Who do You Really Belong To?

Yesterday I needed something to do while the birds were out of their cages, so I watched a Youtube documentary about the Azusa Street revival. For people who don’t know, the modern charismatic movement is believed to have started in America. A few people received the baptism in tongues in Kansas, and the phenomenon took off in a church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles.

A preacher named Charles Parham ran a church in Topeka. Parham wanted to restore the baptism with the Holy Spirit to the church. A few people here and there had been known to speak in tongues, but generally, Christians lacked the baptism. Parham told his followers to pray and seek it, and one day in 1901, a lady in the church received it and began speaking in tongues.

Parham started a Bible school in Texas. A man named William J. Seymour traveled there to study. Afterward, he preached in the church on Azusa Street, and the baptism with the Holy Spirit started to spread. It is from this seed that the hundreds of millions of charismatic Christians alive today grew.

Here’s something remarkable: Seymour was not allowed to sit in classrooms with Parham’s other students. He was black, and Texas law made it impossible for him to join them. He had to listen from a hallway.

That’s not a big shock. What is surprising is that Parham himself believed in segregation. As things progressed, he got very angry about mixed worship and emotional services. I can understand not wanting to see confused people whoop and gyrate, but mixed worship is essential. Parham’s attitude is completely unlike that of modern charismatics.

One of the most remarkable and impressive things about charismatic churches is that they destroy barriers between ethnic groups. People who hate charismatic Christians think we’re all white racists, but that’s because they’ve never been to our churches. People who are full of hatred of Christianity are invariably ignorant, and many like it that way, because they want to hold onto their hate.

Charismatic Christianity is very popular among blacks and Hispanics. It’s very big in Africa and South Korea, for that matter. It attracts people of all races, and they worship together in churches. In Israel, Messianic Jews worship with Palestinians.

Whatever Parham’s problems were, and even if he ended up disgracing himself, he was right about some important things. The results prove that.

What interested me about the documentary was not the history so much as the way the revival came about. It didn’t happen unexpectedly, in a church where no one was trying to accomplish anything. It happened in a group of people who were trying to bring it about.

Azusa followed a “holiness” movement. I don’t know too much about it, but I do know that the holiness church in my dad’s hometown was where the holy rollers gathered. They weren’t calm Presbyterians.

Holiness people believed in sanctification, which means ridding yourself of things that don’t go with Christianity or the Holy Spirit. The documentary says they even gave up coffee, and they stopped taking in “popular entertainment.” This was back in the days when popular entertainment was pretty mild. They didn’t have to deal with Kim Kardashian and Madonna.

They believed sanctification was necessary in order for people to receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit. They called it a second work of grace, after salvation. Baptism with the Holy Spirit was the third grace.

This interests me, because although I have been baptized with the Holy Spirit, I have been pursuing sanctification for years. I know demons work in Christians, and I believe the way we live gives them permission to rule in us. I believe this curtails the influence the Holy Spirit exerts on us. He doesn’t barge in like the Incredible Hulk and punch demons in the face. To paraphrase Obama, if you like your demons, you can keep your demons.

For a long time, I’ve thought of sanctification as something the Holy Spirit does for us as we pray in tongues. I thought we were supposed to be careful not to push it. I’m always afraid of getting carnal, relying on my own strength, and getting in God’s way. I’ve been afraid of the supernatural rebound and backsliding that carnality produces. Now I’m not so sure about the way sanctification works. I think I probably have to take a more active role.

That would make sense. God gave us the flood to show us how cleansing works. He didn’t just send rain. He opened springs under the oceans. The wicked were caught in a pincer movement coming from both heaven and earth.

Before I saw the documentary, I already believed we had to attack our problems by blessing and cursing, from here on earth, AND by praying for God to help us from heaven. Perhaps sanctification works the same way. Maybe we’re supposed to get in there with pitchforks and clean the manure out of our lives.

I threw out maybe 200 CD’s the other day, long before last night. I no longer have a blues collection. I threw out Otis Redding, too. I threw out rock. I got rid of George Thorogood. I felt that I was insulting God by pretending to follow him while holding onto music that promoted sex, pride, and general stupidity. Now I feel I need to get rid of other things, such as offensive books. I still have some guitar instruction books full of rock and blues tunes.

I know people who can’t pray in tongues. They wonder why. Maybe they need to do some spring cleaning. Perhaps they should knock off the yoga, give up socialist politics, discard their dirty Hollywood DVD’s, and go through their book collections.

Every informed Christian knows that holding onto certain objects will give demons places in their homes. That’s nothing new. No Christian should have a Ouija board, tarot cards, a Buddha figure, Harry Potter books, any type of recreational drugs, or pornography. Maybe we’re not trying hard enough to get rid of the little things we think God will overlook.

A friend of mine loves Harry Potter. I can’t get her to give that filth up. She has two kids. I hope they never read J.K. Rowlings’ demonic nonsense.

I have to get rid of my dad’s books. I don’t know if any of them are problematic. I believe I threw some out when we moved. He had a copy of Gay Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife, which is about Talese’s decision to use a writing project as an excuse to participate in orgies. Whatever he has, it must go. His memory won’t permit him to remember what he has read from one day to the next, and I don’t share his taste in books. The boxes are in the way, and I want them out.

Last year or the year before, I threw out a couple of figurines he owned. One was a little naked fat woman, sleeping on a pile of grapes with her genitals showing. Another was an Inuit carving he bought when he took me to Alaska in 1972. Supposedly, these carvings have supernatural meaning.

I threw out our humidors. That hurt a little, because they were expensive, but what’s a Christian supposed to do with a humidor?

I do not lead a sin-free life, but I would like to. Maybe if I keep working to remove the devil’s anchors, I can do better.