SEVEN

The Lure of Novelty

IN THE WORLD OF advertising, every copywriter knows the power of two magic words: “Free!” and “New!” We see them in the supermarket, in the newspaper, on billboards. And consumers respond.

In the church today, we are falling prey to the appeal of “New!” The old truths of the gospel don’t seem spectacular enough. We’re restless for the latest, greatest, newest teaching or technique. We pastors in particular seem to search for a shortcut or some dynamic new strategy that will fire up our churches.

The prayer of the early believers recorded in Acts 4 highlights three fundamentals from which we are in danger of sliding away: “Enable your servants to speak your word … with great boldness … Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders” (vv.29–30).

I want to probe the first of these: “Enable your servants to speak your word….”

There was no confusion in the minds of the first Christians about what to proclaim. There was no searching for new and novel messages. The plain gospel that they heard from Jesus their Lord was considered entirely adequate.

I received a surprise at a large conference not long ago when, between sessions, I sat casually talking with a number of the other speakers. The conversation led to various emphases in the church today. Soon I found myself wondering what religion they were discussing.

One man said how important it is for all believers to find out if any of their ancestors had ever attended a séance, even centuries ago. Unless that “generational curse” was removed we could not expect to prosper as Christians. Even our children and grandchildren would continue to be at risk, he claimed. Imagine being saved, a new creation in Christ, “rescued … from the dominion of darkness and brought … into the kingdom of the Son” (Col. 1:13)—yet somehow still under a curse of Satan!

I thought of the numerous Haitians at the Brooklyn Tabernacle who have come to New York from a land where the main religion is voodoo. If this man’s teaching is true, these Haitians have a lot of homework to do, finding out which of their great-grandmothers had dabbled in the occult, then taking steps to break this long-standing bondage.

Why, I wondered, didn’t Paul speak about this more clearly in his letters? The first century saw plenty of witchcraft. Did the believers in Corinth and Galatia and Rome have to explore their family trees for traces of an evil spell?

In one of the teaching sessions another speaker said, “There are three levels of spiritual warfare: battles with ordinary demons every day, confrontations with the occult such as astrology or New Age, and then strategic-level territorial warfare against the spirits in charge of a whole region. And even the apostle Paul never understood this third level or exercised this kind of ministry.” Imagine this clever teacher transcending the great apostle of the New Testament!

I couldn’t help wondering, what is the name of the demon over Brooklyn? The effects of evil are obvious enough on every street corner. Could I really knock the evil out with one rebuke of the territorial power over the whole borough?

Where does the New Testament portray this strategy? Did Peter bind the spirit over Joppa or Caesarea? Paul spent three years in Ephesus, a center of idol worship, yet there is no mention of “binding the spirit of the goddess Diana,” whose temple in that city was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In Acts 4, the apostles did not ask for the name of the evil spirit over Jerusalem.

Carol and I returned to the hotel sad and depressed. How tragic that young ministers were feverishly writing down all these exotic teachings in the vain hope of igniting their struggling churches back home with techniques and teachings nowhere found in Scripture.

I could find no evidence that these speakers were implementing their concepts at the local church level. Their books and tapes were selling well, but I wondered why they hadn’t come to Brooklyn or other dark places and put their teachings into practice.

I fear that what we have here is the work of “technicians” or “revisionists” or “idea men” who feel the need to innovate, to devise novelties in order to help God’s kingdom along. Unfortunately, America’s moral climate and the church’s spiritual temperature prove these novelties to be impotent.

THE DEVIL IS STILL IN BUSINESS

IF PRESENT-DAY TEACHERS AND authors have in fact discovered something new under the theological sun, I have a question to ask:

Why is there still so much evil rampant in the earth if the devil has indeed been “bound” so many times by Christians today? One well-known preacher went to San Francisco a few years ago, rented a stadium, and did “spiritual warfare” for the night, claiming to bind and rebuke every evil spirit and principality in the city. The next day he and his entourage flew home again. Is San Francisco a more godly place today as a result?

The Bible speaks more about resisting the devil than it does about binding him. First Peter 5:8–9 says, “Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that your brothers throughout the world are undergoing the same kind of sufferings.” Why didn’t the apostle Peter just bind that roaring lion and be done with the problem?

Jesus did talk in Matthew 12:29 about binding the strong man in order to rob his house. He used this metaphor immediately after casting a demon out of a blind and mute man. The meaning is that one person had been set free; nothing more cosmic in scope is mentioned. The text conveys that a strong man, Satan, had been evicted by a stronger one, Christ.

A similar truth can be applied to the practice of seeking to know a demon’s name. Out of Jesus’ dozens of encounters with Satan during his ministry, he asked for a name only once (Mark 5:9). Again, this had to do with one man’s problem, not that of a whole province or territory. Moreover, the apostles never told young ministers such as Timothy or Titus to inquire about demons’ names.

Please don’t misunderstand: I fully believe that the devil invades people’s lives today and has to be confronted. I have had to confront him a number of times in my ministry. One Tuesday night two members of the church brought a teenager to the prayer meeting who, they said, was on drugs and needed to be delivered. That’s all they told me. I didn’t think too much about it; this kind of thing happens often. (Our wonderful members don’t know better than to bring the unconverted to a prayer meeting!)

About a half hour into the meeting, after we had been worshiping for a while, I said, “There’s a girl here who’s been brought by some members, and they’d like her to be prayed for; she’s hooked on drugs.”

These members began walking toward the front with a short Hispanic girl. She seemed in a daze—the effect of drugs, I assumed. Her name was Diana.

I was standing, as I usually do on Tuesday nights, on the ground level with the people, at the head of the center aisle. All of a sudden, I began to tense up; alarm bells seemed to be going off in my spirit signifying that something was wrong—something was about to happen.

I noticed off to my right a visiting evangelist I knew. I said to her, “Amy, it’s good to see you here tonight. Would you come help me pray for this young lady?” As she moved out of her seat, the Holy Spirit came upon her, and she sensed the same anticipation. We were suddenly both on “red alert” for some unknown reason.

One of the associate pastors joined us, and we laid hands on Diana and began to pray. “O Jesus, help us,” I said quietly.

Like a shot, the mention of Jesus’ name brought an explosion of rage and screaming. The five-foot-one-inch girl lunged for my throat, throwing back the two friends who had guided her up the aisle. Before I knew what was happening, I had been body-slammed against the front edge of the platform. Diana ripped the collar right off my white shirt as if it were a piece of tissue. A hideous voice from deep inside her began to scream, “You’ll never have her! She’s ours! Get away from her!” The language then turned obscene.

Some in the congregation stood and began to pray aloud. Others gasped. Some covered their eyes. Meanwhile, several deacons jumped up and tried to pull her off of me. Despite her size, she fought all of us with tremendous strength.

We finally managed to subdue her. Amy, the evangelist, began to pray fervently. I leaned over the girl to address the spirits: “Shut up! In the name of Jesus, come out of her!” I demanded.

Diana’s eyes rolled back in her head, and twice she spit directly into my face, no more than a foot away. The church kept earnestly calling out to God for his help. Clearly, we were not battling some imaginary “spirit of anger” or whatever. This was a classic case of demon possession.

Within a few minutes, the girl was set totally free. She stopped cursing; her body relaxed. We relaxed our grip on her, and she gently stood up to raise her hands and begin praising the Lord. Soon she was singing, with the rest of us, “Oh, the blood of Jesus! It washes white as snow,” as tears streamed down her cheeks, ruining her makeup.

Diana has been serving the Lord for ten years now in the Brooklyn Tabernacle. Recently she married a young man, and both of them gave strong testimonies of their faith in front of mostly unbelieving relatives. She is a wonderful Christian today who loves the Lord and wants to serve him alone.

Diana has allowed me to tell her story to make the point that I believe in confronting satanic activity. Was her experience unique or weird? Not by New Testament standards. This was just “mere Christianity,” the kind of thing Jesus and the apostles did on a regular basis.

But we should not expect to discover new shortcuts in the spiritual realm. Have we forgotten that when Jesus sent out his twelve disciples, he specifically “gave them authority to drive out evil spirits” … yet he also told them that some towns would not welcome them. “They will hand you over to the local councils and flog you in their synagogues” (Matt. 10:1, 17). If the twelve, with one sweep of the hand, could have bound the opposing spirit in that city, wouldn’t Jesus have explained this? It would have spared Christians a lot of conflict.

Instead, Jesus addressed the various churches in the book of Revelation with somber warnings about the opposition they were facing:

To Smyrna: “I tell you, the devil will put some of you in prison to test you, and you will suffer persecution for ten days. Be faithful, even to the point of death” (Rev. 2:10). Christ warns that they are in a hostile environment and there are no quick fixes.

To Pergamum: “I know where you live—where Satan has his throne.” The next sentence does not read: Kick him out! Bind him! No. Jesus calmly continues, “Yet you remain true to my name. You did not renounce your faith in me, even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was put to death in your city—where Satan lives” (Rev. 2:13).

The all-knowing King of kings and Lord of lords, who holds the keys of death and hell, tells the Christians to battle through. In both these letters Jesus describes what Satan was permitted to do, within the limits of some sovereign plan of God that we don’t fully comprehend. Nevertheless, the believers are to press ahead with old-fashioned spiritual endurance.

The trouble with today’s man-made novelties is that they simply don’t produce the impressive results that are often advertised. They do not, so far as I know, result in masses of people being converted, being baptized in water, or forming strong, prayerful churches. Where is the city anywhere in the world that has been “taken for God,” as the rhetoric often claims? Wouldn’t it be wiser, as Paul said, to “not boast beyond proper limits” (2 Cor. 10:13) but rather let the Spirit produce results that speak for themselves?

Just as some say the powers of evil are attached to certain locales, others are proclaiming certain centers of God’s “new anointing.” Certain cities are said to be chosen for a unique outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Where do we find this in Scripture?

It is totally unbiblical to insinuate that people must travel to a particular church anywhere to receive what God has for them. There is no special anointing from the Brooklyn Tabernacle or any other church that can be passed on by the laying on of hands. Nowhere in the book of Acts do people travel to Jerusalem or any other city to be “where the action is.”

All we find in the New Testament is the admonition to “come near to God and he will come near to you” (James 4:8). The responsibility lies with us. If enough people in New York City or San Francisco call out to God with all their hearts, those cities can become world-famous for revival. God is no respecter of geography.

We are too easily distracted from the call to simply wait on the Lord. We get pulled away from the simplicity of the gospel. In Acts 4, the apostles only wanted to preach the Word. It sounds too minimal to modern ears, doesn’t it—isn’t there something more, something greater, something newer?

In the face of a world ignoring Christ’s offer of salvation, we can either humble ourselves before God and return to his basics … or we can go on dancing with ourselves. The potential to see local churches explode with the life of God rests in the balance.

NO HOCUS-POCUS

THERE IS NO BETTER example of God’s moving mightily in a city than the account told in Acts 11:20–21: “… men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks… telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus. The Lord’s hand was with them, and a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord.”

Such a harvest occurred that Barnabas was dispatched from Jerusalem to check things out. “When he arrived and saw the evidence of the grace of God, he was glad…. And a great number of people were brought to the Lord” (vv. 23–24).

Who were these men who launched such a mighty church that it eventually surpassed the mother church in Jerusalem? We don’t know their names. We don’t know their methodology. We don’t know whether they were premillennial or postmillennial or amillennial. But we do know a couple of things: They spread “the good news about the Lord Jesus,” and “the Lord’s hand was with them” (vv. 20–21).

This turned out to be the first truly multicultural church, with multicultural leaders, according to Acts 13:1—Simon the Black, some Jewish leaders, some Greeks, Manaen the boyhood friend of Herod (which would have made him suspect to everyone!), and others. Yet they worked together in a powerful model of cross-cultural unity.

The Jewish-Gentile hatred of the first century was even greater than our racial strife today. God met this problem head-on, for he was building his church his way.

Racial feelings in New York City are worse now than they were ten years ago. A harsh spirit prevails in many churches. We desperately need the love of God to override these tensions, as it did in Antioch long ago.

No novel teaching is going to turn the trick. There are no trendy shortcuts, no hocus-pocus mantras that can defeat Satan.

One man told me, “You know, you ought to think about getting a topographical map of Brooklyn so you could figure out the highest point in the borough. Then you could go there and pray against the territorial spirits.”

I wanted to say, “Brother, that is nothing but Old Testament sorcery. The idolaters of Elijah’s time were into ‘high places,’ remember?” They somehow thought they could get a better angle on the demons, I guess. I don’t care if I led my whole congregation over to the eighty-sixth-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building—we would get a wonderful view of Brooklyn, but we wouldn’t impress God. Or the devil, for that matter.

Others are saying, “The key to releasing God’s power is to sing through the streets of your city. Put on a march, make banners, and declare God’s sovereignty in a big parade.” While Christians may enjoy such an outing, does it really make a measurable difference in a community?

Still others say, “Rebuke the devil, face the north, and stamp your feet when you do it. That will bring victory.”

On vacation, Carol and I watched a Sunday morning church service on television in which the pastor was emphasizing spiritual warfare. He was in the pulpit dressed in military fatigues! This was supposed to scare the devil, I guess. We weren’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

Can someone show me where the New Testament attaches any promise to the movement of our bodies or how we clothe them? When bizarre physical manifestations become the official sign of a supposed new awakening, we have abandoned our biblical roots. Only trouble lies ahead.

Let’s forget the novelties. If we prevail in prayer, God will do what only he can do. How he does things, when he does them, and in what manner are up to him. The name of Jesus, the power of his blood, and the prayer of faith have not lost their power over the centuries.

When Charles Finney preached in Rochester, New York, in the 1820s, more than 100,000 people came to Christ within a year. “The whole community was stirred,” according to one eyewitness. “Grog [liquor] shops were closed; the Sabbath was honored; the sanctuaries were thronged with happy worshipers…. Even the courts and the prisons bore witness to [the] blessed effects. There was a wonderful falling off in crime. The courts had little to do, and the jail was nearly empty for years afterward.”¹

I can assure you that Finney didn’t “bind the spirit of alcohol” or anything else; he just did God’s work in God’s way, and a whole city was affected.

During the Welsh revival around 1904, according to historian J. Edwin Orr, a police sergeant told the local newspaper, “There are seventeen churches in our town, and we have quartets of policemen ready to provide music to any church that wants it.” That was because the cops had little else to do with their time. Even the criminals were apparently in church, where a young coal miner named Evan Roberts led most of the meetings by praying rather than preaching.

When G. Campbell Morgan and other distinguished churchmen came from London to observe the revival, they could not get into the building; they were reduced to peering over other people’s heads out in the vestibule. Did they hear Roberts calling for a march to the high places of the Welsh mountains? In fact, the opposite: Roberts was often overheard to pray, “Lower, Lord—take us lower.” He would fall on his knees and begin to groan out his intercession for Wales, following the biblical pattern of humbling oneself in prayer (see James 4:9–10 and 1 Peter 5:6).

There was also a wave of bankruptcies in Wales during those years—mostly taverns.

THE BIBLE IS ENOUGH

AS A MINISTER I firmly believe that I am not allowed to preach what is not in the Bible. It is an exciting enough book as it stands. It is not something dull that we need to spice up. If we do and teach all that Jesus did and taught—and no more—we will have plenty of thrills. Otherwise, let us be silent where the Bible is silent.

The apostle Paul put it plainly in his letter to the church at Corinth, which had gotten itself into several messes. He was trying to move the people back on track, so he urged them to “learn from us the meaning of the saying, ‘Do not go beyond what is written’” (1 Cor. 4:6). Apparently Paul thought that a scriptural foundation was essential, and beyond that lay little more than trouble.

Meanwhile, he told the Galatians, “Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned!” (Gal. 1:8).

I love what William J. Seymour wrote—the one-eyed, marginally educated African-American elder at the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, where the modern Pentecostal movement took shape in 1906. “We are measuring everything by the Word,” he wrote in the September 1907 issue of Apostolic Faith magazine. “Every experience must measure up with the Bible. Some say that is going too far [in other words, being too strict!], but if we have lived too close to the Word, we will settle that with the Lord when we meet Him in the air.”

No one has the right to adjust the gospel or revise God’s plan for his church. Those precious things are not yours or mine; they are God’s. We need to stop fussing with them. We need to submit to the heavenly design laid down long ago.

DEEPER, NOT WIDER

THE THINGS OF GOD have a circumference. They are preserved in a written body of truth. It is like a well—and no one has ever fathomed the depth of God’s truth.

To go into the power of the gospel, or of prayer, or the Holy Spirit, or divine love is to plunge ever deeper and deeper into God’s well. Every man or woman used by God has gone down into this vast reservoir.

The tendency today, however, is merely to splash around in truth for a while … and then jump outside the well to the surrounding soil. “Look at this—God is doing a new thing!” people proclaim. In six months or so, of course, the novelty wears off, and they jump again to a new patch of grass. They spend their whole lives hopscotching from one side of God’s well to another, never really probing the depth of the living waters inside.

Inside the well there is no cause for leaving or jumping out. Who will ever fathom the fullness of the love of God? Who will ever exhaust the richness of his mercy to fallen human beings? Who will ever understand the real power of prayer?

Especially since the 1960s, fads have come and gone in the North American church, only to be replaced by newer fads. Leonard Ravenhill, the revival-minded preacher and author from Britain, told me shortly before he died, “People say the church today is ‘growing and expanding.’ Yes, it’s ten miles wide now—and about a quarter-inch deep.”

Deliverance from the dark powers has especially captured our fantasies. While Jesus and the apostles did indeed cast out demons from the unsaved, nowhere do we see this being done for the benefit of Christians. Nowhere do we find Paul saying, “You know, you Corinthians have a real mess there. You need to get the elders of the church together, have them go into earnest prayer, and then anoint the church members with oil to cast out the ‘spirit of gossip’ in your church. The folks who are overweight need to have the ‘demon of fat’ cast out of them. The immoral brother who’s living with his stepmother needs to be delivered from the ‘spirit of lust.’…”

Paul had a much more mundane explanation for these problems: They were simply “works of the flesh.” He called for repentance, for dying daily to self—not flamboyant exorcism.

Just as our culture in general is taken up with a victim mentality, where everything is somebody else’s fault, to be relieved by psychotherapy, government handouts, or litigation, so in the church people are saying, “It’s the devil’s fault. Don’t blame me.” No wonder there is little brokenness of spirit among us. Why pray and confess if your main problem is oppression (or possession) by an evil spirit that someone else needs to get off your back? Few Christians or sermons use the word “sin” anymore. Few sense the need to repent of their own wrongdoing. Rather, they look to the outside for a scapegoat.

When you work in the inner city, as I do, the victim mentality can be very strong. “I’m black, or brown, so it’s hard for me to get anywhere in life…. I was molested as a child by my uncle, and I’m still dealing with the pain of that….”

I often reply, “Yes, those things are real—but God is greater. None of us can afford to blame the past indefinitely. My father, in fact, was an alcoholic for twenty-one years, to the point that he lost his career at Westinghouse. His weekend binges eventually stretched to entire weeks, then a full month. When he was drinking, he would call me every four-letter word I’d ever heard, and some I hadn’t…. He even missed my wedding.

“So I should accomplish absolutely nothing in life, right?

“Not at all. I am still responsible. I have no license from God to lie down and vegetate. God can still hold me and put me to work in his service.”

I usually go on to point out a wonderful detail in the life of Joseph, the young man whose brothers sold him into Egyptian slavery. After being framed by Potiphar’s wife, thrown into prison, and forgotten … when he finally married and had a son, he named him Manasseh, which means “to forget.” He said, “It is because God has made me forget all my trouble and all my father’s household” (Gen. 41:51). God is more powerful than anybody’s past, no matter how wretched. He can make us forget—not by erasing the memory but by taking the sting and paralyzing effect out of it.

I am thankful that my father’s life has been redeemed in recent times. He has been sober for more than thirteen years. Today he loves the Lord with all his heart, as does my mother. They are both faithful members and a tremendous support to the Brooklyn Tabernacle.

ALL NEEDS ALREADY SUPPLIED

IF WE VENTURE INTO a gymnasium these days, we are likely to run into fellows who look like superstars in expensive Adidas sneakers, color-coordinated knee bands and all the rest. The only trouble is, they can’t get the ball into the hoop. They have all the latest gear, but they still can’t play.

We as God’s people have all the equipment we need. It has been around for two thousand years. He has given us everything necessary to put points on the scoreboard and win victories in his name. So let us move forward with full confidence in what we have received.

Nothing about God will change. Tomorrow he will be no more anxious to help our lives, our families, and our churches then than he is right now. If we simply avail ourselves of his promises, we will see him do things we could never ask or think, just as he did in the New Testament. It is time to press on.