Drooling in the Spirit

Excerpted from Fresh Power with permission of Zondervan.

The church cannot be the church without the Holy Spirit abiding and empowering it.

If we downgrade the Holy Spirit--worse yet, if we ignore him ...and even worse than that, if we grieve or quench him--we end up with a modern church that is foreign to the New Testament. Church services today in many places have become totally predictable, timed to the minute, devoid of any spontaneity, and with little or no sense of the Spirit's presence. I am afraid the early Christians in the book of Acts would be stunned to see what we now call the church of Jesus Christ. But we're so used to it after all these years that it sadly seems normal to us.

The very people who are thumping the Bible the most vigorously are often the ones trying to have a church without the Holy Spirit. They think that teaching alone can cause their members to live a "victorious Christian life"--but it can't be done without experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit. Vows and promises alone, no matter how sincere, can never overcome the power of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

There are no New Testament verses that tell us to dismiss the precedent of the Holy Spirit's activity in Acts. Nothing in the writings of Paul or Peter or John or Jude says, "Oh, by the way--what the Spirit accomplished through simple, untrained men in the early church can never happen again. Just forget it and try your best with eloquent sermons and clever human programs." Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and so is the Holy Spirit.

On the Other Hand...

While some churches such as I have been describing might be referred to as cemeteries ...others on the other side of the spectrum are more like insane asylums. We have some horrendous abuses going on in the name of the Spirit of God. Many in the so-called charismatic movement have done bizarre things that are not only outside New Testament teaching but actually contradict it. When people bark like dogs, laugh like hyenas, roar like lions, and chirp like birds "in the Spirit," someone needs to lift a voice and say, "Where is this found in the Bible? And how does it edify a congregation?"

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