The Church Under Siege: Will We Bow to Culture or Stand in Pentecost Power?
There has never been a moment when it has been more immediately imperative for God’s church to be distinguished and differentiated from the culture.
It should be set apart by its bold and uncompromising stand on the necessity of preaching, teaching, and manifestly living the biblical doc- trine of Pentecost in its fullest expression. Our call and purpose is to be different than the secular and pseudo-religious world. We must be willingly joyful in our resolute determination to be easily and manifestly distinguishable from them.
The unregenerate world is not looking for a slightly improved version of the existence they currently have. They are seeking freedom from the pain of hopelessness and the deep, cavernous void in their lives, not for just a temporary respite from it. Their hearts cry out for salvation, deliverance, and healing, and for that total life transformation that only Jesus Christ through the power of the Holy Ghost can give them. They are not searching for something else to busy themselves with or the entanglements of rigorous religious rules. They want and are in need of redemption and the effervescent life force of the Holy Spirit of God alive within them. God has promised it to them and to us, but He will require the Holy Spirit to be involved in such a transformation, causing it to be a right now reality.
The Holy Spirit will not impose Himself or God’s will where He is unwelcome or hidden from view. He will refuse to be silenced, slighted, or sealed in a back room or relegated to manifesting only in a small group or home meeting. He must be and will be the very visible, audible fountain flowing forth in our every endeavor of the church and every expression of God’s kingdom in our daily lives.
Any church that denies the Holy Spirit’s work and influence is a sad and ineffective, timid and intimidated spectacle. It is dead when it should be a resurrected remnant. It retreats when it should be a revenant of revival advancing into enemy-controlled territory. It cowers in fear when its armor reveals that it is built for the battle and created for the conflict. Much of the current churchgoing community can’t even be considered as in full-scale retreat—they are being summarily and embarrassingly routed and conquered by hell’s forces. They have abandoned the field of battle and now occupy the silent sidelines. They are too weak or uninformed to engage the culture, content to display a weary smile and sniff a few wilted flowers they have picked along the way.
Having separated from the purveyors of Pentecostal power and truth, they are left powerless with no perceived option but to become critical. How heartbreaking. It is eternally jeopardizing and ill-advised to ever speak a word against the Holy Ghost or to attribute any of His divine works to satan.
Therefore I say to you, all kinds of sin and blasphemy will be forgiven men, but the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven men. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be for- given. But whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, neither in this world, nor in the world to come (Matthew 12:31-32).
The Lord Jesus also said in Matthew 25:30, “Throw the unprofitable servant into outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Whatever you do, don’t keep drilling holes in the hull of the old ship of Zion and then wonder why we’re making no progress!
When the church or a person is without the Spirit of God, they are concealing truth rather than revealing it. The contrasting truths of sin and righteousness blend together in a nebulous shade of gray. Nothing is certain. Nothing is absolute. There is no objective truth—there is only your truth and my truth and their truth. Everyone’s personal reality becomes equally as legitimate as anyone else’s. The meaning of everything, whether simple or complex, is reduced to opinion or depends on context, nuance, or feelings, or some other parameter that can be neither measured nor defined. God’s truth must be manipulated or synthesized, interpreted or contextualized, reimagined or at least rebranded, often rejected or explained away by some other designation.
Here is why: if truth is absolute (and it is), then the truth deniers must acknowledge that they have fallen short of its standard, leaving no options for them other than repentance (Romans 3:23). As a result of pride, they will do anything and everything necessary to avoid that, so they silence their conscience and the Holy Spirit’s voice. They work hard to continue to convince themselves and others that something other than the truth is true.
Here is a corollary to the above thought. A church that denies the operation of the Holy Spirit makes things com- plicated rather than simple. They prefer excessive, extravagant rhetoric rather than plain speech. The reason? If everyone understood it, those in charge would lose their authority. They relish the thought of being the only ones intelligent enough to understand what they are talking about. This aura of intellectual superiority gives them the pretense of power that accompanies their faux expertise on the subject matter.
As you might guess, I have a problem with all that. The Lord Jesus, during His earthly ministry, most often employed everyday, common speech and symbols that the people could readily understand. They might not have liked what He said, but there is little question that they understood what He said. He didn’t couch His discourses in fancy words or in deeply intellectual, philosophical, or theological terminology. Nor should we.
As I have said often, the simplicity of the gospel is its power, and its power is its simplicity. It has been communicated with great power and effect in the following straight- forward truths. Jesus loves you. Jesus died for you. Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus can change your life. I know, because He changed mine. A child or someone who has never heard it before can understand, believe, and receive eternal life. The gospel is not a complex puzzle to be solved, but a simple invitation to receive the love of God. Just as a child trusts without hesitation, so must the gospel of Christ be proclaimed and accepted with childlike faith, wide-eyed and openhearted.
But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it (Luke 18:16-17 NIV).
Any church absent the power of the Holy Spirit will tend to emphasize ritual rather than relationship. Ritual operates under human auspices in acts of formality, liturgy, religious routine, and habit. Rituals, regardless of how meaningful they may be especially at first, void of relationship quickly become dull, dry, and dead. Before long, adherents go through the ritual without even thinking about what they are doing or why they are doing it. Their bodies go through the motions, but ritual loses its power to engage their minds, their emotions, their wills, or their hearts. Dead ritual leads to dead worship.
Relationship, on the other hand, is ever changing and evolving. It is rarely the same from one day or one encounter to the next. Think about the relationships you have with those of your family. Irrespective of the length of time you have known them, the possibility always remains that you will discover something new about them with every new encounter. Simultaneously, they may learn things about you that they had not realized previously, either. Evolving relationships often prove to be exercises in self-realization and discovery, as well. As the result of a continuing relationship, one begins to recognize things about oneself that were previously unknown, or may have been too painful or frightening to admit or to confront.
Relationships can be both comforting and notoriously uncomfortable, which is a prime reason why not a few people avoid them. A continuing vibrant and vital relationship with God the Holy Spirit will certainly result in us discovering new things about Him. This will inevitably require change, adjustment, confession, honesty, and even repentance on our part toward our God. It will also cause each of us to realize things about ourselves that need to change. This is due to the empowering of the Holy Spirit, which enables us to become more like the God we love and serve. In the absence of the Holy Spirit’s influence, we will either remain stagnant or drift further and further from the presence and nature and char- acter of our great God.
A church without the influence of the Holy Spirit will emphasize natural things rather than spiritual things. “But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). You cannot expect a person who was born blind to comprehend the beauty of a sunset in the same way that you do, regardless of how explicitly it might be explained or described. He is not equipped with the capacity to see it with his eyesight as you have been blessed to do. In the same way, you cannot expect natural people to understand spiritual concepts. Those who deny or limit the involvement of the Holy Spirit will have a limited understanding of spiritual things.
Lastly, those churches that choose to deny the power and presence of the Holy Spirit will become inwardly focused rather than outwardly focused. This is the opposite of what the Lord Jesus Christ, the head of the church, commanded us to do. When individuals or organizations become more interested in self than serving others, they begin to die on the inside. When they become obsessed with self, they actually accelerate the process of their own demise. If there is not a seismic shift in their trajectory, they will, like a dying star, implode and fall by their own weight. The Holy Spirit can and will prevent such disastrous collapse if, only if, we will surrender to Him and fully embrace His ministry. In fact, the Holy Spirit of God is on a mission from heaven specifically designed to keep us from falling and destroying ourselves and millions of others. That desired outcome will occur if, only if, we will give Him the priority and the preeminence of which He is deserving and worthy.
Sooner or later, every bill becomes due and payable. The old preacher said it this way, “There’s a payday someday!” This is as true for nations as it is for individual consumers. Sadly, at this writing, we are paying for our national rejection of God the Holy Spirit and His ministry through spiritual, moral, and cultural decline, disobedience, and destruction. The only way this abhorrent and loathsome death march can be reversed is with a personal and corporate reckoning. We must here and now recognize our willful rejection of the Holy Spirit, wholeheartedly repent of it, and embrace His glorious, supernatural ministry to us and through us in this pivotal hour of human history. It has happened before. If history is our guide, I believe the conditions are right for it to happen again. If—only if.
