A long time ago – and we’re talking about 35 years back – I visited a church that was very much into the Holy Spirit. 

At least, that was the impression I had. 

But what they were really into was speaking in tongues. AND they understood speaking in tongues to be THE litmus test proving a believer was filled with the Holy Spirit.

I didn’t know my Bible all that well at the time. But now I know that such an idea finds no support in Scripture. 

I wanted desperately to have the experience of speaking in tongues. I didn’t know anyone in the church and so I had nothing to lose by going forward at the end of the service to “receive the gift of tongues”. 

Some folks prayed over me and, as they did, I was hoping that a jumble of unrecognized words would soon come pouring out of my mouth of their own volition. But after a few minutes of prayer, it became clear to me that if I was going to speak in tongues in that moment, it would require me faking it. 

I couldn’t bring myself to do it. After all, I didn’t want something fake – I wanted what was real.

Now I look back and wonder what I really hoped to experience. Upon reflection now as a 58-year-old lifelong believer, I think it was this: 

I wanted to lose myself completely. I didn’t want to struggle against sin and uncertainty. I wanted to escape my own poor self-image. I wanted God to show up inside my brain, push me away from the steering wheel and take over. 

When read about how the Holy Spirit came over the crowd of disciples at Pentecost, as recorded in the opening of Acts 2, we tend to hyper fixate on the tongues of flame and the commotion of the disciples speaking in other languages. 

And if we do that, we miss what is really important about the story:

When the Spirit comes, He inspires the disciples to WITNESS about God’s power and goodness and He miraculously enables them to communicate these things to the waiting world in a way that they can understand. 

Being filled with the Spirit doesn’t necessarily result in speaking in unknown languages. It’s about speaking and living as witnesses to the love of Jesus. 

Recently I listened to a podcast hosted by two former Christians. 

The question that prompted their “deconstruction” was kind of surprising to me. 

First, they pointed to Jesus’s promise in John 16:13 – that, once sent by Jesus, the Spirit would lead them into “all truth”. And then the two podcasters asked this question: 

“If the Spirit leads disciples into all truth, why are there 44,000 different Christian denominations in the world? Shouldn’t all believers be unified if we each have access to ALL truth through the Spirit?”

Even if 44,000 isn’t an accurate number (and who knows how one would count such a thing), it’s undeniable that there is a lot of disagreement within the Body of Christ – and often over major doctrines. 

Besides, the question would stand even if there were only two denominations on the planet.

But here’s the problem: The podcasters were making an assumption about the sort of “truth” being promised. Does it really seem likely that Jesus was promising that the Spirit would come bearing correct doctrine?

How might our reading of the promise change when we remember that Jesus had earlier said, “I am the way and the truth and the life”? (John 14:6)

What if “lead you into all truth” primarily means “make you more like Jesus”?

Being filled with the Spirit isn’t about intellect. It’s about heart. 

The first time I gave any thought whatsoever to the Holy Spirit wasn’t until a college Bible study. Only then did I realize that my home church never even mentioned the Spirit outside of the last line of the Doxology we sang every Sunday morning following the passing of the offering plates: “praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost”. 

If I had given any thought to the matter as a child, it was only how “ghost” was a strange word to associate with God’s Spirit!

If Google can be trusted, the Tyndale Bible was the first to translate the Greek pneuma hagion as “Holy Ghost”. That was in 1526 and in that day the Old English gast, meaning spirit or soul, had morphed into ghost. 

So ghost originally had a much broader meaning, without any of today’s baggage of being the spooky, ethereal, and shadowy soul of a dead human, out only to haunt the living. 

A truly unfortunate evolution of an important word!

Unfortunately, even though the word ghost changed drastically over the centuries, the descriptor of “Holy Ghost” for the Third Person of the Trinity continues to hang about the Church, thanks to old hymns and the King James Bible, which largely copied Tyndale’s practice in this case.

In the last few years before he died, one of the ideas that Scott Adams sought to popularize was the existence and value of certain “Internet Dads”. 

These were (mostly) men who use their online presence to disseminate fatherly wisdom rather than outrage. They are influencers, true, but only in the most positive directions. They aren’t looking to get rich; they want to spread sanity and propagate critical thinking. 

Adams numbered himself among the Internet Dads. He certainly functioned as such for me. 

Not in a spiritual sense, though, since Adams was an atheist. (Although I would say he was as close to the Kingdom of God as an atheist can get.) Critical thinking and human psychology were his specialties, and he altered my perceptions of reality on a regular basis. 

I’ve always been a bit jealous of the relationship between the Apostle Paul and Timothy, Paul’s “son in the faith”. 

If I ever had a father in the faith, it was for a single brief year during college when an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship staff member, Tom Shepherd, took an interest in my budding spiritual life. 

And even now, at 58 years down the path, if I should come across a real-life mentor tomorrow, I would latch on and not let go. 

To be clear, I don’t feel as though I were singled out for spiritual neglect – mentorship in the faith is a rare thing in the modern church. 

All of this is to say that the Lord seems to be fostering a genuine passion in me to be a mentor to others at this stage of my life. 

Recently I’ve taken great joy in some real-life mentoring situations, and it seems to me that in a world largely devoid of spiritual fathers and sons, mentoring can in fact be scalable – through the internet. 

The existing Internet Dads I know of all tend to focus on finances, entrepreneurship, politics and similar secular concerns.

Perhaps there is space for a spiritual Internet Dad. 

Shout out to my cousin Jennifer who recently reminded me that I had not written on my blog since my birthday in April. 

I didn’t intentionally stop writing here – I just got busy and tired and fell out of the habit. 

Plus, I didn’t have a particular focus for my writing ever since I threw in the towel on my dissertation work at Christmas. The question which lingered in the aftermath was this: What was the point of my doctoral work if I never get to the degree?

I had started my studies under the conviction that it was God’s will that I pursue a Doctor of Ministry through Wesley Biblical Seminary – especially when He arranged for it to be 100% free. 

But then at Christmas this year – four years into the process – I decided that I didn’t care to spend hundreds of hours in a library in order to finish. Especially since I felt like I had gained much already AND I’m too old to waste time.

The question then became this: How do I take what I gained as-is and put it to good use for the Kingdom – without writing a formal dissertation?

I’m back at the computer tonight because I went for a 5 mile walk this morning. It was a neighborhood stroll that may turn out to be the most profitable walk of my life. 

The past 5 months of disjointed thoughts and priorities all came together into a much more cohesive picture. 

Cohesive enough that I now have no excuse to continue dragging my feet. 

I will gladly share more tomorrow after a good night’s sleep. 

Shout out to my cousin Jennifer who recently reminded me that I had not written on my blog since my birthday in April. 

I didn’t intentionally stop writing here – I just got busy and tired and fell out of the habit. 

Plus, I didn’t have a particular focus for my writing ever since I threw in the towel on my dissertation work at Christmas. The question which lingered in the aftermath was this: What was the point of my doctoral work if I never get to the degree?

I had started my studies under the conviction that it was God’s will that I pursue a Doctor of Ministry through Wesley Biblical Seminary – especially when He arranged for it to be 100% free. 

But then at Christmas this year – four years into the process – I decided that I didn’t care to spend hundreds of hours in a library in order to finish. Especially since I felt like I had gained much already AND I’m too old to waste time.

The question then became this: How do I take what I gained as-is and put it to good use for the Kingdom – without writing a formal dissertation?

I’m back at the computer tonight because I went for a 5 mile walk this morning. It was a neighborhood stroll that may turn out to be the most profitable walk of my life. 

The past 5 months of disjointed thoughts and priorities all came together into a much more cohesive picture. 

Cohesive enough that I now have no excuse to continue dragging my feet. 

I will gladly share more tomorrow after a good night’s sleep. 

As pastor of Sardinia Baptist Church, I got a cold call today from a town two hours away – a missionary-to-be looking for financial support to get him and his family to the mission field.

I admired his gumption, but as we talked, I had more and more questions.

Let’s call him Joe.

Joe needs to raise roughly $11,000 per month to put his family on the field. That’s pretty steep!

And the mission field? 

Hawaii! 

Joe might have an easier time if God was calling him to the French Riviera! At least that would be overseas. 

Joe wants to plant churches there among the local Japanese community.

I asked, “Have you ever planted a church?” 

No.

Are you working to plant a church among the immigrant community where you live right now?

No, but I am very active in my home church.

Are there already churches among the Japanese living on Oahu? 

Yes.

Shouldn’t they be the ones planting new churches? Why is an outsider better suited than a local Christian? Could the local believers be trained in church planting by you going on a short-term trip?

There were no good answers for these questions.

I was talking to Melissa over coffee after she got home from school. She had another question I hadn’t even thought of:

Why doesn’t Joe just take a job in Hawaii and plant a church on the side?

I am all for missions, of course, but my time in Haiti gave me a healthy skepticism when it comes to missionaries and their sending organizations – their competency, motivations, and methods. 

Sometimes missionaries end up on fields where they have no business. And lots of money is flushed down the drain. And damage done to God’s Kingdom. 

All because nobody asked the hard questions. 

We should always be suspicious whenever the church regularly uses language found nowhere in Scripture.

You can look up all the uses of the word “heaven” in the New Testament and not find it to ever be used as part of a phrase like “going to heaven”. 

Not once.

You will find one verse which speaks of “ascending to heaven”, though. 

It’s John 3:13 – “No one has ascended into heaven except he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.”

And maybe you don’t want to go there anyway – at least not yet:

2 Peter 3:10-13 – “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn! But according to his promise we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.”

The bad news is … you aren’t going to heaven when you die.

The good news is that heaven is coming to you. (Once everything gets wrapped up.)

Making sure you get this the right way around has more profound ramifications for your theology than you might first suspect.

“Many Christian traditions have seen the ultimate goal of life as being for us humans, somehow, to go and be with God, in heaven. But the great story the Bible tells, from Genesis to Revelation, is about God’s purpose and promise to come and live with us.” N.T. Wright, God’s Homecoming, p.10