A NEW PENTECOST

 

A NEW PENTECOST - PENTECOST CONTINUES TO THE END OF THE WORLD       8-19-05

 

     From time to time we think that God-The-Holy-Spirit shakes our world and produces revival, renewal, and spiritual awakening.  People repent and seek to be right with God.  Lives are cleaned up and morality thrives.  Righteousness becomes a virtue.  The fruit of The Spirit becomes real in the community of the faithful.  He - The Spirit - was/is to: prove to the world that they are wrong about sin and about what is right and about God's judgment (John 16:7-11).  We believe He produces in the Christian such things as Christian love (Romans 5:1-5), holy joy (1 Thessalonians 1:5-6; Acts 13:52), and fruitful Christian life (Galatians 5:22-23).

 

Preface:

    The church is faced with a sense of pessimism and defeat.   Christians spread gloom, even though this is the contradiction of everything they would be expected to believe.  But a real Christian is a man/woman of hope.  Apostle Peter went so far as to say that a disciple of Christ should always have an answer ready for people who inquire about hope (1 Peter 3:15).  Hope is an essential part of our very being.  But just now in some circles hope has drawn criticism from those who see it as just a “tranquilizer” to divert our attention from our problems.

    Christianity means hope!  We must take hold of hope and restore it to its rightful place in our thinking.  Hope is real, from God, and relies on God.  Hope makes a mockery of our weighty statistics, probability charts, forecasts of the future.   “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways, says the LORD” (Isaiah 55:8 NKJV). 

    Hope is the servant of God, the “Master of the impossible” who draws straight with crooked lines (compare Isaiah 45:2).  Hope is the “daughter” of the God who cannot be pigeonholed and who knows how to turn obstacles into servants to do His will.

    Some are distressed that they cannot recognize the church of their childhood (as they think they remember it).  Be of courage!  God the Holy Spirit is at work deep within the heart of His church.  He is the living hope for the future.  He is breathing into the church a fresh youthfulness. 

    We read the Book of Acts, which might be called “The Acts of The Holy Spirit.”  In thought we relive the time when the disciples were in the upper room, 120 of them,  doubtless the Seventy, along with several women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, and His brothers, who had not been believers before (Acts 1:14).  We pray: “Renew Your wonders, O Lord, in this our day give us a new Pentecost.”

    By the power of the Gospel, He - The Spirit - makes the church grow (1 Corinthians 3:6; 2 Corinthians 3:5; John 16:8-15).  We must look to The Spirit beyond men and their limitations.  We must open a few windows in the upper room and allow the first breeze of springtime to come in to us.  Paul warned that while some have the form, they deny the power (2 Timothy 3:5).  And Christianity is about power (2 Timothy 1:7, etc.).

    The Holy Spirit has  ways and means of renewing the church.  As the centuries go by, The Spirit, suddenly and without warning, releases a gulfstream of graces through the action of some believer (saint), who towers over the others.  Churches of Christ honor Campbell, father & son, Stone, Scott, and others who led the “restoration movement” to recover the Ancient Order of things.  Many whose names we do not know have also played a vital role as witnesses of the presence of The Holy Spirit with the church in moments of crisis and opportunity.

    Faith teaches us that suffering is the seed of life.  It is perfectly normal, then, that the sufferings of the church today should give rise to great hope.  No day was so filled with hope, as we look back, as the Friday before the crucifixion.  When Jesus was lifted up on the cross, He won the victory over death, hell, and the grave.  And so as someone wrote: “It is a happy time for the church when she is sustained by nothing other than God.”  Another wrote: “The hour of suffering is the hour of God.  The situation is hopeless: this, then, is the hour for hoping. . . When we have reasons for hoping then we rely on those reasons. . . We should rely not on reasons, but on a promise - a promise given by God. . . We must admit that we are lost, surrender ourselves as lost, and praise the Lord who saves us.”

    Each new crisis teaches us that we are living at the turning point of the history of the church.  God The Holy Spirit is continually revealing, to a degree unknown before, a mystery of death and resurrection.  Now, and always, it is the time to listen to “what the Spirit is saying to the churches” (Revelation 2:29).  He is telling us, it seems, to carry out the very necessary reform and renewal of the church.  The church will always need spiritual awakening.  As someone said: “The church must grow from the inside out.”

    One in another “brotherhood” wrote in 1964: “The world today is giving birth, and birth is always accompanied by hope.  We view this present situation with a great Christian hope and a deep sense of our responsibility for the kind of world that will be born of this travail.  This is the hour of the Church: united, it must offer to this world being born, some Christian orientations as to its future.”  Again: “All that is necessary for evil to succeed, is for good men to do nothing.”

    When asked: “Why a you a man of hope, despite the confusion in which we find ourselves today?”  My answer was: “Because I believe in the Holy Spirit.”  Certainly the Triune God is in control and working out His Great Plan.

 

WHY  DO  YOU  HOPE

 

Stand up and praise the Lord your God!

Praise Him forever and ever!

Let everyone praise His glorious name,

although no human praise

can ever be great enough.

 

Today is holy to our Lord,

so don't be sad.

The joy that the Lord gives you

will make you strong.

Do as the Lord says,

and you will be safe from sin.

 

The long history of the church is filled

with the wonders of God The Holy Spirit.

Who would dare to say that the love

and resourcefulness

of God were exhausted?

 

I believe in the surprises

of God The Holy Spirit.

The ways of His Providence

are by nature surprising.

We are not prisoners of "fate,"

nor of the gloomy predictions

of sociologists

and those who peer into the future.

 

We must therefore be ready

to expect

the unexpected

from God!

 

Think of the prophets and

the great men and women

of old.

Who, in times of darkness,

discovered a spring of grace

and shed beams of light on our path.

 

I am a man of hope - not

from human reasons

nor from a natural optimism.

God is here, near us,

unforeseeable and loving,

working in the world

at this very minute.

 

To hope is a duty, not a luxury.

To hope is not to dream,

but to turn dreams into reality.

Blessed are those who dream dreams

and are ready

to pay the price

to make them come true.

 

To those who welcome Him

He gives each day fresh liberty

and renewed joy and trust!!!

I am a man of hope!

I believe in God The Holy Spirit!

I claim the promises of the Lord!

 

Luke records Jesus as saying:

Keep on asking, seeking, knocking.

And don't you think the Father

who conceived you in love

will give you the Holy Spirit

when you ask Him?"

[Luke 11:9-13]

 

“If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!”  Luke 11:13

 

 

The Holy Spirit - Life-breath of the Church.

 

1. WHAT KIND OF CHURCH?

 

     

      The word “church” applies to a whole variety of images and models.  It can be defined as a hierarchical society, the mystical body of Christ, the people of God, a community either local or universal, an eschatological community, the sacrament of Christ, a service to the world.  A reason for our present tensions is that certain people which to choose one of these models in such a way that it excludes or dominates the others.  The truth is more complex:  The Church is itself a mystery which opens on to the “unsearchable riches of Christ,” which we must accept in their totality. 

 

      A preacher from another tribe wrote about the church of the future.  "We shall have, therefore, a period of greater freedom in the life of the church and of her individual members.  It will be a period of fewer legal obligations and fewer internal 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."