RELIGHTING THE FIRES OF PENTECOST

Paul said in his first letter to the Corinthian church, “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed.” One of Paul’s greatest fears, besides his fear that his fellow Jews would fail to come to Christ, is that the power of the spiritual gifts, especially the sign gifts, would eventually be lost to the Church. But then, less than three hundred years after Paul’s letter, most churches have become just that.

The other day I did an internet search for churches in my city that claim to be “Spirit-filled” or “Full Gospel.” Unfortunately, over time, these terms have been so compromised that today they can mean anything from being jacked up on caffeine in the church bistro, to having a sugar rush from the glazed donuts, to having an ultra-animated church greeting committee, or even having an electric guitar in the worship service.

According to my research, the Unitarians and the Presbyterians are considered “Spirit-filled.” Regrettably, this term has lost most of its original punch, unless these groups have suddenly had an Azuza Street-type revival that I wasn’t aware of. Out of over one hundred churches in my city, there were only two that actually believed in the “baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire” that Jesus promised to every believer in Luke 3:16. This is exactly what Paul feared for his Corinthian believers.

In his book, Charismatic Gifts in the Early Church, Ronald N. Kydd exposes one of the most common myths about why some believe the sign gifts have ceased. He writes that as the Christian community in the 3rd Century grew in size, wealth, and social acceptance, the gifts of the Spirit just quietly slipped away. This started in 313 A.D. with the passing of the Edict of Milan, an agreement between Emperor Constantine of the Western Roman Empire and Emperor Licinius of the Eastern Roman Empire, resulting in them changing their policy towards Christians, essentially ending persecution and giving the Church legal status. If the fires of Pentecost had not been extinguished in the 3rd century, we could have likely avoided the 1000 years known as the “Dark Ages.”

In other words, as the believers were no longer enduring the fires of persecution, their spiritual temperatures cooled, and their hearts and minds shut down to their need for the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. So, it wasn’t that the gifts ceased, as many have claimed, limiting them to the Apostolic Age only, but because the Church at large didn’t think they needed them anymore.

So, the sign gifts didn’t just fade away or cease to exist, but they were simply written off by most of the Church world because they had grown self-sufficient, and so like many churches still today, they reflect another one of Paul’s letters when he said they would have “an appearance of godliness, but they would deny its power.”

My hope is that these sign gifts of the Spirit be returned to the Church, where Paul intended them to be. In this present-day Laodicean Church Age, any talk of having a last day’s revival is improbable. But any talk about having such a revival without relighting the fires of Pentecost is absurd.

In a world that is experiencing a foretaste of the Apocalypse, maintaining one’s personal walk with Christ is a unique challenge. Witnessing firsthand the absolute End Time’s Evil, long-hidden but now rising out of the shadows, we need to breathe in the power of Pentecost as never before.

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Author: Changing from Glory to Glory

I was saved in the "Jesus People Movement". We were the last revival America has seen, other than the recent one that broke out at Asbury University in Kentucky. Many of us "Jesus People" converts became preachers, including myself. In 30 years, my family and I planted churches in Canada and South Africa. We saw many conversions and healing miracles, especially in South Africa. Before salvation in 1976, I fought in the Vietnam War, a bronze star, and then like many disillusioned young people of my generation, I became a hippie. Vietnam wasn’t just about giving us hippies an excuse to get high and medicate our anger, but it was an attempt at stopping Communism’s aggression in Southeast Asia. We failed, and millions of innocent Vietnamese and Cambodian people died, the eventual result of all tyrannical takeovers. Now, in my latter years, I find myself fighting again, here at home, only this time it’s a global takeover, where even our own nation is against our freedoms. God impressed on me as a young convert that I would see the Rapture of the church, and now we are very certainly living in those days just before the Tribulation Period, also called “Daniel’s Seventieth Week,” and “Jacob’s Troubles,” a time when God’s wrath will be poured out upon the unbelieving world. This judgment is not for the Church, the Bride of Christ. We’re going up in the First Resurrection. Paul says to “encourage one another with this hope.” In these final days of the Church Age, the Age of the Gentiles, where there's been a big uptick in Jewish conversions and a diminishing of Gentile conversions, the Rapture seems more imminent than ever.

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