Jeremiah 31:33-34 (NKJV) 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put My law in their minds, and write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. 34 No more shall every man teach his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they all shall know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, says the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”
As we continue the process of building a default position that all things are possible to those who believe, the Lord spoke to me about the source of that kind of thinking. There is only one way we will believe to that degree. We must strengthen and expand our personal relationship with the Lord. Jesus told a grieving father in Mark 9 that the only thing standing between his son and healing was his ability to believe. That was true for him and it is true for anything you or I face today. Our goal is that the first thought we think when faced with the challenges of life is “all things are possible for my God.”
I was saved in the time we call the Charismatic renewal. One of the earmarks of that move of God was that he reached into denominations that had become cold and dead and filled people with the Holy Ghost. Most of them did not believe in the baptism with the Holy Spirit especially when it came to speaking with tongues. They either ignored it all together or taught that it was not from God.
This did not hinder God. He decided that people who loved him and knew him outside of Pentecostal circles needed to be filled with the spirit and he reached beyond those borders and did so. All over the world people from all denominations were saved and filled with the Holy Spirit. This was a sovereign move of God. I believe it was the last such move the world has seen.
There were churches who believed in the Baptism with the Holy Ghost with the evidence of speaking in tongues. They were largely relegated to the “other side of the tracks” so to speak. They had an “us against the world” mentality that caused them to reject the charismatics as somehow not really saved or spirit filled. They believed that if a person was not saved and filled with the Holy Ghost in their circles they were not saved. They held disparate doctrinal points of view but the one thing they could agree with was that if you were not filled in a Pentecostal church you were not really filled at all.
I was Catholic. I knew nothing of being saved let alone being filled with the Holy Spirit. At age 13 I met the young lady who would eventually become my wife. (That was 44 years ago this August by the way.) She was an American Baptist minister’s daughter. American Baptists are not generally evangelical the way Southern Baptists are. They tend to be typical among mainline denominational Christianity in that they teach the need to live a good moral life and that faith in God is important but they do not “preach the Gospel” as more evangelical groups would define it.
Although I did not know anything about the bible I did have two basic understandings from my Catholic upbringing. I knew that Jesus died for my sins and I knew that, if I believed in Him, that death would enable me to go to heaven. I did not know anything about doctrine. I did not know anything about biblical truth. I just knew Jesus died for my sins and I was going to heaven.
Something very strange happened to me about the same time I met my future wife. I distinctly remember sitting in the auditorium of our middle school in 8th grade. I always knew I was going to heaven. I knew I was not perfect, but I was going to heaven. Suddenly I had the thought, “What if I am not good enough to go to heaven?” That was nearly 50 years ago but I still remember it. I believe I was experiencing what Paul described in Romans 7.
Romans 7:9 (NKJV) 9 I was alive once without the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived and I died.
This is part of a very significant and complex chapter however; this statement is what happened to me. I was alive once. I knew Jesus was my Lord and Savior. I knew I was going to heaven. That day in an assembly at the beginning of 8th grade, sin began to revive in my heart and something changed in me. I lost that assurance. I believe that I was at what we might call the age of accountability. Sin “revived and I died” as it were.
I am very grateful that God brought my future wife into my life at just the right time. She led me into a new kind of life based on a new kind of revelation. I do not know what would have happened to me if she had not. The next year was full of challenges from the devil that, I believe, would have led to my destruction if she had not given me the Word of God when she did.
Over the next number of months many things happened. I became part of a Youth for Christ group. It was not that I wanted to be part of such a group. I just wanted to see my girlfriend and if I was going to do that, I had to come to the YFC meetings. I had many discussions with the young people there. I was challenged in my faith and in my catholic identity.
Finally, I went back to the Catholic Church. I knew something was happening but I did not understand what. I went back to what I knew. As a Catholic, you went to confession to get right with God. I went to confession but what I found was not what I was looking for. I will not go into detail, but my experience with the priest left me cold. I knew that there was something else at work in my heart.
One day I said to my girlfriend, “I guess I believe the way you do now.” I had no idea what the meant but I knew that I had crossed some kind of line. I know now that I had been born again. It had not happened the way most testimonies say it should, but it had happened. I knew I was different inside. I once again knew that I was going to heaven. I eventually found out there was much more but I knew that first of all.
I tell you all this to point out the difference between what had happened to me and what I found when I went back to the religious setting of the Catholic church. Let me say this could have been the Methodist, Baptist or any other denominational church you can think of. It could have been the Pentecostal church or today’s Charismatic church. What I found was a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That was the thing that set apart those of us who came to know Jesus during the Charismatic renewal. We came to a personal knowledge of Jesus Christ. We met him for ourselves.
It was not a doctrinal understanding. It was the personal experience that I had before “sin revived and I died.” I did not know anything about what had happened to me. I just knew it happened. The experience of meeting Jesus on a personal level led to my infilling with the Holy Spirit, my call to the ministry and everything else that has happened in my life to this very day.
Personal relationship with the Lord is one of the things that sets Christianity apart from all other human religions. That is the New Covenant. It does not matter what our background is. That is the key to the impossible. I must know him. That is all that matters.
If we want to believe to the degree that “all things become possible” in reality, we must strengthen and broaden our personal relationship with Jesus. When we do, we will see the truth of what Jesus told the father in Mark 9. If we do not, we may have all the right words, right doctrine and everything else religion says we need but it will be just that. Religion. Without relationship we have nothing. With it we already have everything!
Leave a Reply