It was about 9 years ago.  Anne and I had come through a long, tough season: joining a church staff post-split with many more fractures to come, a miscarriage, a move out of the only city we had ever known into the largest southern baptist church in the nation where, at the time, I was one of 17 student pastors.  We had built a house, had our first child, and felt burnout taking place. We prayed and God miraculously moved us from a church of 56,000 to a town of 56,000. This was a different kind of church that I wasn’t ready for, but still there was something so familiar to this new thing.  Within the first week or so after coming on staff, we found ourselves in a VERY powerful worship service. It was a Sunday night (so my Southern Baptist roots were appeased), we were an hour into a worship service and only 3 songs had been played, and I had just experienced the Lord miraculously healing someone.  As I walked back to my seat soaking with sweat from being huddled with so many believers praying over this lady, I found myself in awe. I wanted to talk to someone about it, but it was just me. Anne was next to me, of course, but with the music and the crowd I found a whispered conversation with the Lord to be so simple but so deep. All I could get out of my mouth was, “What is this?”  I know it is hard to grasp the inflection of my question to the Lord in a blog post so I will try to explain: I was stating that I was curious and sorry all in one whispered question directly to my Heavenly Father.

You see, chaos mixed with either rebellion or a wound is an elixir so deceiving that we drink it like medicine instead of rejecting it for the poison that it is.  The chaos I’d experienced was man-made, human-effort, well-intentioned “ministry”. The wound was those with whom I was serving taking too much of me and using my gifts. My rebellion was a plague of personality.  I could do and hide behind the gifts God had given me, but for them to be used by others or myself for our own gain was not the Father’s intent - thus my rebellion was internal. In that moment about 9 years ago, I realized the dry, desert condition my soul was in and, as I was starting to drink deep of the Spirit of God, it was both new and familiar.

The familiar was that the Holy Spirit had always been very real to me and close - but limited.  The new was a depth that I had always believed was possible but never experienced; I was realizing I could experience things just like the early church. Just like Acts.

That incredible Sunday night started a new season of growth and discovering new depths of the Lord through His Spirit that, hopefully, I will never get away from. 

Here is what I have learned from that experience that I wish for you to hear from my heart. The early church saw so much through the Holy Spirit that death was looked at very differently than it is today. In Peter, Paul, James, Stephen, Timothy and others, there was nothing deceased. Nothing was final until the Spirit of God revealed the finality of something. Even the dead.

Flip to today.  I want to believe and see the same things (and more), and the only way to get there is to believe nothing ceased.  There is this controlling demonic thought out there today in our Christian culture that says certain acts of the Spirit of God or the disciples ceased at their death or while they were in their latter days. In order to prove this, many will say that through an “in-depth” study of scripture you can see the subtle changes taking place from early in Acts to the end of the book.  Yet if someone was to challenge them on the writings that take place later they would say that all scripture is inspired by the Spirit of God.  So, this deceptive lie makes us pick and choose what we want to believe about the Holy Spirit.

Another huge concept that I feel many miss in these types of “proof-texting arguments” is that in order to say that the gifts of the Spirit have ceased, we must make a statement that says something like: “Well, today God can not . . . “ That statement in itself illuminates the controlling, man-made logic around this “God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Bible” movement.  

Please don’t get it twisted.  Not everything is permissible and a man can certainly manipulate people to believing the Spirit is saying something He is not.  Just like man can manipulate people to believing the Bible is saying something it is not. And I am not trying to lessen the Bible at all, but I am trying to desperately plead with you that Jesus left us the Holy Spirit and His depths are so deep. Nothing has ceased.  

The first attempt at compiling collected letters that would ultimately become the New Testament was around 130 AD. This didn’t have the 4 gospels and didn’t have the epistles. There was no Acts and no Revelation. The New Testament as we know it wasn’t fully formed until the 4th century.

I AM NOT SAYING ANYTHING AGAINST SCRIPTURE! I am trying to show you that the Holy Spirit was the guide source for EVERYTHING in the early church. The Holy Spirit was and is the Person we are to trust to illuminate. The Holy Spirit uses the Bible to illuminate, but not to have the Spirit FULLY active in all parts of our lives means we can become a shell for religious thought and empty conjecture. We have been at this Cessationism-type of theology in mainstream Christianity only since the early 1900’s. People like me, who grow up in the church, brush shoulders with this third person of the God-head and end up asking ourselves, “What is this?”.

Friends, these are hard things to wrestle with. But my confidence in the heartbeat of our Heavenly Father is only found through my intimate time with Him. Jesus has provided the access to the Father to hear His heartbeat and desires, and the Holy Spirit is the empowering comforter and helper for me to accomplish the things on the Father’s heart. The Bible is the perfect, God-breathed, Spirit-inspired tool and mechanism that assists me in connecting and understanding the Holy God-Head. If I fall into the thought process of believing that certain things of the Spirit have ceased, I can easily treat the Holy Spirit as lesser than the Father and Son. I also can fall into the trap of elevating the scripture above the Holy Spirit because “reading” it is something I can easily accomplish, while the Holy Spirit is mysterious and hard to comprehend. Which is harder - to attain the knowledge of scripture or to rest, allowing and trusting the Spirit of God to illuminate scripture? One can be measured and the other can’t be. One can be opened and closed, started and stopped in “study”; the other is a state of continual selflessness in order to listen. This is what Jesus meant whenever He said “He who has ears let him hear!” Almost every person is born with ears, and yet true listening is very hard. Let us be a people who listen and believe in God to the fullest and, with that, nothing will cease.