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Christianity

Five Reasons I’m Scared to Talk About the Holy Spirit

March 27, 2013 – 11:41 PM

Okay. I’m a minister. So I should want to talk about God––Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is a large part of the job description.

I have no trouble talking about the Father. And I have no trouble talking about Jesus Christ. But the Spirit is a different story.

I am preparing to teach on the Holy Spirit in my campus ministry. No, I’m not merely mentioning Him in a lesson. I am planning a teaching series. Soon I’ll have to stand in front of college students and talk intelligently and helpfully about the Holy Spirit.

And I’m a little scared.

Why?

Because I don’t like to talk about the Holy Spirit. And that’s a bad thing for a minister.

I spent some time today meditating on these fears. I thought I would share them with you. I am only going to tell you why I am scared to talk about the Holy Spirit. I’ll let others tell you how to overcome these fears.

Five Reasons I’m Scared to Talk About the Holy Spirit

1. I haven’t experienced the Holy Spirit like I would like. I know the Spirit should be a strong presence in my life. And I can see the effects of His work in my life and in my ministry. It’s just that I can only point to a handful of times I “felt” the work of the Holy Spirit in my life.

I feel uncomfortable talking to others about something I haven’t fully experienced. But I have to throw off any pride and allow myself to speak as a fellow traveler, not as a tour guide.

2. I’ve never heard the Holy Spirit talked about much. I grew up in churches that were not merely uncertain about the work of the Holy Spirit. They were certain He didn’t do almost anything anymore. He did a few miracles in Bible times, inspired the Scriptures, and then flew back into heaven.

As a result, any time I make a statement about the Holy Spirit, I instinctively feel defensive about that statement. I imagine being challenged on that statement by old preachers. This makes talking about the Spirit quite a chore for me.

3. I don’t see others experiencing the Holy Spirit like people do in the Bible. As Francis Chan says in The Forgotten God, the lives of most Christians don’t show the Spirit’s power like we see in the New Testament. Some are uncertain whether miraculous spiritual gifts still exist. And the churches that still clam that the miraculous spiritual gifts sometimes display them in ways you don’t see in the New Testament (showy and man-centered).

Even apart from the miraculous spiritual gifts, you often don’t see the moral changes that one would expect to see in people empowered by the Holy Spirit. In some Christians, I don’t see the love, joy, peace, and other fruit of the Spirit.

Since many Christians haven’t obviously experienced the Holy Spirit, I sometimes feel that talking about the Holy Spirit would make them uncomfortable.

4. I am aware that the Holy Spirit is a controversial topic. Okay. This point should be the easiest for you to see and agree with me. When it comes to the Holy Spirit, you would be hard pressed to find two people who have the exact same beliefs about the Holy Spirit.

Some people think the Spirit still works miracles. Others don’t. Some think the Spirit speaks to them and directly guides them. Others see this as dangerously subjective. Some think that the experience during a Christian concert is the Spirit moving. Others think that is is simply emotions, similar to what one would feel during a secular concert.

And these disagreements can become nasty. One party says the other is questioning, or outright denying, their religious experiences. The other party believes that all the talk about the Holy Spirit is too focused on misleading feelings and dangerously close to challenging the unique authority of the Bible.

Who would want to talk about the Spirit upset others because you are too “charismatic” or because you are “quenching the Spirit”? No one…especially ministers, since some have been fired for being on the wrong side of the debate.

5. There are many misuses of the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to do much research to begin finding story after story of charlatans who have claimed they were doing great works through the Spirit, when all the while they were deceiving their followers. And in the process these “ministers” got rich.

Some abuse the Spirit because they wrongly attribute their feelings and wishes to the Spirit. People often claim that the Spirit has placed a burden on their heart to go somewhere or do something or marry somebody. Sometimes this is true. But sometimes it is just their own wishes and feelings, evidenced by how quickly they turn aside from their previous plans or dreams. The Spirit is not fickle, but listening to some Christians gives you that impression.

So I’m afraid that when I talk about the Holy Spirit, people will assume that I am misusing the Spirit.

Conclusion

I hope no one mistakes what I’ve written as encouraging others not to speak about the Spirit. I rather hope that Christians will talk about the Spirit more.

Sure, the ways we talk about the Spirit needs to be formed by the Scriptures. But we need to talk more about the Spirit.

I hope that this article helps unearth some of the reasons you are reluctant to speak about the Spirit. After all, you will not freely talk about the Spirit until you remove these barriers to doing so.

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Christianity

Matisyahu on Judaism’s Burdensome Rules

January 4, 2013 – 8:00 AM

When I was in undergraduate at Auburn University, one of my friends told me about a Jewish reggae artist named Matisyahu. My friend would walk around between classes, singing some lines in his best imitation. This wasn’t enough to make me go out and by the artist. But a year later I bought one of the albums on a whim. I loved it. The songs were catchy while being very much informed by the Old Testament. And it helped that Matisyahu was a very unique artist. How many Hasidic Jews are bestselling reggae artists?

CNN Religion Blogs recently ran an interview with Matisyahu. He has recently left Hasidic Judaism.

The interview was pretty wideranging, but one bit interested me very much. The interviewer was asking Matisyahu about his reasons for leaving Hasidic Judaism.

In Judaism there are a lot of rules – everything from which fingernail you cut first to which side you sleep on in bed, to the way you get dressed in the morning, to actual ideas, like ideas about being chosen people or ideas about female/male and how to interact with people from the opposite sex. So all those things that I tried to mold myself into that never really jibed. When I’m talking about all the heaviness, I’m really talking about the rules. So at a certain point … I basically said, “I don’t need to do all these things. It’s my life, I can choose how I want to worship God, what words I want to say. I can say less words.” And once I let go of that, just sort of like a freedom that opened up that I began to taste, this freedom in my life that I had been missing.

(You can read the rest of the interview here.)

Why did I this interesting?

It is interesting to hear someone’s testimony about feeling “heavy laden” by religious rules. It is easy for me to disregard how many people really do feel burdened and deadened by religion. It reminds me about how refreshing many people find the gospel, not the false gospel of moralistic therapeutic deism, but the true gospel of free grace. And notice that he mentioned that he grew tired of trying to “mold” himself by these rules.

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Christianity

Memverse.com: My Review of the Bible Memorization Site

January 2, 2013 – 11:13 PM
Memverse Screenshot

Memverse’s “Review” page.

I have been trying to memorize sections of the Bible over the last seven years, though my efforts were off and on. Even though I have been undisciplined in sticking to it, Scripture memorization has help me. Verses run through me head all day, helping me as I deliberate about decisions, helping my prayer life, and helping my teaching and preaching. The only regret I have about this memory work is that I have not consistently done it.

Three years ago, I discovered an invaluable resource: Memverse.com.

On Memverse, you can create an account and track your memory work. Once you have an account, you choose the verses you want to memorize. Then you just log in every day, go to the Review tool, and work on the verses that you are scheduled to memorize that day.

Without a system like this, it would be difficult for me to keep track of the hundreds of verses I am memorizing. Memverse handles this for you. It track the verses you need to review and when. And it spaces out your verses using spaced repetition, which spaces out the reviews to the optimal time. (Read more about it here.)

Memverse.com has several great features. Here’s a few that I like:

  • When reviewing verses, it groups verses together if they are from the same passage. This way you review John 3:17 right after you review John 3:16. It really helps you learn passages rather than just individual verses.
  • A “Learn” mode, which round after round replaces words in a verse with blanks, so that you start reviewing the verse with it only having one or two blanks. By the tenth round, you are faced with nothing but blanks, but you are well prepared for it by this time.
  • Several leaderboards, so you can see how you are doing stacked up against the other members. It also compares churches with churches (when you register, you tell them your church’s name and location) and state with state.
  • Several translations to choose from.
  • A “Chapter Review” mode, where you can review an entire chapter at once.

It is free to create an account and start memorizing. There is no paid memberships to the site, so you get all the features for free. I hope you’ll consider using the site. Just in case you do, here’s some advice that I’d give you to make the best use of it.

  1. Early on, focus on completing sessions every day. Don’t worry about the number of verses memorized. A verse is defined as “Memorized” when your interval between scheduled reviews (when you get a verse right, the interval is increased) reaches 30 days. You have to review it correctly several times – it differs based on several factors – to reach that threshold. So it’ll take you a few weeks of work before you ever memorize a verse. That can be frustrating. So just focus on completing review sessions every day. Trust the system.
  2. Don’t use the first-letter prompts. When you first start memorizing a verse, you are given first-letter prompts. So, if you were learning “Jesus wept.”, you would see “J w.” After you get it right a few times, those disappear. When I first started using Memverse, I loved this feature. But I recently turned it off, and I’ve discovered that I learn a verse better without it. Why? The hardest thing about learning a verseis the word order, specifically what word starts each verse. Using first-letter prompts encourages me not to focus on word order early when memorizing a verse. This created problems as I advanced in my learning of each verse, when Memverse.com removes the first-letter prompts, and I didn’t know the word order.
  3. Pick a translation and stick with it. Memverse.com has a lot of Bible translations to choose from. But you cannot switch from one translation of a verse to another without starting all over with that verse. Say I’d memorized a lot of verses in the NIV 1984 translation. If I want to re-memorize my verses in the updated NIV (2010) version. I’d have to deleted all the verses – losing all my stats relating to those verses – and add again all theses verses, this time in the new translation. I understand why they do it this way. After all, the translations differ enough to complicate memory work. So it’s best to treat each translation of a verse differently. But this could be frustrating if you’re not initially prepared for it.

So go ahead and join. You won’t regret it.

(And, no, I was not asked to make a review; nor am I affiliated with Memverse.com in any way, except I’m a registered user who wanted to praise a great site.)

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