For a while I have had the gnawing sense that the Lord has been trying to prise open a door in my heart that has long since been locked and the key thrown away. The door in question is the door to the charismatic. There had been a time, another lifetime ago when I had been very active in the ministry of the Spirit. I guess that I should not have been surprised given that we are transitioning from the child to the teenage phase in our work that the Lord would choose to revisit this subject with me. Having just finished the manuscript for the The Apprentice which deals with this second phase of life in which I discuss the characteristics of the teenage phase; it was naïve of me to have thought that I would not be also invited to reappraise my position on the charismatic. I guess what is becoming more and more apparent to me is that it is unnatural for us not to operate in the supernatural.
We are as I have said time and again supernatural naturally. Yet, when I came out of Pentecostalism I had little difficulty leaving behind not only the self-effort which was so much a feature but also the so called gifts of the Spirit which were very much its hallmark. Why? I want to be candid with you, what I was sensing in that environment was the very thing that that apostle Paul rebuked the Corinthians about. In all his church plants there was no more a charismatic community than the brothers at Corinth. Yet Paul told them that:
:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
1 Cor 13: 1-2
And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
For me personally it was needful to deconstruct everything before attempting to reconstruct anything. I had seen each of these gifts in operation yet some how something seemed to get lost in translation. This conflicted messaging has led many in the Exchanged Life community to disown the charismatic movement. They argue, unconvincingly in my opinion, their view that the gifts have ceased.
A while ago I picked up an interesting tip from our web designers that I think it might help explain where I am coming from. Having tried to post a particular article on our website I was dismayed to see the Microsoft Word document that I had lovingly typed when posted did not appear in the same layout on the webpage that it had on the word document. The advice that I got was very helpful. I was told that I needed to cleanse Microsoft Word documents by copying them into Notepad before posting them on the web. Apparently Microsoft Word documents are encoded and these codes can conflict on web pages (I hope that I have explained that correctly, but you get the idea). It occurs to me that spiritually speaking I have had to do precisely the same thing with two of the ‘documents’ that I am anxious to bring into the grace environment; namely worship and spiritual gifts. If they are to avoid being conflicted then they must be cleansed through the ‘notepad’ of agape. Think for a moment of the possibilities when:
If we were to speak in the tongues of men and of angels, with love.
1 Cor 13: 1-2
And if we were to exercise prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, in love and yet ourselves be nothing.
If we give away all we have, and if I deliver up our bodies to be burned, and had love.
I am intrigued by the potential that awaits us in love. We have I respectfully suggest not even begun to explore what the power of love really is. Let us go through the door that the Lord has opened and experience the power of love.
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petemoyo
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