Revive us O Lord

Is there anyone out there who has the same feeling I have, that we can't rest content with the level of Christian life most of us settle for? I suppose I'm feeling this more intensely lately because of the growing evil in the world as the last day approaches, feeling my spiritual weakness, seeing the spiritual weakness of the church at large, which is a sad testimony I suppose, since we should want more of God in any time or place.

I've never been content with my state of weakness, at least intellectually, although I've been confused, discouraged and I suppose just plain lazy about doing anything about it. From time to time I read of those who have moved on to real power, power over sin and self, power for fruitful service to the Lord, and I long for it but the longing easily dissipates under the sense of the arduousness of the task, until the next encounter with such examples.

And now the state of things these days has a peculiar urgency to it that drives me to more desire for it if not yet more actual doing of it. It is an uphill battle even getting myself to focus on the problem, but occasionally I struggle through from a foggy start in prayer to some clarity and freedom in seeking Him in prayer. There is SO much I want to hear from the Lord about these days.

Certain self-indulgences HAVE to go. I'm such a lazy self-indulgent overeating oversleeping American, so used to my comforts and entertainments. How hard it is to purge myself of them or even tame them, especially as I have so little faith that I can overcome, at my age with such bad habits of sloth, so little faith that the Lord would guide and strengthen me in this effort. O woman of little faith. But I desire it enough to be writing about it, and making more efforts toward it lately. Could the Lord take a lazy bum in her sixties and make anything of her even somewhat useful to Him?

Power. The power of God. NOBODY I KNOW HAS THIS POWER. It doesn't matter how good the preaching appears to be in a particular church, how dedicated the Christians are to their service for God, and I don't mean to play any of that down, I know it is true, but in spite of all of it the power we see in the early church is just not there.

Shouldn't it be there? I'm not talking about speaking in tongues or giving prophetic words in church. I'd really rather there were none of that since it so often has come with the lack of the better kind of power I'm talking about. I'm talking about the power of holiness of God's people, the power to witness, a witness that draws people to God by the power of God and not our own power, the living water Jesus promised to believers. The first love of Christ most of us have lost over time. The power that is seen in genuine revivals. I'm talking about power to obey all the difficult commands, to die to self, to bear our cross, to rejoice in all things, to rejoice under persecution, to be anxious for nothing. Power of fearlessness, power to love our enemies, the love that casts out fear, power to bless our enemies. Power that is God's alone. I don't have it to any degree I can rest content with, to put it mildly, and I don't see it in others.

I know there is the idea that we are to slowly grow in the things of the Spirit, but I have to admit I haven't seen that happen to anyone either. I see growth in knowledge, growth in doctrine, a little growth in self control that seems to come more from such learning than from the Spirit and so on, but not growth in and through the Holy Spirit Himself.

But maybe I'm just an impatient American. I haven't much time, I could be dead tomorrow. But I believe God will work in His people in a mighty way if we seek Him diligently for it. Even seeking Him diligently must come from Him, and it's so easy to give up the effort, but we need it, we need it, we need it. I'm trying to seek this. I'll seek it alone or I'll seek it with anyone who shares my assessment and my desire. Oh Lord, hear and help. Amen.

There is in fact a "higher" Christian life than the usual

The main motivation for this separate blog is to collect in one place descriptions and testimonies and analyses of an area of Christian experience well described by some individuals throughout the history of the church, that can fairly be called a "higher" Christian life than the ordinary, whether any particular movement, such as the Holiness movement, or the Higher Life movement, holds theological keys to this experience or not. Insofar as they describe it in a way that makes it accessible I want to showcase their thoughts.

I don't want to have to spend time defending the reality of such a higher life if I can avoid it. The need to do that usually comes out of the erroneous theologies about it, so I'd rather focus on the experiences themselves that Christians have described.

A reason Revival is in the title of this blog is that I think Revival is the model that will made these experiences more understandable and acceptable to those who are inclined to reject them on theological grounds. Revival is God's moving on a gathering of Christians in a sovereign powerful way, and the results in individual lives are pretty much what the Higher Life and Second Blessing people describe, and in the context of revival the usual critics of those movements don't have a problem with them but do appreciate them as a genuine move of God. Since that is true, constructing a solid Biblical theology which supports them must be possible, although I am probably not up to that task.

There's a lot to say about all this but it will have to wait.

That's the verdict: True experience, fine aims, bad theology

I listened to the last of the three hour-long talks by Andrew Naselli about the Keswick movement this afternoon (at the bottom of the link list), and was pleasantly surprised to find him saying the same thing I just said in my last post. That is, the Keswickian experience is genuine and their aims are important, but their theology is wrong. Dedicated seeking for holiness is the important thing even if they have misconstrued how we arrive at holiness and mislead people in their attempts to formulate it.

He also said what I'd said, that they apparently have had the experience of a big step in growth and have simply not understood it rightly.

When people try to follow their advice they usually end in frustration, because the method is wrong. But those who read them for inspiration to live the holy life, as I do, can get a lot out of them.

Possibly that's all that has to be said about this subject and I can now close down this blog.

I doubt it. I'll just wait and see what comes up next.

So what IS this higher life or is it just a big mistake?

OK, I've been listening to that lengthy study of Keswick theology I've put on my list of links. The speaker Andrew Naselli speaks rapidly and is only covering an outline he doesn't want to take up time fleshing out, so I have to start and stop the tape frequently to get parts of it and may be missing some important points.

Although at first he appears to be addressing a fundamentalist audience, at various points he identifies his perspective as Reformed, and it sounds to me like pretty typical Reformed thinking on this subject.

As usual the main criticism of the Higher Life/Holiness/Keswick style teaching is that justification and sanctification are chronologically split into two separate events -- the initial belief in Christ of the forgiveness of sin, and a second later experience of the power of the Spirit that makes it possible to live without known sin -- while the Reformed perspective insists that both are complete in the believer at the moment of belief, and both are worked out progressively over time as well. So you are both fully justified and fully sanctified and baptized in the Spirit upon belief although you have no conscious apprehension of the baptism. Another target of the Reformed critique is the idea of "sinless perfection" which some Holiness groups attribute to the "second blessing" or "Spirit baptism" or experience of sanctification which is the second stage or event in the Christian life. Yet another target is the effect of the system in creating two separate classes of Christians, the "carnal" Christian and the spiritual Christian, while according to the Reformed view Christians are by definition spiritual although they may succumb to carnal attitudes to different degrees, and a person who really is carnal can't be a Christian, as that is the defintion of an unbeliever.

Now I've heard this kind of criticism many times, and I don't doubt its correctness as presented. I know that J.C. Ryle also had this criticism of the Holiness movement and since I admire his teaching very much I have to take it seriously.

At the same time something important is getting lost. Those Holiness people, the best of them at least, truly had an experience of the power of God that transformed them, usually years after their initial conversion. It changed them overnight from struggling Christians -- who despite active service for Christ kept falling into various "besetting sins" and weaknesses of personality -- into joyful lovers of God and powerhouses of bold witness such as the apostles became after Pentecost. The comparison with Pentecost can't be denied.

I have Jessie Penn-Lewis' experience in mind here as I was most recently reading her biography, so let me stick to her for now. She was certainly a staunch Keswickian. The effect of her personal transformation was personally dramatic, but the effect on her Bible teaching, which she had been doing for years with classes of young girls, was to bring about conversions of the sort we normally only hear about in revival accounts. In fact the equation is quite clear. Life begets life and whatever you want to call what happened to her personally, it was a fullness of the life of the Holy Spirit that she did not have previously and it begat that same fullness of life in many of those she was teaching.

So, everything the Reformed say may be true, may in fact be the better basic understanding of what happens at initial belief, but SOMETHING has to explain the fact that these dramatic changes have really happened to many people, and even if their own explanations are faulty, if they have the theology wrong on various points, at least they preserve the reality of a transformative experience of God that it is hard to deny is of utmost value to Christian life and work. So perhaps some of this is a semantic problem, such that we are both fully justified and fully sanctified upon initial conversion, and we are progressively being justified and sanctified as we continue in our Christian life, and yet SOMETHING happens to SOME Christians that sounds like it OUGHT to be the standard of the normal Christian life. Only a few ever seek it or find it, and the kind of teaching you get from such as this Reformed teacher would certainly dampen any yearnings in that direction. But whether we know what to call it or not it's of God and it's higher than the usual Christian existence and it is devoutly to be desired.

That's where I'm at about this at the moment.

What I want to do with this blog

I've been too involved in the Presidential election and the signs of the times lately. That's all important but it takes a toll on the spiritual life if I let it, and I've been letting it. The personal spiritual life is far more important than any specific understanding of such external things anyway; or, perhaps to be more accurate, any such understanding is not really of much value unless it is prompted and guided by the Holy Spirit rather than mere intellect. It has to come from Him. Whatever comes from me is useless. The flesh avails nothing, but all things are possible with God. It's possible to say this without truly knowing it too. The spiritual life is full of snares for the unwary.

So I wrenched myself away from those preoccupations and sat myself down in front of the Bible and the best teachings on the power of the Holy Spirit I had collected over the years.

Then I decided to put together a blog partly to help me do this study I need to do for my own encouragement and motivation.

I just now finished putting together a list of links to talks and books in this general area, which I hope will grow as I get this blog moving.

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Here's an attempt to define my starting position:

I strongly believe the church at large is in desperate need of power from God in revival and personal sanctification and growth in the Spirit. I feel my own lack of such power acutely. As I've read about revivals and personal experiences of the power of the Spirit in individual lives, it is very clear to me that Christians should have such power and that accepting the typical powerless Christian life we see all around us is not what the Lord wants, nor is it going to help us as we approach the very last days.

At the same time I've been exremely cautious about seeking such power because of experiences in the charismatic movement in the early 90s, a confusing mixture of true and false supernatural experiences, both my own and others'. I became afraid of being deceived to such an extent that it's been hard to trust any manifestation of supernatural workings in the church and I've been mired down in doubt for years.

At the same time I yearn for Him to move in His church in supernatural power. I know that God's people MUST be empowered by Him or our lives are going to be less than as fruitful as He wants of us, and being empowered by Him does mean seeing His supernatural workings through us. All of His children see Him working through us in some ways nevertheless, as we see events conspiring to lead us in various directions for instance, and we see answers to prayer and so on.

But there is more, much more. Many Christian leaders will scoff at the idea and put it down as heresy, but I'm going to try to defend it here, hopefully avoiding the theological errors that often come with this territory. The Holiness and Higher Life teachings are put down as error by some of the best, and that has to be taken seriously, but I believe that there is a risk of throwing out the baby with the bath water. It may be bad theology to think in terms of a "second blessing" in some sense, but what is described under that name is usually simply the kind of spiritual power God Himself has brought in many revivals, and even the critics usually agree that the church needs revival. The testimony of a real moving of God shouldn't be thrown out because the theology that explains it doesn't hold up.

However, it is true that the experience of supernatural power makes Christians more vulnerable to the counterfeits of the devil, and the pentecostal and charismatic movements that grew out of the Holiness beginnings are unfortunately rife with examples of that. These things become a spiritual minefield if we are not well trained in spiritual discernment through prayer and study.

There is nothing simple about this. I collected both positive and negative views of the Higher Life teachings in my links and will probably collect more. I want to carefully consider the implications of as much of the teaching as possible in this blog.