Not a Materialist

For those who don’t know me I’m Pentecostal to the bone.  I’m the type of guy who looks forward to spending an afternoon with my wife, a guitar and a couple of free hours so that we can worship God until the Glory comes.  In my view the only reason churches have walls is so that we can fall on the floor and shake in ecstatic fits of glory.  And if I can’t take off my shoes and start jumping around and hollering for Jesus then why even be in a building in the first place?

Yet there was a time when I was younger in the Lord where I hadn’t cultivated an awareness for the Presence of God.  I didn’t grow up Charismatic or Pentecostal and I remember being in a Spirit-filled environment and seeing people getting touched by God on a regular basis and I remember being so jealous.  I mean it seriously tore me up.  I remember pouring myself into the Word looking for the keys to being filled with the Spirit and traveling from conference to conference and reading book after book looking for the missing ingredient that would propel me into a deeper intimacy with the Holy Spirit.

My early struggles with the Spirit

I’m going to be honest in my appraisal of the advice of the conference speakers and books that I read.  They were likely solutions to issues that many people faced as they struggled to connect with God’s Spirit, but they didn’t really assist me at all.  The most prevalent one that I found (at least with the books that I read) was to know that God loved you.  To be honest I had never either then or now struggled by questioning if God loved me.  I was just blessed with a belief that He did.  And don’t get me wrong, I’m not minimalizing the struggle of someone who is fighting to believe it, but it just wasn’t my struggle and therefore wasn’t my solution.

If we are being completely honest I didn’t grow in real confidence that I could regularly touch the Spirit of God until I married my wife.  For those who don’t know her, my wife is an Asian believer, one who was saved into a very ecstatic prayer culture.  Her mentor, a 4’10’’ on fire 55 year old celibate missionary woman, would strongly encourage the youth to wake up at 6 a.m. and spend 2 hours every morning in a group prayer session – Jesus  is worthy of this type of devotion and more!  These sessions were not how we would imagine them in the U.S. where people would find a chair, get a notebook and a Bible and start to prayer/journal with God (what I would do).  No, instead these believers sit on the ground, with no music and focus on God’s inner presence will speak and sometimes sing to God until they are wacked.  It is loud, disorganized and follows no pattern. Totally un-American.  But this is the morning routine of many believers of that faith expression that they maintain their whole lives (Jesus is worth that and much more).

Growing in the Anointing

Once we were married we decided that we were going to worship the Lord every morning as a couple and I started to pick up on some of the things that she would do.  After a couple months of this I started to understand and know that the Spirit of God dwells in a believer at all times.  The key to ecstatic prayer is to begin with that simple faith that He is in you and then to minister to the slight measure of His Presence that you feel in the moment.  We minister to it by expressing what moves our heart.  Then we start to experience a beautiful momentum.  Once you get a little bit wacked, if you minister to the Anointing upon you in a way that moves you, then the ecstasy grows.

I began to do this so often and so regularly that it has become a confidence that God has given me that when I come before Him in worship or prayer that He will meet me.  And even more so I’ve seen God show me different ways that the Spirit enlivens our souls and I can honestly say that as each year has gone by God is waking me up more to the different in’s and outs of getting wacked by Him.  I’m definitely just starting my journey but I’m realizing that the more ways He shows me how to connect with Him, the more He seems to come into my day.

Practical Materialists

One thing that has become very true about the culture that we live and breathe in in these great United States of America is that as a people we have become increasingly materialistic.  Not only in the sense that we care about buying nice cars, clothes and gadgets; but in a much deeper and more intrinsic way, we as a nation have embraced a worldview that only values things that we can see, hear and touch with our physical senses.

This trend of materialism actually began in what many newscasters have called “the greatest generation” – the men and women of World War II – who for some reason or another began to embrace an ideology that placed empirical observation as superior in its explanation of the nature of the world to that of Divine revelation.  In that generation we began to see a shift where doctors and scientists began to replace priests and pastors, where psychology began to replace spirituality, and where medicine and counseling began to replace repentance from sin and receiving forgiveness.  It’s honestly no wonder that the following generation is the one that had a “sexual revolution” and threw off all the morality that their materialistic mothers and fathers had possessed.  When a culture loses its awareness of the unseen holy God, a loss in morality is likely to follow.

Now as Bible believing Christians most of us would object to a worldview that seems to place no regard or value for all things unseen, yet in many ways we are reared to be practical materialists.  This is the real tragedy that I see in regards to the effects of our national materialism.  God has graciously given us His Word and in so doing explained volumes in regards to living by the Spirit and experiencing Jesus by the Spirit and yet instead of embracing these Truths and diving into the waters of Divine ecstasy, we become masters of the Word itself and place on pedestals those who can exposit and explain the Word of God in compelling ways (an amazing gift), yet offer little to no experience or guidance into touching God Himself.

Overcoming our upbringing

So we find ourselves being able to explain all the dynamics of Jesus’ miracle ministry, yet instead of duplicating those miracles by energized faith in the Spirit, we rather find ourselves writing philosophical treatises that seek to defend the validity of the Testimonies themselves (a commendable effort).  And when we see our nation that in some ways has discouraging trends in regards to the Christian faith (though I believe it’s probably better than people make it out to be), instead of getting a hold of the promise of God lubricated by the inner power of God’s spirit in our soul and speaking what God has said over the spiritual landscape of America, we write articles emphasizing negative statistics for the purpose of calling people to action.

For this is the real deception of materialism.  It values data, surveys and facts to form what its worldview is of reality.  It then seeks for solutions for problems prescribed by that data through the means of human strength.  In other words, let’s try to wake some people up about the state of our nation so that they can motivated to get off their behinds and actually do something for God.

But what if God didn’t need numbers of concerned citizens but rather people of faith.  People like Jonathan and his armor bearer who refused to believe the Barna poll data about the state of the Philistine army and just decided that God was with them and that God was going to break through when they stepped out.  The spiritual man understands that the Word of God often directly opposes the poll data because God is looking for a creative force to come from His people that will change the atmosphere by living from a world that is unseen.  One where God is breaking through with the youth in America and one where the spiritual state of the U.S.A. has yet to see its brightest days.  This is the God I serve.  This is the God who is coming to America.