Pastor John,
I don’t have the words to describe what we experienced this evening; I watched it through the computer. To use words like “amazing” or “wonderful”, to describe what happened just seems inadequate. Heavenly might be an acceptable word. Not in the sense that this world uses the word, but really Heavenly because what was said tonight and what was felt – what we were given – was not of this world. It doesn’t exist here, except when poured out by God from over there.
I want to tell what I heard from Jesus while you were preaching tonight. You were telling about a time in the not-so-distant past when the “charismatic movement” began, when God was pouring out His Spirit in a big way on people spread throughout (what seemed to be) every sect and denomination of Christian religion, everywhere. That outpouring of the Spirit was during the lifetime of your father’s work, preacher Clark.
You said God was pouring His Spirit out on folk everywhere then, and that “many of the Pentecostals didn’t like it! Some of them were even mad about it.” But then you went on to say, “My father loved that it was happening!” The Spirit then spoke to me and said, “That’s because his religion wasn’t ‘Pentecostal’, it was ‘the Spirit’.”
I loved that! It made it all perfectly clear. Your father’s religion was “Spirit”. God’s Spirit! That’s all. There is no way to get tripped up with that. Happy wherever the Spirit lands! Amen to more of it!
It reminded me of the scripture from 2Corinthians 3:17, “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” And your father, with his determination to worship God in “Spirit and in truth” only, as the Lord commanded, had that liberty, to love it! No matter where it fell!
Jerry