The
fruit of the Spirit is produced by the Spirit working in us; it expresses God’s
character, his heart, especially in relationships. As this fruit grows, we are
increasingly conformed to Christ’s image. God’s seed in us (cf. 1 Pet 1:23; 1
John 3:9) grows the fruit of his character within us. We may welcome this
growing by distinguishing between the fruit of the Spirit and the work of the
flesh (Gal 5:19-23) and so choosing to sow to the Spirit rather than to the
flesh (Gal 6:8). The work and the credit, however, belong to the Lord.
Like
the Spirit’s fruit, the gifts of the Spirit are also the Spirit’s work within
us. These gifts empower us as individual members of Christ’s body to share with
other members of Christ’s body. But because these gifts are for building up
Christ’s body, and express our functions as members of his body, they, like the
Spirit’s fruit, help us reflect the image of Christ. When we function together
as Christ’s body, as his body we together reveal his image. Like the seed, the
body members share the spiritual DNA of the one whose body we are. Whereas
fruit reveals God’s character in each of us, gifts reveal Christ’s character in
us especially corporately.
The
fruit of the Spirit shows what God can do in us, and the gifts of the
Spirit show what God can do through us. In both cases, it’s God’s work
and he should get the glory (or again, in modern Western language, the credit).
If
one had to choose, the fruit would be more important than the gifts,
because in Galatians 5:22-23 (the passage that specifically articulates the
fruit of the Spirit), the key and ultimate fruit is love (cf. the context of
5:14). In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul reminds us that the gifts (ministries to one
another) without love are worthless (13:1-3), and that the gifts are partial
and will be supplanted or fulfilled by what is complete when Christ returns. By
contrast, love endures forever (13:8-13). We need gifts right now to build one
another up, but when Christ returns we will no longer have this need.
Rating
fruit above gifts does not diminish the present importance of the latter. The
purpose of the gifts is to build up Christ’s body. Thus they offer a concrete
way to express Christ’s love to one another. What can we offer to others
more than Christ’s own work through us? We often think of gifts in a corrective
context especially because we are thinking of Corinth, where Christians were
abusing some gifts. Yet Paul lists gifts also in Romans 12:6-8 and (in a
different sense) Ephesians 4:11 (cf. also 1 Peter 4:10-11), just in terms of
mutual edification.
The
two verses that frame 1 Corinthians 13 remind us how gifts are valuable when
used in love: we should pursue the gifts that most build up the body (1
Cor 12:31; 14:1). Thus we do not say, “I value love, so I don’t need spiritual
gifts.” Rather, we say, “I can serve others in love by pursuing the gifts that
will build them up, and by sharing the gifts Christ has given me.”
If
Pentecostals and charismatics have taught the church much about the Spirit
empowering our speaking (treated in part A), Anabaptists (and early monastic
orders) have taught us much about sharing.
If the
immediate expression of the outpouring of the Spirit on Pentecost was prophetic
empowerment, the longer-range impact was a new community of believers who
walked together in their lives and shared one another’s needs.
Much of Acts
2:41-47 follows the following structure:
A 2:41 Successful
evangelism (3000 converts)
B 2:42 Sharing
meals, praying together
C 2:44-45 Sharing
possessions
B’ 2:46-47a Shared
meals, worship
A’ 2:47b Successful
evangelism
Whereas the
conversions in 2:41 responded to Peter’s preaching, the conversions in 2:47
apparently responded to the life of the new community. Peter’s preaching
explained divine signs at Pentecost; but the sacrificial love that Christians
showed one another was no less divine, no less supernatural.
At the heart
of this display of unity was the costly expression of commitment to caring for
one another’s needs, in 2:44-45. This sharing exemplified on a literal level
what Jesus taught, sometimes on a hyperbolic level. For example:
Luke 12:33: “Sell your
possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not
wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near
and no moth destroys” (NIV)
Luke 14:33: “So therefore,
none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions” (NRSV)
Luke 18:22: “One thing you
still lack; sell all that you possess and distribute it to the poor, and you
shall have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me” (NASB)
Cf. also John the Baptist in Luke 3:11: “Whoever has
two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do
likewise” (NRSV)
In Luke’s
Gospel, sharing possessions is actually a sign of repentance, an answer to the
question what one must do to have eternal life (Luke 3:9-11; 18:18, 22). It
does not earn eternal life, but it concretely evidences the reality of their
turning to God. In Acts 2:37, hearers ask Peter what they must do, and his
answer is more general: repentance and baptism in Jesus’s name (2:38). The
sharing of possessions, however, soon follows as a fruit of this repentance.
In Acts,
believers do not immediately divest themselves of all possessions and move onto
the street at conversion. They do, however, sell what they do not need to live
on, whenever someone is in need (Acts 2:45; 4:34). That this mutual caring is
no fluke is clear because at the next corporate outpouring of the Spirit on the
Jerusalem church—the next “revival” or “awakening”—sharing again takes center
stage (this time, if anything, more emphatically; 4:32, 34-35). Caring for the
needy continues afterward, although eventually the Twelve have to delegate this
ministry to some other Spirit-filled ministers (6:1-6). Churches in one location
also helped churches in another in view of impending famine—even though the
famine was predicted to strike them as well (11:28-30).
Often people
today pray for revival, thinking of the emotional benefits to individuals
involved. But we might demonstrate to God better our commitment to such revival
if we recognized up front what it might cost us. If we are ready to devote
everything to God that he asks of us, it is clear that we really want
revival. And when we are really fully devoted to God and dependent on
his grace and power, revival has already begun, at least with us.
That link lets you read only the beginning of the article unless you are logged in as a subscriber, but CT gave me permission to make available another link, this one to the full article I wrote some years ago, before public news was talking about Boko Haram, etc. (based on my observations and interviews from three summers in Nigeria and continuing contact there): https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/november/23.60.html?share=RLlxvcfn%2fHfyByjmYm8xWxb8glmbImWN
Let’s pray for our brothers and sisters in the northern and middle belt states of Nigeria, whose suffering can be very severe.
The student named Sunday in the article, Sunday Agang, has gone on and finished a PhD and now teaches back in Nigeria, working for peace between Muslims and Christians.
But let me
summarize here. The outpouring of the Spirit in Acts is not self-focused. The purpose
of the Spirit’s outpouring is not just to make us feel good (although that can
often happen—the disciples were filled with joy and the Spirit in Acts 13:52,
albeit in a context of persecution).
But the purpose
of the outpouring of the Spirit is stated more directly in the closing of
Luke’s Gospel and the beginning of Acts. (When I speak of the outpouring’s
purpose there, I do not mean that this is the Spirit’s only activity, but only
that it is the one that Luke is emphasizing.) Right at the transitional point
between Luke’s biography of Jesus and his story of the church, as key elements
of Jesus’s mission are becoming the mission of the church, Jesus lets us know
what to expect.
Luke 24:45-49
(NIV): “Then he opened their minds so they could
understand the Scriptures. He told them, “This is what is written: The Messiah
will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance for the
forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at
Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my
Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power
from on high.”
Acts 1:8
(NRSV): “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and
you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the
ends of the earth.”
I describe
this as “prophetic” speech because it is speaking for God inspired by the
Spirit, as in the prophets of old. In fact, the Spirit often is associated with
inspiring prophetic speech in the Old Testament, and that was the most common
association of the Spirit in early Judaism: the Spirit that inspired prophets.
God was giving
the Spirit as a gift for his people so they could be witnesses to all nations.
This gift is also the evidence that Christ has been exalted (2:33, NASB):
“Therefore having been exalted to the right hand of God, and having received
from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, He has poured forth this which
you both see and hear.” The mighty one greater than John the Baptist is now
pouring out the Spirit, even though in the OT it is clear that only God can
pour out God’s Spirit. That is, Jesus is divine: “He will be baptize you in the
Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16).
What is the
sign or evidence of this empowerment to speak for God? At the risk of sounding
tautological, it is: speaking for God! When the Spirit comes on the gathering
of disciples, they begin speaking other languages, as the Spirit is giving them
utterance (2:4). That the Spirit gives utterance indicates not just any kind of
speech, but speech empowered and directed by the Spirit. That they were
worshiping God in other people’s languages signifies the purpose
of this prophetic empowerment: if we can worship in other people’s languages
that we don’t know, how much more can we evangelize in languages that we do
know. The speaking in other languages shows us that God seeks a body for Christ
from all peoples, and that he is ready to speak in and so consecrate all
langages to reach them.
(One may leave
aside here the question as to whether every believer empowered to speak for God
will speak in tongues. Clearly in Acts 2, the tongues-speaking shows what the
empowerment is about: declaring Christ to all peoples. But does everyone so
empowered express that gift? Acts does not make that explicit claim. One
logical inference, however, is that those who receive this prophetic
empowerment ought to express it, sooner or later, by prophetic speech, and
ultimately in cross-cultural witness.)
Peter is clear
in his interpretation of this experience: “In the last days” (which, since we
are later than Peter, are presumably still going on!), Peter quotes the LORD as
saying,
“I will pour
out my Spirit upon all flesh,
and your sons and your
daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see
visions,
and your old men shall
dream dreams.
Even upon my
slaves, both men and women,
in those days I will
pour out my Spirit;
and
they shall prophesy”
(Acts 2:17-18, NRSV)
The last line,
“and they shall prophesy,” is not in Joel, but belongs to Peter’s expansive
paraphrase to ensure that we do not miss the point. This is prophetic
empowerment. It might be expressed in visions or dreams or direct speech, but
it will be moved by God’s Spirit.
It is also
clear that it is for everybody. When Joshua was jealous for Moses’s sake about
the Spirit coming on the elders, Moses declared, “I wish that all the
LORD’s people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!”
(Num 11:29). In Joel 2:28-29, after a time of repentance, this is fulfilled:
both genders (sons and daughters, male and female servants), both ages (old and
young), and both classes (Israel was not supposed to have other classes besides
these two: slave and free). Moreover, “male and female slaves” in the OT often
designated gentile slaves, suggesting that the “all flesh” on which God pours
out his Spirit is on Jew and gentile alike, all peoples.
Although Jesus
spoke the promise to the eleven appointed witnesses and those who were with
them, we also are witnesses of God’s work. The mission to the ends of the earth
(1:8) continues in our day, and so does the power to go with it. This is clear
from Acts 2:38-39, which evokes language (“promise,” “gift”) of the earlier
promise to the first witnesses: “Turn from sin, and be baptized, each of you,
identifying with the name of Jesus Christ, so your sins may be forgivem; and
you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For this promise is for you, for
your children, and for all who are far away [cf. Isa 57:19, possibly imply
gentiles], whoever the Lord our God calls.”
We can
experience this empowerment of the Spirit individually, of course. “Revival”
can happen on an individual level, but we also pray for it on a corporate
level. Lest we suppose this experience of the Spirit in Acts 2 was a one-off
rather than simply the first and seminal corporate experience, it is not the
last outpouring of the Spirit even on the Jerusalem church. In Acts 3 and 4, after
a healing the apostles preach boldly, and are ordered by local officials to
stop doing so. So they gather and pray again for yet more healings and more
boldness (4:29-30), and God’s Spirit fills the community of believers again:
“and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke God’s message with
boldness!” (4:31).
This gift is
for you and for me. Let’s welcome the Spirit’s power, praying and trusting that
he enables us to share the message of Jesus Christ to those around us and
ultimately to those culturally distant from us. Revival is not just to make us
feel good, though that may be a side benefit in the process. True revival makes
us agents of God’s grace to change the world for Jesus, by preaching him as the
true, rightful Lord and Savior of humanity.
This video link is a discussion among three of us professors at Asbury regarding the New Perspective(s): Joe Dongell, Ben Witherington, and myself, with Prof. Ruth Anne Reese moderating. I am just about nine minutes at the end before I get cut off (maybe because I am too old-fashioned on pistis Christou 🙂 ) but I get to pick up in the second half. The three of us vary on some minor details among ourselves and this is really more about introducing the topic of New Perspective(s) than about our specific views, though we touch on those some …
Huldah’s prophecy for Josiah included some bad
news, not unlike bad news many other times in history.
When northern barbarians sacked Rome in A.D. 410,
pagans insisted that the gods had judged Rome for turning to Christianity. The
north African bishop Augustine had direct contact with many refugees fleeing
Italy for Africa at that time, and wrote The City of God as a response.
No, Rome did not fall because most of its residents turned to Christianity.
Rome fell because its centuries of sins were piled as high as heaven, and
because the Christianity of most Christians was too shallow to stay God’s just
judgment against these sins.
In God’s purposes, God may delay judgments on
some nations for the sake of helping believers in other nations, but if biblical
principles apply, judgments are sure to come on sinful nations. Judgment was
due for the innocent blood of Manasseh’s generation, which included burning
newborn babies as sacrifices or good luck charms (2 Kgs 21:6; 23:10; cf. 16:3;
17:17, 31):
“Moreover, Manasseh also shed so much innocent
blood that he filled Jerusalem from end to end—besides the sin that he had
caused Judah to commit, so that they did evil in the eyes of the LORD”—2 Kgs 21:16 (NIV)
“The LORD sent against him bands of the
Chaldeans, bands of the Arameans, bands of the Moabites, and bands of the
Ammonites; he sent them against Judah to destroy it, according to the word of
the LORD that he spoke by his servants the prophets. Surely this came upon
Judah at the command of the LORD, to remove them out of his sight, for the sins
of Manasseh, for all that he had committed, and also for the innocent blood
that he had shed; for he filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, and the LORD was
not willing to pardon.”—2 Kgs 24:2-4 (NRSV)
A bit of homiletical application for my fellow
U.S. Christians (others will have to judge for their own settings): we are also
polluted with innocent blood. For those of us who believe that life is sacred
already in the womb, we as a nation bear the guilt for more than 50 million preborn
lives since abortion’s legalization in 1973. Those who don’t see preborn babies
as live human beings still ought to recognize massive innocent bloodshed. The
civil war may have been judgment for some of the sin of the slave trade;
between marches in Africa and the infamous Middle Passage across the Atlantic,
some estimate the death of four to six million, not including those who died in
slavery itself. Had the civil war purged the spirit of racism, we might suppose
that the judgment due the United States stopped there, but anyone who knows
anything about U.S. history (not least the Jim Crow era and thousands of lynchings
after Reconstruction) knows that the spirit of racism continued to flourish. One
thinks also of the slaughter of Native Americans—often women and children noncombatants.
Air power reduces U.S. casualties in war but in some (especially urban)
settings increases “collateral damage” (much as many have tried to prevent
these). Etc.
Those who do not believe that any of the above examples
might count as the shedding of innocent blood still need to reckon with an
estimated 17,284 cases of murder and non-negligent manslaughter in 2017 alone
(which has varied in recent decades from a high of 24,700 in 1991 to a low of 14,164
in 2014). Very few of these would have been government-sanctioned actions, but
they do reflect a culture of violence. In 2010, over 10,000 people died and over
300,000 were injured from drunk driving. Etc. However you slice it, our nation
is stained with innocent blood.
Are there many nations much worse, especially
in current government-sanctioned violence? Of course. And entire movements such
as ISIS and Boko Haram, which have killed indiscriminantly and often even
targeted those who bear Christ’s name surely will face judgment. But as
mentioned earlier, we don’t have the right to judge ourselves charitably by
simply comparing ourselves with others. We live in a nation with a heritage of
knowing biblical morality. So it seems that if the biblical pattern holds in
this case (though even throughout the Bible there are variables known only to
God), our nation stands under divine judgment.
But Huldah also had some good news for the
king. Yes, judgment was coming. But because Josiah responded in a radical
way to the Book—because he took it seriously—the judgment would not come in
his generation. Josiah’s generation would be short-lived (sadly, he died young),
and he was not able to turn the following generation fully from the legacy of
past idolatry and good-luck bloodshed. But Josiah did make a difference for his
generation.
One person who takes the Bible seriously and
lives according to the message one finds there can make a big difference.
Granted, none of us is a king who can dictate a top-down moral reformation, so this
model of national revival is not so easy to imitate. (If I do have any royal readers
in some other countries, though, you can apply some of these passages much more
directly than some of the rest of us.) But we are also a partly bottom-up culture,
and there are believers also among some of our cultural elites.
We can have an influence by showing how much
better God’s design for living is—by living that way ourselves, and sharing
with those willing to hear us. “This is how everyone will know that you’re My
disciples,” Jesus said: “if you love one another: (John 13:34-35). “And I’ve
given them the glory You’ve given Me, so they may be one, just as We are one: I
being in them, and You in Me, so that they may be brought to full unity—so the
world may know that You sent Me, and that You have loved them just as You have
loved Me” (17:22-23). Three thousand were converted through Peter’s sermon at
Pentecost (Acts 2:41), but Jesus’s movement in Jerusalem grew daily (2:47) as
outsiders witnessed Christians sharing meals, prayer and apostolic teaching
from house to house, and even possessions (2:42-47).
When a British preacher told D. L. Moody, “the world has yet to see
what God will do with a man fully consecrated to him,” it
changed Moody’s life. When a friend of a friend of German immigrant George
Mueller began living completely by dependence on God, it so touched Mueller
that he decided to begin the same adventure. Over the course of his life in Britain,
he and his associates cared for over 10,000 orphans, and provided education for
more than 120,000. Mueller was moved by compassion for the orphans, and also to
show the world that God’s Word was really true, and could really be lived by in
their own time. The friend of a friend had a huge impact on Mueller, who impacted
Christians around the world, including Hudson Taylor and the China Inland
Mission, with a living, active faith in God in the present life.
You as a reader may be just one person. But like Josiah, God can use you in your sphere of influence. What will it look like, if you are fully consecrated to God? If you take God’s Word seriously? The world may have yet to see.
(For the first installment of Part II, see http://www.craigkeener.org/what-does-revival-look-like-ii-returning-to-gods-word-2-kings-2210-20-a-setting-the-stage/)
It is said that Smith Wigglesworth, an early
Pentecostal leader, grew disillusioned with the Pentecostal revival toward the
end. He affirmed that God had poured out the Spirit, but lamented that the
movement was not more grounded in the Bible. (Wigglesworth read only the Bible,
so I need to make a caveat here: most of my many books are to help
readers understand the Bible. I’m not against other books, including those that
are not Bible study tools. But if you’ve got only so much reading time, the focus
should be the Bible.) He longed for an end-time revival, and was looking for a
revival that would bring together Word and Spirit.
As we noted in the previous post, God’s people had
forgotten the law. Most people could not read, and during Manasseh’s long
reign, priestly scribes had stopped public readings of the Bible. But because
Josiah is serious about serving the Lord, and had orally heard stories about
the past, he had priests restoring the temple. Some ancient temples had
foundation documents deposited in their masonry, and in the process of
repairing the temple’s priestly sanctuary, the priests uncovered the law.
Hilkiah the high priest rightly recognized this as a special treasure, and
handed it over to Shaphan the royal scribe. Reading from it, Shaphan realized
how important it was. Along with his report to the king about the temple
finances, therefore, he read the book to King Josiah.
Josiah really wanted to serve God, but, like
many in our generation, he did not understand all that God required of him. But
he was doing what he could (repairing God’s neglected house), and in this
process the law came to light. (In 2 Chronicles, much of Josiah’s moral
reformation is already underway, but 2 Kings emphasizes the extent to which
much of this reformation depended on returning to God’s Word.)
When he heard the book of the law, he heard for
the first time the fulness of what God required. He did not do with the Bible
what some of us do (and have been able to do only in recent centuries, when literacy
and printing have made possible private reading of the Bible). He did not
congratulate himself on how long he spent on his devotions, listening to the
book.
Nor did he say, “Wow, I’m glad I’m walking with
God. Too bad for all these other people who aren’t paying attention to the book.”
Nor did he say, “Okay, this is useful for tomorrow’s sermon, and then we can
move on to some more timely subject likely to hold everybody’s interest.” He
didn’t even say, I’m too young. After all, he was only eight when he became king
(2 Kgs 22:1), and was just 26 now (2 Kgs 22:3).
He responded in a radical way to the book. He
recognized that this was not just an antique of interest for his people’s
heritage. It was not just something to be read but not taken seriously. It was
God’s message, and it promised judgment to any generation that disobeyed it. Granted,
they were doing much better now than in the days of his grandfather Manasseh or
his father Amon. But the law showed that judgment for the sins of those prior
generations had continued to build. He recognized that, according to God, his
nation was at a crisis point, and in grief over corporate sin he tore his
expensive royal robes (22:11). Finding the book was good news. But for the
state of their nation, the book contained bad news.
Josiah didn’t do what we sometimes do with God’s
Word today. He didn’t say, well, it can’t be that bad. Look, even the priests
don’t seem that bothered. This must all be an exaggeration. Too often we shrug
off radical teachings of Scripture (such as Jesus calling us to forsake all and
follow him) by consoling ourselves that we’re surrounded by good Christians who
don’t take it that way.
Well, who’s to say that all these good
Christians are right? Maybe they’re doing the same thing we are. Maybe Jesus does
want us to abandon everything to follow him. In most cases that will not mean
giving up our jobs or becoming homeless (in Acts, only specific messengers of
the kingdom do this), but it does mean that we should devote everything we are
and have to Christ’s honor. You can serve Christ in most jobs (including
flipping greasy hamburgers—so nobody misunderstands what I said in the previous
post), if your lifestyle there helps your fellow workers to desire Christ and
if your wages serve good purposes. But what does Christ’s Lordship say about
our “leisure” time—the movies we watch, the things we read? Are there better
ways to spend our time and resources for God’s kingdom than the way we spend
them? Scripture invites us to evaluate our resources in light of eternity, to
make the most difference we can for Christ.
Josiah heard what Scripture said. He had an
idea what it meant for his generation. But he needed the voice of the Spirit to
guide his application for his generation, and so he sent to the prophetess Huldah
(22:14-20). She was the most prominent prophetic figure at this time (Jeremiah
was still quite young). Thus Josiah sent to her for the word of the Lord just
like, a century before, Hezekiah had sent to Isaiah (2 Kgs 19:2). Huldah gave
Josiah’s messengers the bad news straight: the book meant what it said, and
religion was not what “everybody” was saying.
Much public religion in North America is driven
by shortcuts, sound bites, and even marketing hype (“God directly revealed
this to somebody much more spiritual than you or your pastor!”) But the Spirit
bears witness to the Word, just as the Spirit-inspired Word summons us to heed
the Spirit. We have a privilege ordinary Israelites in Josiah’s day didn’t: we
have Scripture available for ourselves (indeed, much more Scripture than yet
existed in his day). If his generation could be liable for neglecting the whole
counsel of God, how much more can we?
