Dave Faulkner. Musings of an evangelical Methodist minister.
No script this week, I’m afraid: urgent pastoral priorities meant I had to dig out this old talk on understanding biblical prophecy, which I originally delivered from a PowerPoint with a set of bullet points rather than a rough script.
Anyway, here is that PowerPoint. You’ll see from the opening slide that I used different readings originally. However, the principles still hold.
A film I enjoyed back in the 1980s was a comedy called Clockwise, starring John Cleese. He plays Brian Stimpson, the headmaster of an independent school. Stimpson is known for his strict punctuality, something he enforces in the culture of the school.
Stimpson is invited to be the guest speaker at an educational conference. However, one obstacle after another puts him more and more behind time to get there – the very worst thing for such a punctual man.
As the stress on him heightens with hopes regularly raised and then dashed, Stimpson says this:
I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.
Ezekiel knows something of the oscillation between despair and hope, and what that can do to someone. In the previous chapter, he has had a wonderful message from the Lord about how he will give Israel a new heart and a new spirit. It’s a wonderful message, where God’s people are back in their own land, and no longer in exile in Babylon, as is the case at the time of Ezekiel’s ministry. Imagine how that lifts him up.
Then in here in chapter 37 it begins with ‘The hand of the LORD’ being on him (verse 1), and so surely this exhilarating sense of hope is going to continue. But no. He is taken to a valley – rarely, if ever, a good place in Scripture – and that valley is filled with the dry bones of the dead. Israel isn’t alive. She is dead.
And you realise just how down in the dumps Ezekiel has become when the Lord asks him,
‘Son of man, can these bones live?’
I said, ‘Sovereign Lord, you alone know.’ (Verse 3)
Not much hope there. The vision of the new heart with God’s Spirit inside and God’s people living back in the Promised Land has been sunk by seeing the valley of dry bones. I don’t know, Lord, says Ezekiel, only you know.
I labour the point because something similar can be our experience. We have in a sense gone into exile too in that Christians are now not only a minority in our culture but also increasingly a group that is thought of as evil. Every now and again, though, we see some signs of hope. But then along comes a pandemic, our churches lose a lot of money, decisions and crises that were still potentially five or ten years away suddenly confront us, and even when in-person worship resumes not everybody feels happy to come back. Some of those who don’t return make that decision for obvious medical reasons, but others who don’t show up again are a big surprise.
Are we walking among a valley of dry bones? Sometimes we are.
Is there any solution? Yes there is, but what Ezekiel 37 and the Feast of Pentecost make clear is that it doesn’t lie with us. None of our programmes, none of our wheezes will make a scrap of difference. We are dry bones.
No, the solution comes from God and it is in the shape of his Spirit. There are three prophecies about the Holy Spirit that Ezekiel receives, and each shows what God can do for us when we are open to being filled with the Holy Spirit.
The first prophecy reveals the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of promise:
4 Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones and say to them, “Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! 5 This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.”’
7 So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I was prophesying, there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. 8 I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them.
It all begins here. The job isn’t finished – those last words were ‘there was no breath in them’ – but here the sending of the Spirit (or breath, it’s the same Hebrew word) is the sign that God will keep his promise to give life to his people.
But the question is, will we seek and pray for the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives? Yes, it’s a work of divine grace, we are dependent on God for the gift of the Spirit, but that happens after Ezekiel prophesies the word of the Lord. So will we seek the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives?
I know some Christians get nervous about the Holy Spirit. There is something about that word ‘Spirit’ and sometimes the Holy Spirit does strange things. However, we shouldn’t expect the Spirit of God to do things exactly our way! The good news is that the Holy Spirit is also called in the Book of Acts ‘The Spirit of Jesus’, so what if the question instead were this: how much do we want the Spirit of Jesus to be at work in our lives?
Or put it this way: if I’m conscious that I’m not as much like Jesus as I might be, then what I need is more of the Spirit of Jesus.
And frankly, which one of us is as much like Jesus as we might be? So don’t we all need more of the Spirit of Jesus?
It’s time to put our fears about the Holy Spirit aside and recognise that we need to be filled and filled again with the Spirit.
The second prophecy reveals the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of power:
9 Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.”’ 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet – a vast army.
Now there is life and breath in the bones, and they become not an enormous mausoleum but ‘a vast army’. That is God’s power, the power of the Holy Spirit, at work.
Doesn’t this speak to another way in which we sense our inadequacy from operating on our own without the Spirit of God? Isn’t it true that so often we look at ourselves in the church and feel powerless to do anything effective in society? Do we feel that our best efforts are feeble in the face of overwhelming social forces that aggressively promote values that are contrary to what we hold dear as Christians? Do we look like a vast army? Probably not, much of the time.
Then think of how it was said of the early church that they had turned the world upside-down. Oh sure, they hadn’t got rid of some vicious Roman emperors, but they had started a subversive revolution at ground level. For all the good the church does today, I have to be honest and say I don’t think we’re leading a Jesus revolution in our day.
Of course, we don’t want to be a vast army in a literal sense. That’s not how God’s kingdom works, as Jesus showed, and as the early church lived. But the battle for what is good, pure, true, and beautiful is one in which we need to be engaged, and we need to fight in a manner like Jesus and the apostles.
So once more, there is really only one solution: to cry out in persistent prayer for more of the Holy Spirit.
The third prophecy reveals the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of prophecy itself:
11 Then he said to me: ‘Son of man, these bones are the people of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up and our hope is gone; we are cut off.” 12 Therefore prophesy and say to them: “This is what the Sovereign Lord says: my people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. 13 Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. 14 I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land. Then you will know that I the Lord have spoken, and I have done it, declares the Lord.”’
It is prophesied that Israel will be back in her land of promise. And a few decades later, it happened.
Not for Christians, of course, is there to be a physical land with its borders somewhere on this planet. Instead, we seek the kingdom of God, where not only God reigns but people walk in his ways and no longer rebel against him. And even inanimate creation is affected, no longer damaged but flourishing. Under God’s reign we have a community of disciples, a community of beauty, of peace, of love, of justice.
We’re a long way short, aren’t we? Not just in society, but in the church. Whatever good things we find in the church, it would take someone with the most rose-tinted spectacles ever made to argue that we were close to the kingdom in all its fulness in the way we live.
Certainly, I believe we’re a long way short. Not only do I as a minister often see the dark side of the church, the longer I live as a Christian the more conscious I am of the ways I fall short.
Either way, there is only one answer, and it’s the one we keep coming back to this week: we need to be more full of the Holy Spirit than we are right now. That is how God changes things for ancient Israel: ‘I will put my Spirit in you and you will live.’
In conclusion, everything points to us needing more of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit isn’t absent from us as with ancient Israel, when the Spirit only came upon selected individuals. In our era, the Holy Spirit comes upon all who entrust their lives to Jesus Christ.
But just as some people have a vitamin deficiency where they need to take more vitamins, so I think the signs I’ve described show that we have a Spirit deficiency.
If there is one thing we could all do that would lead to a major difference in the life of the church of Jesus Christ, it would be that we set ourselves persistently, regularly, and urgently to pray that God would fill us with his Holy Spirit.
Because when he does we shall be more like Jesus. When he does, we shall be more equipped to be Christ’s subversive army of love in he world. And when he does, we shall see more of his beautiful kingdom.
And if the church changes like that, then we shan’t be weighed down with despair, but surrounded by the growing seeds of hope.
It’s been a long time.
Years.
But restarting this blog is long overdue.
For the past several weeks during the coronavirus lockdown I’ve been posting weekly devotional videos on YouTube in place of regular sermons. At the very least – and especially considering how popular the sermons have been on here – I thought I ought to start posting them here as well as church websites, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
So here is this week’s.
There are just two disadvantages to this: you get both to hear me and to see me.
It is sad to read this morning the overnight news from Texas about the death of David Wilkerson. in a car crash. His life and ministry impacted millions. No appeals to his supporters for the money to buy a Lear Jet, just a guy who risked his life in the violent Projects of New York to show the love of Christ to gangs led by the likes of Nicky Cruz. Famously, this was recounted in the book The Cross And The Switchblade, and the film of the same name, along with Cruz’ testimony, Run Baby Run.
Then the founding of Teen Challenge, to help young people with troubled lives. And a ministry at Times Square Church, New York, where he still preached regularly, even as he approached 80.
Google the Internet and you will find some of the controversial prophecies he made in recent years, not least on his blog. On some of these, time alone will tell.
His life affected my family. My sister went forward at one of his evangelistic meetings, around 1978 at Loftus Road, Queens Park Rangers football stadium.
Today I give thanks for the life of a courageous Pentecostal preacher, and the fruit of his ministry. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.
This week, I bought a new toy. Actually, you might say I’m treating it less like a toy and more like a pet, given how regularly I am feeding it and taking it for walks.
I bought an iPod.
I’ve wanted one for aeons. I love music. I have a large CD collection. The thought of portable, available music is bliss. Yet I’ve never bought an iPod before.
Sure, the last time I had to buy a mobile phone, I bought one that came with an MP3 player. But despite good reviews, the Sony Ericsson W810i proved to be unrecyclable rubbish. As a phone it’s good, but the MP3 is terrible. The software provided is the most unreliable I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve become quite acquainted with Sony Ericsson‘s technical support people, who could only blame it on an unspecified clash with other programs on our PC. What are the problems? When I do get tracks on it, either because the software got out of the bed the right side just for once, or because I resort to a conventional copy and paste in Windows, it has a sneaky trick for me. It mangles the order of the tracks. Usually, they are completely reversed. Occasionally, just the first track is moved to the end. Imagine that when you’re listening to a live recording, such as Bruce Cockburn‘s brilliant recent release Slice O Life.
Then it has another trick. It calls this ‘Playback failed’. At the end of a track (and lately in the middle, too) it goes on strike. The only solution is to reboot the phone.
In short, it’s about as productive as a nineteen seventies British Leyland shop steward. I swear I have a Friday afternoon phone, much as we used to speak of being saddled with Friday afternoon cars.
So I’ve been Googling around forums, seeking advice. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who have reported the same faults with this phone. (So maybe it’s not a Friday afternoon one, but Sony Ericsson’s regular standard. Do they supply specially tweaked ones to reviewers and then ship piles of manure to the shops?) I’ve tried all the suggestions I could find. Nothing has improved the phone.
Well, I clearly needed a new MP3 player. And rather like Janis Joplin singing, ‘O Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz‘, I prayed, ‘O Lord, please may I have an iPod?’
Now my ideal iPod would be an iPod Classic. The 120Gb version. No, actually, the short-lived 160GB model. I would need all that capacity and more to fit in what I want. But the price was not right. Money for treats is not plentiful chez Faulkner. I could pray for the Lord to provide, but what had he provided? I had £25 in Amazon vouchers, and someone had also recently given me £20. The new bottom of the range 4GB iPod Shuffle was £56.60 on Amazon, whereas everybody else was charging the full £59.00. Whoo and indeed hoo, a £2.40 discount. I would only need to find £11.60 of my own money.
That was manageable, but was it right? I’ve always made a point of praying about financial decisions, especially big ones. I know this isn’t the biggest, but much as I wanted an iPod, I knew I could be giving in to self-indulgence here. There have been various occasions when God’s answer has been dramatically clear in my life. One was about getting to theological college the first time, when I was turned down for a student grant. There is a long and wonderful story I can tell about how God provided the finances.
And in 1998, I had another example. I was praying about buying a new computer. I wanted one. The old one was crawling and there was little more that could be done to cure its arthritis. I had an ongoing prayer, asking God to show me whether it was right to buy a new one or whether I was merely justifying my love of PCs.
I had a woman in one of my churches who had received the most remarkable gift of prophecy. One Saturday, she went down to the church building to pray on her own. While she was at the front of the worship area near the pulpit and communion table, she prayed for me. She told me soon afterwards that the Lord had told her to tell me I could have what I wanted. She had no idea that I was praying about buying a new PC.
It wasn’t so dramatic with the iPod. It clicked in a simple way. What was the reason I’d gone for a phone with an MP3 player? Answer: because I need to exercise more., and I needed a motivation to get out walking. Listening to music and podcasts became my incentive. All I can say is that still just felt ‘right’, and hence I welcomed my new silver arrival on Thursday morning.
And this experience prompts me to ask: what are the criteria you use as a Christian in making a serious financial decision? One or two of mine have poked their heads above the parapet in this story, not least the importance of prayer in the discernment of motives. Let’s have a conversation below in the Comments where we can encourage one another. And if you have some good stories, please share them. I for one would love to read them.
I thought I might collect some of the links I’ve found interesting but not necessarily saved to my delicious account. I know several other bloggers do this about once a week, but most of my best ideas are borrowed! Anyway, here goes:
Three little words so hard to say: in the week of the Obama landslide, an investigation into why politicians are reluctant to say “I don’t know”.
Brother Maynard nails some of the nuttier ‘prophetic’ responses to Obama’s victory.
Meanwhile, Erika Haub describes voting in the US election.
A primer on today’s missional church: can’t remember who tipped me off to this page, but J R Woodward collects a huge resource of web articles, videos, bios of missiologists, book reviews, blogs and reources for all who want to explore the good ship Missional.
Glad to see this: New lifeline for Bletchley Park. A few years ago when he did his MBA, my brother-in-law sorted out their ecommerce.
Were these Christians worshipping a modern-day golden calf?
Spring Harvest, King’s College London and Paternoster Publishing are hosting a one-day conference on how Jesus taught and we learn.
The cult of Mac: why Apple is more than a corporation, it’s a religion. And how does ‘branding’ affect our faith?
This picture reminds me of friends who used to mime the action of birds when it came to the ‘I’ll fly like the eagle’ line in Geoff Bullock’s worship song ‘The power of your love’.
Well, that will do for a first attempt. Do you find any of this useful?
I wrote several posts a few months ago about Todd Bentley. We arrived home from holiday to discover he was leaving the Lakeland ‘Revival’ and separating from his wife. Three days later his ministry admitted he was in an unhealthy relationship with another woman. Many bloggers have waded in. Dan Edelen has a lot of wisdom borne of pain in several posts. Bill Kinnon is more fiery, especially on the backtracking by C Peter Wagner. There are numerous others.
Whatever my criticisms of Bentley, I take no pleasure in these events. Here are some thoughts.
Losers According to Bill Kinnon, C Peter Wagner has described Todd Bentley as a loser. Crudely, that seems to mean Wagner didn’t back a winner, so he inflicts this description on Bentley. Whatever I think of Bentley’s ministry, especially the violence, if you write people off as losers you dismiss the Gospel. In the words of an old Steve Taylor song, ‘Jesus is for losers’. Watch the video for the song here:
No, if Wagner talks like this, what Gospel does he believe and preach? Where does the Cross fit in? Dan Edelen talks much about charismatics needing to recover the Cross: here is a prime reason why.
This isn’t a time for casting stones, it’s a time for prayer and grace as well as church discipline (which after all according to Jesus was meant to be restorative).
Accountability Bill Kinnon links to Phoenix Preacher, who said on August 26th,
Scott and I knew about Bentley’s immorality two months ago, but couldn’t find anyone willing to go on the record.
It’s in the nature of wrongly relating to someone other than yourself that there will be deceit, but this implies that appropriate accountability structures were abused. Yes, it’s good that Bentley stepped down, but that seems to have been for the sin of having been found out. Why were others culpable in the cover-up? Was it conspiracy or fear? We may never know.
But there is not only the accountability to his organisation Fresh Fire and the wider church, there is also the question of accountability in marriage. In what I am about to write I am aware that ‘there but for the grace of God go I’, but – it seems one of the problems seemed to be Bentley’s protracted absence in Lakeland. Like many ministry marriages, Debbie and I have it built into our relationship that if a question arises of my being absent overnight or longer, we discuss it before agreeing. We have done so with respect to my forthcoming sabbatical early next year.
It must have been very tempting (and yes, I probably do mean ‘tempting’) for Bentley to stay in Florida rather than Canada, given what was happening. It must have been exciting for him. The emotional pressure on Shonnah to agree must have been huge. But the fatal flaw in the logic is the idea that the revival depended on him. I suspect that when I take my sabbatical next year, my churches (which have never had a minister on study leave before) will discover just how unnecessary I am! It is a salutary lesson.
Prophecy Clearly, Wagner’s ‘prophecy’ in June that Bentley would increase in this, that and everything looks pretty sorry now. While I am not one of those who believes modern-day prophecies have to be 100% accurate (as per Old Testament standards) because they’re not adding to Scripture, it does strike me that the prophecy concerned is just altogether too typical of the prophetic drivel that sometimes infects charismatic Christianity. It is the sort once characterised by a friend of mine as ‘Thus says the Lord, I love you O my children’. It’s all about how wonderful the recipient is. While I’m neither for the sort of word that reduces everyone to worm status, I thought the only person we were meant to big up like this was Christ. This stuff needs serious questioning. It’s linked to my next observation.
Personality Whatever happened to all those prophecies around the 1990s that ‘the coming revival’ would be ‘a nameless, faceless’ one? Rather than that, we still promote our personalities, and then (like the secular press) exclaim with horror when they fall. The personality cult is one of the most insidiously worldly aspects of evangelical and charismatic Christianity. Bentley often said on the stage at Lakeland that it wasn’t about him but Jesus. Nevertheless, others promoted him and he allowed it. He could have stepped out of the way more for his associates or others. He rarely did. This may have been a tactical error rather than malicious, but any of us called to a public rôle in Christianity need to learn and accept the hard lesson that it’s not about us, it’s about Christ, and our actions need to match up. That’s not easy, and it requires some holy ruthlessness on our part. Often we’re not willing. The attention or acclaim is too attractive.
So may God have mercy on Todd and Shonnah Bentley and the anonymous female staff member. May God have mercy on C Peter Wagner. May God have mercy on us all. We who are without exception sinners need grace – the kindness of God that leads us to repentance.
Big Circumstance 