No Pillar of Salt Here

July 11th, 2011

Nothing of Interest Lies Behind Me

If I had to name the strangest thing the Holy Spirit has done for me, I think it might be this: he has made me into a morning person.

I have never liked mornings. For most of my life, I didn’t really wake up until noon, and I felt most energetic late in the evening. I hated getting out of bed.

These days I don’t leave the bedroom until I’ve spent a long time in prayer, much of it in tongues, and I feel God’s presence come into me, and I sense that he has prepared a victorious day for me. I feel invigorated and eager to get up and see what’s ahead. That is just crazy.

The Holy Spirit is doing great things at my church. This is a welcome change. We’re supposed to be charismatics, but I don’t recall seeing the gifts of the Spirit in action in our services. It’s my understanding that some things have been prohibited, because of the danger of scaring off new people. First limitations were placed on exhibitions of the Spirit’s power. Then they disappeared entirely.

I guess I’m overstating what has happened. Sometimes someone who is teaching says something that clearly came from God. And I have seen some “prophecies” which I think came from adrenaline, not God. But the general rule is that the services are scripted down to the minute, and we try to make each weekend service exactly like the others.

The problem with this is that God has to be unpredictable. It’s great to try to have order in your life, but God has to have room to do things we don’t expect. One of his great strengths is his knowledge of the future. His enemies don’t have that. So it’s a tool he uses to frustrate them, and the only way he can do that is to do things that can’t be predicted.

The crucifixion is an example. The disciples were crushed when they learned it was going to happen. But look how it turned out. It restored us to our positions as governors of the earth, and it saved us from hell. Some of us, anyway. God did the unexpected, and he even tricked Satan into helping.

It seems like the sermons are getting less powerful over time. We hear the same kind of stuff apostate churches teach. “Try hard.” “Be good.” “Pray a lot.” But behind the scenes, among a few people here and there, the Holy Spirit is working a counter-revolution.

I’ve persuaded a bunch of people to start praying in tongues more, especially in my prayer group. Wild things are happening. I used to come in and try to tell people what I had learned about the Holy Spirit. Now they’re telling ME. I learn wonderful things from them. I feel built up when they testify about what God is doing for them and their families. And our numbers are growing.

We have a guy who has only shown up twice. Once a long time ago, and again this past Saturday. His wife is Jewish. To her, a cross and a swastika are pretty much interchangeable. I believe she’s an atheist, so her objections are not based in Judaism.

He says he has been hiding his Bible from her. He put it in a box covered with foil, so she won’t know what it is. He reads it when she’s not around. He’s an outcast in his own house.

She made him go into psychotherapy. She chose the doctor. He’s a Jewish atheist. He tells my friend the Bible is full of lies. Surely that’s unethical. He ought to be turned in to the Department of Business and Professional Regulation.

His wife believes Christianity is a mental illness, and it sounds like his doctor is in the same camp. Mind you, my friend is not bothering her. He’s not telling her what to believe. He’s not trying to force her to go to church or become a Christian. He’s just praying and reading his Bible, and she is treating him like a lunatic. She even told him to choose between her and the Lord. Fortunately, he said he would choose the Lord.

Here’s the great thing about his story. God baptized him with the Holy Spirit, even though he wasn’t free to go to church or associate with Christians. He started praying in tongues one day. No one laid hands on him or prayed for him. It’s like what happened to me a long time ago. God has a purpose for this man, and he is not going to let the man’s wife get in the way.

We started reminding him that he is the priest of his home. The man is the head of the woman. He is supposed to lead, not follow. We told him he had to quit hiding. If he reads the Bible in the living room, his wife’s head isn’t going to explode. It’s not going to hurt her. Let her be unhappy, if she so chooses; it’s not her place to tell him what to do.

I don’t know what my friends in the group would have told him a year ago. Probably useless things. “Tough it out.” “Christians are supposed to suffer.” “Stop complaining.” Instead, because they’ve been building themselves up in the Spirit, they told him the right things. Take charge, obey God, pray in tongues, associate with other believers, and let God work it out. Don’t let the tail wag the dog. And I told him he needed to go see my Messianic friends. He’s not Jewish, but he knows what it’s like to be shunned by a Jewish wife. They would have unique insights to help him succeed.

Maybe she’ll leave. She has free will. But if that happens, her husband should be able to say he provided a clear example for her.

I wish I had time to talk about the way God is unifying my friends and me. I’ll give an example. Yesterday an illegal alien showed up with a newborn baby and started begging in front of the church, holding a sign. I had to deal with her, in my capacity as a security volunteer. I needed someone who spoke Spanish. There are few Cubans in my church. Nearly all Cubans speak Spanish. We have some Puerto Ricans, but they generally speak Spanish poorly. We have a pastor who speaks Spanish, but he didn’t want to do it. Guess who God found for me? A young man who sees me as a source of Biblical knowledge. Someone who takes my Facebook stuff, without telling me, and reposts it on Twitter.

We went and talked to her and took her to the church’s cafe. I felt like God wanted me to do something for her, so I ordered her some food, and I agreed to do other things the Spirit seemed to suggest. While I was at the cash register, my friend Alonzo came out behind me with his credit card out and told the cashier he was paying for whatever I was having. I said, “It’s for someone else.” He said, “It doesn’t matter. I got it.” Later he told me the Holy Spirit told him to go up and pay for what I was ordering.

We heard a sermon about the power of words. The pastor mentioned two things. He said the Bible says we conquer through the blood and the word of our testimony. He also discussed the story of Moses at Meribah, where he struck a rock with a stick to open up a spring, instead of speaking to it, as God had commaned.

While I was working in the sanctuary, Alonzo came up, and I started telling him what I believed the true significance of these things was.

I said I thought the Meribah story was about the baptism with the Holy Spirit and prayer in tongues. Water, wells, and springs usually symbolize the Holy Spirit inside us. “Beersheba,” for example, means “well of seven,” and seven is the number of the Holy Spirit, as symbolized by the seven lamps in the Holy of Holies.

We are supposed to get the living water flowing, pray in tongues, and take on God’s nature and his power. We do this instead of struggling to please him with our own puny tools. Apostate churches, however, claim tongues are from the devil, and they tell us we have to earn our righteousness and our favor from God. Jesus bought it all with his blood, but we have to earn it!

When Moses struck the rock, he was using human effort. He tried to “help” God. Instead, he deprived God of his glory. His punishment was that he was kept out of the Promised Land, which symbolizes the kingdom of God. Spirit-filled believers have God’s kingdom inside them; a believer who rejects tongues and will not listen to the Holy Spirit will not enter the kingdom.

I told Alonzo this was my take, and he started telling me he had told his wife the same thing. And we had a remarkable conversation about it, in which we confirmed each other’s conclusions.

I said I believed the passage about the blood and the word of our testimony referred to salvation (the blood) and tongues, in which the Holy Spirit testifies using our mouths. This is the word of God. It’s the sword of the Spirit. Scripture is the word of God, but so is anything God says today. And of course, Alonzo was right there with me. He said he believed the same thing.

The unfortunate thing is that the sermon didn’t connect the Holy Spirit and tongues to the power of words. What we received was a shallower interpretation. “Be careful what you say, and make sure you speak positive things in God’s name.” That’s great, but it’s the tip of the iceberg. We should have received the whole thing. People came for a meal, and all they got was a roll and some parsley.

I have had concerns that I haven’t been listening to the Holy Spirit lately; not as much as I should have. So I’m trying to do a better job.

A week or two back, in our prayer group, I felt that the Holy Spirit was telling me to make a big sacrifice in order to put a complete end to a terrible relationship. I was involved with the wrong woman, and the relationship failed, but I got stuck with a worldly connection to her. I feel that the Holy Spirit has told me to get rid of it. Why would God provide me with someone new, while there are still strings tying me to someone else? If I were a woman, and I married a man, I wouldn’t want to see him writing alimony checks or doing anything else to indicate he had a relationship–even a dead one he regretted and thoroughly repudiated–with someone else. So I plan to listen to the Holy Spirit. He will wash this person out of my life for good and clear the way for someone else.

When I do what I’m planning to do, I will be wronged to a certain extent, but it’s better to be wronged than to wrong. God repays. He repays you, and if they don’t change, he repays the people who wrong you. We are not supposed to jump in the mire with the pigs and mud wrestle. We fight principalities and powers, not people.

“Meribah” means “bitterness” or “quarreling.” I don’t want to get bitter because I got stuck fighting someone with earthly tools. Bitterness may rest in those who wrong me, but it will be rinsed out of me by God’s cleansing waters. When I think about the things that have been done to me, I have my crabby moments, and sometimes I give in a little, but I know that the future is sweet, and this garbage will soon be too far behind me to see.

Comments are closed.