On a cold and blustery Saturday in January 1969, some 200 people gathered for a six o'clock wedding at a modest church in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn. To the west, the winter sun had already sunk behind the towers and cables of the new Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, increasing the chill in the air. Inside the sanctuary, however, the lights were on and the beautiful arrangements of white calla lilies were in place for a festive occasion.
The twenty-six-year-old groom, who worked in midtown Manhattan as a personnel representative, waited nervously at the front for his beautiful bride to enter. She, a receptionist for a large pharmaceutical firm in the city, was resplendent in her white, Spanish-style wedding gown, with a long train descending from the tiara atop her head. The couple truly loved the Lord and had been praying for his presence at their special occasion. They wanted this day to be remembered not just for its smooth ceremony and joyous reception, but also for the touch of God upon all that occurred.
The forty-minute ceremony came to its peak when the middle-aged minister announced at last, “And now you may kiss the bride.” The recessional followed, then a receiving line, then photography, and finally the reception. The bride's parents had arranged for a delicious catered dinner to be served in the church's fellowship hall. Guests sat at nicely decorated tables.
When the father of the bride, a minister himself as well as a talented vocalist, arose to address the crowd, he did not propose a toast or engage in humorous remarks. Instead, he made a few introductory comments and then offered up a gospel song of that era, accompanied by a pianist. It seemed almost a prayer for the young couple to adopt as their own:
Fill my cup, Lord, I lift it up, Lord!
Come and quench this thirsting of my soul;
Bread of heaven, feed me till I want no more—
Fill my cup, fill it up, and make me whole.1
An atmosphere of worship came over the assembled guests. Some closed their eyes in reverence, some nodded their heads, others set down their coffee cups and gently raised their hands in praise. A murmur of prayer and adoration spread across the hall when the song finished. The mood turned from party-like to praiseful. People interceded for God to bless these newlyweds and fill their life together with the richness of his Spirit.
No one was in a hurry to break the flow of what had sprung up spontaneously. The bride and groom sat quietly, their heads bowed in prayer. And then, unexpectedly, a woman in her mid-thirties came out of the crowd and stepped up before them. She began to speak.
At first she prayed a blessing for the couple, but soon her words changed to a prophetic declaration, the kind of thing one might have heard in Bible times. She spoke from no prepared script at all. Her inspiration instead seemed to come in the present moment as she said, “ … The hand of the Lord is upon you both; God has chosen you for his special work. He will use you in ways you could never imagine. The day will come when you will stand before thousands and thousands of people, speaking the message of God. Your influence will go well beyond anything your mind can fathom on this day. You will travel around the world telling people of the love and grace of Jesus Christ.”
The woman's words carried a ring of authority, yet they were delivered in tenderness. She concluded with a statement that God's favor would rest upon the wedding couple as they faithfully surrendered to his leading. When she stopped, a fresh swell of praise to God rose up from the guests, while both the bride and groom found themselves in tears. It was several minutes before they regained their composure.
On the plane to Hawaii the next afternoon, the young man mulled in his mind, “What was that all about? It doesn't make any sense. We both have our jobs in the business world; we don't have any training for ministry; we haven't even discussed that kind of life. How could those things ever happen?” When he talked with his new wife about it a few days later, neither one could solve the puzzle.
Who Are We Missing?
I am fully aware that some might dismiss such an event as religious fanaticism or an emotional imitation of phenomena that ended with the apostolic age. But I can vouch for the truth of this story because I was the groom that day and Carol was the bride. I can also tell you that every word the woman spoke that day has literally come to pass. We have not sought to fulfill her prophecy; in fact, in the early days we fought against such a turn in our careers. However, in looking over what God has brought to pass in our years of ministry, I can only conclude that his Spirit wanted to say something important that wedding day, and he chose an inconspicuous but willing person to serve as his messenger. She was no less—or more—than Ananias of Damascus, whom the Lord sent to find Saul in his blindness and tell him amazing things about his future (see Acts 9). She was another in the line of Philip the evangelist's “four unmarried daughters who prophesied” (Acts 21:9).
More significantly, I am convinced that more of these moments would happen in all of our lives if we paid more attention to the person I sometimes refer to as the Forgotten One. Christians generally respect the person of the Holy Spirit, of course, but most of us do not think about him very much. We plan our futures and pursue our goals with the hope that God will bless all that we do. But very few are conscious of the living, active Spirit of God who waits to take his rightful place in our lives.
This kind of thinking has been a problem for God's people all through history. It was a similar problem that nearly tripped up Joshua. The Bible tells us, “Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’” (Josh. 5:13).
Joshua had assumed he was the senior commander on the ground. Moses was gone; he was in charge. He had already identified Jericho, on the horizon, as Target Number One. He was now preparing to launch his first major offensive in the Promised Land. He was probably nervous and certainly prayerful as he waited for the battle to begin.
So who was this fellow who showed up unannounced and holding a sword? What was he doing here? Whose regiment did he belong to?
“Friend or foe?!” Joshua barked.
Isn't it amazing that Joshua appeared almost ready to fight the Visitor who was in fact his key to victory? We often do the same foolish thing today. God shows up in the middle of our situation, and we nervously question his identity rather than discerning his powerful presence.
The rest of the biblical account is well-known. The Forgotten One answered Joshua's question directly:
“Neither,” he replied, “but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.” Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, “What message does my Lord have for his servant?”
The commander of the Lord's army replied, “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did so (Josh. 5:14–15).
The Bible does not give us any extra identification for this “commander of the Lord's army”—whether he was the pre-incarnate Jesus or the Lord God in a special manifestation. We do not know, and probably do not need to know. What is much more significant for us is to recognize that this heavenly personage was seriously underestimated and almost overlooked. Joshua had no idea in the beginning who was confronting him. He didn't think this person was important at all. He didn't realize how much he needed the Visitor's help. He soon learned better.
Not Just a “Ghost”
Christians today are generally reverent toward God the Father, and we give well-deserved praise to his Son, our Savior. The member of the Trinity who most often gets neglected in our songs, prayers, and preaching is the Holy Spirit. He is not some amorphous liquid or gas; he is a real person, co-eternal with the Father and the Son. He was in the beginning with them both; in fact, Genesis 1:2 specifically states that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” at the start of creation.
Those of us who grew up with the King James Version of the Bible read often about the “Holy Ghost,” and maybe that is part of our problem. As a child, I found the term a bit spooky. I had no desire to get to know a ghost, holy or otherwise.
But in fact, Bible translations have long since removed this obstruction by switching to “Holy Spirit,” and he is not some scary specter. He is a person whom all believers should want to know and follow. He is a living being who has feelings and speaks to God's people. We find this mentioned repeatedly in the New Testament. It was an accepted fact that after Jesus ascended, he sent the Holy Spirit to take his place among the disciples. Just as our Lord promised, the Spirit began his vital ministry in the early church, as expressed in the New Testament:
While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them” (Acts 13:2).
The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons (1 Tim. 4:1).
So, as the Holy Spirit says: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion …” (Heb. 3:7–8).
“Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Rev. 2:7 and following).
We need to pay close attention to the Spirit's words, the way the Antioch church did, as mentioned above. The minute the Spirit singled out Barnabas and Saul for ministry, the group didn't just move along to the next item on a pre-established order of service. They “fasted and prayed, [then] placed their hands on them and sent them off” to preach the gospel in new territories (Acts 13:3).
This is one of the vital things the Holy Spirit does: he directs individuals into kingdom work. He makes things happen for the advancement of the Father's purposes. He equips ordinary men and women to do extraordinary things. If we don't believe this and become insensitive to the voice of the Spirit, we will miss wonderful things that God has planned for us. We will stay bound to mere facts and theories about the Lord without ever experiencing the power of God in our lives and circumstances.
The Spirit was active in the Old Testament as well. We will highlight just four of many occasions in the book of Judges when the Spirit launched people into doing exploits for God.
Othniel
The first person is Othniel, nephew of the famous Caleb, who was one of the twelve spies sent to scope out Canaan before the Israelite invasion. “The Spirit of the LORD came on him, so that he became Israel's judge [or ‘leader’] and went to war. The LORD gave [the] king of Aram into the hands of Othniel, who overpowered him. So the land had peace for forty years, until Othniel son of Kenaz died” (Judg. 3:10–11).
This military achievement was no small feat. The Israelites had been bullied and pushed around by this neighboring king for quite a while. Othniel rose up and turned the tide—for forty years. Imagine any political leader today who handled his job so well that his country stayed out of costly conflict for the next four decades. He would be a national hero. Schoolchildren would end up writing stories about him. His face would no doubt be engraved on a main coin or currency bill. That is what Othniel achieved—because “the Spirit of the LORD came on him.”
Gideon
The second person to notice in Judges is the shy, timid, self-deprecating Gideon. He grew up convinced he was nobody. He seemed destined to be a classic example of the underachiever. He expected nothing of himself, or anyone else in his family for that matter. When an angel showed up one day and called him a “mighty warrior” who would throw out the Midianite oppressors, he replied with half a dozen excuses and apologies. He could never do anything significant, he told the visitor.
Yet, as time went on, Gideon found out otherwise. The moment finally arrived when “the Spirit of the LORD came on Gideon, and he blew a trumpet, summoning the Abiezrites [his clan] to follow him. He sent messengers throughout Manasseh, calling them to arms, and also into Asher, Zebulun and Naphtali, so that they too went up to meet them” (Judg. 6:34–35). Who, Gideon? He had never taken charge of anything in his life. But now the Holy Spirit was empowering him, and within two days an incredible victory unfolded for Israel.
Jephthah
The third leader is the little-known Jephthah. It wasn't his fault, of course, that he was born as the result of his father visiting a prostitute. His half-brothers scorned him and let him know he didn't fit with the rest of the family. They bumped him out eventually, and he gathered “a gang of scoundrels” to be his posse (Judg. 11:3). Through his various comments we get the distinct impression of a man with a chip on his shoulder. He spoke too quickly, without measuring his words.
Yet, when the nation got into trouble and desperately needed a leader, the elders turned to this man. And in that moment, “the Spirit of the LORD came on Jephthah. He crossed Gilead and Manasseh, passed through Mizpah of Gilead, and from there he advanced against the Ammonites…. And the LORD gave them into his hands” (Judg. 11:29, 32). The Spirit's anointing overrode his quirks and human weaknesses.
Samson
Finally, of course there is Samson—set apart from birth to serve God, and given extraordinary physical powers to do so. Yet what Samson achieved on Israel's behalf was more than just a matter of bulging biceps. Four times the Scripture says something else about him:
The Spirit of the LORD began to stir him … (Judg. 13:25).
The Spirit of the LORD came on him in power so that he tore the lion apart with his bare hands (Judg. 14:6).
Then the Spirit of the LORD came on him in power. He went down to Ashkelon [and] struck down thirty of their men (Judg. 14:19).
The Spirit of the Lord came on him in power. The ropes on his arms became like charred flax, and the bindings dropped from his hands. Finding a fresh jawbone of a donkey, he grabbed it and struck down a thousand men (Judg. 15:14–15).
Yes, Samson (like Jephthah,2 and even Gideon3) embarrassed himself later in life through an unwise choice. But that does not negate the fact that God used these men in powerful ways to accomplish divine goals. And all they achieved was through the enabling of the Holy Spirit.
The same Holy Spirit is the one who empowers us today to do great things for God—imperfect though we be. He takes us with all our limitations and raises us up to handle challenges that otherwise scare us. He makes the critical difference in our work for the LORD.
“Let the Holy Ghost Work”
D. L. Moody, the great evangelist of the late nineteenth century, once said in a sermon preached here in New York, “We want the Holy Ghost to work in our way, and if He doesn't come in that way, we think sometimes it is not the work of God because it has not come in the usual way…. What we [need] to do is to let the Holy Ghost work in His own way.” 4
When anything happens on earth by God's grace, the Holy Spirit is the divine agent. If a preacher is effective, it is because the Holy Spirit is working. If any of us are encouraged while reading the Bible, it is because of him who is both the author and revealer of Scripture. If someone is convicted of sin, it's because the Holy Spirit has applied heavenly pressure to that person's soul. If someone is comforted in the midst of distress, it is because, in the words of the old song, “the Comforter has come.”
A few years ago, an attractive, early-thirties, blonde Australian named Vanessa Holland showed up in our service at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, brought by someone she met in a martial-arts class. She left early that first Sunday to get to her job. The next week, however, she came back alone and stayed for the entire service.
When I invited people to put their trust in Christ that day at the close of my message, she was one of the first to step forward. In fact, she says now with a laugh, “I was so moved that I was basically knocking people over to get to the front. I had never heard anything like this before, that God could forgive me and wipe clean my awful past. It was so real, so right, so true!”
Vanessa is hardly what you would call gullible or naïve. Before she arrived on our doorstep, she had traveled the world in search of fulfillment. She had tried everything from drugs and sex to self-help cults to astrology to Buddhism. Her mother, whom we later got to know during a visit to the church, openly stated, “We Australians are very laid back. That's why we took to the hippie life back in the sixties and seventies. We don't like rules. We loved the thing about ‘freedom’—sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. That's how Vanessa and her brothers were brought up; I admit it.”
Vanessa remembers as a little girl wandering through adult parties in her home and witnessing all kinds of things a child should never see. As soon as she reached her teenage years, she moved in with a boyfriend and began imitating the lifestyle of her parents. “There would always be a bunch of guys hanging around our apartment drinking and smoking pot,” she says. “I started getting really depressed about this time. So at seventeen, I moved to the other side of Australia and hung out with a crowd much older than me. I thought it was cool … but at the same time, I felt like I didn't really belong.”
By nineteen Vanessa and a girlfriend had saved up enough money to attempt a trip around the world. First stop: New York. Vanessa absolutely fell in love with the city. “It was so alive; it had so much to distract me from my growing unhappiness.” She decided to stay here. She found a boyfriend who could support her through selling drugs, robbing people, and running credit card scams.
The next dozen years were a sad series of escapades of looking for peace in all the wrong places: New Age books and seminars, “body work” (treatments from self-appointed healers who wave their hands over you in an attempt to “straighten out your chakras”), charting her astrological markers, and of course, relationships with men. “But I somehow dated only thugs!” Vanessa now says with regret. “I got in the most dreadful situations you can imagine, each one worse than the one before.” She tried to make better decisions based on a small bag of divination stones with little markings. They failed to lead her where she should go.
At one point Vanessa linked up with a group of friends to form a “family—three gay men and three of us girls. Maybe this would make me feel better and lift my depression.” Soon, however, one girl became a heroin addict. One of the men developed AIDS and got terribly sick. A couple of the others moved away.
On the phone to Australia, Vanessa would moan, “Mum, why did you even have to bring me into this world? There's just no point to my life.” She developed more than one suicide plan and looked forward to pulling them off, but never did.
Then the woman in the martial-arts class mentioned her church. “Sure, why not?” Vanessa replied. “I've tried everything else. I've got nothing to lose.” She knew virtually nothing about Christianity. It had some connection to Christmas, she vaguely assumed, but beyond that she drew a total blank.
The instant she walked into the building and sat down, she sensed something very different. Soon the choir began to sing. “I didn't know what was going on, but I started to cry,” Vanessa recalls. “That really was not like me, because I had become very hard.
“I had been in large audiences before, listening to New Age lecturers—but I'd always felt very alone there. This was absolutely the opposite. I felt warm and safe in this place. I didn't know it at the time, but it was the Holy Spirit just enveloping me.”
That first visit was cut short because of work, but a week later she returned, listened to the full message, and then raced to the front in tears to give her heart to the Lord. “Pastor Cymbala talked about being forgiven of your sins that day. I wanted that so badly. I wanted all the junk of my past to be swept away. I wanted to get rid of the anger and depression. I was so hungry for relief from the pain of living the way I'd been living all my life.”
The Spirit of God had broken through this young woman's many facades to bring her home at last.
“The change in my life was so real, and so immediate, that it shocked me,” she says. “Nothing had ever changed me for more than five minutes before. Now, all of a sudden, I was joyful and excited about life. I also felt offended by my old actions.
“I was managing a restaurant—a big achievement, I had told myself, even though I had gotten the job only because I was sleeping with the owner. Among the staff there, I was known for my absolutely filthy mouth. It was kind of my Aussie thing; we make an art form out of vulgarity, it seems. Whenever anything went wrong, the cooks and waiters were almost entertained by this chick cutting loose with a torrent of nasty language in a Down Under accent.
“Well, that very week after I went to the altar at the Brooklyn Tabernacle, something happened at work, and I blurted out a vulgar word. Instantly I was mortified! I actually gasped and clutched my throat in reaction. What had been commonplace in my life now became a knife in my heart. I was so embarrassed!”
Other changes began to sprout. “Suddenly I realized I was no longer afraid of the dark, which is something I'd always suffered. My roommate used to tease me about having every light in the place on at five in the morning. I think it traced back to weird things in my childhood, playing the Ouija board with my mum when I was little, and all that.
“Anyway, now the problem vanished. I could turn out the lights when I went to bed and feel nothing but coziness. Darkness no longer triggered my apprehension.”
Today Vanessa Holland runs her own business as a personal trainer, assisted by two part-time employees. Her life has stabilized, and her outlook is positive. She found out along the way that her mother had come to the Lord just as dramatically back in Australia and had been fervently praying for her daughter to find peace on the other side of the globe. To see them worshiping together in our church when her mother came to visit moved me deeply. While she was here, in fact, we videotaped them both for a clip that appears on the choir's 2006 DVD, I'm Amazed … LIVE. The clip includes photos from her unruly past as well as her riveting testimony.
Her summary Scripture these days, Vanessa says, is Romans 15:13, which talks about how “the God of hope [can] fill you will all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.” The major cleansing of her life has been nothing short of a work of the Spirit of God.
The Spirit of Holiness
We didn't program Vanessa to clean up her act. We didn't say she had to stop swearing, doing drugs, or sleeping around. The Holy Spirit took care of all that from the inside out. It was a case of what the Lord said through the prophet Ezekiel long before Jesus came: “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws” (Ezek. 36:26–27). The Spirit of God was the motivating, activating force inside her soul.
Who among us can live in purity by willpower alone? Yet Jesus calls us to personal holiness. He is serious about this requirement, no doubt; he is not just spinning idle words. He expects us to be holy as he is holy. And the One who calls us will also equip us.
One of the New Testament's most straightforward paragraphs says at the end, “God did not call us to be impure, but to live a holy life. Therefore, anyone who rejects this instruction does not reject a human being but God, the very God who gives you his Holy Spirit” (1 Thess. 4:7–8).
If the Holy Spirit remains the Forgotten One in our spiritual walk, we will fail to become the pure and joyful person God planned for us to be. We simply won't succeed. There is no holy living outside of the Holy Spirit's control. That, in fact, is part of his name; he is called the Holy Spirit for good reason.
He works deep inside us to change our desires from pleasing ourselves to pleasing God. He also uses the Word of God to enable us to control our thought lives. The Holy Spirit is the only one who can subdue the strong urgings of the lower nature. He is the only one who can break habits that have been repeated countless times. He is the only one who can overcome Satan and all his subtle temptations.
The more we walk in the Spirit, the more we share Christ's attitude toward sin. We get beyond simply turning over a new leaf or promising to be different. We start to think about sin the way God does, and we are repulsed by it, just as Vanessa Holland was that day in the restaurant. This too is a work of the Spirit.
One word picture in the Bible for the Holy Spirit is fire. John the Baptist foretold that on the day of Pentecost the early Christians would be baptized “with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matt. 3:11). That, in fact, is what appeared that day as tongues of fire hovered above the 120 disciples. The apostle Paul wrote to one church years later, “Do not put out the Spirit's fire” (1 Thess. 5:19).
Fire has at least three remarkable properties that help us understand the work of the Spirit.
1. Fire penetrates whatever it touches. Wood is not the same once it is set on fire. Neither is plastic or carpet—or skin. Fire goes deep below the surface and alters the very molecular structure of whatever it invades.
The Spirit has a way of penetrating to essentials below the surface of our lives. “The Spirit searches all things” (1 Cor. 2:10). If there is brooding resentment against someone or some situation, the Spirit puts his finger on that problem and calls us to forgive. What does not please him becomes the center of his focus. “He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of people's hearts” (1 Cor. 4:5).
Spirit-anointed preaching has a way of getting to the heart of matters that are truly important. These sermons are not just clever or entertaining. They dig down to areas that need God's attention. In his memoirs, evangelist Charles G. Finney wrote, “I could not preach unless I went into the woods to seek the Lord so that my words would penetrate the people. I knew when the Spirit was upon me because it made the people uncomfortable.”
When the Spirit helps us to pray, he penetrates deep inside us, enabling us to give expression to the deepest desires of our heart. We don't just say nice-sounding phrases. Some of the most powerful public praying I've ever heard has come from people anointed by the Holy Spirit, whose words were very simple—but everyone knew the words came from their hearts as well as the heart of God. There was no attempt at eloquence or fine-sounding phrases. The prayer instead came from the very bottom of the soul.
The Holy Spirit destroys whatever is flammable. He burns up what doesn't belong in our lives, the “wood, hay or straw” (1 Cor. 3:12) that are going to be exposed on the day of judgment anyway. They might as well get burned out now.
2. Fire serves as a light. It leads us like a lantern. That is how the Israelites got through the trackless desert, of course. A pillar of cloud and a pillar of fire led the way (Exod. 13:21–22).
The Holy Spirit is a bright and shining guide for us. Are we following him, or are we meandering off on our own side trails? If we insist on charting our own path and wind up getting lost, we have no one to blame but ourselves. The fire of the Spirit knows the best course for each of us and lives today to guide us.
As one insightful leader wrote, “If Israel followed this pillar of fire and cloud so carefully, how much more should we follow the Holy Spirit? … The organized church has largely proven a tremendous framework of form and ceremony, built up against God himself. The Holy Spirit has no right of way…. We have got to leave room for God somewhere.”5
Doesn't this describe the bland predictability of many of our services today?
3. Fire is contagious. It spreads from one location to the next. Wherever there is willing fuel, it leaps up.
If we are ablaze with God's Spirit, we are bound to affect other people. This is the history of every spiritual awakening, from Jonathan Edwards' day in the 1740s to the noontime prayer meetings just before the Civil War, to the Welsh Revival, to any other movement of God you care to mention. These movements were incendiary. People were touched by the fire of God, and soon the heat spread to others, whose lives were changed as well.
Have you ever noticed the motto emblazoned across the Salvation Army's crest? It reads, “Blood and Fire.” Maybe you thought those words simply signified having a courageous spirit to get out on the street and face the difficult needs of humanity—sort of like “blood and guts.” No, that is not their meaning at all. General William Booth, the founder, was very specific: “The blood is the blood of Christ, and the fire is the fire of the Holy Ghost.”6 That is what drove the passion and work of the early Salvationists. We need the same blood and fire today.
If we don't want this kind of intense passion for the Lord … if we would rather not be made pure in our daily living … if we don't want to be led in new and challenging directions … then our only choice is to keep our distance from the Holy Spirit. Hold him at arm's length. Don't let his heat start to warm our faces. Too many people in too many churches are living just that way today. We forget about the Holy Spirit, even while holding to orthodox doctrine. This neglect of the Forgotten One is probably the greatest cause of spiritual malaise. It is also a human tragedy in light of God's great promises for us.
The only route to our Promised Land is outlined in God's Word, and the one who can empower us and guide us there is God the Holy Spirit. Today is the first day of the rest of all our lives. Whatever the past failures or heartaches, we cannot undo one single day. But we can open our hearts afresh to the Holy Spirit and begin to draw from him all the heavenly resources he supplies.