But when who had set me apart before I was born, and who called me by His grace was pleased to reveal His son to me, in order that I might preach Him among the Gentiles...
I like to consider myself a fairly sensible guy. That's really a cop-out sometimes to protect myself from taking risks, but nonetheless, it's who I have become.
Shortly after my first tenure ever served as Youth Pastor (to be honest, it was really about a year before it was over) I began to question many things about my "experiences" in the body of Christ. We, like many people in the late 1990s were swept into "revival" mode. The Pensacola revivals were in full swing and churches across the country were longing to fall in line. I'm not going to get into all the ins and outs, but there were some weird things happening.
But without that ever taking place, I probably would have reached the same crisis of belief. I grew up seeing weird things, and with what I would easily label strange occurences in the body of Christ, and I would be lying if I didn't say that I thought such weren't driven by who I thought to be weird people. And it was these weird people that I, the sensible human being, distanced myself from. There just seemed to be a major conflict in my heart that everyone had these "words" from God when the Word of God as so often ignored. Even the absence of preaching in any given service was one of the earmarks of a "Spirit-Filled" environment. Yeah, that still rubs me wrong, and always will.
But now, as I often do, and as misguided as I think they often were, I failed to see what God wanted to teach me by them. These people always seem to have a sense of prayerful revelation. As cooky as they were to me at times, none that I remember ever claimed to have extra-biblical revelation (which will always be a spiritual no-no), but rather a strong sense of listening to God through prayer.
I am a Word man. Always will be. But the pitfall in that is to forget that even the WORD still needs a sense of prayerful REVELATION to the reader. The truth, embodied in Jesus Christ still has to be REVEALED to us everyday. Using the Word of God as our guide, "he who set us apart before we were born, and has called us by his grace, [is still] pleased to reveal his son to us" today.
So let me, let us, read with REVELATION. Not just what does the scripture say, buy what is God saying to me through the scriptures. This is not a bad thing at all, to pray when we read His revealed Word that He as the divine author works it into our lives. God bless and may we all find Revelation.
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