There are no particular facts, but Scripture indicates spiritual awakening is all-or-nothing. Once the Spirit invades your being, all of Eternity comes with Him. The connection is complete. Why it is we cannot then immediately exercise all the gifts of the Spirit is a question with no simple answer. Obviously the hindrance is somewhere below that level for us.
This man was listening to Paul as he was speaking. When Paul stared intently at him and saw he had faith to be healed, he said with a loud voice, “Stand upright on your feet.” (Acts 14:9-10)
Our Western trained instinct is to ask a thousand questions regarding instrumentality on something like this. There were physical symptoms for his malady. Were there physical symptoms of faith to be healed? In what sense did Paul “see” that man’s faith? Should we expect it’s something we can learn? Could we then unlock whatever potential it was that allowed Paul to perform miracles of healing?
Is there a minimum standard moral and spiritual equipping? What does it take to break through our balky flesh and intellect? Is it some kind of failure that some folks can do this and others cannot? Such questions were central to the horrific trouble Paul had in Corinth with the gifts of the Spirit.
The Corinthian population was hardly a good example of Greek culture and learning. They were about as materialistic and superstitious as the barbarians far to the north in central Europe. That is, what dogged the Corinthians trying to cross over into a spiritual life is similar to what the Anglo-Saxons brought to the question. To the degree both failed, it was the same fundamental failure. What plagues us today in our Post-Enlightenment West (essentially Aristotelian reason tainted with Anglo-Saxon culture) is very much like what kept the Corinthians in turmoil.
Would I have to write as I do if we all possessed a more ANE-oriented intellectual background like the Hebrews? How often I wished that Paul could have written a stronger treatise more directly comparing his two cultural backgrounds! He understood the differences instinctively and clearly had that in mind when he wrote about the troubles of the European churches struggling to accept what was essentially a Hebrew religion. Part of our difficulty today is the common failure to notice how often Paul’s demands reflected the essential Hebrew-ANE approach to morality.
So when Peter saw him [John], he asked Jesus, “Lord, what about him?” Jesus replied, “If I want him to live until I come back, what concern is that of yours? You follow me!” (John 21:21-22)
This was calling Peter back to the Hebrew ways of thinking. Everything is personal, a direct link between us and Christ. There are sure to be shared elements, but in the daily life of keeping that link between soul and spirit alive, it remains a question of what God demands of you as a unique individual servant accountable to Him first.
Thus, I keep asserting that a fundamental tenet of Christian Mysticism is: It’s personal. I can offer my personal experience and grieve before you my personal failures, but I cannot decide for you what faith requires. As Jesus told Peter, I can’t nail down on this earth who gets to play line-leader or why. All I can do is decide when something won’t work if you tend to hang around me.
No, I cannot teach you how to perform miracles. I’m still struggling to get myself switched over to a different understanding of reality. And maybe my mission doesn’t require anything like the miracles Paul and his friends performed. It’s not that Heaven has changed, nor has human moral and spiritual needs, but the context has changed an awful lot. We are forced to dig back into that world and rightly divide what belongs to us today.
(And I can never predict where these articles will end up once I start writing them!)
