Reclaiming Pentecost

Though I’d heard the word “Trinity” murmured in the background of my teen journey as I was struggling to understand how and why the God I’d known growing up as a Jewish kid could have a Son, I was focused primarily on Jesus. It wasn’t until after I came to faith in Jesus that I realized there was someone else bundled into this package of belief: the third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

My reading of the Old Testament had highlighted the Spirit of God’s work in a variety of ways, which awakened me to the way the New Testament spoke of him in places like John 14:15-31 and Acts 2:1-41. The Bible offered me the outline, and I looked to other believers around me in the 1970’s to fill in that outline. Everyone seemed to have the inside track on how this would look:

• I heard from the Dispensationalists on the Moody Bible Institute radio station that the kinds of supernatural things attributed to the outpouring of the Holy Spirit found in the book of Acts (tongues, healings, prophecy) ended when the last of Jesus’ twelve disciples died.

• I heard from televangelist Pat Robertson on The 700 Club that miracles still happened today if only I had enough faith to lay my hands on the TV to receive what God wanted to give me. I could also demonstrate my faith by sending a sacrificial financial gift to his ministry.

• I heard from faith healers like Charles and Frances Hunter, a.k.a. “The Happy Hunters”, that illness was a sin, and health and prosperity was my Holy Spirit birthright.

• I heard from some of my friends who attended Pentecostal Assemblies of God congregations that the only way I could be assured of my relationship with God was via the baptism of the Holy Spirit as evidenced in speaking in tongues.

• I heard from a fellowship group I used to visit on Saturday nights (that eventually became a full-fledged cult) that the Holy Spirit spoke directly to the group’s leaders, and I could experience the abundant life Jesus promised if I trusted those leaders without question.

• I heard from my Jesus Freak friends that the goosebumps I sometimes experienced from singing Jesus music songs were a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Yes, it was all very confusing.

Since the Bible told me that God wasn’t a God of confusion, I tried to harmonize these various teachings. Some went together better than others: Pat Robertson, the Hunters, and my Assembly of God friends all swam in the same stream, though with different emphases. The No Name Fellowship group and my Jesus Freak friends were adjacent to that stream, though they resided on different sides of the stream’s bank. The Dispensationalists were definitely not adjacent in any way to that stream, but since they used the same vocabulary words, I figured at the time that they were saying the same thing but in a way that seemed more buttoned-up and orderly than the unpredictable emotionalism that seemed to mark the encounters with the Holy Spirit my Pentecostal and Charismatic friends were having.

There were two common denominators among each of these groups. The first was the conviction that only the Holy Spirit could bring spiritual revival to church and culture alike, though exactly what that revival would look like varied pretty widely by group and denomination. Was it a return to the perceived morality and social order of the 1950’s? An Acts 2 experience where thousands came to faith in the resurrected Jesus all at one time? Breathtaking supernatural signs and wonders like healings?

The second was that so much of the way each talked about the Holy Spirit had more to do with what this Third Person of the Triune One God would do for me, myself, and I. Would he bring certainty and order to my faith and teach me what the Bible said (which matched what they taught), as my Dispensational siblings promised? Or would he give me either a transcendent perpetual spiritual high and/or power, health, wealth, and fame, as my Pentecostal/Charismatic siblings suggested? We’ve often excelled at missing the point.

According to Jesus, this was the role of his Spirit:

But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he will make known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you. (John 16:13-15)

No matter what he does - and the Spirit does a lot including but not limited to teaching, comforting, confronting, convicting, revealing, giving spiritual gifts for the good of others in the Body, growing spiritual fruit in our lives as a mark of the reign of God on earth, guiding us toward repentance, and inspiring – he does so as a co-equal member of the Godhead in order to glorify the Father and the Son. (Mind blowing, right?) He does not live in us in order to give us control or lovely parting gifts to upgrade our circumstances. What he does give us is something so much greater - resurrection life. His life. Communion with him.

Maybe you’ve had some distorted versions of the ministry of the Holy Spirit presented to you along the way. I know I echoed some of the warped theology and practice I imbibed during the early years of my journey with Jesus. (If you knew me then and I left some bad theological baggage behind in your life, please message me so I can properly apologize.) Maybe you’ve only seen the destructive merging of Charismatic Christianity with the unquenchable hunger for power that has become the New Apostolic Reformation. Maybe you’ve witnessed a toxic pastor invoke the Holy Spirit to ensure that he is not exposed as a sexual or spiritual abuser. Maybe you’ve been taught that Pentecost was nothing more than a case of mass religious hysteria or the stuff of folk tales. But if you’ve read this far, maybe you hope for something different than those things.

That longing for what is true and real, that longing for hope – even if it is as faint as a flicker of flame – is itself a gift of the Holy Spirit.

The church calendar celebrates Pentecost this year today, Sunday, June 7th. (The Jewish holiday on which the events of Acts 2 occurred is called Shavuot, and was actually celebrated a week ago.) May each of us who has witnessed the false and warped representation of the work of the Spirit feel, even slightly, the shift of the winds because they are, indeed, heralding holy change.

Come, Holy Spirit.

Change is coming

Downsizing: Letting Go of Evangelicalism’s Nonessentials offers a critical review of the last 50 years of Evangelicalism in America. It is a conversation to which you’re invited, because whether you have been a participant or an observer, you have a story to tell, too. I wrote this book to make space for that story. Downsizing is ultimately a book of Spirit-infused hope. The book releases August 19th. You can use one of the buttons below to preorder your copy so you’ll get it hot off the press that day! :

The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let the one who hears say, “Come!” Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life. - Revelation 22:17

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