God's Spirit

Two of my friends, Isaac and Dan have written about the charismatic gifts. Both posts are more than worth the read. They've made me think a lot. I need to do a bit of sorting-out here.

The first church I went to was my grandparents' Evangelical Free Church which my parents began to attend when my family moved in with my grandparents when I was three. Those types of churches were really the only ones my mom took my sisters and I to all through our many moves. I remember being quite bored and annoyed with being snapped at for being the figetty kid that I was (am).

Then when I was ten we moved to Colorado to stay. As usual we didn't know a soul but soon met a nice homeschool family who went to an altogether different kind of church. They were going to an Assemblies of God church in Summit County and Living Word Fellowship (the second met in our town on Thursday nights). They started taking my mom, sisters, and I. Both are Pentecostal churches but Thursdays were definitely more lively. Unlike the other places I'd been these people definitely believed that God is still active in the world. Suddenly church was interesting. They spoke in tongues, fell down when they were prayed for, jumped around while they sang, randomly shouted "Amen," prayed for healings rather than easy deaths (something that had really bothered me as a small child in other churches and I always refused to go along with despite what the adults said), and they believed that God would give them nice houses and expensive cars. My dad started coming to church with us and we were all baptized in the Holy Spirit.

I became much more interested in God. Suddenly He was so much closer and more accessible than ever before. When all the adults in the small Thursday church began reading through the Bible I joined them and loved it.....till I got to Chronicles and then the long genealogies sapped my determination. I joined an Assemblies of God girl's group in Grandby and kept at reading through the Bible.

It lasted about two years. My family went through a year where we were short on money so we couldn't drive the distances and my dad quit liking the pastor of the Thursday night church. So we started going to the Kremmling Community church (again) when I was thirteen. This church was almost fundamental, which was disturbing after being in the quite dogmatic pentacostal churches. What would happen to my young relationship with God in such a dry, lifeless church? I was really worried and asked God for some help.

It came through an older girl in my Sunday school class when I was fourteen. She had been on several Teen Mania mission trips and helped me get started going on a trip. Now, the extra interesting thing about all these church changes is that while I went to the Community church on Sunday with my parents that same homeschool dad was still taking my sisters and I to the girls' group at the Pentecostal church in Grandby. So I was going to two churches at the same time each saying confidently that the other was wrong. It was a very interesting time. I tried not to think too much, it made my brain hurt. :p

Then I went through something of a crisis. I came home from my first mission trip sky-high on pride. Of course I didn't take long to fall, and I did it hard. My family had also been going through a rough time financially for a few years which affected everything else in the house. The private school I had been going to moved to the other side of our large county in the middle of a year so I quit going and lost all my friends from there right after my fifteenth birthday. My parents decided they didn't want me hanging out with one of my other friends because her parents were scary. (In my parents' defense they really were scary.) The homeschool family that we had been friends with for so long suddenly went through a yucky divorce. My sisters and I watched close-up the breakdown of this family that had influenced us so much. The girl who had introduced me to Teen Mania left the church pregnant during her senior year. One way or another I lost every friend I had in a period of about a month and a half.

Very dark times, but they made me think. Without a friend to lean on, I took a much closer look at my two churches. My parents were not members of the Pentecostal church which caused my sisters and I to have a distinctly lower place in the girls' group. No one but my teacher from middle-school genuinely wanted me there. I was a number. People there gossiped and randomly told others that they would go to hell for their worldly acts like having a Little Mermaid watch. I went to the Community church's youth group, Sunday school, and Sunday service with my parents. Here I saw the exact same things: gossip, leagalism, condemnation, and cliques. The gossip forced my pregnant friend to leave. I was a geeky homeschooler/freshman with braces; the youth group didn't care that I existed. Again I was a number. I began to doubt it all. People who believed the prosperity gospel freaked out over their finances. People who obnoxiously prayed in the name of Jesus that God would take the "rebellious spirit of the devil" out of a cheeky kid couldn't seem to get it together enough to make their marriages last. Those that believed in miracles never asked for them without screaming their prayers as if God couldn't hear. I found myself very confused, cynical, and doubting God. I mistrusted Christians - especially traveling pastors who claimed the fire of God but didn't stick around long enough to let us see it in their lives. I'd glare them down when they offered to pray for me to be "Slain in the Spirit," a thing with I had never done and in my state of distance from God had no intention of doing. I didn't believe any of it anymore.

However, in order to keep up my perfect, innocent homeschooler image of flawless Christianity, I had applied and been accepted on a second mission trip. God let me know He was still real, and really interested in me a few weeks before I left and I began taking my questions to Him. On that trip I saw people healed. One boy was completely paralyzed on his left side. All his limbs were undersized and had barely a scrap of muscle on them, while his other side - still small - looked and functioned normally. Another group prayed for him but I saw the effects, he walked. The boy went home and got his mother and a lot of people prayed to give their lives to Jesus and filled out the little cards we gave them so that someone from a local church could follow-up with them. There was also a blind woman who received sight and a sick man was healed.

It's all very confusing. Since then my parents stated taking us to a more middle kinda church, Immanuel Fellowship, which believes that God works miraculously but doesn't obsess over signs and then they moved on while I have decided to stay here where I'm finally much more than a number. I have prayed for healing and both seen and not seen it. I've seen prayers I've prayed for my friends' hearts answered with more power than I had dared hope. A couple of people are almost completely different than they were five years ago when I and a few others really focused in prayer for them. Yet there are others who's lives and attitudes have only dramatically worsened as I've prayed. I've seen God use me in friends' lives and I've seen everything fall apart no matter how hard I try and how hard I pray. Seems like it's been a lot of the latter these last few years. I find myself discouraged and wondering what it is I'm looking for in all of this.

Dan talked about the Fruits of the Spirit, love, and how the miraculous gifts are named right along side and at equal standing with things like hospitality. (Gal. 5, 1 Cor. 12-14) After hearing Jesus warn the pharasies over and over that it's a wicked generation that seeks a sign (Matt. 16:4, Luke 11:29), why is it that we so often seek a sign to prove that God's Spirit is moving? Yet Jesus also said, "Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father." (John 14:12) I've often heard those of the Pentecostal persuasion saying that this means we will see the same miracles of physical healing and provision that Jesus did and even more. While I think that we can't just demand whatever, whenever and expect God to bend the entire universe just to give us our fancy of the moment. I do think that Jesus meant this words as much as He meant anything else He said to us. However, I think we've taken a very narrow view of it. Jesus didn't just perform miracles of physical healing. He loved sinners. He patiently discipled twelve young and largely uneducated men. He got up early to pray every day. He forgave sins. He forgave and loved the mob that crucified Him.

So, what is the point? Why does God sent His Spirit? Like Dan pointed out, the emphasis in the New Testiment seems to be on transformation rather than miraculous signs. The same seems to be true of the passages about the Holy Spirit. I may be wrong, but it seems like God is not as interested in sending His Spirit through signs as He is in sending Him through the miracle of transformation. I think we don't always see a transformed heart as a miracle. It's not very loud or flashy, and in most people it happens so slowly that it only visible in retrospect. Maybe it's just me, but that's always seemed more desperate and hopeless than the physical, obvious stuff.

I think that we seek the signs and wonders because they are easier. (Not that there's anything wrong with them in and of themselves.) They are easier because they're loud, we don't really have to be in tune to and listening to God to see what He's doing when He works through the overtly miraculous. It's a quick change and doesn't require the patience of the slow, frustrating transformations that the heart makes. When abused it's a quick way to win yourself a name in God's Kingdom and it's a cheap way to trick yourself into feeling close to God in the absence of a real relationship. Tongues can be faked and 1 Corinthians 13 says that they will pass away. Love however cannot be faked very long but it's permanent. Yet true love requires a deep change of heart and at times incredible sacrifice. It can be pretty painful and unglorious.

Not that it's an easy answer, but I was impressed buy a comment left on Isaac's blog by a man who calls himself "The Big Dog." He said, "I would posit that there might be a third explanation: [in answer to Isaac's two options for why we don't see the Spirit moving] What if God is still sending His Spirit, but He's sending Him (It?) in ways and places that we're not expecting or looking for, so consequently we assume He's not there. We miss what would be obvious if we were looking for it. The religious establishment of the day completely missed the import of Jesus' arrival and ministry because He didn't come in a way and in the time they were looking for. I think God and the Spirit are always at work, always on the move, always up to something - and I often miss most of it because I'm running on default systems and autopilot."

We make God small in our minds by our attempts to draw lines around Him and find the formula that makes it easy. It's so hard to accept that He is, as C. S. Lewis says in the Chronicles of Narnia, wild and untameable by us. We can't just trust that He does what feels best to us but what is best, even when it hurts terribly and doesn't make any sense. But how do you trust someone too big and wonderful to be nicely predictable? How do you walk beside Someone who is both the Lion and the Lamb? Who is capable of making Himself known both through the parting of the sea and a still, small voice? Someone who spoke the stars into existence and also lay helpless as a baby in the arms of a teenage girl? How do you begin to understand someone like that?