Is this Jesus/ Holy Spirit and Father character for real?
How do we know that our "experience" as Christians is not our own personal delusion or mental projection of how we think it is supposed to look? Could it be that we are deceived? How do we know it's for real?
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I don't know how to answer this question, but having had no "charismatic" experiences myself, I tend to hold others who publicly display such behaviors with a certain degree of suspicion.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, this question is a real battle in my life as of late and I am genuinely curious about what any readers have to say about the issue.
"God is dead, Marx is dead, Freud is dead, . . . . And I'm not feeling too well, myself."
-Ronald Blaize-Molony
When talking recently with my friend, Ben, I asked him if he'd ever encountered Pentecostal Christians who were suspect in their application / demonstration of charismatic gifts. Ben spent his undergraduate years at a Pentecostal university, and he has remarkable integrity and acuity as a friend and fellow believer, so I figured he's shoot straight with me. He did. He said that he had indeed witnessed people who abused their gifting and tried to force it and/or use it illegitimately on others, not the least of which was saying that such giftings were the hallmark of the Holy Spirit. I thought to myself, "Ah ha! I knew it."
ReplyDeleteBut the question I posed to Ben set me up to merely reinforce my own suspicions. I really do want to be as objective as any human can possibly be, so I then re-framed the question. Subsequently, I asked Ben if he had ever witnessed what he believed to be the Holy Spirit's legitimate bestowal of charismatic gifts on his fellow believers. To this he answered that he undoubtedly had. Without going into great splurges of detail, he said that there were a few times where he honestly believed that the Holy Spirit WAS moving, and doing so in ways inexplicable by modern, rational modus operandi.
While this doesn't solve my current dilemma of doubt, it certainly challenges my notion that the Spirit doesn't really "work like that anymore." From a scriptural standpoint, there is no honest reason to deny categorically any charismatic manifestations of the Spirit (or stories thereof). 1 Corinthians 13:8 comes to mind. But if we want to use this to declare that the charismatic gift of "tongues" has ceased, then we should also be prepared to say that knowledge is dead too. I am not comfortable with that, and I hope you aren't either.
My quest rolls on.
-Corbin
I desperately want to be a conduit for the Spirit and his power to flow through, but have I attempted to put him in a box? If we could imagine what that effort might look like from the Spirit's perspective, it might be hilarious indeed.
ReplyDeleteBut can we consider Gal. 5:22?
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self–control. Against such things there is no law.
What does a "legitimate manifestation of the Spirit" look like? Undoubtedly it MIGHT be speaking in a foreign language that we have not studied to communicate the verbal message of Christ, it MIGHT be a miraculous healing, it MIGHT be a real and proper prophesy. But then again, it might not.
But THESE things are not the proof of the Spirit. In fact, "speaking in tongues" can undoubtedly be forced (faked). But those are GIFTS of the Spirit, not what he produces by necessity. The FRUIT of the Spirit, by contrast, is his natural, dare I say "universal" outflow. It does my heart good to know that if I seek the Holy Spirit's legit presence in my life, all I need to do is take a hard look and seek the sober assessment of others in discovering whether or not things like "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self–control" are in my life on a regular basis, even if not every moment of life. I AM human after all, and I CAN override the Spirit through his own respect for my freewill (dang it).
I take great encouragement in this scripture in Galatians. While I might prefer to be lightening rod for the Spirit, I must also be content to let his less flashy (but more important) fruits overflow from my life. May we pray for the FRUITS and seek to let the Holy Spirit reign in our everyday, pedestrian experiences of life.
-CL