This book, Go Now, is filled with bold faith and miracle stories from the head hunters in the northern Philippines to Communist China where Wendell and his wife Daisy, made over 1000 border crossings with suitcases filled with Bibles. Wendell gives you an intimate inside look at how God worked deep in his heart rescuing a discontented young man and crafted him into an effective tool for His service. Now, onto Post #5 of 9.
Pastor Derstine briefly explain the typical Church-ianity I had been experiencing primarily up to this time in my life, would always leave me feeling empty, and indeed, there was more! I leaned forward eager for whatever he was about to tell me.
“Have you ever heard of the Holy Spirit?” he asked.
Well, that question surely opened a can of worms. During my last years of high school, I had actually heard quite a bit about the Holy Spirit. Though I didn’t understand much about it (Him) I knew the Holy Spirit was somehow a part of God. I understood much more about who Jesus was, and I knew that God was out there somewhere, but how all this fit together was a great mystery to me. What I did know was that churches were arguing about who the Holy Spirit was, what He does, and how to get Him. Some said you get Him at the time of salvation and that’s all there was. Others said that you get Him as a second infilling of the Holy Spirit, called a baptism of the Holy Spirit. Some referred to the infilling of the Holy Spirit as a “second work of grace.” In fact, there was discussion about whether we should even need or want the Holy Spirit.
There were also discussions and arguments about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Is speaking in tongues a required sign of having received the Holy Spirit, or is it a manifestation of the devil? People who had received or been baptized in the Holy Spirit, as some would insist you must be, seem convinced that they had a higher connection to God than those other Christians without such experiences. And although their behavior was so weird, it seemed as if they did have some special kind of connection that I was somehow lacking.
All this conflicted with the concept I had grown up with that God is a God of order, discipline, and correctness, demanding a kind of holy purity. What followed from this understanding was the assumption that if you put on a good-enough act on Sunday when the religious crowd is around, what goes on the rest of the week doesn’t really matter.
I had witnessed the split of several churches over the subject of the Holy Spirit and I had come to my own conclusion that the Holy Spirit was probably something good but also something that created a lot of other problems too. Because the Holy Spirit issue was so controversial, I had concluded that I would be much better off if I kept myself at a safe distance until the dust settled.
To be continued tomorrow…
FYI, I’m thinking of spicing up your day a tad with a double header today with a second post this afternoon by Marlin Miller of Plain Values. You can visit merlinsmustache.com after it posts at 12:01 pm, thus not needing to wait on my email announcement sometime later….