Tag: Holy Spirit

Baptisms and Re-baptising

Acts 19:1-5 –

And it happened, while Apollos was at Corinth, that Paul, having passed through the upper regions, came to Ephesus. And finding some disciples he said to them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”

So they said to him, “We have not so much as heard whether there is a Holy Spirit.”

And he said to them, “Into what then were you baptized?”

So they said, “Into John’s baptism.”

Then Paul said, “John indeed baptized with a baptism of repentance, saying to the people that they should believe on Him who would come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus.”

When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.  And when Paul had laid hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke with tongues and prophesied.

This passage came up in my Bible reading this morning, and I wanted to tease it out a little bit.  Paul comes upon some disciples, presumably Gentiles, and he notices that there’s something missing.  So he asks them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit.”  Presumably, this means that the thing that he noticed missing was some visible evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work.  Upon further inquiry, he discovers that they were baptized “into John’s baptism.”  I take that to mean that they were repenting of their sins and believing in an unnamed christ, with the anticipation that they would one day gain the further information of who that christ was.  Paul supplies the missing piece, that the christ in question was Jesus Christ.  All twelve of them accept this information readily, and are baptized again, into Jesus Christ.  At this point, the Holy Spirit supplies the missing part that Paul noticed – they speak in tongues and prophesy.

I’m gong to completely ignore the question of whether regeneration, baptism into Jesus, receiving the Holy Spirit, and supernatural gifting are inextricably interlocked.  We can say that they are closely associated, but that it’s possible to be a bit patchy on a few of those items, and move on from there.

What caught my attention this morning was the concept of rebaptism.  Baptists, of course, are known for rebaptism, especially for those who were baptized as infants.  But I’ve always been a little leery of it, because I felt that getting baptized again involved among other things a repudiation of your former baptism.  It’s not like a bath, and it’s not like communion.  In some ways it is like circumcision.  If you have to do it again, this must mean there was something not quite right about the first time, so that it didn’t take.

So, my parents, when I was about 12, heard a new teaching about what baptism accomplishes, and were persuaded to get baptized again.  My mom recommended it to me, but I felt that the dunking I got when I was 5 was quite sufficient.  This was in spite of the fact that, right around that time, I had a major turn in my walk that looked a lot more like true repentance than what happened when I was 5.  But, as Luther said, the whole Christian life should be one of repentance.  If repenting some more was the basis for rebaptism, we ought to get rebaptized every day.

But here we see some folks getting baptized all over again, and they don’t seem to be repudiating their former baptism.  You don’t reject John the Baptist when you accept Jesus. Jesus is the fulfillment of everything John preached. On the other hand, having met Jesus, you can’t stay with John.  Or rather, you could, but that wouldn’t make you a Christian, would it?

Rebaptism from John to Jesus doesn’t seem to be a requirement.  Paul was baptized into Jesus and I think never into John.  James, and John the apostles were disciples of John before they came to Jesus, and there’s no indication that they were baptized again, any more than there’s an indication that Jesus baptized John the Baptist.

So it looks like rebaptism is okay, but it’s a totally optional practice.  Probably it’s not even a guaranteed method of getting the gift of tongues.

I’m still not sure what to do with groups like the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, who apparently believe that it is acceptable to separate from other groups of Christians along the lines of Reformed doctrine, but perfectly reasonable to stay together across the issue of infant baptism.  They have churches that practice infant baptism, and churches that only baptize on profession of faith.  Usually those guys can be friends, but they can’t be the same denomination.  The Baptist church tells the guy who was baptized as a baby that his baptism was basically a meaningless event, every bit as invalid as an infant marriage, that he must say his vows and go under the waters again.  I think the Presbyterian church says basically that  the infant baptism is every bit as valid as an infant marriage – as long as you stayed with it, it must have took – and that it’s the remarriage as an adult that is kind of silly.

Paul here tells the Corinthians that the messiah is Jesus, and they are so excited that they go and get baptized all over again.  They come up spluttering and speaking in tongues.  And one thing is certain: after that the Corinthians definitely new how to speak in tongues.

Prophesy

Reading my Bible, I’ve been stuck for 6 months in 1 Samuel, mostly because I haven’t been reading it. But I was struck by this passage today:

The LORD said to Samuel, “How long will you grieve over Saul, since I have rejected him from being king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil, and go. I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.” And Samuel said, “How can I go? If Saul hears it, he will kill me.” And the LORD said, “Take a heifer with you and say, ‘I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.’ And invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do. And you shall anoint for me him whom I declare to you.” Samuel did what the LORD commanded and came to Bethlehem. The elders of the city came to meet him trembling and said, “Do you come peaceably?” And he said, “Peaceably; I have come to sacrifice to the LORD. Consecrate yourselves, and come with me to the sacrifice.” And he consecrated Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice.

When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, “Surely the LORD’s anointed is before him.” But the LORD said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” Then Jesse called Abinadab and made him pass before Samuel. And he said, “Neither has the LORD chosen this one.” Then Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said, “Neither has the LORD chosen this one.” And Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel. And Samuel said to Jesse, “The LORD has not chosen these.” Then Samuel said to Jesse, “Are all your sons here?”

1 Sam 16:1-11a ESV

There are so many things to look into here that my gut wants to look right past: Why were the people afraid of Samuel, when Samuel was afraid of Saul? How is it that God was concerned about Samuel’s dejection over Saul? How is it that Samuel was dejected, when so recently he was stony toward Saul? How could God tell Samuel to use misdirection to get to Bethlehem without arousing suspicion? Wasn’t that a little bit like lying?

I’m stuck on something a little more fundamental: what was it like for Samuel to speak with God like He was a man? How did he know it was the voice of God? Was it audible? Apparently it was enough like an audible voice, that he thought Eli was calling him from another room when he was a child, but not so audible that the people around him could hear it.

I picture Jesse standing there before Samuel, sweat dripping down his face, a little bit nervous and a bit concerned. There’s no indication from the text that Jesse knew why Samuel was there. Samuel says he’s here at Bethlehem to offer a sacrifice, though Bethlehem is not an official place for sacrifice. Then he picks out Jesse and has him consecrate himself and his family. No one knows what Samuel is doing. Again, when Jesse introduces his family, Samuel walks down the line like a judge at a beauty contest, saying nothing, having some kind of personal dialogue inside his head. His eyes light, and then he frowns, and frowning walks his way down the line, staring at each son like he’s weighing their souls. When he comes to the end of the line, he turns to Jesse: “The LORD has not chosen these.” he says, “Are all your sons here?”

What is anyone supposed to make of this? Ah, but Samuel is a prophet, and prophets do strange things. People, in turn, have strange ideas about prophets and what to do with them. Can you use a prophet as your personal tracking device – trade him a little produce and he’ll tell you where your goats have gone? Maybe. In a sense, it worked that way for Saul. At least, Samuel knew where the goats were, though for God, the goats were just an excuse. Can you ply them with gold to pronounce blessings and curses, to change the fate of history? Balak tried, and Balaam was plied, but with stunningly unintended results. How different was a Jewish seer, really, from the voice that moaned at Delphi?

The answer, is “very different.” But not because the prophets are a different kind of men. No, but God is a very different God. He is very hard to manipulate. “Our God is in heaven. He does whatever He pleases.”

But how did it happen, that Samuel heard the voice of God? Oh, don’t hide behind that mysticism. You’re only mystical when the lights are off. Yes, Samuel was God’s own prophet. He heard a voice that was somehow not quite inside his head, and knew that voice was God’s own word and not the frenzy of his own mind. Not a word of his fell to the ground. But how did he know?

It’s an urgent question precisely because it’s 3000 years later. Jesus Christ has come and brought God’s spirit with him. Peter preached at Pentecost that the very thing folks were laughing at – people proclaiming God’s grace, wildly, in every language they didn’t know, was the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy:

And in the last days it shall be, God declares,that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams; even on my male servants and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit, and they shall prophesy.

Suddenly, in some way, and in some sense, what applies to Samuel applies to me. I can grant all kinds of exceptions – Samuel was called to a national stage for a specific purpose, and so on. But it remains that Samuel was a prophet of God, and as a Christian I must believe that God’s spirit has been poured out “on all flesh.” Is Samuel a prophet? Why am I not one?

I can hear the charismatics and Pentecostals cheering. But let me ask you, do you mock the word of God? Not one of Samuel’s words fell to the ground. If you prophesy, do you prophesy nonsense? Do you hear words in your head that sound godly, or even just amazing, and assume they came from God? How can you tell?

On the one hand, I’m constrained to believe that, if Joel is true, then it must not be true, because prophecy now would supersede the personal work of Jesus Christ (See Hebrews 1). On the other hand, I’m compelled to believe that I should be frivolous with the very oracles of God.

But Samuel walked with God, and not one word of his fell to the ground. He mourned for Saul, challenged God like a friend, calmed the people, and appointed kings. If God has sent his spirit, there should be more men like him. How could it be that the coming of the Spirit would usher us from a golden age to bronze?

A Key to Spiritual Growth

I count three experiences that had the biggest impact on my understanding of revival and spiritual growth.

The first one was a revival (or maybe a series of revivals) that came through my church and school when I was in high school and into college. If you’re familiar with the Toronto Blessing, there was a connection to that. But it was a tradition of revival that can be traced back at least as far as the Azusa Street and Welsh revivals at the beginning of the 20th century: The Holy Spirit moves on a people, and people respond with extra church services and prayer meetings. These meetings are characterized by profound spiritual experiences and a huge emotional impact. These experiences result in changed lives. People pray for this kind of revival. We acknowledge the value of quiet seasons in our spiritual lives. But the ideal state for the church is revival, and if it’s been too long since the last revival, that’s a sign that something may be seriously wrong – which again is a cause for prayer for revival.

Under this mindset, the most unaccountable thing is when people in the leadership decide to stop the meetings, curtail emotional outbursts, and turn people’s attention back to daily life. Every time that happened, we were perplexed, and sought answers why anybody would ever want to do that. Is the pastor afraid of people who don’t want the revival? Doesn’t he understand God’s work?

Just as often, we took the revival underground. Nobody can stop private prayer meetings, can they? So my friends and I – high school students – held meetings in each others homes, where we prayed for revival and prayed for each other. We crashed youth group prayer meetings of other churches. And eventually, our church would have another set of extra meetings.

When I went to college, I took the revival with me. My roommate and I hosted meetings around the Prayer Tower at ORU. We prophesied over each other. We expected our little revival to overwhelm the chapel schedule and even take precidence over classes. And to a certain extent, it did. Meetings, ours and others’, grew and multiplied. Meetings of 50-100 students around the prayer tower were common. Worship services broke out in the dining hall.

And then it waned. People went back to classes, went apostate as they gave priority to study over prayer. Mandatory chapel services were not allowed to lapse into a free-for-all. And we, the local revivalists, were scandalized. Why would anybody ever want to do that? Don’t they understand God’s work?

I have to confess that there was a personal advantage to these revivalistic meetings: they made me normal, maybe even cool. It would take a long pile of introspection to analyse why that was, but it should suffice to say that, the more revivals there are, the more friends I have, and the more impressive I appear. So not only did my worldview push me toward these kinds of meetings, so did the part of me that likes to be flattered.

The second experience came right on the heels of the first: I dropped out of school and moved across the country to go to a school at a church where the revival never stops. Okay, there were other factors involved. But for the purposes of this essay, I went there, and one of the deciding factors was to learn about ministry at a place where they do it right, with “right” being defined as “the revival never stops.” A place where the leadership doesn’t get distracted from what really matters.

There was a lot of other stuff going on in my life, but eventually one thing started to really stand out was that the revival didn’t accomplish anything. We had the music and the meetings and the powerful spiritual experiences. We had conferences and guest speakers. We had numerical church growth. But we didn’t have much in the way of conversions, or discernable spiritual growth. We had kids who became teenagers and then adults, but life was life. Even with all the meetings, everything was fundamentally the same.

Around my second year at MorningStar School of Ministry, I overheard a conversation. A lady was telling her friend that she had dropped out of the school because she was seeing negative spiritual development in her life. The implication was that, somehow, pursuing the things of the Spirit in this way had caused her to decline spiritually. I was scandalized. And I think I was scandalized because I could see similar effects in my own life.

Another conversation that stands out to me was a phone call I made to my old roommate back at ORU. He was still eagerly expecting the coming revival that was going to sweep through the town. They had had many false starts, but it was coming soon. My gut reaction was: so what? What will you do then? Because my church is pretty much vived, and it doesn’t seem to make any difference. It was exciting, but so is Six Flags. Some people, however, have to live there, and it doesn’t mean so much for them.

There were other things at that church that weren’t working out for me, indirectly related to revivalism as well. Many, many assumptions I had about who God is and how he works were either undermined there, or obstructed, until ultimately I fell flat. All I had left was “Jesus died on the cross for my sins” and “the Bible is true.” It was a long process putting everything back together again. Probably that was a good thing, but the experience itself was awful. I couldn’t hardly walk straight for fear that I was inconsistent with my own philosophy. Give me fear, famine, plague, and sword; take away every comfort from me; but Father, please don’t ever leave me without a cohesive worldview again.

The last experience comes much later in my life. I’d been married, had a child, gone to grad school, dropped out, been unemployed, and we were living with my in-laws. And this church we joined ! It was nothing. It was everything. In all respects, it was a normal contemporary church, slightly on the larger side. There were nice people. We made friends with them.

The best way I can put it is this: I have a short list o things I’m actually good at. Church is one of them. I can sing, and I can talk. I’m “inclined to teach,” as the scriptures say. I’m used to jumping into a church feet first. They’re always short on leaders, and I usually have something I can contribute. It wasn’t that way at Cornerstone Church of Knoxville. Within a few weeks, I knew that my place would be to sit down and keep silent. There were new converts at that church with more spiritual maturity than me. I wasn’t qualified to be an assistant home group leader. I may not be yet. Over the year and a half that I was there before joining the Army, and through my wife’s experience, longer still. I saw significant spiritual growth all around me, and an impressive array of simple maturity.

I would say that I’ve never seen anything like it, but that’s not entirely true. I’ve seen hints at this church and that, but without being a member it would be hard to say. But at this church, I was a member.

I was the slightest in the House—
I took the smallest Room—
At night, my little Lamp, and Book—
And one Geranium—

So stationed I could catch the Mint
That never ceased to fall—
And just my Basket—
Let me think—I’m sure—
That this was all—

I sat and watched, and caught the mint, and it was very subtle, but this is what I think made the difference: expositional preaching. Every Sunday, a pastor would preach a sermon from a preselected text, methodically working our way thorugh the entirety of a larger passage. Every Sunday, that pastor preached the gospel. I don’t mean that he found a way to slip in the fact that Jesus died for our sins, nor do I mean that he managed to end every sermon with a rousing appeal for conversion, though those elements were present here and there. I mean that the gospel was intrensic to the topic of the text. Somehow, every Sunday, the pastor made it plain what this psalm, or that paragraph in I Corinthians had to do with Jesus. Every Sunday it became a little clearer that everything, everything, everything was summed up in Jesus: hardship and happiness, education and healing, roles of men and women, providing for your family – everything. Every passage in scripture, either tacit or explicit, is talking about Jesus. He is the one through whom the world was made, and he is the one in whom all things will be compiled, so how could it be otherwise?

And by this thorough, detailed, explication of this gospel, like running a powerful microscope over every cell in the body, we grew. I saw my wife mature, endure hardship, and change the focus of her life, in accordance with the gospel. I saw it in my friends. I trust they saw similar growth in me.

Everything I had been hoping for in the powerful experiences of revivalism were being accrued quietly through by means of the regular expositional preaching of the gospel.

Now, I want to keep my charismatic credentials clear: I still believe in the Holy Spirit. I still believe He does things from time to time that are… less that subtle. Miracles, prophecy, all of that. But still more powerful is the regular preaching of God’s word. People have to be carefully, carefully taught. And things that you think are too obvious to mention are the things that must be eplicitly stated, or they will be abandoned shortly. Most importantly, we cannot hope to skip steps. The window into the spiritual world, against the expectations of so many, is usually through the mind. We must take down every vain imagination, one at a time.

The Spirit of the Lord Rushed upon David

1 Samuel 16:13,

“Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brothers. And the Spirit of the LORD rushed upon David from that day forward. And Samuel rose up and went to Ramah.”

You read a text often enough, and you start to wonder what’s behind it. Who wrote 1 Samuel? Did he interview people? How did he know that? What does it mean, that the Spirit of the Lord rushed upon David?

I’m assuming David told somebody, later, that he felt something. How else would he know that the Spirit “rushed” on him? The ’84 NIV says that the Spirit “came upon him in power.” Which begs the question of what it means to come upon somebody in power, as opposed to just coming upon them the normal way. We’re still left with the impression that David had some kind of experience that he felt. Maybe that experience had later results in terms of supernaturally increased ability to lead or sing (prophesy?), or go to war. But for it to be noticeable, at just that moment, David had to have an experience.

That semi-mystical experience then had enough theological value to be included in the text of scripture as an example of what it means to have the Holy Spirit come upon you.

Assurance

John H at Confessing Evangelical gives us more proof that the Pope is a closet evangelical. Or perhaps, not so closet.

At the same time, I’m starting to have afterthoughts about my agreement with John on the Lutheran understanding of assurance. The Lutheran emphasis has always been on the word preached with authority. The gospel has it’s effect as it is preached, and the Christian can have confidence in his salvation because it has been proclaimed to him personally by Jesus Christ, via the preacher. In the standard Lutheran liturgy, there is a time for public confession of sin, after which the minister proclaims, “your sins are forgiven.” And they are, because Jesus Christ has said so. In the same way, doubts about true conversion can be allayed with “But I’m baptized!” or even, “I am baptized! So there!”

And there’s an element of truth to it – particularly when compared to a Catholic understanding that says, “unless you see me putting my own effort into it as well, it didn’t take.” In other words, the Catholic understanding is typically that sanctification is an intrinsic part of justification, to the point that assurance is withheld against the collateral of the ongoing fruit of a Christ-like life. The Lutheran balks and says no, the word of God preached is always effective. The preacher says I have been buried in Christ and raised with him, and so I have been. The word of God does not fail. I am a Christian.

But I’m starting to veer toward a more Calvinistic perspective, which is more biblical, I think. Continue reading “Assurance”