Bringing the Streams Together

John 17:20-26; Colossians 3:9-17; 1 Thessalonians 5:19-24

I decided to do a fourteenth and concluding sermon in the Six Streams of Living Water series. Let’s assess what we have learned and how we can apply it in the life of our church.

We have learned that in the early nineteenth century founding days of our Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement and in our period of most rapid growth in the early and mid-19^th Century, all Six Streams were operating within our movement. This was true in the other mainline Protestant churches such as Methodist, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian. Most mainline churches were built (1) on the authority of inspired Scripture and the compelling Great Commission characteristic of the Evangelical Stream, (2) on the focus on personal transformation into Christlikeness characteristic of the Holiness Stream, and (3) on the guiding and empowering presence of the Holy Spirit characteristic of the Charismatic Stream. The other three streams were present also. Then, settled middle class spiritual complacency and the influence of skeptical higher education on the training of clergy caused mainline churches to become less friendly to the streams on which they had been built, causing the less comfortable and less educated members of mainline churches to withdraw and start their own denominations. These new denominations tended to be primarily One Stream denominations, either Evangelical or Holiness or Charismatic. Without the checks and balances of the other streams, they fell into excesses and abuses, but they still had a dynamism that caused them to thrive better than the old mainline churches.

Meanwhile the old mainline churches focused at the congregational levels on respectability and at the leadership levels on the Social Justice Stream which they eventually overly politicized and inadequately grounded in personal morality, driving even more believers from their folds. The result of all this is that the old mainline churches in this country are in precipitous decline. Is there hope for recovery? Perhaps, but it will take bold action.

While Judy and I were in Indianapolis, we became acquainted with a United Methodist congregation in Ginghamsburg, Ohio, a bedroom community outside Dayton. About 15 years before we became aware of it, the congregation was in rapid decline and down to 90 members. We were told that the Methodist hierarchy wanted to close the church and so sent them the pastor that they thought least equipped to renew the congregation and most likely to alienate their members. The bishop appointed Michael Slaughter. At first, it looked like the hierarchy had it figured right. Slaughter arrived and announced his program for attempting to renew the church. The membership dropped to down to 45. But then it started to grow. In a few years it reached 300. In a few more years it reached 2,000. According to its website, the congregation is now 4,500 strong in weekend worship attendance, the largest United Methodist Church in Ohio.

Don’t worry, that won’t happen here. We are not sitting in the path of urban sprawl. In our setting, topping 300 combined in two or three worship services by 2020 is a plenty big goal. But the principles on which Slaughter renewed a mainline church are still valid for us.

More than on any other Stream, Slaughter built on the Evangelical Stream with its focus on the authority of the Bible, the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the bringing of people to faith in Christ. Slaughter announced that the first principle of growth would be to move from the vague theism that was being taught in the church before his arrival to clear proclamation of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Further, he asserted that telling people about Jesus was the business and purpose of the church and that this purpose would govern everything the church did, even how it worshiped. He wanted to be clear from the beginning with every person to whom the church presented the gospel that following Jesus costs us everything that we might want to claim as our own rights. In other words, a believer in Jesus Christ holds no area of his or her life back from Jesus’ command, from dedication to Jesus’ mission.

Also in line with the Evangelical Stream, Slaughter announced that scriptural truth would be the primary source for everything they preached and taught, for everything they believed and did.

Going beyond the Evangelical Stream to the Holiness Stream, Slaughter insisted that their scriptural foundation was not just for information, but for transformation. To support this transformation he asked new members to covenant to follow certain practices that are typical of disciples of Jesus Christ, things very similar to our 9 ways, including belonging to a small group that incorporated accountability to the covenant and to spiritual honesty.

In line with the Charismatic Stream, Slaughter saw a major function of the church as helping members identify their spiritual gifts and to respond to the callings, leading, and empowerment of the Holy Spirit.

He insisted that strong spiritual leaders were part of the Holy Spirit’s work, that they were not managers, but Spirit-led visionaries who must hear and articulate the vision and mission of the church and then embody and model important aspects of that mission and vision. In other words, the leader must tie together the Contemplative, Charismatic, and Incarnational Streams… listening to God in prayer, discerning the leading of the Holy Spirit, and living it out in daily life, and that the pattern set by the adventurous leaders was then to characterize the whole membership.

Slaughter did not neglect the Social Justice Stream, but moved it beyond ideals, positions, and stands and moved it into tangible commitments. Slaughter insisted that the mission of the church included serving the least and the last. For starters, he asked each church family to consider connecting to one underprivileged inner city Dayton child and buying the same kinds of gifts, clothing, and school supplies for that child that they bought for their own children. That’s where the rubber (of expensive athletic shoes) met the road. He then used these connections to inner city life as the foundation for building vision for all sorts of missions to address the underlying problems. He encouraged members to find their individual callings to social service and to pursue them. In short, Slaughter led his church to a well-rounded approach that brought together every one of the Six Streams, and it was very fruitful. I don’t know if he even knew about the Six Streams concept. He just did them, and it worked.

Does that mean that we should imitate the Ginghamsburg church? Not in the details. God led Slaughter and the members of his church to do what was right for Ginghamsburg and Dayton, Ohio. God will lead us to do what is right for Berryville and Carroll County, Arkansas. But I believe that the healthiest of churches anywhere will have all six streams flowing together, with appropriate checks and balances.

I began by talking about the fact that what led to success for the early Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement was lost, fragmented in mainline churches. I am suggesting the Six Streams as the corrective for that decline. The great thing is that it is not only a moving forward, but also a return to what made our movement (and the other mainline churches) strong in the first place.

How do we bring the Six Streams back together? We do it with a combination of openness and caution. We drop our prejudices against the best parts of each stream. We guard against the worst parts of each stream. For instance, for the Evangelical Stream, we develop an enthusiasm for the richness of inspired Scripture and for obeying the Great Commission to go and make disciples, but we guard against angry crusades against those we identify as sinners. For the Holiness Stream, we take very seriously the purpose of God to restore our lifestyles to fit with the image of God, but we guard against legalistic self-righteousness. For the Charismatic Stream, we welcome the leading and empowerment of the Holy Spirit in all its Scriptural actions, but we guard against undiscerning fascination with all things supernatural and spectacular and speculative. And so on.

The Apostle Paul demonstrates this open and cautious pattern with regard to the Charismatic Stream in 1 Thessalonians 5:19-24. Paul establishes two guidelines for openness: do not quench the Spirit; do not despise prophecies (that is, Spirit-given messages). He establishes a basic rule for how we evaluate prophecies: test everything; hold fast what is good; abstain from every form of evil. He puts the measuring rod before us, our wholeness and maturity in Christ: Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely (or make you totally holy), and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus. He makes clear that this is the work of God: He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.

That kind of sane balance is what we are aiming for with all Six Streams, and we are aiming for the result of wholeness in our church life and wholeness in our personal lives. May it be so. Amen.

And Behold, It Was Very Good

Experiencing the Incarnational Tradition and the Sacramental Life

Genesis 1:24-31; 2:1-3; Ephesians 4:17-24; Revelation 21:1-5

Genesis 1:1 asserts that God created everything. The point is that God is Sovereign over all creation. Figuring out how the seven days of creation relate to scientific theories of origins might be an entertaining pastime, but I do not see how such speculation helps us live the Christian life. I prefer to focus on the purpose God has in revealing these days of creation. In 1:2-13 the text asserts that all created matter was in unproductive disorder until the Spirit of God began to move and God began to speak forth his sovereign purposes. This tells us that God’s Spirit and Word are the foundation of meaningful life. Now that is important to know!

God on Day One created light, put the light in regular rotation with darkness, and saw that the light was good.

God on Days Two and Three divided the waters above from the waters below, creating a breathable atmosphere, and then raised up land to divide the waters below, giving a place for vegetation, and saw that the sea, the land, and the vegetation, not to mention the atmosphere, were all good.

God on Day Four assigned to the heavenly lights the role of marking the seasons, making calendars possible, a fact that is important not only for farmers, but also for a covenant people who will honor God with regular days and seasons of worship, rest, commemoration, and celebration, and saw that this ordering of seasons was good.

On Day Five, we see the animals of sea and air populating the world, and on the first portion of Day Six, we see the land animals further populating the world, and on each day, God saw that this rich variety of animal life was good, and blessed the animals to be fruitful and multiply.

Let’s read about the last portion of Day Six, which describes the second most important purpose of creation, in Genesis 1:26-31: 26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Human beings, male and female, are created in the image of God. That means that human beings have the capacity to communicate with God and to represent God’s nature and purposes. It is this created capacity that leads to their being assigned the role of dominion or reigning over creation. This is not an unlimited reign. They rightly reign only so long as they fulfill their created purpose of representing the nature and purposes of the Creator for his creation. Some things were initially revealed about those purposes.

One, God has revealed that the light, the air, the land, the water, the ordering of the season, the creatures of air and sea and land are all good. Add the human beings, and the whole thing taken together is VERY GOOD.

Two, God has blessed the plant life, the animal life, and the human life to be fruitful, to reproduce in such ways that the rich and varied goodness of creation is sustained.

Three, God believes in the value of order in all creation. God ordered things on the days of creation, and assigned human beings as his representatives to maintain a fruitful order. God’s words about grain fruit, nuts, and leafy vegetation indicate specifically that there is an orderliness to food production and consumption, and that human beings are responsible for maintaining that orderliness in accord with God’s intentions. God later will make explicit a concession that allows human beings to eat meat, but again the assumption is that this will be done in an orderly way that is proper to the fact that the created order is VERY GOOD, and that God values each part of it. So, from the beginning of creation, God’s purpose, not just for a select chosen people, is that all human beings are assigned to maintain the creative, fruitful balance of a good creation, and in doing so, to represent the nature and purposes of God.

The creative balance is terribly important. For some reason, near the end of the last two summers, roadrunners have moved near the Christview Ministries Center. It is such fun to see them, to watch the way they move. They make me laugh. I am hoping that they also bring some balance to nature. In my opinion, the numbers of copperheads could be reduced a bit in our woods [On my Monday Sabbath, the day after I preached this sermon, a roadrunner came to the window where I was seated at my computer, looked at me, cocked his head once to each side, and decided that he should quickly and unobtrusively exit stage right. His exaggerated pivot and long tip-toe-y stride were so funny that I had a belly laugh].

Four, beyond what is here revealed, we should note that, as the human beings God created are fruitful and multiply, they will need to extend the creative orderliness from the natural order to the social order. Our families, communities, nations, and cultures also need to be organized with an eye to God’s creative plans, to God’s special kinds of orderliness, to God’s ways of love, compassion, mercy, justice, peace, and hope. When Israel and then the church are later called to represent God’s nature and purposes, to be a kingdom of priests and a holy people, God intends that calling to be shared with all the people of the earth. The people of God are to live in such a way that the remaining people of the world will be drawn into relationship with their Sovereign Creator.

We have talked about the second most important message of this text, our calling as human beings to be children of God. The most important message of this text comes on the Day Seven in Genesis 2:1-3: 1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2 And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. 3 So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. God did not rest because he was tired or because he was limited in his power to attend to many things simultaneously. God set aside the seventh day as holy because he wished to set a model for us who were created in his image, a model of observing a periodic Sabbath day.

The purpose of God’s resting is fulfilled in the fourth of the Ten Commandments, Exodus 20:8-11: 8 “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, 10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. 11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

The Sabbath principle is that, if we wish to fulfill our divine calling to represent the nature and purposes of God, we must set significant time aside from our own agendas to let God be God, to let God be the Sovereign Creator and Provider, to let God speak his purposes and power into our lives, to let God remind us of who and why we are, and we must grant such time to those around us as well, including those who serve us and even our working beasts. Christians do not have a Sabbath law. It would be easier if we did. But we do have a Sabbath principle which we must find our own ways to implement, and we will suffer when we do not implement the Sabbath principle on a regular basis. This is not just a cultural need of a few religious people. It is a need that is built into our created natures. We are at war with our own natures when we do not observe the Sabbath principle in a godly manner. Regular, substantive, quality time with God is basic to our ability to live out our divine calling in daily life.

If we live only by the principle of the Day Six, that we are the god-images, the little lords, on earth, and if we try to carry out that role of power without sufficient time with God, the result will be disastrous. There are no scarier words in the Bible than, “Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Those words are attached to the very worst in fruitless, decadent, and destructive living. Our taking dedicated time with God, time apart from our own agendas, time to let God’s nature and purposes take rulership over our lives, is vital to our living out our created purpose. This must be our top priority, or we will lose our direction, and, even with the best of intentions, we will wander off into destruction, doing what seems right in our own eyes rather than what is right in our Creator’s eyes.

My message today is that we were created in God’s image, and that we must spend time with God so that we can live out in our daily lives our calling in life, the reason we were created. This is the point of the incarnational tradition.

God has not surrendered his purpose in creation. Nor has God surrendered his purpose in salvation. The widespread message in our culture that the purpose of salvation is to get us off the hook for our misdeeds is a serious misstatement of the Bible’s message. God’s purpose in saving us, in sending his Son to die for us, is that we might be restored to his purpose for us from the beginning, the purpose that we might be his royal children, living as his image-bearers, representing his loving nature and creative plans, reigning with him in making life ever richer in beautiful variety.

The process of being restored to God’s plan for us and of living for the praise of his glory is the meaning of our present lives. Paul put our purpose this way in Ephesians 4:22-24: 22 to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, 23 and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, 24 and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. And, as new creations in Christ, we are to walk in Christlikeness. Paul stamps the message with these words at Ephesians 5:1-2: 5:1 Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. What a goal, to be walking representations of Christ’s love, divine love incarnate in us.

Revelation 21:1-5 shows that the saving process that we Christians are presently undergoing leads to a goal, our dwelling and reigning with God and the Lamb, in a perfected new heaven and new earth. Let’s read again the key concepts of that passage: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away…And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” 5 And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”

That is what will be for those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life: all things will be new; all things will be as they were meant to be from the beginning; the richness and variety of beauty will be ever astounding, breathtaking. Our purpose right now in this life is to represent that goal toward which we are moving, the restored creation of heaven and earth, in the concrete circumstances of our lives. We do that by gratefully receiving, rejoicing in, taking care of, and sharing God’s daily blessings.

We will do that in a variety of ways. Some of us will farm or garden. Some of us will prepare and market produce. Some of us will distribute the overflowing abundance to those in need. Some of us will work with our hands, mixing our labor with the earth’s resources to produce things both useful and beautiful. Some of us will keep the wheels of the economy turning so that laborers may be justly paid for their labor. Some of us will work with our minds, producing words that instruct, guide, and inspire. Some of us will pass our most cherished truths and skills to succeeding generations. We will work in many ways, and God is able to bless every work that is dedicated to his glory.

If we are Christians, we will do our individual tasks for the glory of God. Even if the work itself seems to us of little spiritual significance, our impact on our employers, employees, fellow workers, customers, family, and friends, will be for the glory of God. Even if we are unemployed or retired, we will look for ways to embody God’s love in meaningful daily activities, to build a community of hope through Jesus Christ, always pointing ahead, showing our eagerness for the perfection that will one day be. And we pray that Christ will be incarnate in those of us who have been baptized into unity with him, who weekly gather to feed on his Word, his Spirit, his Body and his Blood. And we pray that Jesus will lead us in every endeavor until we reach the goal. May it be so! Amen!

Experiencing the Charismatic Tradition and the Spirit-Empowered Life: Wisdom for Unity

Isaiah 11:1-9; Ephesians 4:1-7; 1 Corinthians 12:1-13

We are in our tenth of twelve weeks of looking at the Six Streams of Living Water, the various traditions of Christian spirituality that have periodically renewed the church through the ages. We have looked at the Contemplative, the Evangelical, the Holiness, and the Social Justice traditions; we are in the midst of looking at the Charismatic tradition, and, in the next two weeks, we will look at the Incarnational tradition. If you have missed some of the sermons, or have let your mind wander or doze, as happens to all of us at times, all the sermons appear on this blog, just keep scrolling and clicking your way back until you can review all of them. One of the most important concepts to keep in mind is that the negative stereotypes associated with some of these traditions came about after they were split off from and isolated from other parts of the body of Christ that could have helped keep them in productive balance. Many of these splits took place in the mid-19^th through the early 20th centuries, and those splits have weakened the church ever since. We need to recover the wholeness of the church and the wholeness of Christian spirituality.

Last week, in examining the Charismatic tradition we looked at a wide array of essential works that the Holy Spirit does in and for the church. Today our focus is narrower, on a part of the work of the Holy Spirit that is often overlooked, his giving wisdom to his church to find the path of unity in fellowship and vitality in mission.

A. In Isaiah 11, the prophet gives six characteristics of the Spirit-Filled Royal Son, the Messiah King: supernatural wisdom, understanding, and counsel are practically synonyms; and backed by supernatural might, knowledge, and the fear (or reverent awe) of the Lord, they provide the foundations for the peaceable kingdom. It is hard to avoid seeing that God’s wisdom imparted to his Royal Son is the core of the matter. The good news is that this same wisdom is available to us as we believe in Jesus and claim the promised Holy Spirit, so that we may view matters with the mind of God. Some people always act based on their heart. Some people always act based on their head. Some people always act based on tradition. Some people always act in rebellion against tradition. Some people always act based on their woundedness, trying to find comfort or consolation for what hurts. Some people always act on the basis of fear or anger or greed or ambition. None of those bases for action lead consistently to good results. Some of them lead pretty consistently to bad results. For our long run good, for the good of people around us, for the good of the fellowship and mission of Christ’s church, we need to get beyond our human habits, beyond what Paul calls setting our minds on the flesh, and, instead, we need to act on the basis of God’s wisdom, what Paul calls setting our mind on the Spirit. We need to take time to hear from God who always offers us the best approach for the long run. God doesn’t promise that his way will always be painless; there are costs to the fact that we live in a sinful world, and sometimes the sin comes against us not only from outside, but also from inside, and complicates our best efforts to hear and follow God’s wisdom. Sometimes, perhaps usually, because of the human complications, sacrifice is required. Nevertheless, God’s way will always be good, God’s way will always make us better, and God’s way will always give those around us opportunities to get better too. God’s wisdom is not worldly wisdom about how to get ahead and win, but God’s wisdom is always focused on opening up opportunities for redeeming and healing all that is broken. I am not saying that God’s wisdom leaves us as pushovers for every manipulative sad story that a human weasel or a human leech can dream up. Not at all. God’s wisdom can be tough and demanding. God’s wisdom can and does set boundaries. But God’s wisdom aims at offering real new beginnings for all who are truly open to them. Among all who share the focus of God’s wisdom, there is an opportunity for the work of peacemaking to be effective. Where God’s righteous faithful, redeeming, and reconciling wisdom is not the focus, unity is harder to come by. If our energies are organized around the wrong causes, God may not even desire unity for us until we get our priorities straightened out. There is no use in uniting around human folly. So, Isaiah’s point is that real peace is based on divine wisdom that comes from the Holy Spirit.

B. In his Letter to the Ephesians Paul shows two more ways that the Spirit brings peace: (1) giving us spiritual fruit and (2) anchoring us in gospel truth. Let’s look at those in turn:

(1) Giving us spiritual fruit. Paul specifically mentions humility, gentleness, patience and loving forbearance. When qualities such as these are increasing in our lives, it is a sign that the Spirit of God is at work within us. Sinful human beings are not naturally like that. Elsewhere Paul lists some examples of the fruit of the Spirit as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. He contrasts these to the works of the flesh, that is, the products of sinful human thinking. The works of the sinful human thinking include moral faults, spiritual faults, relational faults, and other behaviors that are harmful to ourselves and to others. The Holy Spirit leads us away from destructive behavior and into constructive behavior.

(2) Anchoring us in gospel truth: one God, one Lord, one Spirit, one faith, one hope, one baptism, one body (the church). A church cannot be united unless it knows what holds it together. If we think that it is our church culture and traditions that hold us together, how we do things, then we will always be fighting for control with people who have different ideas of how we do things or of how we ought to do things, but if what holds us together is a living faith in one God, one Lord, one Spirit, one faith, one baptism, one church, and might we add, one mission of representing the redeeming and reconciling love of Jesus Christ offering hope for new beginnings to the people of the world, then there is a chance that we might get our minds on things that count, things that actually make a difference in the world and in the lives of people around us, things that make a difference for Jesus and his mission, and we might not care so much about who wins the preference contests. In fact, the preference contests might just disappear because we will be too busy trying to make positive differences in the lives of people to focus on trivia that has very little to do with Jesus.

So, while Isaiah speaks of divine wisdom, Paul speaks of spiritual fruit and solid faith, all from the Holy Spirit.

C. In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul gives us two tests for discerning whether the spirits that offer to move us are from the Holy Spirit: (1) Is it consistent with the fact the Jesus the crucified is reigning Lord? (2) Does it help build up the church with love and mutuality in both fellowship and mission? Let’s read:

1 Corinthians 12:1 Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers, I do not want you to be uninformed. 2 You know that when you were pagans you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led. 3 Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking in the Spirit of God ever says “Jesus is accursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit.

4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; 5 and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; 6 and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone. 7 To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. 8 For to one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, 9 to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, 10 to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the ability to distinguish between spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. 11 All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.

12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit.

Paul begins by saying that we do not have to be Christians to have strong spiritual experiences. Non-Christians have what they take to be ecstatic experiences, revelatory experiences, miraculous experiences, and so forth. Spiritual experiences prove nothing. Paul believes that there are deceptive spirits at work in the world capable of encouraging much counterfeit spirituality, of pulling the wool over the eyes of the naive. Paul implies that going through the motions of joining a Christian church does not free us from being influenced by demonic forces in the world. Even church members need methods of discerning the difference between the work of the Holy Spirit and the work of the Deceiver.

Method One: Paul asserts that a person who truly believes and professes that Jesus the crucified is Lord of the universe is, at least that far, led by the Holy Spirit. No one can truly believe and profess that Jesus the crucified is the Lord of the universe unless the Holy Spirit helps him or her come to that conclusion. The best evidence that the Christian faith is true is that nothing about its central foundational events—the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ--appeals to a merely human mind-frame. If God through the Holy Spirit did not help us believe that, we simply would not, could not, believe it. Of course, we could just accept it because some trusted authority figure told us that it was true--a parent, a grandparent, a brother or sister, a teacher, a preacher, a friend, a celebrity—but that is not really believing it ourselves. Until we have faced with full force the questions raised by the dead, mutilated body of Jesus being taken down from the cross and have come to the foundational mind-blowing conviction that God reigns even over suffering, shame, and death, we are not yet Christian because we have not yet believed with our hearts that Jesus died for our sins and that God raised him from the dead. We are not yet Christian without that faith, because we have not yet seen that Jesus has defeated every evil power and principality that could otherwise influence us. We are not yet Christian without that faith because, until we believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, we are driven by our own worldly convictions about what power is, our worldly desires, our worldly fears, our worldly securities, but, if Jesus has overcome the world and we know it, then we are free to be children of God living for the praise of his glory. Paul tells us that only the Holy Spirit can help us make that transition, to begin the process of setting us free from worldly thinking. And since the Holy Spirit is the only one who can convince is that a crucified man is the most powerful figure in the universe, and who can enable us to live in that conviction, becoming people of self-giving love in a way that only a person who believes in resurrection power can, then if we hold and live that faith, it is evidence that the Holy Spirit is indeed at work in us.

Method Two: Paul asserts that a person who truly has the Holy Spirit will show humble love within the fellowship of faith, will respect and participate in the mutuality of spiritual giftings that characterize the body of Christ, and will seek to build up the church in love. The Holy Spirit is not about ambition, self-importance, status games. The Holy Spirit is not about winning every contest. The Holy Spirit is about strengthening the church, its mission, its fellowship. Just one chapter over from today’s sermon text, right in the middle of three chapters about spiritual gifts and spiritual discernment, that Paul says, 13:4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends. Please be clear. Paul is not a romantic or a sentimentalist. The love he is talking about is the steadfast covenant love of God, a love that is committed, a love that gives of itself for the well-being of present and potential children of God. That foundational commitment to self-giving love in action marks the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives. When that kind of love genuinely exists, the Holy Spirit is present, because that kind of love is not a natural product of unredeemed humanity.

So hen we are talking about the charismatic tradition, these are the things we most want to see: 1. God’s own wisdom that results in peace and unity, 2. solid, foundational faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ, 3. spiritual fruit, especially self-giving, upbuilding love for Christ’s church and its mission of redeeming outreach to the world, 4. Christians being guided and empowered for redeeming missions that bring new hope for children of God and for would-be children of God. Those things cannot be without the Holy Spirit. Where those things are happening, the charismatic tradition is accomplishing its reason for being. May it be so among us!