The LORD told the young Samuel, “I will do something in Israel at which both ears of everyone who hears it will tingle.” (1 Samuel 3:11) Bad news can bring physiological effects. So too can startling, good news. But so too can rabid criticism of Spirit-filled evangelists by cold-hearted Evangelicals.
I know this because I’ve read and seen things said against some Spirit-filled preachers that have made my skin crawl. I disagree with some self-serving statements, but to denounce them out of hand publicly online may be self-harming. God’s judgements in the world can be His answers to our nighttime prayers. Such judgements are consequential (Isaiah 26:9).
When I became a Christian, in 1961, the only things I could find written about speaking in tongues were in the old Keswick Book Depot, which was in a cellar-like shop in Collins Street, Melbourne. Evangelicals ruled the theological roost at the time, Keswick bookstore later moved to a much nicer ground-floor shop in Flinders Lane.
Soon after, David Wilkerson’s soon-to-be best-seller “The Cross and the Switchblade” was released. A great story and at the end sound teaching on the Holy Spirit. What was Keswick to do? So many people wanted to buy the book. So, they stocked it in a kind of ‘under the counter’ way, not wanting to sell it but needing book sales.
Sir Edgar Coles must have thought the book pretty good because he had stocks of it placed on a stand just inside the entrance of Coles’ main Bourke Street store. (Sir Edgar was a Christian.) Well, that really let the cat out of the bag! The Charismatic Renewal that followed put the Pentecostal experience — recorded in Acts 2:4 and 10:44-46 — front and centre!
Sixty-plus years later, objections are fewer. I visited Koorong’s largest Brisbane store and books authored by Pentecostals were stacked up right inside the entrance! Books with well-known TV evangelists on the covers! I do not view every TV show or read every book in store but subscribe online to those I like. (Few Christians view free-to-air television these days., but am aware that many people do, most of whom are unsaved.)
We should leave the judgement of who is saved and who isn’t to the Lord, who is a lot kinder to those that we may view as somewhere in between. We get a bit preoccupied with ourselves at times and forget that Jesus came to seek and to save those who are lost. The Apostle Paul described himself as “the chief of sinners” — the worst of the unworthy!
Does “the law of kindness” govern the words that you speak? (Proverbs 31:26) Or do words of criticism come far too quickly? According to the prophet Samuel, the ears can “tingle” at what they hear. Kind words carry comfort easily, but unkind words carry swirls of doubt that leave “tingles” of doubt as to future prospects.
The presence of the Holy Spirit among God’s people can have — like it or not — physiological effects — not just in the ears either, but from head to foot! View live programs in which the Spirit of God is moving and healing and saving, and experience it in the good feelings that move on and in and through your own body. I suggest that you begin at this website: