April 16, 2015
Full Gospel
I visited a church where the
pastor’s wife described their fellowship as a “Full Gospel” church. The Full
Gospel movement is associated with Pentecostalism and they believe the
activity of the Holy Spirit in the early church (healing, talking in tongues
and miracles) is still taking place today. I find it curious that these folks
feel they are preaching and practicing the full gospel, but yet when they
spoke in tongues they talked over one another, there was no interpreter and I could
not understand a word that was said. “If anyone speaks in a tongue, two—or at
the most three—should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the
church and speak to himself and God” (1 Cor 14:27-28 NIV).
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3 comments:
Gail;
-----I think I’ve told you the story about the Pentecostal church I attended for half a year when I was in High School, when the congregation fell silent as a female voice rose up in glossolalia at the back of the sanctuary. Hardly had she gotten going and the congregation gotten silent than another male voice over-spoke hers from the middle of the church. I still don’t regard that as evidence the Holy Spirit never was inside this glossolalia stuff anymore than knowing a preacher looked at pornography makes every preacher disingenuous. Logic doesn’t work that way.
-----John wrote that the Spirit is the witness because the Spirit is the truth (I John 1:7.) Paul says tongues are for God and the individual. One who speaks in tongues utters mysteries in the Spirit to God (I Cor 14:2,) and it is his own spirit praying to God when praying in tongues (14:14.) Of course, that should not be too shocking, because when we repent and turn to Christ, our spirits are made alive in Him. So also, when we say “Abba, Father,” His Spirit is bearing witness with ours that we are alive in Christ Jesus. So when we approach God in tongues, even more, His Spirit is bearing witness to us. And that is edifying just as Paul said, “He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself,” (I Cor 14:4a.) It is important to edify in the Lord, for we live in a filthy, dirty world, and edification in Him is like an immune system. He made us for a very personal, very one-on-one, very intimately, private relationship with Him. It is an important relationship, because it is not only at the source of the springs of life welling up from the heart to which Psalms and Proverbs and Jesus all referred, but this relationship with Him is that source. Having become alive in the Lord there is reconnection between your spirit and His, for the severance of fellowship with Him was the “…death in the day you eat of it…” Eve and Adam received from the forbidden fruit and passed to us all. The Spirit in the life given to the Lord is the new birth out from that old death.
-----But truth we must bear. For the same Spirit in which we are alive, the same Spirit who bears witness to us through our spirits, is truth. If we think the witness we think is being born to us is from the Holy Spirit when it really does not fit the Bible, truth has been abandoned. Paul very clearly wrote that prophecy is for edifying the church, and tongues are for edifying the self. And he implies all over in his letters that coming together as a body is for bringing edification to the body, which by deduction is also receiving edification from the body. None of that is the direct spirit-to-heart thing happening inside yourself within your intimate relationship with Abba.
-----I don’t think tongues don’t fit in the gathered church. Paul didn’t. He also said clearly that if you are inclined to edify the church in tongues, then there must be interpretation. The confusion I experienced and the audio-mayhem you experienced were devoid of interpretation. And every time I did hear an interpretation at that Pentecostal church in my youth, it was some rough quotation of scripture. I always used to think to myself, “Why not just read it then and avert all this hubbaggubbabbubba?”
Love you all,
Steve Corey
-----I think this is a very important issue, because God gave man the gift of tongues. And I think it is a very serious issue to look God’s gift-horse in the mouth. I thank Him for tongues (though I don‘t really do tongues.). But I thank Him more for the Spirit, because it is His Spirit aligning our spirits with truth by being joined within each of us. That is a serious connection. And it happens in the other slice of bread which is even more real than our physical slice of bread, because that spiritual slice already partakes in eternal life, having been joined with the Holy Spirit. The physical slice is yet dead. Therefore, the meatloaf between the two slices becomes a very important connection between the life the Lord makes within us and the sharing of that life with others by edification from our speech and actions.
-----I don’t think we can deny the early church had the Holy Spirit going on amongst themselves, because the Bible relates to us the extraordinary things they were doing through their physical bread slices. Their spiritual bread slices, being alive in the Spirit, were getting through their meatloaf to their physical side. That means their meatloaf was indeed turning to pastrami and olive loaf with lettuce and tomatoes and such. Their minds were truly being renewed in a wondrous way. Then tongues, if done as Paul said, by the Spirit with interpretation, tongues would edify the church with all the delicacies of all the Biblical attitudes.
-----If then, then why not today? I know the Campbellites believe the perfect which came was the finality of the revealed Word of God, therefore, tongues and such passed away as having been of the imperfect. I’ll rent this idea for a spell, but I’m not buying yet.
-----Many believe the letters Jesus dictated to John were prophetic of the church age. I do too. Each letter smacks of a period of church history portrayed in its admonitions and praises. Each letter also takes its corresponding place perfectly in the succession of the church’s historical periods. The first, significant event happening to the church in history can be seen in the letter to Ephesus. This was the church having left the love it first knew. Preachers almost always pomp upon emotional devotion and missional aspiration and the likes being the love Ephesus had at first. But you can tell by Paul’s letter to the Ephesians they had something special going in their understanding and ability to digest deeply spiritual concepts. Therefore, he wrote them deeply. Love is more than emotion and ambition and a gurgling all over everything. It is an attitude of intention towards the needs of the beloved. Therefore it is an investigation of those needs as well as of the personhood of the beloved. For love is an interest in the beloved so much that it is a surrender to the benefit of the beloved. Love will find out the beloved by search and seek. For it must know the beloved. For it is about the beloved‘s sure fit within the truth. And yet, if you read some of the late first century liturgies, you find minds having become so occupied with knowing the right way of doing things that they’ve become supercilious meatloaf - whether baptism should be done in running or still water, three times forward, or three times backward, or whatever. Just getting some water and dunking was good enough fifty years earlier when everything was about the beloved having come to the Lord. Not the ritual. Surely this wander came from their ambition and zeal to guard the truth from careless or deceitful errors. And onward through the next two centuries their occupation became more and more and more toward knowing above and beyond the beloved. A return to relationship was needed. A return to truing relationships with each other and the Lord like they had at first. And if they did not return, their lamp would be removed from its place (Rev 2:5.) Notice the Lord did not say He would remove it from them. He said from its place.
-----The Holy Spirit has a place within the Church that when it is there the Church moves efficiently and properly and righteously. From both history and the remaining six letters we see the church not being efficient, not being proper, not being righteous, and especially not being one so all the world would know Jesus was sent by The Father. No! Far from that! Look at the world’s knowing now! It is sure the church has been sent from insanity to spoil worldwide fun in the sun. Moreover, the world has sickened of the debauchery of Thyatira and the warring of Sardis which makes the preaching of Philadelphia sound as hypocritical as the gruel of Laodicea is senseless. Not only does the world not know Christ was sent from the Father, they equate Christ to Santa Claus and The Father to the Easter Bunny, and creation has succumbed to evolution. It would have been otherwise had the church returned to one in love as it was before.
-----The Church at Ephesus never returned to its first love to value the beloved more than petty doctrines and beliefs and rituals all made up out of ideas plucked from beyond what is written (I Cor 14:6.) That vibrant, goofing up yet standing up church of the New Testament is just not quite the same flavor as the goofing up fallen down church of the historical texts thereafter. Somehow forgiveness and forbearance and grace and mercy and gentle persuasion and especially edification and encouragement and consolation never seemed to rise up the church’s scale of pertinence to that place where it held tightly to goofy doctrines, religious zealotry, excommunications, and eventually holy wars. Its lamp was not taken by the Lord, it was just removed from it’s place within the church like an out of joint hip removed from its socket. The Church just hasn’t walked so well as it did at first. And the limp has cost such gifts of delicacies and delights as truly speaking in tongues and interpreting and laying on of healing hands unto real rising ups and walkings.
-----You don’t have to buy this idea. Just try renting it for a spell and see what you think.
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