Below is a lengthy "article" of sorts that I wrote. Why? I don't know. Only that it has been something that consumed me for a week now, and is an outgrowth of much prayer. I share it for edification, for warning if you may be experiencing this sort of thing where you are in your own local church fellowship. God help us.
(Note: Readers in this forum are way more informed than the folks who were in my heart as being the 'audience' for this when I wrote it. References that assume that you are not familiar --- not intended for THIS audience. I know you know what's what and who's who. :)
What Is Wrong With Pentecost?
Several years ago, a man told me, "You need to come to Pentecost. If you just got a taste of Pentecost, it would change your life.”
What he didn’t know then was that I had already tasted Pentecost years before. We bolted away from it. We wandered through the whole "seeker friendly” church movement. We applied ourselves as good students of the "church growth movement.” We were smitten with it. There was liberty of worship, there was emphasis on praise and song and emotional engagement.
But, there was no power of God.
Ultimately, God graciously lead us away from that. We came back to what we thought was a church living in the stream of true Pentecost. We expected that we would sit down and enjoy the taste of heaven and the powers of the age to come. It was a taste that we had known years before. For a time, it seemed to us that perhaps we really had found that again in fellowship.
What we’ve found has, instead, made me wonder if Pentecost in America is dead.
What is wrong with Pentecost? I don’t think I’m alone in wondering what is wrong. We know something is. This is the fruit of a long time of much prayer, reflection, and study of God’s Word -- with deep agony and groaning in my own spirit, asking God to help me understand what is happening to His church. You don’t want to make these examinations and petitions lightly. But, when you do, and you get a clear word from God, you are responsible for that. A lot of this may seem academic or boring. We really could do with being bored for a few moments, and take a good long inhale on the history of God’s activity in this society. Please follow me through this. It matters.
Why? "The biggest threat to the church comes from within, voices that say that they speak for God but don’t.” -- Carter Conlon. What you’re going to read matters to you, deeply, desperately. Let me give you an example. There’s a youth movement going on. Maybe our youth are part of it, maybe not. I don’t know. It has swept northward out of Brazil. There is an unhealthy emphasis on worship. Youth are gathering in large numbers in services that go on for 4 or 5 hours and they just sing these syrupy songs that are not even theologically correct. Biblically, they’re just in error. And, the youth believe they have hold of something because deeply in their emotions they are moved. It is stirring up rebellion and division of the younger from the older. (Conlon, 11-16-14, Don’t Draw Back.) Galatians 6:12 warns that there are many who want to make a good showing in the flesh. Where repentance and turning from sin and where the cross of Christ are not front and center, it is dangerous. And, there are other movements --- young and not young --- burning through the Pentecostal and the so-called Charismatic churches (a word I hate by the way), that are wrapped up in this kind of thing. It is clear to me that this is occurring. It is clear to me that we are not immune. It is clear to me that we are not prepared. So unprepared are we that we do not even see it.
There was an article in a newspaper in Birmingham, England about a 51 year old man who shared an open-space office floor plan with 20 other employees. They worked at a publishing office, proofreaders and all that. For 5 days, his co-workers buzzed through their days, and the man sat very quietly, undisturbed by them. On Saturday, a custodian came in to clean the office and there the man was, at his desk, dutifully sitting there. The custodian joked with him, "Why are you working on Saturday?” He didn’t answer. Because he’d been dead since Monday. He was the first guy in each morning and the last guy to leave at night, and he usually sat in the same position all day, and he was always quiet. No one even saw that he was dead.
If you see someone at work who has been still for a while, give them a nudge. We need a Holy Ghost nudge, and I don’t know that we’ll find much humor in it. The church looks alive, it looks like it is doing what it supposed to be doing, but it isn’t!!
In Revelation 3:16, Jesus told the apostle John to write to one of seven churches of Asia, "you have a name that you are alive, but you are dead.” He then gave them a very brief history lesson, and told them they needed to live the lesson. I think that reviewing some historical context for our Pentecostal faith is needed.
In 1703, John Wesley was born in England. His father was an Anglican preacher. His mother, Susanna, was very smart, very wise and devoted to Jesus. The Wesleys had 19 children. 300 years before anyone knew of the Duggars. Young Wesley loved games and dancing, but then he turned his mind and heart to the things of God. He attended Oxford University. He founded what was called then the "Holy Club”. It was a society of serious young men who focused on God. He gave the first half of his adult life to a method of growing in maturity in Christ, a rigid way that he and his mother called "the method”. But the method did not produce what Wesley later discovered by God’s grace.
He and his brother, Charles, came to the American colony of Georgia. On the boat trip over, he encountered a group of Moravian brethren. Moravians were European protestants who loved God and each other with deep passion and fervency, and they loved the truth. Wesley saw these Moravians’ zeal. They had a real relationship with Christ through the Holy Spirit and the Word, and it left him stunned and wanting. After some very difficult time preaching in Georgia, Wesley returned to England. He met another Moravian preacher and went to a meeting in London in 1738. He had an experience in which he wrote that his "heart was strangely warmed”. He experienced, probably for the first time, true salvation, devoting his life to salvation by faith in Christ alone. He turned to evangelism after this experience and he reconnected with an old friend from his "Holy Club” days, a fiery preacher named George Whitefield. Both of them took to open air preaching in the fields of Bristol and beyond, preaching under the power of the Holy Spirit to miners and rural people and the poor.
Wesley wrote, "I could scare reconcile myself to this strange way of preaching in the fields, of which he [Whitefield] set me an example on Sunday; having been all my life till very lately so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order, that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.” Here’s what he meant: ‘I didn’t think God moved except in a church building in a church service; I couldn’t believe that God moves where the gospel is preached in truth, outside of the church house. It felt sinful to me, but I saw it with my own two eyes that men were saved when Whitefield preached outdoors, outside of the church meeting.’ John Wesley was a true Pentecostal man. There’s no record of tongues. But, there was more of the power of God in John Wesley’s preaching to the trees, miners and farmers than you’ll find in the most so called Pentecostal churches in America today.
He would sometimes stand on his father’s tombstone and preach to people who would never dream of attending a church service. They would pack into the open air fields to hear him or Whitefield preach. They preached under God’s anointing about the wrath of God, the need to flee from God’s wrath. He preached about man’s guilty sin and our repulsiveness to God. He preached about God’s great mercy upon sinners through the blood of Jesus Christ. And, he taught of the need for a true love for God in Christ and the need for power to live for Him in truth. He called out men and women and children to repent, to be converted, to be filled with the fullness of God.
Whitefield was a staunch Calvinist and Wesley an Arminian in theology. If you don’t know what those mean ”“ apply yourself to learning. You need to know what you believe and why. But, if you do know, then don’t be amazed that these two men of differing views could be one in mind and spirit and purpose about the things of God and the great need of the people. That’s another mark of true Pentecost. The Holy Ghost brings all together in Him. He is not worried about "isms”. He is truth, and that’s that. He binds together those whose hearts are His. That’s what the word religion means ”“ being tied with each other in the love of God. Anybody who tries to sell you a difference between religion and relationship knows nothing of either.
John Wesley found himself on the wrong side of his beloved Church of England. People who loved the forms of church hated him and threatened his very freedom and life. Without permission from his church, he started setting forth lay preachers to shepherd over people who were converting to faith in Christ. It was very much as in the book of Acts, that the Holy Spirit anointed men who were sold out to God to preach powerfully ”“ not with fancy speeches or smooth entertaining motivational talks or credentials from the central office ”“ but with the power of God that brought men to their knees in repentance and trembling and crying. From this movement, eventually what came to be known as the Methodist Church was born, an offshoot of the Church of England.
Wesley preached that the COE failed to call sinners to repentance. My friends, true Pentecost preaches repentance, repentance, repentance. When Peter was filled with the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost, he didn’t preach worship. He didn’t preach praise. He didn’t preach "liberty of worship” and passion in praise and song. He didn’t give tips on how and when and if to raise hands and sing out. He preached repent, be baptized and the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord. Wesley preached that same message. And, miracles were attested to. People would climb trees in the fields to hear them preach, and fall out under the power of God when they did. God himself bore witness to the truth of Wesley and Whitefield.
Today, the Pentecostal church falls asleep at the mention of power on the one hand, or on the other we what we call power is just choreographed outward movements that do not change lives or change churches. Today’s Pentecost has been reduced to a form of worship in a church meeting. Today’s Pentecost ignores the message of the reality of God’s power in our lives everywhere else. The power of the Holy Ghost on a man or woman in the prayer closet is neglected. Instead, the messages and the urging is an agitation over more demonstrative and well attended meetings. Attendance appeals and demonstration of emotional liberty in worship is the great marker of today’s Pentecost and it has absolutely nothing to do with biblical Pentecost or historical Pentecost.
What God did through John Wesley, Whitefield and men like Jonathan Edwards was revitalize dead theology and dead men as the church entered the industrial age. God was bringing new life to the church through some men, while the great swell of the church was overtaken by the worldliness that came with the growth of the new industrial commerce. God sent to them men like the great Scottish Presbyterian of the 1830s, Edward Irving.
Don’t get lost. This is vital to know. This is so important to know if you claim any part of the life of the Holy Spirit today, you need to understand the full picture here.
Now, Irving had some errant beliefs. But, one thing this Presbyterian did was challenge the Church of England and said that there would be a period prior to the second coming of Christ where a "latter rain” outpouring of the Holy Spirit would occur, and he taught that the "extraordinary” gifts of the Spirit would be given again to the church in the time before Christ’s return. (Actually, they were never removed, but that’s not the point, here.) In Scotland, it was reported that some people, in their submission to God and their whole-hearted seeking of God, people had these experiences where they would suddenly speak in an unknown language. And when I say whole-hearted I don’t mean intensely sincere emotion, I mean whole-lifed. People are seeking the baptism of the Spirit today with intense and sincere emotion. Paul walked in the Spirit because he did a cold calculation and said of his own very successful life, his own prospects of a great future for himself, "it is dung; give me Jesus and what Jesus gives to me and I’ll be content.” Whole heart means whole life. The Scottish Presbyterians with Irving sought God with their whole lives. A fire of revival of the gift of tongues then spread through Irving’s church in Scotland. He was dismissed from the Presbyterian church. But, he didn’t stop. He continued to shepherd those who would not deny this power of God in an independent fellowship. This was in the 1830s.
Wesley eventually died, but the movement that God started through himself and Whitefield and others in England found its way back across the Atlantic to the young United States. The experience of sensing and knowing a powerful release from the grip of sin ”“ an experience that happened at times when men were converted but more often at some point later in their walk with Jesus ”“ an experience the Methodists called "entire sanctification”, was being realized by men and women who were also seeking God with their whole lives. These things were happening here while Irving and others were realizing New Testament gifts of the Spirit in Scotland. Listen, stay with me.
No one had to stage the power of God. No one had to set the mood for God. No one worshipped themselves into frenzy before the power of God fell. No extended song services with a peppy beginning, no build up of emotion in a dramatic or poignant praise anthem, no slow sloppy agape love songs, no "worship leader” or "praise and worship band” to lead times of singing. These people would’ve thought we are heretics today for calling our singing and playing "worship”. The power of God came as the preaching of the Pentecostal truth continued --- repentance, repentance, repentance. A call from sin to salvation, a call from hellish living to holy living, a call to whole-life living for the glory of Jesus Christ, a call from individualism to body life and fellowship and sharing suffering with one another. That’s true worship in its only acceptable form. These are the roots and offsprings of real Pentecost.
Charles Finney was an influential intellect, a fiery evangelist, and by many accounts an absolutely horrible personality of a man. He started preaching about this new and more stable experience of Christian life. He preached about what life really looked like when a man or woman is sanctified. He sometimes referred to this life as "baptism of the Holy Spirit”. He was one of the first to use this New Testament phrase to describe what was happening. He insisted that the Scriptural baptism of the Spirit was for the purpose of Godly empowerment to live a life pleasing to God, a perfection of commitment to God in life. He taught that Joel’s prophecy in Joel 2:28, quoted in Acts 2, would enable men to prophesy in the last days. Now, we’re approaching the 1870s.
A contemporary of the aging Finney was an up and coming Dwight Moody. He’s famous for his evangelism and the Moody Church and Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. In 1873, Moody preached a series of messages in England. He was a peer to the most famous preacher in Western Civilization, British pastor Charles Spurgeon. He preached meetings in Spurgeon’s church. Moody and Spurgeon were friends but chided each other about their bad habits. Moody chided Spurgeon about his cigars and asked him when he was going to quit smoking them. Spurgeon poked Moody in his very large belly and said, "When you get rid of that.” Moody emphasized the need for the Spirit’s empowerment for Christian service, and preached on the need for what was coming to be called a "second blessing”. Shortly before he died in 1899, Moody wrote, "the greatest blessing next to being born again came 16 years after [I was born again], when I was filled with the Spirit, and it has never left me.”
At a convention in Keswick, England in 1874 ”“ called "Convention for the Promotion of Practical Holiness” (now we just use one word trendy names like Passion or Verge or Hydrate or whatever) ”“ preachers came away emphasizing the "deeper life” in the Holy Spirit, and four key points: repentance unto salvation, baptism in the Holy Spirit (tongues were not mentioned), divine healing and the second coming of Christ. From this movement the great preacher, A.B. Simpson (whose name you should know but don’t) started the great Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination in Canada. The CMA gave us other men of the word of God like A.W. Tozer.
After Keswick, a flood of publications hit the churches on seeking the "enduement of power” from the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Tongues were not emphasized or even envisioned by most of these men. But, out of those numbers of people who, with whole life, gave themselves to the pursuit of God, came testimonies of tongues and other testimonies of power and peace.
The emphatic push was for men to repent and believe, and that the Holy Spirit would be given to them for power to love Jesus, power to live a life pleasing to God and power to obey the Great Commission. This is true Pentecost. More and more over the next 10 years people started testifying to outbreaks of the presence of the Holy Spirit in miraculous events ”“ including tongues, healings, deliverances. These miracles came in the backdrop of committed teaching of biblical orthodoxy about the Christian faith. There was still not what we see today of the emphasis --- what I think of now as a fetish, really --- with singing and carrying on physically in a church service. These things occurred, but they were not thought to usher in the Spirit of God, and singing was not thought to be a primary form of worship.
Out of these experiences and moves of the Holy Spirit, God raised up a brief but fervent generation of whole-life seekers of His glory in the late 1800s and early 1900s. In the eastern United States, from Indiana through the Appalachians and into Tennessee and Georgia, men preached repentance and holiness and the need for fullness of the Spirit. They conducted revival meetings that swept southward and westward. Over time, from these the Assemblies of God and the Church of God sprang forth. In 1901 in Topeka, Kansas, in a bible school ran by a preacher named Charles Parham, a young lady named Agnes Ozman began speaking in tongues. Parham began teaching that this was the initial evidence of anyone who would be baptized in the Holy Spirit, borrowing his belief from the 2nd chapter of Acts and teaching that as a normal course of Christian growth, one would speak in tongues if he is Spirit baptized. Then, Parham was run out of Topeka.
I’m abbreviating events, now, because there’s so much more record of this history; it would be easy to bog down in it. Meanwhile, in India, holiness believers there started speaking in tongues not knowing what was happening in America. Americans did not know what was happening in India. In 1905, Parham moved his school to Houston, Texas, where a black preacher named William Seymour learned from Parham regarding the Holy Spirit. In 1907, Seymour moved to Los Angeles as a pastor of a church. He preached the message of fullness of the Spirit, and he was locked out of the church. He moved his preaching to a private home, and then to an old church on Asuza Street. Revival broke out and people were being saved on the message of repentance unto salvation and giving oneself to God with their whole lives and the need of the fullness of the Spirit. People experienced these and would speak in tongues. Seymour instructed them, and this is a quote -- "Don’t go from this meeting and talk about tongues, but try to get people saved.” This is true Pentecost ”“ leaving the meeting and bringing the power of God to bear in the world. The meeting was not the point. The meeting was the launching pad. To a whole-life dependence on God to save and the whole-life of a converted person being given to God for His glory at all times. A whole-life given to God to do with as He sees fit. A passionate pursuit of the glory of God. To living the gospel of Christ, delivering the gospel of Christ to the lost, in the power of the Holy Spirit, with all of His gifts.
A man from Dunn, NC named Gaston Cashwell attended some of the Asuza Street meetings, received this baptism of the Spirit and spoke in tongues, and returned to Appalachia to preach this message. One of the men who received the baptism with tongues in Cashwell’s meetings in NC was T.J. McIntosh, the first Pentecostal missionary to China. Look at the church in China today!! By 1908, some of the leadership of the fledgling Church of God in Cleveland, TN, sat directly under Cashwell’s preaching at a revival in Cleveland and had this experience. A.J. Tomlinson and a fellow COG brother named M.S. Lemons went to a revival in Birmingham, AL preached by a man named M.M. Pinson in June, 1907 and came away convinced about "baptism of the Spirit” and Parham’s and Cashwell’s "initial evidence” position on tongues. In January, 1908 Cashwell himself went to Cleveland and this experience was realized by the COG leadership, including Tomlinson, for the first time. It has since marked this denomination and others born from it. But, somewhere, the reasons for it were lost, and we along with it.
The great fires of Pentecostal power gave men a taste of heaven and the powers of the age to come. Why? For the purpose of empowerment to deliver the gospel to the lost peoples of this Earth and to live lives in holiness and pleasing to God. To fuel a missionary thrust of the gospel into all corner of this planet over the last 100 years.
It is my heart, and what I believe is a word from God, that the power of Pentecost itself has been largely lost and forsaken by the church that calls itself by the name of Pentecost today, and that we are being called to repent and return to our first love and first works or suffer the loss of our Shepherd as our light and our salvation.
When Jesus, in Revelation 2, wrote through the apostle John a letter to church at Ephesus, He told the church that they had worked hard but that they had left the love that they had at first. He told them to repent, to turn back, to go live and do the things they did when their love for the things of God was still alive and warm and real. He told them if they didn’t, that he would remove their lampstand. Now, hear me: Those lampstands of the 7 churches in Revelation were the messengers/bishops of those churches. It was, in effect, a warning that the light and message of those churches was at risk. I don’t want to be understood as saying God is going to remove any particular pastor or person. No one person is the issue, here. The issue is much deeper. The issue is a complete absence of real Pentecost and a wholesale substitution of something else that calls itself by that name. The point is that if we do not repent and get rid of the substitute and turn away from it and run fully toward the real Pentecost, it isn’t merely our church leadership that is in jeopardy. It is our whole connection with the one true Lampstand, Pastor Jesus.
At the outset of this, I admitted that my wife and I wandered away from Pentecost. We didn’t wander away from what was perfect, but we wandered away from what was true. Where we wandered from was still concerned with bible truth. What we wandered from was still hungry for true Pentecost, even if it had made some really wrong-headed decisions about how to care for people and how to shepherd them in the way of true Pentecost. But, what we wandered into was anything but Pentecost.
We wandered into a movement that had grabbed hold of something powerful. It had grabbed hold of something that grabbed people’s hearts. It had grabbed hold of something that moved people deeply and stirred up emotions within them. And, those feelings, genuine as they were, were also expressed outwardly and freely. It seemed like home to us to an extent because there WAS an openness of worship, an openness of expression in worship that we had always known. It had what you might call Pentecostal personality.
And, there is a Pentecostal personality. It has been co-opted and made into another thing altogether. For many years, our forbears met in storefronts and cinder block buildings, heated by wood stoves and sometimes in halls or houses with dirt or sawdust floors, and in the overflow of the deep cleansing of their lives, they sang enthusiastically and with great liberty and passion in their assembled times of worship. But, it wasn’t the personality of their singing or worship that moved God. It wasn’t even necessarily God’s purposeful movement of the personality of their worship in that direction. As the Pentecostal message swept through, the people who reacted to it were mostly people who, in the deep emotional swell of God’s work in them, dove naturally head first into a collective, emotional outpouring of praise and song.
Pentecostalism owns that. We lovingly own that. Charismatics and the so called new-wave Pentecostals or neo-Pentecostals kept that personality trait in their worship. But they moved away from Pentecostal faith and into error. Bethel, Jesus Culture, the KC International House of Prayer, even Hillsong. They’ve traded on the personality of Pentecost with the error of Balaam. We’ve copied their copy of the copy. We’ve traded on the personality of Jesus Culture and the rest as if we can hold fire to our bosom and not be burned.
You’ve heard the old saying that there is strength in numbers. Well, when the church growth movement and the seeker-friendly churches of the 1990s and early 2000s realized they weren’t committing heresy when they raised their hands to worship, they opened the door to other more demonstrative forms of expression. Weeping, praying aloud and passionately phrasing their songs and choruses. Over and over. Soon enough, everybody was doing it. And, they even acknowledged where they copied it from. It came from the Pentecostal church ways and personalities of worship.
But, there came a time where their acknowledgement turned into redefinition of our movement. We came to define Pentecost by a style of assembled worship. That is not Pentecost. There is no importance of worship style to Pentecostal belief. There is no importance of worship style to Pentecostal belief. There is no biblical description for what sort of personality you should bring to corporate worship. Biblically, quiet worship is as valid as loud worship. Hands to the side is just as much a worshipping posture as hands raised. There is no requirement that we sing loudly or sing quietly or sing just rightly blending in. There is no requirement to sing in tune or off key. A raised hand, a waving hand is the same as a still hand, an upward face the same as a bowed head, the standing worshipper the same as the seated worshipper.
But, somehow, somewhere, Pentecost came to mean raised hands, waving hands, upward facing countenances and boisterous, emotional songs and louder praises and even floor rolling or falling out. We wrongfully took David’s dance before the ark and applied it to NT church life and there’s simply no warrant for it in Pentecost. It is foreign to Pentecost to import a spontaneous, one-time OT event into the regular life of the NT church. Somehow, this emphasis on outward worship came to mean Pentecost to the point that we have taken to the pulpit and stage to instruct, encourage and even goad people into that form of demonstration. Biblically, that’s not Pentecost. That’s not Pentecost. It may be genuine. It may be done decently and in order. There is no biblical instruction to forbid it, but it is not biblical Pentecost and it isn’t even traditional Pentecostal holiness thinking to insist on such orchestrations.
I want to be clear. Outward worship can be beautiful. Outward, expressive worship in the assembly of believers is not a preference expressed by God. Jesus never states a preference for it in the NT, and He never disapproves it. What He does, though, is disapprove form for reality. It was the sin of the Pharisees. They offered a bill of goods that had no power, a false religion of form. Listen.
In Luke 11, Jesus sat to lunch with a Pharisee but didn’t ceremonially wash before eating. The Pharisee was shocked ”“ shocked, I tell you ”“ that Jesus had not washed. Jesus said, "you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup … but inside … you are full of robbery and wickedness.” There are matters of the heart that outward expressions can not penetrate. But, Pentecost can. It has to be the real deal. "You love the front seats…”, He said.
Put me where I can be seen. Let me spread my hands far and wide and shake my head and hop and piously cry out the name of the Lord! This is like I like it!!
"You are like concealed tombs and the people who walk over them are unaware of it,” Jesus said to them. This points back to Passover. It was unclean during Passover to touch a dead body or even walk over a grave. Graves were marked with stones that had been grown over and dirt covered and hard to see so that people might accidentally walk over a grave and make themselves unclean. So, before Passover, people would whitewash the tombs and markers so people would know during Passover not to walk on them. In Matthew 23, Jesus told the Pharisees they were like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful but inside are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. The result is an appearance of being right, an approval of the outward form, an applause even for getting the outward expression just right ”“ but inside there was death, hypocrisy and lawlessness.
What we’ve turned Pentecost personality into Pentecost itself. That is a bill of goods that deprives us of power and feels so good to the flesh that it will make a person forget their uncleanness. Jesus asks us, as He did the Pharisees in Matthew 23, "How shall you escape the sentence of hell?”
Our power does not lie in the form of our worship. That’s nothing more than works righteousness set to music. We say, "Well, the Bible says that God inhabits the praises of His people.” And, that’s a powerful image. Because when Jesus is sharing the elements of communion, the bread and wine, with the disciples at the Last Supper, He tells them, THIS is My body, THIS is My blood. We’re tempted to almost think of our singing and corporate worship then as a sacrament if God is actually IN our praise. And, some people say that God is literally in our praise and many more believe it to be true.
The problem is that Bible nowhere says that. And, to the extent it almost says it, it doesn’t almost mean what we say it means. Psalm 22 says,
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?
2 O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer,
and by night, but I find no rest.
3 Yet you are holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.”
It doesn’t say "His people”, it refers to Israel. The Hebrew more accurately reads "You are enthroned and holy. You are Israel’s praise.” In fact, the NIV renders it so. Does God not enter when He is praised by His people? He enters before He is praised. He is praised because He already showed up, as it were. Our praise is simply a recognition of Him and His deeds. Isn’t God is pleased with praise? You can’t get through Ephesians without the phrase "to the praise of His glory” just washing across you time and again. He loves our genuine praise. But, when we make His praise a habitation where the Word of God does not, it leads us into overstating the value of a certain type of loud, boisterous emotionally charged worship for worship’s sake. Because if God inhabits my praise, then my praise is responsible for God’s presence. But, that’s voodoo, not worship.
Watch. This point is crucial for our day and time. I know you may find this hard to accept. But, this is a warning. Our praise does not bring God’s presence. There is a worship that brings a supernatural presence, though.
Revelation 13. "I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with 10 horns and 7 heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads. … (v3) … One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth marveled as they followed the beast.” -- This represents a deceiving power in the earth when Satan has been cast down into the Earth in Rev. 12 with a "woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short.” And, in Rev. 13:3, this beast that is Satanic in origin mimics in some way the death and resurrection of Jesus, and it draws the whole earth after him. And, v. 4, "they worshipped the dragon (Satan) for he had given his authority to the beast and they worshipped the beast.” His praise is demanded, insisted upon. They consider him irresistible: "who is like the beast, who can fight against it?”
Watch. This beast arises from the sea with Satan’s personality, Satan’s authority, mimics and mocks the Lord Jesus, and insists upon worship. The beast was given "authority … over every tribe, and people, and language and nation, and all who dwell on earth will worship it…”. v. 7-8. Those whose names are not written in the Lamb’s book of life will worship it. How? Watch.
"I saw another beast rising out of the earth … exercis[ing] all the authority of the first beast in its presence and makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast whose mortal wound was healed.” Rev. 13:11, 12. The second beast forces worship to invoke the presence of the first beast. Keep watching. The second beast ”“ v. 14 ”“ works signs "in the presence of the beast”. Worship. Signs. Why? To invoke the Satanic presence and satisfy the Satanic lust for adoration. Watch. v. 14 ”“ The second beast "[told] them to make an image for the beast that was wounded by the sword and yet lived.” This mocks the resurrection of Jesus and it mocks the commandments of God the Father who, in the OT, commanded that no image be made, no image be worshipped, because He is the one, true God. It hearkens back to Israel at the foot of Mt. Sinai who, while Moses was on the mount with God’s real presence that inspired Moses’ worship, Israel at the bottom made an image and worshipped it to invoke a presence. Only, here, Satan delivers something that even Israel at Sinai could not conjure up ”“ v. 15 ”“ "it [the second beast] was allowed to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast might even speak and might cause those who would not worship the image of the beast to be slain.”
There is a present conjuring in our assembled worship. As if God would respond to the particular personality of our worship with His presence to animate us. If we are His, we are already animated, we are already given new life. We don’t have to sing or pray in a particular style to awaken Him because He is not asleep, or to invoke Him because He is already "with us” and "in us” at His own initiative!!
I submit to you that this fetish with a Pentecostal personality of singing may well be a precursor and paver for the voodoo worship that the whole world will follow after to invoke the beast’s presence in the images of the beast that those who reject Jesus will be forced to make, and they will willingly make it.
I submit to you that this insistence among ourselves that our worship must take on a particular style or personality of raised hands and physical demonstration is fleshly and not of the Spirit of God. That a form of deception has crept into the church that calls itself Pentecostal and is not. That it is dangerous and is a satanic strategy to corrupt the church of Christ from within. That’s why it hasn’t been limited to just the Pentecostal churches.
What we grabbed hold of when we wandered away and into this seeker friendly movement, I told you was powerful. But, it was flesh power, not God’s power. It was emotion as a reaction to music and a newfound openness to physically demonstrative praise. What was absent from them is what is absent from Pentecost now ”“ repentance and holiness and power from on high for the purpose of taking the gospel to lost ethnes, lost peoples.
What brought the early Pentecostals ”“ even the pre-tongues era of Wesley, Whitefield, Simpson and Moody ”“ to a sense of the presence of God was the conviction produced by preaching the gospel, which is fully in accord with the Acts 2 example and the whole witness of the book of Acts, and is fully in accord with Romans 10:15 ”“ faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word of God, and how shall they hear without a preacher, and how will one preach unless he is sent? That’s why it is written, Paul says, quoting Isaiah, "How beautiful are the feet of him who brings good news!” The good news is the beauty, the good news is the power of God, Romans 1 says.
What is moving contemporary "Pentecostals” to sense what they think is the presence of God is music and a certain style of lyric and melody that resembles pop love anthems along with kinetics ”“ movements of a certain kind. These are said to "trigger” a sense of close presence with God and produce an experience that is unique to musical worship. No such animal exists in the witness of Scripture. Not that music is out of the picture or unimportant. It can please God as the OT and NT bears witness to. But, the fullest expression of God with us is the God-man, Jesus Christ, and His promise was not to send us a new song but a new Spirit. You never see Jesus singing in the Scriptures. I’m sure he did, but no one thought it important enough to write down. And, if you believe that the Holy Spirit is the author of Scripture, you have to conclude that singing in our forms or using worship poses of our kind are not particularly important to Him. We are Biblically taught that His power comes to the heart that is whole-self, whole-life given over to Him and His purposes and ways regardless of how it sings, shouts, whispers, stands, waves, sits, or bows.
And, let’s face it. It is easier, cheaper to gin up a shout and a wave and a clap than it is to experience real Pentecostal power and revival. You don’t have to give up anything to shout and sing and clap. You have to die daily to live in the power of the Holy Ghost.
Make no mistake: When our hearts are turned to Him, when we lift up truly Spirit-filled thankful hearts to Him, when His excellence is proclaimed in truth, when His righteousness is declared in truth, when we prostrate our hearts before Him and cast every crown at His feet as no longer ours, God is Jehovah Shammah ”“ God is there. But, this turning of heart, lifting of thanks, proclaiming of excellence, declaration of truth, laying on our faces, so to speak, in His presence, casting our crowns ”“ this doesn’t happen to music. It happens in the prayer closet. It happens in the private times. It happens when we’re turning off the world and turning ourselves over to Word, to the Holy Spirit, in our day to day, minute-by-minute lives. It happens in the checkout line. It happens in the cubicle. It happens in the classroom or the courtroom. It happens in our living rooms and in the solace of our own beds when we lay down our heads and from where we put our feet on the floor in the morning. It happens in the shepherding lost men and women toward Jesus, and in keeping in safe pasture ”“ by fellowship, gathering, equipping and ministering -- those who have been saved. This is where Pentecost is most real. This is where God responds most meaningfully, most truly. This is true Pentecostal worship, and without this, anything you do in a gathering is mimicry and mockery.
We are in need of a total shift in the way we think about God and relate to Him. God, forgive our choreography and fakery. Forgive our sorcery and empty invocations. Forgive our sinful ways. Awaken us to ourselves! Awaken us to our sin that we might find space for repentance and find mercy!! Take the songs of pleasure away until we master the songs of sorrow! Jolt us to awareness! Turn us away from our own fleshly desires! Crucify our flesh! Cleanse us and we’ll be clean! Make us to know You in truth, Lord! Sweep us clean of the places we’ve created in our hearts that relish the doctrines of devils. Make us holy, as You are holy. Open our eyes to the lost world around us! Make dust of our worldliness! Make dust of our lust for the world, our lust for the things we see, our lust for the things we want to do, our lust for the things we want to have, our lust for the things we want to be. Oh, God, deliver us from the bondage of our pre-occupation with ourselves and our pleasures!! Break us from the chains of self-love. Loosen the fetters that bind our hearts and minds to the lusts of the flesh. God, please make us inescapably aware of the seriousness of our situation, the seriousness of Your Word. Let us see how close we dance and shout and sing along the edge of perdition itself!! Forgive our orchestrations! We repent of the idea that singing is worship; we run to the truth, Lord that obedience from a heart overflowing with Your love is worship, that closing ourselves off in the sweet closets of prayer and fellowship with you is worship, that being overcome by the love of our neighbor so that we do not suppress the truth of the gospel to them --- that this is worship!! Set us aside, Lord. Sanctify us to yourself and for your purposes and your own glory, Lord. We seek nothing but you, Jesus. Your glory, Your honor, Your praise, Your power. Baptize anew in the Holy Spirit, Lord. Empower us to be your witnesses to the uttermost parts of the Earth. Your promise in Acts 1:8 is Your promise now. We are those who are far off; we are those whom the Lord our God has called. Pour out Your Spirit on Your sons and daughters even now, Lord! Do as You have spoken! Glorify yourself in your people, Lord. Come quickly, Lord Jesus, lest we are deceived and perish. Save us, Lord, to Your own hand. Amen.
