Charge me up and Turn me Loose

My pastor has been doing a series on carnal Christians lately. It has been very interesting, because God has been working ON him, not just THROUGH him.

He told us he had been planning to do the typical spiel on carnality. Don’t look at porn. Don’t fornicate. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. But he said God changed the plan while he was working on his notes. The message he ended up teaching was about the need to spend time with God, in contrast to running around doing things you think (incorrectly) will please him.

This makes sense. The law came from God, but it was a poor substitute for God himself.

The law is like a sheet of instructions you leave for a babysitter. You write, “Don’t let Mikey stay up until twelve playing HALO.” Mikey tells the babysitter, “It doesn’t say anything about Worlds of Warcraft.” And the babysitter has to give in, and Mikey sleeps through the alarm the next morning. Everyone obeyed the law you wrote, but are you pleased? Of course not.

Jesus complained about Jews who used the law like Mikey did. For example, they were permitted to call their stuff “corban,” which means an offering to God. The great benefit of this was that they didn’t have to share these things with other people. You got to hold onto your money or stuff while you lived, and then it went to the Temple. Meanwhile, you might have two elderly parents starving in the gutter. So you used the law to kill, whereas the Spirit, which is God acting and speaking through you in real time, gives life.

Carnal people use their own tools instead of God’s. They may be serious Christians, and they may try to do what the Bible says, but they don’t get baptized with the Spirit, and they don’t get filled with God’s power and character, and they don’t get directions directly from God, so they end up doing things–in God’s name–which God does not like. In the book of Matthew, God called these people “workers of iniquity” and “lawless.” You’ll see it in the passage where Jesus talked about his judgment-seat statements to carnal Christians.

Here’s an example that will really irritate carnal people. A bum comes up to you and says he’s homeless and needs money for food. You say to yourself, “The Bible says we have to be good to the poor.” So you give him ten bucks. You think you’ve pleased God. But when you get to the judgment seat, you find out the bum bought crack with the money, got high, and was too happy to listen to the missionary God sent to take him to a Christian shelter. You felt all warm and fuzzy when you gave the money, but you ended up getting in God’s way and prolonging another person’s suffering.

A person who hears from God in real time may hear things that seem unscriptural. Remember what Paul said? He wanted to take the gospel to Asia, but the Holy Spirit held him back. Imagine how a carnal Christian would react. “SATAN is telling me I can’t preach the gospel in Asia! God would NEVER tell me not to go somewhere and preach the gospel!” And of course, Paul was correct, and he pleased God by choosing not to help the people in Asia. Why did God make this decision? Search me. He’s God. It’s not our place to judge him.

What God really wants is for all of us to be prophets, not just readers and interpreters of instructions. Moses prophesied about this. He said, “Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” Then of course there is the famous passage in Joel 2. God wants each of us to be with him, through the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and he wants us to hear from him minute to minute, instead of running to a book he wrote. The Bible is incredibly powerful, and it’s a wonderful gauge for determining whether things come from God, but it is not as good as having God with you. This is why God called Jesus “Emmanuel,” or “God with us.” He knew Jesus would baptize us with the Holy Spirit, and that would connect us to God’s power and guidance, like computers hooked up to the Internet.

The Bible is general. The Holy Spirit is specific. Sure, you can open the Bible and have your finger fall on a verse that tells you what to do in your specific situation, but the Holy Spirit can do much more than that. He can say, “Go buy a pair of red shoes and then take a bus to Omaha, where you will meet a chiropractor named Earl.” The Bible has limits, and the Holy Spirit does not.

The need for God’s presence is the reason loud, obnoxious worship music sometimes annoys me. God tends to speak in a quiet voice, and when someone is shrieking about Jesus at 125 dB, it can be hard to hear that voice. If you can’t hear it, you are not fully in God’s presence. And it’s not a matter of taste. All human beings are wired up the same. We are created in God’s image, not Marilyn Manson’s. Everyone is programmed for sensations like peace, joy, excitement, frenzy, and so on. It may sound hip and clever to say some people can hear God in a Gwar song, and there may be a grain (a tiny one) of truth in it, but it’s a misguided and counterproductive argument.

God’s nature is peaceful, warm, and reassuring, and the wrong music can make it hard to perceive those qualities. If you want to use harsh music to get immature people into the pews, great, but if you don’t end with music that reflects God’s nature, you have allowed the immature to shape you, instead of allowing God to shape them. The big problem with seeker-sensitive churches that rely on tools like obnoxious music is that they mimic the world until they become part of it. Christians are supposed to be missionaries to the unsaved, but if you ape the unsaved in order to avoid offending them, eventually, they succeed in converting YOU.

It also occurs to me that the word “carnal” should not be used as an insult. Until you get close to God, which takes time, carnality is all you have. Everyone starts out with carnality. And every Spirit-guided believer resorts to carnality from time to time. And we’re stuck in these bodies while we’re here, so it’s not like we can ignore the physical world and abandon physical tools. I think that when you call someone carnal, it should not be intended or perceived as an insult. It should be like telling someone he forgot to plug in his table saw. It just means you’re not using the power God has provided.

You can see why God equates faith with righteousness. In order to know what God really wants you to do, you have to have faith working in you, and that comes only through the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Once you are able to hear from God and use his power, you have to use faith to make it work, and you have to trust God over and over.

Think of the Jews at the edge of the Red Sea, following Moses by faith. Think of the Jews following Joshua around the city of Jericho over and over, doing absolutely nothing with their carnal tools. God’s power showed up and did astounding things for them, NOT BY THEIR OWN STRENGTH. This is what walking by faith is like, every day. God tells you he will do something, and you have to sit there and trust until it happens, and in doing so, you please him by allowing his plan to go forward minute by minute. No wonder God calls faith righteousness. Without it, you’re just doing what you think his book told you to do, and you will be wrong a big percentage of the time.

You can tell me your church’s doctrine says I’m stupid. Unfortunately, I am an eyewitness. I am applying this stuff every day, and it just keeps working. A Spirit-deprived (carnal) church is like the law: it’s a tutor that introduces people to God. Once you know the teacher and see him at work, how can you go back and listen to people who don’t know him? Does that make sense to you?

I don’t have all the answers, but what I believe works and works and works, and things get better and better and better. I would be afraid to go back to the powerless life. I am marked as the enemy’s enemy. I am a target. Don’t ask me to put down my machine gun and wait to get shot, just so I can conform to wrong doctrine and avoid offending people. I’d be like a snail without its shell. A tasty snack for the birds of the air.

Samson was given to us to show us the results of carnal doctrine. The seven locks of his hair represent the seven Spirits of God. Once they were gone, he was blind and weak, and his enemies owned him. This is the same guy who literally possessed the gates of his enemies when God was with him. He pulled the gates of Gaza out of the ground and took them home.

Christians who reject the Spirit and his power are like the unbelieving Jews of Jesus’s time. There is no real difference. Those Jews received salvation through sacrifice, so you can’t say Christians are better off because they get eternal life. We will see many, many pre-Christian Jews in paradise. Their problem was that they told people to earn God’s help, even after Jesus made it clear that a better way was coming. Carnal Christians do the same thing. They say God doesn’t work miracles. They say prayer in tongues is gibberish (or Satanic). They say Christianity is hard, making Jesus a liar (he said his burden was light). They tell us to transform ourselves by effort, ignoring the fact that Paul told us the Spirit would transform us. They even tell us to pray to people other than God.

I don’t want to be a whitewashed tomb. I want the living water to clean me from the inside out. Anyone can have this. Get on board and ride, or pick up your burden and walk.