A Change of Heart

 A story is told of a mother who brought her son into church one Sunday. The boy stood on the pew and the mother asked the little boy to sit down. “Please sit down,” she asked. “No,” answered the boy. More firmly the Mom said, “Please – sit – down.” “No!” said the boy. Exasperated, the Mom pushed the boy down into a sitting position with a loud “SIT DOWN!” The boy looked angrily at his Mom and said, “I may be sitting down on the outside, but I’m standing up on the inside!” 

We don’t want to be like that little boy, looking like an obedient child, sitting so nicely, but in his heart he is actually completely different. What can change our hearts? True repentance.

 

Jesus once told a series of three parables, recorded in Luke chapter 15, about repentance. Seems that there were certain folks who took exception to Jesus’ continued relationship with people who were known to be of a low moral character. They did not see that these people had repented. Jesus explained the situation to his accusers in these parables. They apparently did not know what repentance really was.

 

Jesus spoke of a shepherd who had 100 sheep when one wandered away and became lost. The shepherd found the lost sheep and brought it home. In the parable, Jesus equates the shepherd finding the lost sheep as the moment of repentance. What did the sheep do to repent? Nothing.

 

Then Jesus tells another similar parable of a woman who had 10 coins and lost one of them. She searched and searched until she found it. Jesus again equated the finding of the coin with true repentance. What did the coin do to repent? Nothing.

 

Knowing that this could be confusing, Jesus tells a third parable to clarify his point. It is often called the parable of prodigal son. In this tale, the younger son insults his father, demands his inheritance before the father dies, and goes off and spends it all on wild living. After he has spent it all, he can’t make enough money to even feed himself. He decides then to ask his Dad if he could just be an employee, no longer worthy to be his son.

 

His Dad sees the boy coming from a long way away and runs to him, hugging and kissing him, calling him his son. At this point the boy stopped, and, realizing that he father really did love him, asked for forgiveness. Nothing was said about becoming an employee. Here was the point of repentance: the boy believed his father and accepted his father’s love. This is repentance. What did the boy do? Nothing, really. He just came and asked for forgiveness. The relationship between a father and wayward son was restored. The father initiated, and the son accepted, his father’s restoring love.

 

The associates of Jesus had reestablished their relationship with Father God by believing in Jesus. They were “sitting down on the inside”. They had repented by receiving Jesus, by accepting God’s love. Like the sheep and the coin, the boy was lost and then found. We too can be found by God when we receive Jesus and His love. This is the heart of true repentance: a change of heart about Jesus. This is how we become a child of God.

You Can Lead a Horse to Water, Part 2

Now after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” Mark 1:14-15 NASU

So begins the preaching of Jesus. The topic of the kingdom provides the context in which we can understand all that Jesus said. Jesus’ message was not primarily about love, or repentance, or Israel, or His deity, or salvation, or eschatology. Yet all these themes and more find their place in the story about the King and his kingdom. It is in the kingdom that all these other topics find their proportion and place.

No wonder then there is so much confusion about the kingdom. To understand the kingdom is to understand the main thrust of Jesus’ teaching. It is the thread that weaves these various subjects into a whole.If ‘Jesus is Lord’ is the heart of the gospel and maranatha its benediction, then the kingdom is the message.

How then is the baptism in the Holy Spirit to be understood in light of the kingdom? Where does this topic fit into this story? So often this baptism is put into other stories. If you are an Evangelical, this baptism becomes salvation. Since their view of salvation is punctilliar – a point in time where at one moment I’m not saved and the next moment I is, conversion and receiving the Spirit must be identical. If you are a sacramentalist, the baptism in the Spirit is conferred by some specific liturgical act such as water baptism or the laying on of hands. Those who believe that you receive the Spirit in water baptism find evidence here for that belief. If you are a Pentecostal, this is where you receive the Spirit after you are saved with evidence of speaking in tongues. If you are of a holiness extraction, this baptism becomes the time where you are totally given over – sanctified - to the will of God. Whatever your point of view, this baptism in the Spirit is located at the heart of your doctrine.

Everybody loves 1 Corinthians 12:13. Yet all of these views are unchanged by their reading of this verse. This is a problem for those who believe that doctrine must, in all cases and times, take precedence over experience. Gordon Fee makes it really clear in his book How to Read the Bible for All It’s Worth that history must be interpreted through the lens of the didactic – the teaching – portions of scripture. Too bad the early Christians didn’t know this. They interpreted the whole Bible of their day, now known as the Old Testament, through their experience of Jesus and the resurrection. And, I might add, through their common experience of the Holy Spirit.

This common experience of the Spirit is what 1 Corinthians 12:13 was referring. Yet many translations do not bring out this point. The way it is translated makes it look like the Spirit is the baptizer, and by the Spirit we are baptized in or into the body. The body becomes the thing into which we are baptized. As Fee and Turner, among others, have pointed out, the Spirit is what we are baptized into, not the body. This is the normal phrase always translated elsewhere as baptized in the Holy Spirit. The goal of this baptism in the Spirit is to unify one body out of many diverse peoples through their common experience of the Spirit. The whole passage is emphasizing unity in diversity, and this verse is making it explicit. We all, as the body, have a common experience of the Spirit.

This is what Paul seems to mean by saying that we were all given the Spirit to drink. Like land being flooded for irrigation purposes, we all have an opportunity to be soaked in the Spirit. This is where my title comes in. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. For God’s kingdom purpose of unity in the body, we were all given the Spirit to drink. But we must drink. Some sip, some refuse, some gulp it down like thirsty travelers crossing the desert. But we are all given the same drink. So it is not a case of the have’s and have-not’s. It is a case of those who drink deep and those who sip.

You Can Lead a Horse to Water

Recently I have been wrestling with the Lord. Like Jacob, I’m trying to pin the Lord down. And like Jacob, I have a limp for all my trouble. I have been trying to pin the Lord down on an understanding of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Simple, you might say. Why bother with something so obvious…?

I started out as a simple Pentecostal. I met Jesus and was completely changed. I was healed of drug abuse, my behavior radically changed, and all I wanted to do was pray, read the Bible, and tell others about Jesus. Six weeks after I met the Lord I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, shouting in tongues until I was hoarse.

Everything was simple. The few people I came across who believed that the gifts of the Spirit died out with the Apostles I quickly dismissed. We needed the word confirmed to us as much as they did and the perfect won’t come until Jesus returns. Simple.

But as I read more and more and did my best to come to an equitable understanding of scripture I began to notice things. I noticed that there was no verse that said that you must speak in tongues – and that there was no proof that speaking in tongues was the evidence that someone had received the Holy Spirit. The only verse that even indicated that tongues was an evidence of the reception of the Spirit was in Acts 11, where Peter is explaining to the leaders in Jerusalem how he knew the Gentiles had received the Spirit and could therefore be baptized. I also noticed that according to Romans 8:9 NIV “ if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.” At first this was a non-issue. After all, everyone I knew believed that the Spirit lived in a person when they were born again. When you were born again your spirit and the Holy Spirit were conjoined. As far as I knew, only those radical Pentecostals who didn’t think you were saved until you spoke in tongues believed that you did not, in some sense, get the Spirit when you believed.

But we all believed that having your spirit made new by conjoining with the Holy Spirit was not the same thing as receiving the Spirit in the baptism in the Holy Spirit. In recent years this has come under attack. Bruner, Dunn, Fee, Turner and others have all claimed that you are baptized in the Spirit at conversion. They have done some real scholarly work. The non-issue has become an issue. If what I understood about my experience is incorrect, I want to know. I need to able to teach the truth.

In this controversy I see two pivot points. For the Pentecostal side, this verse is crucial. 1 Corinthians 12:13 NIV “For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body — whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free — and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.” For the conversion/baptism in the Spirit side, Acts 8, the incident at Samaria.

In the next post I’ll look at 1 Cor 12:13 and the following post I’ll take on the implications of Samaria.