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.