Charismatic Renewal — Its Wisdom and Its Limits

Today's Scripture

1 Corinthians 14:1 — "Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy."

Acts 4:29-31 — "And now, Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal, and signs and wonders are performed through the name of your holy servant Jesus. And when they had prayed, the place in which they were gathered together was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness."

James 5:14-15 — "Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up."

The Big Idea

Charismatic Christians — named from the Greek word charismata, "gifts of grace" — believe the Spirit's gifts continue today, and they expect God to act. That expectation is obeying real verses, and the joy it produces is biblical joy. But expectation without testing burns people. Today we honor the fire, and we look honestly at where it jumps the fireplace.

Reflection

The verses they actually obey

Yesterday we listened to the quieter tradition. Today, its mirror. And we start by admitting something uncomfortable for cautious Christians: some commands in the Bible are obeyed mostly by charismatics.

1 Corinthians 14:1 — "Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy." 1 Corinthians 12:31 — "But earnestly desire the higher gifts." Earnestly desire is not a suggestion to tolerate the gifts if they happen to show up. It is a command to want them. Charismatic Christians read those verses in plain English and do what they say. Whatever else you conclude about the movement, that instinct is not rebellion. It is obedience to sentences other traditions have to find ways to soften.

The deeper instinct underneath is that knowing God should feel like something — not always, not on demand, but really. John Wesley was a buttoned-up Oxford clergyman, precise and dutiful, until the evening of May 24, 1738, at a Bible study on Aldersgate Street:

"I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death." — John Wesley, Journal

Notice what warmed him: not lights or music, but the gospel — Christ alone, even mine. Jonathan Edwards, the most careful tester of experiences in church history, insisted that this kind of felt religion is not optional:

"As there is no true religion where there is nothing else but affection, so there is no true religion where there is no religious affection." — Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections

Read that twice, because both halves cut. Feelings alone are not faith. But faith that never feels anything — no warmth toward God, no grief over sin, no joy — is not the real thing either. The charismatic movement, at its best, is a sustained protest against half number two.

Praying like the early church

Listen to the first Christians pray under threat: Acts 4:29-31 — "grant to your servants to continue to speak your word with all boldness, while you stretch out your hand to heal." They did not ask for safety or strategy. They asked God to act — and "the place in which they were gathered together was shaken."

That prayer is the charismatic heartbeat. Ask big. Expect God to move. And before we file it under "apostolic exception," notice James 5:14-15, written as ordinary pastoral instruction for ordinary churches: "Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up." That is not a special conference. That is a Tuesday in a healthy church. Many non-charismatic congregations have quietly stopped doing it; the charismatic world never did. Ask people from cautious churches when they last saw their elders gather around a sick member with oil and bold prayer, and you will often get a puzzled look — at a verse that sits in everyone's Bible.

And then there is the joy. Romans 14:17 — "the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking but of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit." Acts 13:52 — "And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit." Joy is not decoration on New Testament faith; it is a family trait. Much of the global church — especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where Pentecostal Christianity is growing fastest — worships with a gladness that can make older Western churches uncomfortable, and that looks, on close inspection, a lot like the book of Acts. A.W. Tozer named the appetite underneath it:

"O God, I have tasted Thy goodness, and it has both satisfied me and made me thirsty for more." — A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

Thirst for God is not immaturity. It is health. Blaise Pascal, the brilliant French mathematician who met God one unforgettable night and sewed the account into his coat lining, understood why arguments alone never satisfied him:

"The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know." — Blaise Pascal, Pensées

God made hearts as well as heads. A tradition that engages both is not being shallow. It is being human.

Where the fire jumps the fireplace

Now the honest second half. A fire in the fireplace warms the whole house. The same fire on the living-room carpet burns the house down. The difference is not the fire. It is the boundaries.

The first boundary the movement keeps breaking is the one Edwards drew: intensity is not evidence. Think of the last night of summer camp. The bonfire, the songs, the tears, fifty teenagers promising God everything. Some of those moments are utterly real — many believers can point to one as the night everything changed. But every youth pastor also knows the other version: the feelings evaporate by the second week of school, because the feelings were mostly the fire and the music and the friends.

Tears, trembling, goosebumps, a roaring crowd — none of it, by itself, proves the Spirit is present, because skilled production can manufacture all of it. When a tradition starts treating the feeling as the proof, it creates Christians whose faith collapses the moment the music stops. The real test arrives the following month, and Paul told us what to look for: Galatians 5:22-23 — "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control." Fruit grows slowly and cannot be staged. The temperature of the room proves nothing; the patience of the person in March proves a great deal.

The second boundary is the testing of prophecy, which we walked through yesterday in 1 Thessalonians and Deuteronomy. Paul's package deal — "Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, but test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:19-21) — gets split, with the first two commands kept and the third one dropped. Untested words have wrecked marriages, savings accounts, and faiths. Leaders who never publicly reckon with the prophecies that failed leave a trail of people who believe God lied to them.

The third boundary is the gospel itself. In some streams, the Spirit's power gets fused with promises of wealth and guaranteed health — the so-called prosperity gospel — sold hardest to the people who can least afford the disappointment. The New Testament knows nothing of it; the apostles were poor, sick sometimes, and persecuted often. And a fourth boundary follows close behind: experience without formation. Vivid conversions, thin discipleship — decision after decision with no slow training in obedience. Dietrich Bonhoeffer's warning lands directly here:

"Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ." — Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

An experience of power that never becomes a life of obedience was never about Jesus, whatever name was being sung at the time. The Spirit can be grieved as well as quenched: Ephesians 4:30 — "do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption." Cold churches quench him. Careless ones grieve him. He asks both of them to repent.

The greatest experience the Spirit gives

So what is the experience to seek? Scripture's answer is more wonderful than another wave of feeling. Romans 8:15-16 — "you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, 'Abba! Father!' The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God."

The Spirit's signature experience is assurance — the settled, sometimes overwhelming inner certainty that because of Jesus, God is your Father and you are his child. Not because you mustered the right intensity, but because the Son took your sin to the cross and rose to give you his place in the family. Every true warming of the heart, from Aldersgate to last Sunday, is finally about that. Notice that this is an experience both traditions can seek with all their might, because it cannot be faked by a fog machine and it cannot be quenched by a hymnal. It runs on the gospel. John Newton — former slave trader, author of "Amazing Grace" — reached the end of a long life with his memory failing and his assurance intact:

"Although my memory's fading, I remember two things very clearly: I am a great sinner and Christ is a great Savior." — John Newton

That is what the fire is for. Not goosebumps for their own sake, but sinners made certain they are loved. Seek that with all the boldness of a charismatic and all the care of a cessationist. Test everything, hold fast what is good, and let the Spirit set the temperature.

Going Deeper

Do one charismatic thing and one testing thing today. The charismatic thing: pray for somebody's actual healing — by name, out loud if you can, asking God to act, the way James 5 says churches should. The testing thing: take the most powerful spiritual experience of your life and ask the Edwards question — in the months that followed, did it make me love Jesus and people more? Write down what you find. Expectation and examination are not enemies. Together, they are what trust looks like.