Monday, January 4, 2010

The Free Church Has Nothing To Envy Toward Charismatic Ministries

I believe there are Free Church leaders who would kind-of like to be Charismatic. It might be that they were reared in dry- anti-emotional ministries that paid too little honor to the Holy Spirit. That was my experience, and I can understand the appeal. But the grass is not greener on the other side of the fence.

We should pull back from the Charismatic churches' false claims about apostleship:

I'm not an apostle, none of us are apostles, and that's because there are no apostles. The apostles, and prophets, were all part of the Church's foundation. I have no reason to expect, or want, or work toward, an apostolic ministry. So when various writers (like C. Peter Wagner) talk about apostles for today, or call themselves apostles for today, it leaves me unmoved -- because the Bible tells me better. I have the apostles, and the prophets, in the form of my New Testament. I have the Spirit of the apostles, living in my heart, granting me wisdom, and empowering my work. I don't need any more anointing than the one I received at my salvation. There are no conferences or revivals to which I need to travel, in order to add power to my ministry.

We need to remember that our intuitions are not the voice of God, contrary to what is commonly taught in Charismatic circles:

The Bible tells me that it, the Bible, is my Bible. The Bible is God's voice. The Bible is the word of the Spirit to me, in a personal way. The Bible claims to be completely sufficient for every need I have (2 Timothy 3:16-17). Of course I believe that the Spirit communicates with me directly. But so does my sin-nature, so does my human capacity for foolishness, and so can demons. So the Bible is the grid by which I evaluate my thoughts, emotions, and intuitions. There is far too much intuitionalism in Charismatic ministries. It is a grave sin to claim to speak for God, if what you are speaking is emerging out of yourself. I believe that sin happens all the time in Charismatic ministries.

We need to thank God for logic, since reasoning is a natural gift of the Spirit:

I dislike the disparaging of reasoning you hear in Charismatic ministries. It's unbiblical to disparage reasoning. God reasons. God is the ultimate Ground of reason. God spoke to the prophets in sentences that had subjects and verbs, and which made connective sense as He spoke in a linear, logical, "Western" (that's meant as a joke) manner. The Spirit tells us, in the early chapters of Proverbs, how supremely valuable are wisdom and knowledge. Ministries that tell me to suspend my thought processes, and go into semi-trancelike states, are not guiding me in accordance with the will of God. Suspended states of consciousness were sometimes caused by God to His children, from time to time (like Peter seeing a vision of a sheet, in Acts 10), but in all cases they were miracles caused by God -- they could not be self-caused by technique. If God wants to give me a dream, I have faith in him that He can do it, but I don't need to seek it, and having an experience like that wouldn't bring me any closer to Him than I already am.

We need to maintain the humility that knows, when it comes to the basic presence of the Spirit, we're no better or worse than any other child of God:

I received the Spirit in His fullness when I believed, and so does every other Christian. We may fail to obey the command to keep on being filled with the Spirit, but nevertheless He is in all of us believers, and upon all of us, and all around all of us, as His temple. My times of spiritual dryness are caused by many things -- neglect of worship, prayer and Bible reading, the sin of doubt in my heart, sometimes even physical sickness. But there is no Christian group that represents the "in" group. There is no ministry that can give me something that I don't already have, that will transport me into a superior class of Christian. And that is what Charismatic theology claims to be able to do. I object to that, in light of the Bible's promises that He already has all of me, and I already have all of Him. What I need to do is unpack more thoroughly what I already have been given.

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