Posted by Ben Curran on October 23, 2016 at 11:11:14:
Dear Dr Janson,
Thank you for your post about the Venus/Jupiter conjunction. It was a comfort to me. All reminders that the return of Jesus is near are welcome. My soul yearns for....
...THE POWER AND THE GLORY.
Those middle class citizens of South Africa who, like myself, have had occasion to live in various parts of the country and attend a number of different churches for long enough to get a feel for what is going on in each of them, might have reason to ask the same question that I am asking today, namely:
'What happened to the supernatural in the church? What happened to the power and the glory?'
This is not a question which applies only to the South African middle class. One does not have to do much reading in the area of world evangelism over the last thirty years to see that it is largely in the third world where Christians can still expect to experience public miracles as part of their life.
Why is this? Why is church so boring for so many of the people who earn a salary, have a pension and medical-aid benefits, and are able to take the odd holiday away from home? How can it be that the power and glory of God are so widely absent when that same Holy Spirit, which was the source of that power, is as available to us today as it was in the early church?
And we know that the Spirit is still available because there is one sense in which we experience it in the same way as the early Christians did. We experience it as that inner voice which guides us and gradually explains all things in the Bible to us. It still comforts us and convicts us of God's goodwill towards us. And it still sometimes does 'private' miracles in our lives, 'private' in the sense that nobody else would know about these amazing things if we did not tell them what had happened to us.
But walking-on-water, feed-the-five-thousand, water-into-wine, raise-the-dead miracles? No. Not for most of us who lead reasonably comfortable lives.
Again, why is this? Well, here are a few guesses from me:
Public, high-impact miracles are missing because for the power of God to be demonstrated in a public place, two factors need to be present. The first is the Holy Spirit, and the second is faith on the part of the people present that works of power can be done right there and then. The second one, the faith, is missing.
That sort of faith is missing because it is so long since most people in our congregations have seen a work of power which publicly demonstrates the glory of God, that the group sentiment is one of scepticism and unbelief (as in Jesus' experience in the synagogue in Nazareth). And my guess is that this is the norm because it is so long since most of us have been in a situation where we really needed such a work to help us.
It seems likely to me that God gave so many miracles to the people of the early church because they were so desperately in need of them. They literally were as lost as real lost sheep are. There was an enormous new truth, the truth of the New Covenant, which Jesus needed to teach them, and he needed to do it quickly because he knew his days were numbered. So the power of God was displayed freely to help this teaching process.
We are not lost. We have the Truth. We have had it for so long that a billion of us have got bored with it and have decided that science offers us a better and more exciting truth. And we live lives of such material comfort that, so far, we have gotten away with that attitude.
We live in a world in which about eighty percent of the population works unceasingly to feather its nest to an ever more luxurious degree. And to some extent most of us have succeeded. In addition to the physical comfort that most of the middle class live in, we have also shielded ourselves against the possibility that we might end up in real need by insuring ourselves against that possibility. We have short-term insurance and life insurance. We have pension plans and medical plans and loss-of-income plans......We no longer trust God to help us in the bad times, we trust our financial institutions to protect us in the bad times. This may just turn out to be a mistake.
Where, in all of this, does the following instruction from Jesus appear?
"So do not worry, saying 'what shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?'or 'What shall we wear?' for the pagans run after all of these things and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." (Matt 6).
Where does that instruction feature in our middle-class daily lives? Well, if you are anything like me, it does not feature too high on your list of things to pay attention to.
So how are we to get out of this mess that we are in, this spiderweb of the trappings of comfort that we are bound up in, this vast array of expectations that our wives, children, parents, siblings, friends, work-mates, cousins, grandparents and everybody else has of us. how are we to break out to live lives free of the expectations that keep us from taking the above instruction seriously? If you are like me, you are not going to be strong enough to do so on your own. We are going to need that age-old help, the Holy Spirit, to do it.
But here we need to stop and think for a moment. Given the teachings of Jesus, I personally have no doubt at all that God wants us to break free of the trappings of a materialistic lifestyle. So if we start praying for help to do so, what is going to happen? God is going to grant that prayer, that is what is going to happen. And He is not going to worry about breaking a few eggs in the process of dishing up that particular omelette.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, what it amounts to is this. Do we want to go back to a way of life in which the Power and Glory of God are actively present, or don't we?
But perhaps, just perhaps, this decision is about to be taken out of our hands.
...............................................