BEYOND PENTECOST - WHAT
COMES NEXT?
R. D. Ice 10-21-2003
After Pentecost, what??? One has written: “Perhaps it is time for us
to realize that as long as we debate institutions and structures, and not the
mystery of the Church in her depths, we are bypassing the real issue.”
What if God withdrew His
Holy Spirit from our world???
Without the Holy Spirit,
God would be far away. Christ would stay
in the past. The Church would be simply
another organization. Authority would be
a matter of domination. Preaching the
gospel would be a matter of propaganda.
Worship would be no more than seeking to “call upon” an absent
Deity. Christian living would be no more
than a “slave mentality.”
The Holy Spirit IS present. The Creation is resurrected and groans with
the birth pangs of the Kingdom. The
Risen Christ is here. The Gospel is the
power of God to salvation. The Church
shows forth the life of the One God who is a Trinity. Authority is a liberating service to bless
all humanity. Preaching the gospel is a
“Pentecost.” Worship remembers the Cross
& Resurrection; celebrates present blessings; anticipates the coming future
glory. Human action is given a divine
meaning.
James M. Campbell wrote in
1897. “The truth for which Pentecost
stands requires to be specially emphasized in the present day to counteract the
tendency towards materialism in philosophy and life; and also to counteract the
tendency toward formalism in religion.
On the one hand we have a science which denies the existence of
spiritual agencies and shuts God out of His world, combined with a worldly
spirit which takes account of the seen and tangible only, and ignores the
spiritual in life; and on the other hand we have a religion which shows a
decided tendency to decorous formality in worship, and to exclusive absorption
in mere outward activities and in material and humanitarian interests, to the
neglect of the cultivation of inward life, from which all the streams of
religious activity are fed. How needful,
therefore, it is to see that the Holy Spirit is here to oppose and to overcome
this downward drift! . . The advent of the Spirit means that there is now
present in the world a divine power working for spiritual results. . . The two
pivotal events in historic Christianity are the coming of Christ in the flesh,
and the coming of the Spirit.”
Note that Jesus said: “And I
will pray to the Father and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide
with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive
because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him for He dwells with
you and will be in you. I will not leave
you orphans; I will come to you.” John
14:16-18. NKJV
Jesus said: “Nevertheless I tell
you the truth. It is to your advantage
that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but
if I depart, I will send Him to you. And
when He has come, He will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness, and
of judgment: of sin, because they do not believe in Me; of righteousness,
because I go to My Father and you see Me no more; of judgment, because the
ruler of this world is judged.” John
16:7-11. NKJV
"Nor bound, nor clime, nor creed thou know'st
Wide as our need thy favors fall,
The white wings of the Holy Ghost
Stoop, seen or unseen, o'er the heads of all."
[Whittier
Partly because of the
rationalism of John Locke, partly due to the extremes of
"pentecostalism" on the frontier, God The Holy Spirit has been pushed
aside or ignored [even denied by some] among the Restoration Movement.
"An attempt is made to bring the
doctrines of the Holy Spirit into harmony with the enlarged Christological
thoughts of the present day. The place
which the doctrine of the Holy Spirit occupies in the self-revelation of God to
man is just beginning to be appreciated.
It is not too much to say that no other doctrine within the circle of
evangelical truth has suffered a more complete eclipse." [James M. Campell]
In New Testament Christianity
the Holy Spirit is acknowledged as One with the Father, and it was sufficient
to appeal to Christian consciousness as evidence of His continual presence, to
regenerated lives as evidence of His divine power. “The Fathers in the church appealed to
experience because Christianity, as they knew, is essentially not a past event,
but a present life; a life first manifested in Christ, and then perpetuated in
His church.” [Gore]
We do not need to go back
to Pentecost. We need for the church to
bring Pentecost into the present. We
look to the past, but we must look to the future also. God’s great kingdom must reach forward into
the future, to spreading the gospel of Christ Jesus - Crucified, Risen Coming
Again. As a historical event, Pentecost
can never come back again. But
everything that was spiritual and essential remains. The heavens that were opened are kept open. God The Holy Spirit continually bestows
vitality and spiritual power to God’s church.
1. A spiritual
Christ. A changeless gospel must
adapt to a changing society. Note Paul
in 1 Corinthians 9:19-23. The message
never changes, but methods do.
And it is the historical task of the church to be forever spiritualizing
more and more her understanding of the Christ and of salvation.
The One God is Father-Son-Holy
Spirit. [Some demote the Spirit to
emphasize Christ, and then demote Christ to emphasize the Father.] The coming of God The Holy Spirit on
Pentecost was the coming of Christ to dwell in the hearts of His people by His
Spirit. James M. Campbell wrote: “No
more serious mistake could be made than to regard the Holy Spirit as supplying
the lack of an absent Christ. He is
rather the ‘bodiless divinity’ [the Nameless One] by whom Christ, no longer
with us in the flesh, is made present and omnipresent.”
“While He [Christ] was with His
disciples they were like weak children clinging to the hand of a father; when
He was taken away they learned to walk alone.
The blossom dropped off that the fruit
might appear; the earthly Christ faded from sight that the spiritual
Christ might be revealed; the visible hand was withdrawn that the unseen hand
might henceforth guide and sustain in all life’s dark and difficult ways.” [J. M. Campbell]
Paul speaks of an ongoing
spiritual transformation in we Christians.
“But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of
the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just
as by the Spirit of the Lord.” [2
Corinthians 3:18 NKJV]
God is One. The Christ who could die is seen to be also
the Christ who has conquered death and is alive forevermore. It is not enough to believe in a Christ who
lived and died. We must also believe in
a Christ who lives and reigns right now.
The ransomed march on their way to Zion
2. A spiritual God. In giving a spiritual Christ Pentecost gave a
spiritual God. Pentecost did not give a
new God, but a new and fuller conception of God. The Incarnation was God manifest in the
flesh. Pentecost was God manifest in the
Spirit. “God is Spirit, and only by the
power of His Spirit can people worship Him as He really is.” John 4:24 GNB
[A correct way this verse can be translated.]
J. M. Campbell writes: “Taken
simply to express the threeness, or the three-foldness of the One divine Being,
the names Father, Son and Holy Spirit are full of precious significance. But, instead of saying Father, Son, and
Spirit are one God, we ought to say there is one God, who is Father, Son and
Spirit. The Father is God in universal
relations; the Son is God in revelation; the Holy Spirit is God in
operation. If love be the immanent power
‘by which Deity unfolds into a Trinity,’ in the Father we have the original
fountain of love, in the Son we have love revealing itself, in the Holy Spirit
we have love communicating itself. God
as love could not remain in solitude or inactivity.”
Pentecost did not mark His
coming into the world or into the heart of man for the first time. But it did mark His coming in fullness of
power. It marked a new stage [dispensation]
in His continuous and continuing redemptive activity. “My Father has been working until now, and I
have been working” (Jesus in John 5:17)
Peter in his sermon on Pentecost
makes the fullness of the Spirit’s operations the distinguishing. feature of
the new covenant age ushered in that day.
“I will pour our My Spirit upon all flesh” was declared to be
fulfilled. Sons and daughters, young men
and old men, servants and handmaidens - there was a full outpouring of the Holy
Spirit upon all. Compare Peter’s defense
to the Jewish leaders at Jerusalem
3. Spiritual
worship. J. M. Campbell wrote: “The
truth that God is spirit carries with it the obligation to
worship Him in spirit and in truth. The
revelation of God in the Spirit being the final form of divine
self-manifestation, those who do not know Him in the Spirit do not know Him as
He is now revealing Himself, and those who do not worship Him in spirit do not
worship Him in the way in which He seeks to be worshipped.” An alternate translation of John 4:24 would
be: “God is Spirit, and only by the power of His Spirit can people worship Him
as He really is.”
Worship in the New Covenant is
not of “ritual and holy places.” Not
location centered, yet the First Century church gathered together in groups to
join in worship. Somewhat like the
synagogue, they sang praise, studied the Bible, preached [someone spoke a lesson
of encouragement], took up a collection to carry on the work of the Lord
(including taking care of the poor and needy).
Since Jesus raised from the dead, we now celebrate the Lord’s Supper
[the Holy Meal] to remember and to praise Him.
Material actions can have spiritual results. The group of worshippers has fellowship - koinonia
- as we/they raise one voice to God.
The more real the love of Jesus becomes in and through our lives [and
our worship], the more real our fellowship with fellow believers. Compare 1 Corinthians 10:16-17.
When we celebrate the Lord’s
Supper, our attention is drawn to the bread and the cup (fruit of the vine) and
the statement: “Do this in memory of Me.”
However, we first look to Him who invites us. As Jesus prepared for the Last Supper, He
said, “I have longed to eat this Passover with you” [Luke 22:15]. It is the Lord who first desires to unite
Himself to us. He loves us first and
invites us to His table at which He presides invisibly while, in His name, a
brother presides visibly. The Holy Meal
is Jesus coming to be with His own. The
Holy Meal is an act both of the Lord and of His Church; or rather, an act of
the Lord in and for His Church.
4. A spiritual
apprehension of Truth. The natural
man does not receive the things of the Spirit [1 Corinthians 2:14]. We thank God that the “ABCs of the Gospel are
so clear that anyone can understand enough to produce faith in us and prepare
us for spiritual knowledge. Being born
of “water and the Spirit” [John 3:5; Titus 3:5] gives us the ability to
evaluate the written word - God’s wisdom - as the Spirit makes this known to
us. To a soul immersed in carnality, the
spiritual world is a blank page. But to
the spiritual man/woman, sensitized by The Spirit, the spiritual world stands
revealed. Paul writes: “But we speak the
wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the
ages for our glory” [1 Corinthians 2:7].
Christ has finished the work He
came to do. A baptized Christian has
been born of water and The Spirit.
Baptism is a “finished work” in that he/she has already received the
fullness of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit
is not still on His way, but He is already radically present from the very
beginning of this Christian life - even if the awareness of His Presence is not
known by the person. Strictly speaking,
our need is not to become holy, but to remain so (compare 2 Corinthians
5:17): we must become what we already are.
We have received the Spirit of Holiness within us as a pledge and first fruits. Now we must be faithful to this and in
faithfulness cultivate the resources already within us. “You must be holy,” says God.
When the action of the Holy
Spirit becomes more effective in us, it is not that the Spirit has suddenly
awakened like some dormant volcano unexpectedly come to life. It is we who are awakened to His Presence by
a combined movement of His grace, a deeper faith, a more living hope, a more
burning love. It is God who reaches out
to us and bears us aloft. This is a
truth that we must learn and learn again.
5. An influx of
spiritual life. Salvation is much
more than forgiveness. We are being
transformed into the likeness of Jesus [2 Corinthians 3:6-18]. This larger life which the Holy Spirit brings
is the life which Christ brought down from heaven. Christ said: “I have come that they may have
life, and that they may have it more abundantly” [John 10:10]. This abundant life which He came to bestow is
administered by the Holy Spirit. “If
anyone thirsts, let him come to Me and drink. . . But this He spoke concerning
the Spirit, whom those believing in Him would receive” [John 7:37-39]. After Jesus was glorified in the Cross &
Resurrection, the Holy Spirit was given at Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is Himself the “rivers of living
water” of which Jesus spoke. Compare
Isaiah 12:3; 43:20; 44:3; 55:1; Ezekiel 47:1-12. And, Jesus’ offer to the Samaritan woman
[John 4:13-14].
6. The spiritual
man. As we bear the image of the
first Adam, so we Christians bear the image of Christ who is the second Adam [1
Corinthians 15:47-49]. Brinsmead said:
“The Holy Spirit works into us what Christ worked out for us.” We are to “work out our salvation” in the
sense of making our salvation a real experience, a new way of life. Compare Romans 12:1-2.
“For through Him we both have
access by one Spirit to the Father .” To
be a Christian is to be
Spirit-filled. Compare 1 Corinthians
12:13. In preaching the whole gospel, we
must include the role of The Spirit also.
[The written word is not intended to be a substitute for The
Spirit. Nor is the church a substitute
for Christ.]
A human is body/soul/spirit [1
Thessalonians 5:23]. The spiritual human
is possessed by The Spirit. We are
Spirit-moved, Spirit-possessed, Spirit-governed, one with Him in all things,
filled with the love of God, holy joy, and all the fruit of the Spirit.
The spiritual human has gained
the mastery over the material. Jesus and
His apostles dignified work by being a carpenter, a tentmaker, a
fisherman. But material things were
tools to be used to the glory of God. Compare Ephesians 4:28; Acts 6:1-6; Luke
3:11.
The spiritual human is one to
whom all of life is spiritual. No
distinction between sacred and secular.
It is not that the sacred has become common, but that the common has
become sacred. What is the church
doing? Plowing the field, clerking in a
store, feeding the hungry. But especially praying, preaching the gospel,
praising God. We know no one is a
“fleshly way” [2 Corinthians 5:15-19].
In Christ we are a new creation, related to God through a
new covenant, and the world is crucified to us.
The spiritual human is empowered
to do spiritual work. [Warning: it would
be an error to be so spiritually minded that we were no earthly good.] Filled with the Spirit’s sympathy and love,
he/she gives himself/ herself to others, expecting nothing in return. Without spirituality all gifts, natural and
acquired, are useless and vain. But let
a man be moved by the impulses which come from the heart of the Spirit and he
will be impelled to bring the fruits of his life as an offering of love, and
lay them down at the feet of the Divine Master whose service is the service of
mankind. Put “men whose heart God has
touched” behind the truth and it will touch other hearts. We do not need a “new gospel,” but we need
men and women who are filled with the power of the Holy Spirit.
7. Spiritual
holiness. “Fill the bushel (basket)
with wheat,” said John Newton, “and you may defy the devil to fill it with
tares.” Note Jesus’ parable about the
evil spirit [Matthew 12:43-45]. It is
not enough to flee from sin. We must
practice righteousness as a habit. As
light displaces darkness; as dead leaves are pushed off by the swelling of new
leaf-buds; as snow slides of the roof when reached by the heat from within; so
evil disappears when the Holy Spirit, the Conqueror of sin, takes possession of
the heart and life.
The Holy Spirit does not flow
into a self-emptied soul like air into a vacuum. The command is not, “Empty your hearts and I
will fill them.” It is “Open your hearts
and I will fill them.” Note the example
of Joshua the high priest [Zechariah 3:3-4].
“See, I have removed your iniquity from you, and I will clothe you with
rich robes.” Some are desperately trying
to do with their own efforts what has been already accomplished at the
Cross. Even at its best the religion of
the Pharisees was a thing of formality and ritual rather than life. It was good form, but lacked a right
spirit. Compare Luke 18:9-14. When at Pentecost God filled the lives of the
120 with power, and again at the house of Cornelius, a transformation took
place in the lives of these disciples which was as great a change as any of the
signs and wonders. Power to be holy was
bestowed on sinful men/women.
Paul warned about having a form
of religion, but denying the power (“they will hold to the outward form of our
religion but reject its real power” GNB) [2 Timothy 3:5; 1 Timothy 5:8]. Jesus Himself went about doing good and
healing all who were oppressed by the devil [Acts 10:38].
8. Spiritual
authority. J. M. Campbell wrote:
“Pentecost marks advancement from outward to inward authority; from outward
obedience to inward obedience; from outward restraint to inward constraint;
from a law written upon parchment to a law written in the heart.” Compare Paul in 2 Corinthians 3:3.
The authority of God over our
lives is spiritual. The Law was “rule and regulations” covering the details of
life. The New Covenant is written in
hearts and lives. The two great
commandments are to love God with our minds, heart strength, lives; and to love
our neighbors as ourselves. Jesus said
on these hang all the Law and the prophets.
The authority of God over our
lives is administered by Christ. “The
government is upon His shoulders.” His
nail-pierced hands hold the scepter of universal dominion. He is King in the absolute sense, having all
power and all authority. And He is a
King who loves His people and works for their good.
Christ administers His authority
through the Holy Spirit. J. M. Campbell
wrote: “Apart from the work of the Spirit upon the hearts of men, the influence
of Christ would soon have faded out, and Christianity have become a spent
(exhausted) force. By the coming of the
Spirit the spiritual authority of Christ was perpetuated, and His authority
made a reality in human experience.”
[Salvation is too important to be left entirely in human hands. Compare Romans 8:26-30.]
God, through Christ, through the
Holy Spirit, imparts a new principle of obedience. This principle of obedience is love -
Christian love. Compare 1 John 3:23;
4:7-21; 5:1-5. God’s own love is poured
out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit [Romans 5:1-5]. J. M. Campbell wrote: “The authority founded
upon love is compatible with the largest possible freedom. The law of love which Christ promulgated and
exemplified, the law by which He rules, is ‘the perfect law of liberty
(liberation).’” “Where the Spirit of the
Lord is, there is liberty.” Loveless
labor and duty is drudgery. Labor of
love is a delight. B. F. Mills was quoted
as saying: “to be a legalistic Christian is harder than to be a perfect Jew.”
9. Spiritual gifts. Each is born with a gift or gifts. All have at least one. This is true of natural, but not of spiritual
gifts. In the church of the First
Century spiritual gifts were given by the Holy Spirit to each as He willed, so
that each was equipped to do his/her part in the work of the church. Compare Ephesians 4:7-16; Colossians 3:12-17.
Coming together as an assembly
to worship is vitally important [Hebrews 10:25]. But there is also an overall “life” of the
congregation at all times. An English
writer of the 1800s wrote: “The whole world is a temple and man is everywhere a
worshipper.” Pure religion (worship -
threskea) is expressed in outward actions.
Jesus pictures the Judgment as “pass/fail” according to works of
kindness and helpfulness. (Matt. 25:31-48).
Some set up “zone meetings” to
get the congregation to interact with each other. Others act as though they believed the church
ceased to exist between “assemblies.”
The church
of Pentecost
Spiritual gifts are for the good
of the whole church. One has written:
“Authority owes it to itself to listen and to assume at times its proper
responsibility when faced with necessary changes: it will thus avoid being
relegated to rearguard action. It is
striking to see how the ‘children of light’ can be so far behind the ‘children
of this world’ when it comes to accepting self-criticism and a strict and
impartial evaluation of methods and results.”
10. Spiritual
operations. One wrote in 1973
looking forward to the future of his “brotherhood.” “We shall have, therefore, a period of
greater freedom in the life of the Church and her individual members. It will be a period of fewer legal obligations
and fewer interior restraints. Formal
discipline will be reduced; all arbitrary intolerance and all absolutism will
be abolished. Positive law will be
simplified, and the exercise of authority will be moderated. There will be promoted the sense of that
Christian freedom which pervaded the first generation of Christians.”
The Church in all her dimensions
obeys one and the same Spirit. As a
visible reality of this world, she must have laws and mechanisms. The Word of God and the Spirit of Jesus are
the ultimate authority in the Church and all “leadership” is at her service.
But the danger of legalism
becomes greater whenever the “leadership” attempts to create “laws” which are
too precise, with all the risks that implies, since these must then be applied
concretely in very different circumstances.
To strive for unity in the Church through rules and regulations is to
confuse unity with uniformity. [Unity is
in Christ and the Holy Spirit.]
One wrote to warn against
“legalism” in our thinking. “We have
made the Church an organization like any other.
We have invested all our efforts in making it able to stand by itself,
and now those efforts are expended in getting it to function. It goes, more or less, really mostly less,
but it goes. Only, it goes like a
machine, not like something alive.”
The Church must always step back
from her history and look at herself in the mirror, as James says, to “see the
face she was born with,” lest she go off and “forget what she looks like.” The history of the Church if for us a school
of humility. This same history is a
school of hope. We learn that the
Church’s most disconcerting moments prepared the way for unexpected tomorrows. We now can easily think we are at the end of the
world when we really are only at the end of a world.
11. A spiritual
Kingdom. Love & Power, There is a surprising link between Christian
love and spiritual power that we need to look at closely. The love of God that is poured out into our
hearts [Romans 5:5] is just that, the love of God. That love is profoundly humble, but it is
also profoundly free and powerful. This
doesn’t look like the freedom and power that the world recognizes. Immediately after Paul’s great hymn of praise
to Love [1 Corinthians 13], he goes on to say: “Pursue love, and desire
spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy.” It is not enough to sit back and let love
come to us - we are to pursue love. We are to seek eagerly after love, to seek
God Himself, to seek eagerly to walk the way of love. And it is not enough to be “open” to the
spiritual gifts; instead we must set our heart on them, positively desire them,
pray for them, confidently yield to them.
Love impels us to avail ourselves of all that God is willing to make
available to us as a way of helping and serving others, of setting others free,
of encouraging and strengthening them.
Not to set our hearts on spiritual gifts is to fall back into that
cowardice, timidity, or fear that Scripture explicitly warns us against. Compare 2 Timothy 1:6-7.
As one has said: “We must
recover holiness without legalism, boldness without presumption, and power
without pride. When the church does this
she will gain the attention of both the heavens and the earth, because her God
will be with her in His manifest presence.”
There is an energy, a dynamic, a
power, a strength imparted by God through the Holy Spirit, love poured out into
our hearts that energizes us to act.
“Him we preach, warning every man and teaching every man in all wisdom,
that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus. To this end I also labor, striving according
to His working which works in me mightily (Colossians 1:28-29 NKJV).
Christian love and spiritual
power are intended to be profoundly linked; when they are not, something less
than the fullness of the gospel is present.
Strengthened now, in faith, hope, love, and spiritual power, let us look
again at the situation in which we and the whole Church are living.
Ralph Martin wrote in 1994:
“Seventeen hundred years of Christendom are falling into ruins around us. An age is coming to an end, not just the end
of a remarkable century but the end of seventeen hundred years of
Christendom. The greatest apostasy since
the birth of the Church is clearly far advanced all around us.” Yet at the same time we can see that Africa
and India
God has made all mankind with an
instinct for truth, a sense of right and wrong, and most of all a hunger for
God Himself. Eventually, truth will win
out. Perhaps after great suffering and
great waiting, but truth will win out!!!
God is judging His church. Judgment begins at the house of God. 1 Peter
4:17. Our choice: Throw up our hands in despair? Lift up our
hands in prayer, praise, joy, hope!
Note 1 Timothy 2:8. We are
privileged to live in a time that while exceedingly difficult, is also a time
where we have seen and will see yet more of the great interventions of
God. But one thing is certain, God is
not worried about the situation. He is
not anxious. He is not afraid. He is in control and will see to it that all
things work out to the good of those who love Him. The nations may rage. Mankind may scheme. God laughs.
Compare Psalm 2:1-6.
At her best the Church is full
of faults, many warts and wrinkles. An
ideal church is nowhere to be found, but a church with an ideal is found
wherever there is a church in which the Holy Spirit dwells. She - the Church - believes that great things
are struggling to birth in the womb of the present. She “abounds in hope through the power of the
Holy Spirit” ([Romans 15:13]. The Holy
Spirit fills her life with a never failing hope. “Then he said to me, ‘Write: Blessed are those who are called
to the marriage supper of the Lamb!’ And
he said to me, ‘These are the true saying of God.’” Revelation 19:9.
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