ver.: 14 January 2007
Take a look at these letters from people who are asking spiritual questions :
> I stumbled on to you website while trying to find
information on the Trinity.
> I'm finding it hard to explain to a Nine year old boy.
2000 years' worth of adults wrestling with it leaves the entire church at a loss to describe it. Me too. Every explanation gives something of a wrong impression. Keeping that in mind, we must try, or lose sight of it. The best I can think of (that doesn't lean on a lot of very adult God-talk) would be to use any three-part object that is an identifiable whole, where the parts have some relationship to each other. St. Patrick used a shamrock. But of course, God is no object. To say 'Trinity' is to say that, in some way, God is a relationship as well as an organic whole. The only field I know of that can begin to handle that concept is (unfortunately, adult-level) science fiction.
Children usually have an easier time with mystery than adults do. I think he might grasp it easier than you may think.
[[ If any of you in Web-land have ideas on explaining the Trinity in a way that a grade school child can grasp, I'd love to hear it (and rip it off...). Email me about it. ]]
> I am new to the computer so I'm very excited to search
through the many
> websites that people have developed
then visit my links pages :
http://www.spirithome.com/links.html
http://www.spirithome.com/links2.html
http://www.spirithome.com/links_movements.html
http://www.spirithome.com/links4.html
They're links to the most reliable sites (and a handful of the weirdest sites) in the Christian religion field. Just click and go there. In fact, there's so much there that you'll have to bookmark it for repeated trips. (To wit : I've made a site where there's always something more to learn. For me as well as you.)
> I understood a lot about the origins of my faith from your Pentecostalist History pages.
That's why it's there.
> But what other brand of Christianity (or religion) does
not share in
> similar shortcomings if the search light were to be put on
it?
I had no intent of putting it down. Indeed, I try to bring forward the impulses and movements that created it and still re-create it to this day. Pentecostalism is one of the main shapes of the Christian faith today -- in my mind, the second most important next to Roman Catholicism. While most Protestant theologians will do no more than tip the hat to that fact and move on as if they have nothing specific to say, I can't do that, because it has had an impact on my own faith -- not through a shake-it-down faith experience of my own, but through other people who have had such experiences. And those people are of the Body of Christ.
As for the shortcomings of the leaders and theologies, they must be acknowledged -- in the same way I have to acknowledge Luther's venom against Jews and the abuses of human rights in Geneva under Calvin, the same way we all acknowledge that the first leader of the Church, Peter, denied Jesus three times, and at first was very reluctant about admitting Gentiles. We have to see the truth and treat it for what it is. In doing so we earn the right to acknowledge the great ways God worked through these people. So it also is with Pentecostalism, but it's so relatively young as a movement that it hasn't really done much acknowledging. I hope my pages help them do that. (They've begun to look at the race questions recently -- but as they're finding out the hard way, there's always more at play with race than meets the eye.)
> I currently have a couple of jehovah's
witnesses coming to my house
> every week. I keep trying to explain my belief that the
Holy Spirit
> is not just a force of God, but part of the Trinity, which
of course
> they're not buying at all. No matter what scripture I
quote to help
> explain it, they come back with something to prove the
opposite. This
> is very frustrating as you can well imagine. I did get
them to take a
> book from me.... I was surprised they agreed to read the
chapter on the
> Holy Spirit, however they're only trying to find a way to
refute it.
(1) Even when things don't seem to be registering with them, remember that the Holy Spirit is at work in your witness. It may be for someone else to put the final pieces in place. Your job is to be trustworthy and diligent with your part.
(2) JWs have a very strict view of God and of existence, full not of God's grace and freedom in Christ, but of damnation for almost everyone, including many of their own. Everything you tell them will (at least at first) be fitted into that worldview, even if they have to do it in the manner of Cinderella's stepsisters when they tried to fit the glass slipper. (Yecch...) They don't practice Christmas -- not just because they don't celebrate holidays, but also because they don't really believe the main point of this holiday : immanu 'el -- God is with us. The ultimate thing to speak of with a JW is not the issue of whether there is a Holy Spirit, but what kind of God we have -- a God of grace and love, who makes good come from evil and life come from death, who wants us to know the truth and feel its passion and fashion our lives around it, who takes our mustard-seed sized faith and moves mountains with it, and who is working to help us become the kind of people who build each other up and keep each other pressing on. In short, to transform us into citizens of the Kingdom of God. It is in that context that the Holy Spirit most makes sense -- once Jesus as God-with-us left, the Spirit was sent "in His stead", to be God with us today. God's loving solidarity with us is still firmly in place through the presence and work of the Holy Spirit, keeping us with Christ.
This is what JWs need to know. God loves us. (I almost sound like Tess and Monica on TV -- but we find the simple message so hard to really accept sometimes.) Holiness, worship, fellowship, employment, family, everything else becomes a celebration of this.
I hope this helps you with the JWs you know. Remember to love them more than argue with them -- as hard as they make it sometimes. And keep praying.
> Please sir, could you show me in the
Bible when Jesus had people line up
> to have hands laid on them and be knocked out on the
floor. Then I would
> like to know how does this experience glorify God.
Please don't put me in the spot of defending something I was not necessarily defending and something I myself have never experienced nor caused to happen.
Things that were not done by Jesus can glorify Jesus. Every week you glorify Jesus in ways which are not described in the Bible and which were not done by Jesus or by the disciples. I'm trying hard to see why you want to apply a different standard to pentecostalism than you apply to yourself and to other kinds of Christians.
I see no Scripture that honestly supports the 'slain in the Spirit' experience - that's the main point of the 'slain' article - but also no verses that specifically condemn it. So we're left in the vast in-between land which also holds most of the rest of what we do in our lives. When that happens, I look toward the things in Scripture that teach us what character God's work has. Scripture says that what ultimately glorifies God is that we become truer followers and that we love one another. On that score, many pentecostalists I know of glorify God in many remarkable ways in their lives, and are amazingly strong and mature believers. The 'slain' experience was the catalyst for them, the thing that set them on this road. But in other people, that same experience has been the road to experience-addiction and slavery to religious authoritarians. (Other branches of Christianity have their own different sets of problems.) With that in mind, I steer clear of uttering judgement. It's not my place to set rules on such things.
I can only speak for me on this. You have to figure this out
for yourself, prayerfully.
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> While you are fasting, can you have
something to drink? Like a coke,
> cup of coffee, tea, juice....?
That is up to you. Most fasts aren't total or near-total; in that case you must do without the stuff that you most think you can't do without or don't want to do without. But since the purpose is for discipline, you would have to set those rules at the start, and you must not change them later except if you really have to for health reasons.
I suggest that you don't use caffeinated drinks, like colas, coffee or tea. Caffeine affects your overall system quite a bit, and much more strongly when there's nothing else being put in. The same is true of herbal antidepressants such as kava kava or St. John's Wort -- use none while on even a partial fast. If you are on prescription drugs, check with your doctor first.
If you're going to go on a total fast (water or fluids
only), or any other drastic physical discipline, make sure
someone else is keeping close medical track of you to
make sure you're not getting dangerous.
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This was found in a church bulletin:
> I need information about Mary, things like
where she was born dates
>and so on
Such hard information does not usually exist on the people of yore. Mary (Heb. Miriam = 'stubborn', 'determined', 'obstinate') is no different. It can reasonably be guessed that she was born around 18 to 20 BC (14-18 years of age at the time of Jesus' birth), probably in Galilee. She did not die until after Jesus' death and the earliest days of the church, which she lived to be part of (thus, after 32 AD or so); she probably lived her last years in the Jerusalem area (where Jesus' brother James and the apostle John lived in the earliest days of the church), though there are traditions that say otherwise. She had a number of children, both sons and daughters (Matt 13:54-56), all younger than Jesus. She appears to be a widow by the start of Jesus' ministry (no mention of Joseph in Jesus' adult ministry years, and some hints that the earliest believers viewed her in the manner of devout Jews toward widows).
Step away from the Mary of common piety, superstition, and theologies traditional or new. Look at the Mary of Scripture. She's one very interesting woman. Her Yes to God gave us a chance to say yes to the God who, through the Son of Mary, said Yes to us.
> I have recently felt God telling me to
study up on spiritual warfare.
> I think it might be because He has that in His plan for me
in my future
> ministries.
All I have on it myself is on the pages. I am just a learner, and I share what I learn.
Spiritual warfare is about loving God and other people, not about hating the Devil. It is about doing right in your own life and doing right to the people around you before it is about anybody doing anything Satanic. It is about the simple and everyday decisions much more than it is about exorcisms and power confrontations (though be prepared....). It is about reading the Bible more than it is about catching the latest hot 'deliverance' preacher, tape or book. And it is not something to engage in by yourself.
Just like all Christians are called to be evangelists by living their lives as Christ would have us do, all Christians are called to fight spiritual wars that same way. And, like with evangelism, a few are called for a more intense role in spiritual warfare. But those few must keep seeing things as they really are. It is God who wins the war, not ourselves. We just do what He gives us to do.
> Do you know what is meant by "baptized in the Holy Spirit"?
The term is usually used by Pentecostalists to describe the initial experience of being overcome by the Spirit. It's a fairly dramatic thing, and it holds the potential for moving someone from no commitment (or weak commitment) to a vigorous commitment, and a period of activity in which the person re-sets their lives and seeks out what God wants of them.
In my own way of looking at it, all baptism in Christ is baptism in the Spirit. It is, after all, Christ who sent the Spirit. The Spirit is at work bringing that person into the Body of Christ. That may have to be done the hard way, and it can be renounced (you are a free being, in that sense). But "the gift of the Holy Spirit" comes with baptism (Acts 2:38-39). What that means and how that shows is different with each person. And if you turn away, the Spirit is committed to working hard to bring you back -- willing to be silly, to be annoying, to use hurtful situations, even to set you into life-and-death situations and choices, just to get you back for the Kingdom. In that baptism, the jealous God says, "you're mine!" In that baptism, all followers of Christ are united, part of the same entity, the Body of Christ (1 Cor 12:13-14). The main thing the Spirit brings to you in baptism is Christ Himself, that you could know Him and be changed to be as He is.
That sounds starkly different than the Pentecostal approach, but there is actually much common ground. For instance, I myself share the Pentecostalist belief that great power comes with baptism, especially of an adult convert. That power is in the gift of the Holy Spirit and in the gifts which the Spirit brings to that person. I look at 'manifestations' differently than they do, going back to the meaning of the term, which is simply how something shows itself (or, is 'made manifest'). The Spirit shows forth in the convert by way of the power of their gift(s) to build up the others around them. Pentecostalists don't deny this at all; they just add a step in between, saying that something flashy has to happen in a flash. Even there, I'm not so different; I believe flashy things can happen and sometimes do happen and can be a remarkable gift to that person and to those around them. But they don't have to happen and usually don't happen, and the Spirit is at work anyway.
Luther had doubts at times about his place with God, whether all those awful things some folks were saying about him were true. But at those times, he remembered that he was baptized. Noone could steal from him what he'd been given in baptism. Remembering that he was baptized made him remember Whose he was. And this is the work of the Spirit.
> Is the "body" that we believe is
resurrected, the earthly body or the
> risen body. I've been reading about this subject and am
quite confused.
> I have always thought that we believed the resurrected
body is a
> spiritual body or risen body.
The body we will have is said to be transformed to be like Christ's post-resurrection body (Philip 3:21) -- the usual term is 'glorified'. It is still our body, and we don't ever become disembodied spirits. Our current body is no 'container', it's not filth, and it's not a reason to be ashamed. To be worthy of the Kingdom, it will need to be made complete, to the state it was meant to be. What's true of the body is true of all else about ourselves.
I don't use the term 'spiritual body'. The term encourages us to think of our material body as something less than a gift of God. That idea did serious damage to people of the Middle Ages, and especially to women up until recent times. The idea that usually comes to mind with the term 'spiritual body' is as much a theological deception as the idea that Jesus 'physically' died, but not 'spiritually'. Jesus not only died, he died our kind of death, whatever that is, completely. He just didn't stay dead, that's all. And, believing in Him, we won't stay dead.
Our body is what we are. Unbodied, we simply aren't ourselves, and aren't what we were created to be.
Beyond that, I dare not speak.
> This is the biggest pile of [solid
biowaste] I have read as of today.
> I don't think you have any concept of God and certainly
not of Jesus ...
> Your projection of guilt is astonishing ... what religion
are you anyway?
> certainly not Christian.
The guilty don't need to project. We just change our ways, and then follow Jesus.
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