"Reflection............................"

Francis Chan stepped into my radar at least a couple of years back, a friend pointing me to a You-Tube copy of him preaching a sermon entitled “Luke Warm and Loving It”. He had a book out at the time, one called “Crazy Love”, but I kept ignoring the impulse to purchase it. With nothing to read while on vacation in Pensacola, however, his latest, “Forgotten God”, caught my eye at Barnes and Nobles, held my attention, and has fed me well, its pages devoured at least twice since. Hopefully, our Wednesday evening Bible class can discuss its content after we conclude with Tozer. In just the introduction, this author speaks of a “tragically neglected Holy Spirit”, and “entertainment model of church adopted in the 1980s”, and how “we are not all we were made to be when everything in our lives can be explained apart from the work and presence of the Spirit of God”. The line that says it all, though, is a suggestion that “Perhaps it’s not theology we’re missing, but rather theology with integrity”. Now that will rattle some sabers… My own roots are in Pentecost. I was “born-again” into old-time holiness on March 27th of 1972 and have watched it lose most of its legalism as it chased Charismatic television evangelists into its present state. If we, as a denominational body, have over-“theatricised” the Third Person of the Trinity in our midst, seeing ourselves as somehow authorized to operate under the anointing regardless of whether or not the Anointed is in it or not, it might also be said that too many others seem to have settled on the extreme other side of that condition, His reality reduced to ritual if maintained at all. It amazes me God’s patience with our humanity. It bothers me that those who come to our altars connect with Christ only to drown in doctrinal dogma that fails them in the journey that follows, health, wealth, and prosperity not necessarily an automatic benefit secured through conversion. Laodicea, it seems to me, crept in somewhere along the way and we are too busy counting our “blessings” to look in the mirror……