Some Christians spend more time seeking experiences than studying the Sermon on the Mount. This is because being meek and poor in spirit is not their idea of being blessed. Being blessed is to them more like lying on the floor after being “touched” by the Spirit of God.
The peaceful scene of a sermon on a mountainside does not have the same appeal to them. Although inspiring, it is not experiential. However, the Christian life is more than an endless search for the spiritual counterpart of that “perfect wave” — much more!
The mistake some Pentecostals believers make is to pursue God’s power for what it can do, and while commendable it can develop a performance-based approach to faith not unlike that of the church at Ephesus, which pursued ministry at the expense of its “first love” (Revelation 2:4). They are always on the lookout for the “new move” that will lift them to the Next Level.
If there’s a word for this it’s “flowing,” by which I mean moving in the anointing of power through the use of spiritual gifts — “flowing in the stream of the Spirit”. I have been filled with the Spirit for sixty-three years and by God’s grace will remain so for the rest of my life. I love being in the “flow” of the Spirit and enjoy to the max spontaneous praise during times of praise and worship.
Longtime Pentecostals are spiritual surfers, in that we are always in search for the perfect wave of revival that will carry us through to The Second Coming. But we should seek to “grow” as well as “flow” — to be not only powerful but also productive. Most of those I’ve met over the years have both in balance.
When God spoke to the children of Israel about the land into which He was about to lead them, He described it as “a land flowing with milk and honey.” He said so sixteen times. A land “flowing with milk and honey” suggests an abundance of natural products: milk from goats and wild honey from among rocks.
No crop cultivation. No food preparation. That was as attractive to the Israelites then as the flow of the Spirit is to today’s Pentecostals. Nothing had “flowed” in the vegetable gardens of Egypt because crops had been irrigated by foot-operated waterwheels. (Deuteronomy 11:10)
The idea of “flowing with milk and honey” would have been as attractive to them as “flowing in the gifts” is to us, and The Promised Land to them as attractive as God’s promises in Christ are to us. After having escaped the pull of Egypt, the Israelites were as drawn to their inheritance in the land of Canaan as we are to ours in Christ. And if their refusal to face the challenges turned an eleven-day journey into a forty-year wilderness trek, well, how many of us have wasted time wandering in the ‘wilderness’ of our own will?
On arrival in Canaan, they were not disappointed. The land was “watered by the rains of heaven” through seasonal “early rains” and “latter rains” so there was no need for waterwheels. However, after the first year of living off captured crops they needed to plant wheat and barley: grain crops that would provide bread.
Milk and honey would have been a welcome change of diet after forty years of bland manna, but they would not have wished to exchange manna for a diet limited to milk and honey. They would have concluded that growing is as important as flowing.
The Apostle Paul lists nine gifts of the Holy Spirit in I Corinthians 12, and in Galatians 5:22-23, lists nine “fruit of the spirit” — fruit grown in our human spirit. The first is more spectacular — we could say more Pentecostal — than the second, but both are necessary.
So, by all means, “flow” in spiritual gifts — while also “growing” the fruit of the spirit.