Pentecost – Changing from glory to glory

THOSE LAST FOUR WORDS

I’m not trying to embarrass this guy, or maybe I am, but there’s a certain pastor named Bill from Amarillo, Texas who gives a one-minute “Let’s Go Deeper” segment on a Christian radio station, so you may have heard of him. Now that I’ve outed him, I’d like to give him his due.

Pastor Bill said he was preaching his way through the book of Jude and then quoted verse 20, which reads in part, “But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith…” If you’re wondering why I left off the last five words of that Scripture, it was purposeful, because in explaining this text, Pastor Bill also left it off.

And there lies the problem. Leaving off those last five words changes the whole meaning of Jude’s intent. I’m not living in Bill’s head so I don’t know if he just innocently misinterpreted this Scripture or if it’s intentional and he’s trying to avoid a subject he’s uncomfortable with, but when you go out of your way to eliminate part of the written Word, I suspect the latter. Now that we’ve exposed his crime, let’s look at his takeaway from this aborted text. Bill asks the question. “How do we build ourselves up in our most holy faith?” Great question. The answer would have been obvious to him if he hadn’t cut off those last five words.

But he did. And then instead, Bill takes us on a detour and redirects us to Acts 20:32, which has Paul speaking to the Ephesian elders: “And now I commend you to God and to the Word of his grace, which is able to build you up.” Then, Bill does a virtual cut and paste from Acts 20 and attaches it to Jude 20 and creates his own version of Jude’s words. According to Bill’s new translation, we are built up in Christ by the “words of his grace.”

True. But we are also built up in corporate worship and by Christian fellowship and by someone close to us being converted to Christ and by a whole host of other things. Though we are certainly built up by the “words of his grace,” Jude was speaking specifically about something different. In case you haven’t already read those last five words, I’ll let Jude give them to you now. They are, “PRAYING IN THE HOLY SPIRIT.” So, the completed verse would read, “But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit.” Elsewhere, Paul defines “praying in the Holy Spirit” as “praying in tongues.”

And so you see why this is such a big deal. It’s not like if you don’t like the plain interpretation of something, you can just translate it differently to suit your own taste just because you’ve got the pulpit. The JW’s know all about that. And then there’s that thing about not adding or subtracting from the Word of God. I’m pretty sure that would include cutting and pasting parts of it.

After the Resurrection and just before he ascended back to heaven, Jesus gave his final instructions to the disciples: First, the Bible says, “He breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” At this point, they were spiritually reborn and received the indwelling Spirit that comes with salvation. Then, a little later, he instructed them further: “And behold, I am sending the promise of the Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.” So, in addition to receiving the indwelling Spirit upon salvation, he said that forty days later at Pentecost they would receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit and be “clothed with power from on high.”

This is just the plane, straightforward reading of the text. You don’t have to be a Bible geek or have a Greek and Hebrew lexicon to understand it. You don’t need the fifty-six-volume Bible Illustrator commentary to arrive at the proper interpretation. And you don’t need a master’s degree in theology to understand this, though that in itself these days might be a hindrance. And you certainly don’t want to fuse two unrelated texts together in order to pretend they mean something else, as Pastor Bill appears to have done.

And Bill’s not alone. Countless Bible teachers avoid these biblical truths like black mold on a toilet seat, One such teacher said, “Paul’s letter to the Corinthians was to get them off the kick of speaking in tongues.” I guess then Paul would have to kick the habit also, since he said, “I speak in tongues more than you all.” Another said, “The gift of tongues is not given for personal enrichment.” Again, we’d have to believe that Paul spoke a lot in tongues but was never enriched by the experience. And my favorite: “Jesus didn’t speak in tongues.” I even once had a pastor mock the use of tongues from the pulpit while looking angrily down at me. Yikes, with everyone clapping and praising God in this mega church, how did he know it was me? And this was in a self-proclaimed Pentecostal church. Go figure.

“The devil comes to steal, kill, and destroy.” To me, one of Satan’s most successful and devastating thefts has been his robbing the Church of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The result of this theft is that without this original juice, most of Christendom has become stuffed up with religiosity and programs substituting for the power of God, and some are even denying the faith altogether. This theft has robbed the Church of the main thing that makes it a Church, the full, energizing power of the Holy Spirit to overcome in these perilous, waning days of the Laodicean Church Age.

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As the song goes, “These are the days that we’ve been waiting for, all of our lives.” These are the days the prophets eagerly looked forward to. The blueprint we were given at Pentecost wasn’t meant to just strap us into the starting blocks and then have us quit the race after a quick sprint. Are we to believe that God didn’t want us to have all his spiritual weapons in our arsenal and the fullness of his power to make it to the finish line?

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 3^rd 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.

IN A MIRROR DIMLY

In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul writes, “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I don’t want you to be misinformed.” Yet, the vast majority of Christendom today is just that, misinformed about the gifts of the Spirit. Then, in chapter 13, the “love chapter,” a chapter that has caused more divisions among believers than any other chapter in the Bible, Paul continues in the same thread when he writes, “For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.”

There are many who believe that the “perfect” is referring to the Bible, and that upon its completion, the spiritual gifts will “pass away.” But that argument becomes a stretch when later he continues, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.” That could only be referring to a time when we will see Jesus face to face and forever be in his presence. And later he adds, “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” Though the Bible helps define who we are, only Jesus himself is the one who can fully know us. Paul is simply saying that when we get to heaven and are forever in the presence of God, it would be “childish” to think we would still have a need for spiritual gifts.

But back up. When Paul says, “we know in part” and “see in a mirror dimly,” he is saying that it is because of these same spiritual gifts operating in our lives, that for now, in this darkened and sinful world, at least we are able to see that much, that is, “in part,” and “dimly.” And that without these gifts we wouldn’t be able to see very much at all. Which, sad to say, is where many Christians live today, theologically thin and spiritually starving.

Is it any wonder that Satan’s most deadly arrows against the church have been to rob her of the power of Pentecost? It has to be his biggest coup. This is why most of the Church has lapsed into the Laodicean Age, “having a form of godliness but denying its power.”

THE BLUEPRINT

Having been birthed in the rich soil of a healthy, biblical church environment, until it turned into a heavy-shepherding Christian cult, I have been blessed to experience what I believe the Church was meant to be, starting with Pentecost. I have also been able to minister in this biblical pattern in my own ministry, especially in our tent church in South Africa, where we saw many conversions and healing miracles. Now, retired, I have observed a multitude of other church structures over the years and have not seen that pattern duplicated, and I find myself in the words of Crosby, Still, and Nash, trying to “get back to the Garden.”

This is what I believe. The End Times, remnant church, what’s left of its tattered self, will never be popular with the world, or even with the rest of the church world. For those holding out hope that the Church is going to rise up, defeat Evil, and transform the world, making it ready for Christ to return, isn’t it getting tiring by now having to keep pumping something up that won’t hold air? Statistics say that church attendance in America has been rapidly declining, not increasing, but then that may be a good thing, seeing as how most of the churches themselves are only offering religion. This is a far cry from what Jesus meant for His Church when he said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” So far, the gates of hell have done a pretty good job of crippling, perverting, diluting, and relegating much of the church world to impotence and irrelevancy.

What did God intend for His Church? In John 17, Jesus pleaded with His Father concerning His greatest desire for His Bride: that they would be unified as one in purpose and spirit. Four times in this chapter He said things like, “that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be like us.” Paul added in Ephesians that we should be “eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” And to the Philippians he said that we should be “standing together in one spirit, with one mind, striving side by side for the faith of the gospel.”

This is not about the present-day ecumenical movement of the World Council of Churches, taking the likes of Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Catholicism, and combining them with all the other false religions of the world, until they’re all unified around nothing more than their own subjective “truths.” Or like the recent interfaith movement taking up the “Pride’ mantel, virtually signaling their allegiance to the soon upcoming system of the Beast. This is the religion of Babel, of Babylon, and eventually, the one-world religion of the antichrist.

So, what’s happened to get us off course? The Early Church in persecution was doing fine, never better. Not that I’m advocating for more of the same. Then, after getting “legalized” and accepted by the State, it became compromised and religionized until it was murdered by the cult of Romanism, whereby the Church went into a one-thousand-year period called the “Dark Ages.” It reemerged with Martin Luther, who broke away from Romanism, and over time, the original “gifts of the Spirit” began seeping back in, along with conversions and the power of Pentecost, and they began looking more like the original Church of Acts.

The Evil one couldn’t let this stand. Since his primary target has always been God’s people, be they Jew or Gentile, he succeeded in getting the revitalized Church to divide into denominations, and even the non-denominational became their own separate denominations. Most allowed themselves to be lobotomized, severing their connection to the power of Pentecost, and now “having a form of godliness but denying its power,” they have been divorced from their biblical roots until they fit the Lord’s warning, “can a bad tree produce good fruit?”

So, what should the Church be unified around? It’s not like we weren’t given a blueprint to follow. It’s not as if the Book of Acts had somehow been deleted from the Bible, although most of Christendom has done just that, relegating its power and miracles to a distant past. God made it easy for us; Luke even gives us an eyewitness account of the early Church: “And they continued steadfastly in the apostle’s doctrine…” (Acts 2:42). Luke didn’t say, “Just make it up as you go along.” He didn’t say, “If you don’t like a particular doctrine, if it makes you feel uncomfortable, just write it off as something of the past.” He didn’t say, “If your denomination doesn’t believe that way, then just ignore the Scriptures and go along with their doctrines. It’s like the Church has thrown out the blueprints and invented their own version of Christianity, doing “that which seemed right in their own eyes.”

Again, what should the Church be unified around? The pattern left for us is not some deep mystery buried deep within the book of Leviticus or the Dead Sea Scrolls. It’s found in plain sight in the Book of Acts, where the Church was born on the Day of Pentecost, the original imprint. They believed the baptism of the Holy Spirit to be a separate experience from the Spirit of God that comes to dwell in every believer’s heart upon salvation. In Acts 19, Paul asked the Ephesian believers, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”

These Ephesians were already believers, they possessed the indwelling Spirit of God. Paul wanted to know if they had also received the baptism of the Holy Spirit “since they believed,” for if these two experiences were one in the same, then why would Paul be asking this question? And continuing in Acts 19, we see a biblical pattern, the Ephesians were saved, baptized in water, and baptized in the Holy Spirit. Then, they went out and preached everywhere, made disciples, and planted churches throughout their known world. All the present-day Church had to do was follow this simple pattern and they would still have the same power today.

God calls the gifts of the Spirit the “gifts of the Spirit” because they are a gift, like salvation, not merely a doctrine. What should you do with a gift, especially one so valuable and came at such a cost? That’s easy, one should be grateful, and to show one’s gratefulness, they should put it to good use. God offers a free gift to empower believers and His Church, so why have most of them said, “No thank you, we believe you’re outdated, that you don’t exist, we can get along just fine without you, that you make us uncomfortable so we’ll invent a doctrine to deny you? Doesn’t that seem like a rude response to a free gift?

This First Church also believed in the imminent return of Jesus in what’s known as the Rapture, harpazo in Greek, or raptus in Latin, which means “seized” or “carried away.” It’s where we get our English word “Rapture.” For those who say the word Rapture is not found in the Bible, it is if you read the Latin version. The Kione Greek translation is even more descriptive, harpagsometha, which directly translated says, “we shall be caught up, taken away,” with the idea of it being a sudden event.

If the Church could be unified around even these two events, the Holy Spirit baptism and the imminent return of Christ in the Rapture, the rest would fall into place and we could all regroup around the blueprint given to us in the Word. It’s as simple as just believing what the First Church believed and then practicing it.

Jesus said in Matthew 12 that “every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand.” And Paul said one of the most serious sins the Church can commit is to bring division among believers. Jesus spoke about the power of Christian unity when He said that if even just two of you agree in prayer about something, it will be done for them.

If the Tower of Babel was destroyed by God because of their power in unity to do Evil, how much more if we had genuine, biblical unity today, where we could once again be the Church that “turned the world upside down.”