Treasury of Hearts

I tell you the solemn truth, the person who believes in me will perform the miraculous deeds that I am doing, and will perform greater deeds than these, because I am going to the Father. (John 14:12 NET)

I spent a lot of time among the Neo-Pentecostals, AKA Charismatics, along with the old line Pentecostals. They’ll mix with each other, but maintain a recognizable difference. Aside from the typical doctrinaire assertion that you are only half-redeemed if you don’t engage in glossolalia (“speaking in tongues”) they both share a tacit condemnation of the person if that person doesn’t lay hold of all the wonderful miraculous things they claim come with their movement. The underlying assumption is that Jesus said it was all for us, and the only reason you don’t have it is that you just don’t believe.

Compare this against the Cessationists: They believe all of that stuff was a special dispensation only for the first generation of Christians. Once all the Apostles died, those miracles were done. They assert there are no genuine Gifts of the Spirit these days and that the Charismatics are all lying, or at best, self-deceived.

There is a large segment of Western Christianity that avoids the excesses of the former group while unconvinced by the arguments of the second. All of them tend to work together on certain common interests, as you might expect. You cannot put people into organized groups without pushing an interest, and it will always be political in nature. All of them want to change this world, though they are certainly interested in changing the individual soul.

Of course, the fundamental flaw in all of them is a Western orientation. While the Charismatics surely do see some good things happening in the lives of people, helping to persuade some of the hardest sinners to repent, they have a poor grasp of God’s moral character. Thus, much of what they claim is suspect purely on the grounds that they are focused on the wrong level. They talk about the heart, but it’s a very muddy concept still deeply tainted with emotion. They confuse the Two Realms promiscuously. The Cessationists are simply too cerebral, keeping alive the spirit of Pharisaism that way. They insist that the sin of the Pharisees was simple hypocrisy. They don’t understand that the ancient concept of hypocrisy is quite different from ours today. Yet they manage to do some good things, as well.

You won’t catch me suggesting that these folks all need to stop what they are doing. I’ll dispute their assertions, but it does virtually no good at all taking the message to them. And I’m not interested in upsetting the applecart for them. I have learned through a lifetime of ministry that you can manipulate folks into anything you can imagine, but a genuine change in the soul requires a miracle intervention of God. Manipulation is a work of mere human talent, and requires a vast system to keep it alive. The real thing tends to keep working without any system at all. It’s not a question of human need, but of what God will do. That is, we work within the limits of God’s calling on our lives, and we stop at the moral boundaries these others cannot recognize.

Because of what I’ve seen in this lifetime of ministry, I’m quite content to leave people where they are. I recognize the human urge to fix it for them, but that’s not a moral urge. I can rejoice in the moral good that comes out of their work, even while I realize much of that good is accidental. My whole point is that none of them have a clue about the moral character of God because they insist on filtering all their contact with reality through a Western frame of reference. So long as you retain those Western assumptions about reality, you will never really find the God of the Bible.

So I reject the whole discussion about miracles and cessation. On the one hand I assert God still does miracles, but I most certainly don’t define “miracle” as Western Christians do. I do see a serious limitation on God’s promises, but it’s not some doctrinaire assertion that God doesn’t work that way any more, but that God won’t do much in a system that rejects His hand. Instead of the everyday experience of His mercies by His promises, we get only those miracles that He insists on doing despite us. Thus, it’s not a question of making oneself believe against the flesh and unbelief, but that no one involved knows what to believe. That is, they are so Westernized that they aren’t even on the same planet with what the Scripture says.

This is part of what John saw in the Apocalypse, a part of the depth of sorrow conveyed by his prophetic images. He knew that Christians would lose touch with that Ancient Hebrew Mysticism, and thus lose themselves in a Pharisaical fantasy of Hellenized rationalism. This may not be the End Times in any sense, but having found the treasury of the Ancient Hebrew approach to Scripture, I am determined to hold it up for all to admire, regardless whether their eyes can see it. There is enough for everyone.

I have no idea how God grabbed your attention and brought you here. There might be common threads, but Jesus Himself told the twin parables of the Pearl of Great Price and the Treasure Found in the field to illustrate that we cannot guess how God calls people to Him. That He called some of you here is the true wealth of my life right now, the rich treasure that justifies my continued work and effort. Not the human thrill of being noticed, so as to boost my ego, but that I have a sense some of you, at least, are catching hold of God’s truth. Even if I stood alone, I would forge ahead and continue posting what I’ve learned just so I can talk about it and use it myself. But as you surely understand, sharing that treasury of truth with others increases its value. You are for me a significant measure of His glory, the thing I seek above all.

I love you all.