REVOLUTIONARY POWER - 1
A gracEmail subscriber requests some discussion here about "revolutionary" people, power and purpose, the titles of my classes at the March 2009 Tulsa International Soul-Winning Workshop.
We have considered what it means to be revolutionary people. For starters, it means being God's agents, gospel carriers whose character and lives are more important than their marketing skills or their ability to persuade others. Revolutionary power does not refer to our skill at "selling" Jesus. All human power combined cannot produce the spiritual regeneration of even one small person. That result requires the supernatural power of the living God.
The New Testament makes this very clear. Early in Romans, Paul exclaims that the gospel "is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes" (Rom. 1:16). He reminds the Thessalonians that the gospel did not come to them as verbal communication only, but "also in power and in the Holy Spirit" (1 Thes. 1:4). Writing to the Corinthians, he compares himself and all gospel carriers to fragile earthen jars. God entrusts his good news to us weaklings for a purpose, Paul explains. It is to show "that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us" (2 Cor. 4:7).
Strangely, not all Christians share that biblical perspective. Alexander Campbell, a founding father of my own "restoration movement" heritage, interpreted conversion as a mere intellectual process, based on one's acquiring information previously unknown. Campbell's fellow-restorationist Barton W. Stone acknowledged dependence on the Spirit's power. However, within two generations, the movement's heirs largely forgot Stone's God-honoring teaching on this point in favor of Campbell's humanistic explanation.
REVOLUTIONARY POWER - 2
A gracEmail subscriber requests some discussion here about "revolutionary" people, power and purpose, the titles of my classes at the March 2009 Tulsa International Soul-Winning Workshop.
The power that turns hearts to God is not human in origin but divine. George Atkins' 1819 song restated biblical truth in its request: "Will you pray with all your power, while we try to preach the Word? All is vain unless the Spirit of the Holy One comes down." People who under-rate the power also usually understate the result. If nothing happens in "conversion" besides a change of intellectual content, then human strength is adequate to the task. But the Bible sees much more in someone's coming to faith in Jesus Christ.
The transformation of an unbeliever into a believer is like God commanding light to appear in a dark universe (Gen. 1:1-3). When we observe the result of the miracle of faith, we may know that the same God who once said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in an unbeliever's heart, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 4:3-6). This wondrous event is illustrated in the saleswoman Lydia of Thyatira, whom Paul met at a riverside women's prayer meeting in Philippi. As Paul declared the gospel message, "the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said" (Acts 16:13-14). Unless the Lord opens hearts and speaks light, hearts remain dark and closed.
The spiritual change that occurs when a person comes to faith is fully as radical as the transformation pictured in Ezekiel's visionary valley of dry bones (Ezek. 37). In a vision, God places the prophet on the site of a one-time battlefield, littered with broken skeletons of an army long dead. God then commands his bewildered spokesman to prophesy to the bones, which Ezekiel faithfully does. As he speaks, something marvelous transpires. Throughout the field, like some giant jigsaw puzzle solving itself automatically, bones begin to move, finding their adjoining bones and reassembling into whole skeletons. Sinews appear, then flesh, then skin. The prophet then prophesies to the wind. Breath enters the skeletons and a once-dead army, now brought back to life, stands in formation on its feet. Similarly, we believers were once dead in our sins, but God made us alive in Christ (Eph. 2:1-7). Saving faith itself, like salvation in its entirety, is a gift of divine grace -- the result of God's activity and not ours.
REVOLUTIONARY POWER - 3
"Regeneration" is a biblical word for conversion, which emphasizes God's ability to generate new life where human logic says no life is possible. We may think of Abraham and Sarah, ages 100 and 90 respectively, to whom God promised their very own son (Gen. 17:15-17).The fulfillment of that promise was no more difficult than the spiritual regeneration of men and women. Jesus borrowed the metaphor when he told Nicodemus that all people must be "born again" or "born from above" (John 3:3).
This is a necessity in the very nature of things, since all things reproduce after their own kind. What is born from "flesh" is flesh; what is born from the Spirit is spirit (John 3:6-7). Nicodemus was sure that he could handle this "born again" business if only Jesus would tell him how (John 3:4, 9). However, Jesus assured him that this, like the wind, was a mystery Nicodemus could neither manipulate nor understand.
Regeneration involves our trusting, not our trying. Poisoned by sin, we are like the Israelites in the wilderness, bitten by deadly snakes. God provided their only remedy, having Moses lift a brass snake high on a pole. Whoever looked in faith at that snake would live. In the same way, God provided us a Savior. Jesus was lifted up on a cross, and whoever believed on the Son of God has eternal life (John 3:14-16). Regeneration is a God-sized job.