance the race that God has set before us” (Hebrews 12:1, New Living). The apostle Paul did this, for he wrote, “Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14).
Rodney J. Buchanan
June 8, 2003
Mulberry St. UMC
Mt. Vernon, OH
www.MulberryUMC.org
Rod.Buchanan@MulberryUMC.org
Pentecostal Power
Questions for June 8, 2003
1. What are some of the ways the church has failed to reach you and others?
2. What are the reasons that the church today is so unlike what we read about in the book of Acts?
3. What have been some of your misconceptions about Christianity which God has had to correct?
4. If Christianity is not about what WE do, what is it about?
5. Why are we so afraid to really commit our whole selves to Jesus Christ?
6. What is the difference between salvation and transformation? Is it possible to have one without the other?
7. How do you see “apatheism” and “flexidoxy” operating in our culture? Why is this deadly to true Christian faith and practice?
8. Read Hebrews 12:1. What are some of the “weights” and “hindrances” that are keeping you from running the race as you should?
9. If you are going to experience the power of Pentecost, what will you need to do?
10. Read Philippians 3:13-14. What is the prize?
