Going Where the Wind Blows

“Where the Wind Blows”

by:
Rev. Stan Moody

Isaiah 52:13-53:6
John 3:1-12

This morning, I intend to explore with you some of the mysteries of the Third Person of the Trinity – the Holy Spirit. I do that because, as you are well aware, I have the conviction that revival is about to come to America but not in the places assumed by the church. I believe that revival will come to the Church of Jesus Christ first, and then outward from the church to the world in which we live.

I believe these things because of my sense that the confessing church in America has lost sight of its first love – Jesus Christ. It has replaced the love of Jesus with love of country, love of the law, love of doctrine, love of power and love of money.

I am reminded of 15 years ago, when Pastor Wilson Hickham left his church, Calvary Temple in Waterville, and decided to go into the low power TV business. His rationale was that in order to reach more people for the Gospel, he needed to have more money and power than was available in the church. The way he expressed it was this: “The drug dealers and organized crime have all the money. God wants us to get ahold of that money so that we can spread the Gospel through television.”

The concept intrigued me so much that I stayed in contact with Wilson when he became so broke that he moved in with one of his kids in MA, and his wife was waiting on tables at Howard Johnson’s. I stayed in contact with him when he had his first heart attack. What I discovered about Wilson most recently came from an unexpected source – an interview by Michael Heath, Executive Director of the Christian Civic League of Maine.

God has blessed Wilson in unexpected ways, it seems – has turned his desire for accumulating money to one of spending money he doesn’t have to help others in need. In his case, he has developed a ministry to widows and orphans in Rwanda. As you are aware, some 10M people have been slaughtered there since 1994, and Wilson has created a bank to help the widows of those slaughtered to create small businesses so they can feed their families.

The wind bloweth where it will. As we believers scheme and dream, remaining open to the Spirit of God will cause us to find ourselves in places we never could have dreamed possible.

Last week, I received a telephone call from a reporter at the Press Herald. She was looking for some information to write another article bashing the Christian Civic League. After 45 minutes or so of talking with her, I told her that I hoped the CL would not die – that its mission was a good one and an important one, even though I firmly believe that they are wrong. My reasoning was that “iron sharpens iron” – that the CL has awakened the sleeping giant of faith, and that things are happening within evangelical circles that would never have happened had the Christian Right not departed from the core doctrines of the faith.

I sent to her that little essay that some of you received this week concerning the marriage bill that died in Committee in Augusta. The line that I liked the best was the line, “They are killing two gods with one prayer.” It is only when another Christian group departs from the faith that the Spirit moves on the hearts of others to examine what they really believe. There is nothing that has moved this ministry more than my search for truth in the face of my own sin and what I call the apostasy of the Christian Right.

An editorial writer for the Washington Post nailed the emerging evangelical rebellion against the Christian Right this past week. The piece was called, “Christians Who Won’t Toe the Line.” As you may know, James Dobson and others tried to muzzle the Association of Evangelicals from moving on to such incidentals as poverty and conservation because it would detract from key wedge issues of abortion and homosexuality. The Association told them, in essence, to get lost.

Calling on Evangelicals to return to being people who are known for our love and care for our fellow human beings, Rich Cizik, NAE’s VP for Governmental Affairs, said this: “If you put politics first and make it primary, I believe that is a tragic and fateful choice.”

I was pleased to see Cizik’s statement on ecology: “Tell the parents who have children who are mentally disabled from mercury poisoning – tell them that the environment is not a sanctity of life issue.”

For those of you who should like to read the editorial, you can find it on one of my blog sites, www.mcchurch.blogspot.com.

In the last week in April, I will be a speaker at a conference in Chicago put on by the Institute for the Study of Christian Zionism, of which I am a member of the Board of Advisors. Bringing the Battle of Armageddon to the Mideast is the political agenda of a Christian Right that refuses to allow the Spirit of God to move where it will but insists on directing its movement – tired of waiting for God and taking matters into their own hands.

Evangelist John Hagee has become prominent in the Christian Zionist movement and is using his influence to push the Bush administration and a number of legislators to invade Iran because Iran is supposed to be one of the major players at Armageddon. He claims that he represents the beliefs of some 100M Evangelicals and sympathizers in America.

God will raise up from within His church voices all over America who will be willing to say, “Enough, already!” But that will only come when the Church of Jesus Christ is struck dumb by the HS of God. Revival is not for America; revival is for God’s church so that it may reach America for Christ. The result will be very painful. The Christian Right, which has displayed a willingness to kill and savage the reputation of others to advance their agenda, will not give up easily. Dobson, Falwell, Robertson and Hagee have empires and billions of dollars at stake. “Judgment, however, begins in the house of God.”

If the HS truly is like the wind that blows where it will, we can assume that, even though the Church of Jesus Christ may not be reaching America for Christ, the Spirit of God is reaching America for Christ – one soul at a time. The question comes down to whether or not the confessing church wants to be part of God’s unfolding plan of redemption.

If you read the 52^nd and 53^rd chapter of Isaiah carefully, you will realize that God stripped every argument that would suggest that Jesus came from money or privilege. He was not even tall and good-looking – there was nothing in His appearance or personality that would make Him a charismatic leader.

He was born into poverty, came from the despised region of Galilee, gathered around Himself the most common and unlikely of followers, was not educated in Judaism (although He created it), spent time talking with women and pagans, owned no property and condemned hypocrisy. No wonder the establishment was willing to take the chance to kill Him – there was nothing about Him that would persuade anyone of any messianic qualities. This total lack of any human credibility was done in order that God through the HS might have all the glory and not leave a thing to human marketing skills and ingenuity.

It was done this way, I would suggest, for such a time as ours, when fame and fortune have elevated church leadership to almost rock-star status. John the Baptist, you will remember, had this to say about Jesus: “I must decrease, and He must increase.” Today, evangelical leadership has decreased the person and work of Jesus Christ by insisting that Judaism is God’s preferred method of salvation. Jesus, then, is nothing more than a stopgap measure until the Jews get it right.

In His dialogue with Nicodemus, Jesus likens being born again to a wind that blows where it will. You can’t control the wind; you don’t know where it is coming from or where it is going; likewise, you can’t dictate to or control the Spirit of God. The wind and the Spirit of God blow where they please – not where we please them to blow.

Nicodemus does not understand. Jesus chides him because as Israel’s teacher, he ought to understand these things He is trying to explain in earthly terms. Jesus is the living word of God. Nicodemus is too engrossed in the words to understand the word! Like many of today’s Christians, Nicodemus knows the Bible, but he doesn’t know the God of the Bible.

If we have said it once, we have said it 1,000 times from this pulpit: “The Bible is not a book of rules. The Bible is the revelation of God.” You can know the Bible and not know God. That’s how so many people get bound up with the political wedge issues instead of the full revelation of God. They are surprised by sin because it says right here that you should not sin. They have forgotten that God is not about condemning sinful creatures. If He were, none of us would escape. God is about redeeming sinful creatures.

There have been at least three major Great Awakenings in America – the first one in the early 18^th century. The Second Great Awakening was in the early 19^th century and the 3^rd was in the late 19^th century. You may be more familiar with the 3^rd Great Awakening that gave rise to such famous evangelists as Chares Finney, D. L. Moody, Charles Spurgeon in London and many others.

What was characteristic of these awakenings was that they were spontaneous and unexpected. God, you see, was the leader of these movements. They began with a desire on the part of God’s people to pray. We are told that in the City of Philadelphia, during the 3^rd Great Awakening, businessmen would break for prayer at noon every day of the week. Thousands could be seen in one place at noon on any day.

Prayer meetings were springing up everywhere. There are accounts of sinners attending and rising up to request prayer for their own souls. A church that was asleep suddenly came awake, and the outreach was incredible throughout the world.

This phenomenon is known as the outpouring of the HS. It doesn’t happen often, and that is a good thing, because we wouldn’t be able to take very much of it. To be confronted with our own sin and the depth of God’s grace toward us is too much for the Christian to bear for too long.

There is a method to the action of the HS. The first step in that method is awakening sinners and carnal or nominal Christians to the power that we already possess but can’t seem to exercise. The second is to awaken new powers of reason that we never before had. It is not the role of the HS to give us reason. We already have that. What the HS does is to set our reason on a higher plane so that we might be able to properly discern between good and evil in our own lives and in the life of the church.

You can have all the business or political instincts in the world, but your understanding about spiritual things can be dark. The role of the HS is to remodel the mind so that those instincts make eternal sense.

The HS also gives us new powers to discern what God has done with us and is doing with us. As all of us do from time to time, I was thinking about those times when I permitted myself to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. It takes a certain amount of sneakiness and craftiness to get what you want in the sin department, doesn’t it? I was putting myself back there in one situation after another and was quite surprised to discover that I didn’t know how I could move from knowing that sin was possible to actually engaging in it.

It isn’t that the sin is not tempting. It is. It is just that the ability to go from the temptation to the act is a much wider chasm than it used to be. I am not suggesting for a minute that I am sinless – far from it. What I am suggesting is that it becomes more difficult, as the HS reforms the mind, for the Christian to move from the thought to the act.

This could be anything – sex, money, pride, reaction, retribution, whatever. What the HS does for the believer is to make the jump from the thought to the act more difficult or more unlikely with time.

If this changing of our attitudes and our appetites did not happen, none of us would ever get into Heaven. That is what makes the agenda of the Christian Right so puzzling. They seem to have the attitudes and appetites of the very world that they condemn, which suggests that there is little going on inside that would keep the wheels in motion. I often ask myself how any could be in ministry for their entire lives and still be playing politics with God’s holy word.

It is the work of the HS within us to keep the wheels in motion toward another way of looking at things. He takes away the defilement of our natures that puts our machine out of order. This is necessary so that we do not nail down any dogma but remain in a position of being able to be surprised by the Spirit. Can you be surprised by the Spirit if you are protecting a billion $ evangelical ministry? How about even a $100,000 ministry? At what point does the running of a religious empire quench the power of the HS to open our hearts and minds to new vistas of God’s grace and love?

I have noticed something in our little church here. What I have noticed is that a particular sermon may be helpful for someone who manages not to be here on the Sunday it is delivered. I have noticed that when I think I have a winner of a sermon, that is when the attendance is way down. I have noticed that often when I think a sermon is a dud, that is when one of you will say to me, “That sermon really touched me this morning.”

What that tells me is that the HS is blowing like the wind in here as well, and that the best sermon in the world is useless unless the Spirit acts on the hearer. The pastor, or the Bible, or a particular hymn is the instrument. The HS, however, is the messenger. The moment we begin elevating the pastor, the Bible or a hymn as the messenger, we get off the track.

We began this message this morning with the thought that we may be headed for another Great Awakening. Because the church of Jesus Christ has drifted so far from the Gospel, I can see no possibility for the reign of truth unless we experience a new movement of the HS.

But we here at the NMMH Church do not have to wait for a Great Awakening. I remember a series of revival songs we used to sing when I was a kid. They began with this: “Lord send a revival; Lord send a revival; Lord send a revival, and let it begin in me…In my heart; in my heart, send a great revival. Teach me how to watch and pray, and to read my Bible.”

That same HS who blows into history from time to time with a Great Awakening stirs within each of God’s people, encouraging us to watch and pray and desiring to give us the power to stand clear of temptation. What it means to quench the Spirit of God is to stifle that urging within us.

Just think what could happen in the NMMH Church if the Spirit of God were free to move in our midst. Is that too much to ask or desire?