Friday, September 11, 2020
Surprised When God Answered
Throughout the centuries after the life of Jesus, the progress of the church has ebbed and flowed. Sometimes God’s people have done well, and at other times they have strayed far from God and His truths. Whenever He could find them, God used people to restore the church to the right paths. The church, at large, began straying away from a Biblical view of “the Godhead” and “the plan of salvation” as early as the 2nd century. But through movements such as the reformation and the awakenings He has been able to incrementally restore the truths that were originally established. One such movement that helped restore an understanding of the baptism of the Holy Spirit as experienced by the disciples on the Day of Pentecost was the Asuza St .revival.
An important precursor to that great revival in Los Angeles was what happened in Topeka Kansas, in 1901. Charles Parham was a minister who established Bethel Bible School - a Bible School where people lived by faith. He was at a place in his spiritual and theological journey where he was understanding that there had to be a greater experience with God than just a confession of faith. So, in December of 1900 when the semester was coming to an end and Parham was leaving for a few days, he challenged his students to study the Bible to determine what evidence was consistently present when the first century Christians received the Holy Spirit.
As the students studied the book of Acts, they discovered a consistent event associated with salvation was that believers were baptized with the Holy Spirit. They also noticed that was usually accompanied by them “speaking in tongues.” In other words, early Christian converts spoke in a language they had never learned as a part of their salvation experience.
The students spent several days in prayer and worship, and held a New Year's Eve watchnight service at Bethel on December 31, 1900 and then another on January 1, 1901. They were fighting a war to see the power of the church restored. Prayer was the weapon they used to break long-held beliefs in order to embrace biblical theology.
God responded with a demonstration of truth. In the New Year’s service, a woman by the name of Agnes Ozman felt impressed to ask everyone to pray for her to receive the fullness of the Holy Spirit. While people were praying for her, she immediately began to speak in a language she had never learned. What a pleasant surprise!
During this period of time, there was an African-American man by the name of William Seymour who, because for Jim Crow laws, sat outside Parham’s classrooms and listened to the teaching about the HG. He would later move to LA where he eventually received the baptism of the HG, speaking in tongues. He became a key leader of the Asuza St, mission that was an epicenter of a movement that has now seen millions baptized with the Holy Spirit, evidenced by speaking in tongues. It is a delightful and surprising experience awaiting anyone who will seek Him.
Friday, September 04, 2020
It's A Big Deal
The casual tourist can take a forty-minute cab ride from Framingham, MA, through the heart of Boston to the airport. In the process they will travel through what used to be neighborhoods and business districts, and they will drive under buildings, subway lines, and the Boston harbor. To them it may not seem like it, but the highway they will travel is a big deal.
The final few miles of the trip to the airport is part of “The Big Dig, one of the largest civil engineering projects ever done in the United States. It consisted of 161 lane miles of highway, (about half in tunnels) and four major highway interchanges within seven and a half miles. To dig this network, 16 million cubic yards of dirt were moved - that is the equivalent of 541,000 truckloads. Contractors used 3.8 million cubic yards of concrete, which is enough to build a sidewalk three feet wide and four inches thick from Boston to San Francisco and back three times. Begun in 1991, the project was not completed until 2007, but they successfully rerouted one and a half miles of the Central Artery of Interstate 93 underground, built 300 acres of park above ground, constructed I-90 under the harbor and built the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge over the Charles River. The Boston Globe estimated that the project will ultimately cost $22 billion, including interest, and that it will not be paid off until 2038.” (www.ma.gov)
“The result of this amazing project was a 62% reduction in vehicle hours of travel on I-93, the airport tunnels, and the connection from Storrow Drive. Traffic went from an average 38,200 hours per day before construction (1994–1995) to 14,800 hours per day in 2004–2005, after the project was largely complete. The savings for travelers was estimated at $166 million annually in the same 2004–2005 timeframe. Travel times on the Central Artery northbound during the afternoon peak hour were reduced 85.6%.” (Wikipedia)
No telling what traffic would be like today had the Big Dig not been dug, because in the early 1990s, every day 200,000 cars were trying to navigate I-93, making it one of the most congested highways in the United States. Today the project handles about 536,000 vehicles each weekday. The Big Dig was a big deal!
The same can be said for what Jesus did. The average person might view the story of Jesus coming to save the world as no big deal. But when Jesus was born, He fulfilled hundreds of prophecies - that, in itself, is a statistical wonder. He left his throne and was born of a virgin, which has never been done before or since.
Then it got bigger and better. Jesus healed the sick, cast out devils, commanded the weather and raised the dead. He was so effective that the most important leaders of His day became jealous. When it was time, He survived the bigotry, self-righteousness and politics of his own people who collaborated with their sworn enemies to publicly lynch the God-man who had done nothing wrong. However, in their rage and political scheming, they helped fulfill many more prophecies that predicted Jesus would die for the sins of mankind and rise from the dead on the third day. That story is one of the most well-known and well-loved stories of all times, because it was a very big deal. Finally, forty days after his resurrection, Jesus rose into heaven in front of 500 witnesses, promising to come live in the hearts of those who believed and give them power to follow him into everlasting life - another very big deal. Don’t be fooled, the story of Jesus is a very big deal. Be brave enough to embrace it and it will change your life in a big way.
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