One of the most remarkable aspects of the current world-wide movement of the Holy Spirit has been a reawakened sense of the awe, mystery, and wonder of God. Within the last several years, events such as the revival in Argentina, the Toronto Blessing, and the Pensacola Outpouring — not to mention numerous lesser-known revival activities — have caused Christians world-wide to grapple with the controversial phenomena surrounding the work of the Holy Spirit.
Most of us create within our mind a picture and concept of God that fits neatly within a three-volume systematic theology that we can proudly display on our bookshelves. Along the very noble path of attempting to explain God and His ways, we tend to domesticate His awesomeness and attempt to create Him in our image. This approach usually works well until God shows up in our midst with His manifest presence. At that point, we quickly discover our faulty misperceptions of God — namely that He is manageable and that His ways are fully rational to humans.
According to the Barna Research Group, a majority of people who attend Christian worship services leave without feeling that they experienced God’s presence. Less than one-third of the adults feel as though they truly interacted with God. Stunningly, one-third of the adults who REGULARLY attend worship services say that they have NEVER experienced God’s presence at any time during their life. According to George Barna, “The research shows that while most people attend church services with a desire to connect with God, most of them leave the church disappointed, week after week. Eventually people cease to expect a real encounter with God and simply settle for a pleasant experience.”
So what happens when the pleasant experience is replaced with the real encounter? “God is, of course, present everywhere,” writes author John White. “But there seems to be times when He is, as it were, more present — or shall we say more intensely present. He seems to draw aside one or two layers of a curtain that protects us from Him, exposing our fragility to the awesome energies of his being.” Theologian Guy Chevreau explains: “Theologically, what we are talking about is the omnipresent and eternal God localizing and actualizing His presence, in space and time.”
The theological works and journals of men such Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley have been studied and analyzed within the last five years by curious Christians in search of some way to gain a theological grasp upon the phenomena of falling, crying, trembling, and laughing. While I had assigned these kinds of manifestations to Pentecostal and charismatic Christians, it has been interesting to discover that many of these curious responses to God’s presence appear within my own Methodist and holiness roots, long before Azusa Street. This often comes as quite a surprise to the heirs of the 18th century Wesleyan revival. Over the decades, our history has been written in such a way as to make it more palatable and acceptable to modern sensibilities. In the process, unfortunately, we have lost sight of the marvelous wonder of God’s dynamic presence.
With the Scripture and Church history as our guide, it becomes very evident that when a holy God encounters sinful people three things usually occur: 1) Sinners are radically converted, 2) Christians are transformed and renewed, or 3) The mind of the saint or sinner is offended and the state of his heart revealed. Just as a storm is produced when high and low fronts converge, so too a storm of a different kind emerges when the glorious and radiant presence of the Lord comes near.
1. THE RADICAL CONVERSION OF SINNERS
How different would our perception and understanding of God be if we had been one of Saul’s companions on the road to Damascus? As you were traveling with him, “suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’
“‘Who are you, Lord?’ Saul asked.
“‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ he replied. ‘Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.’”
Luke says that the “men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything” (Acts 9:3-9).
Without wanting to make this a normative conversion experience, it is safe to say that witnessing the holiness and awesome power in that one encounter would forever shatter your one-dimensional, flannel-board-Sunday-school concept of Jesus. Conversion, in this instance, was not merely an intellectual ascent to the doctrinal positions of Christianity. Nor was it an emotionally cathartic event. It was just plain terrifying!
As one reads the testimonies of early Methodist converts who eventually became preachers, it is not difficult to see a pattern of anguish and terror as they wrestled with Holy Spirit conviction that literally shook their body and soul.
Philip Gatch describes his encounter with the convicting power of the Holy Spirit at his conversion on April 26, 1772. “Immediately I felt the power of God to affect me, body and soul. I felt like crying aloud,” he testifies.
God said, by his Spirit, to my soul, ‘My power is present to heal thy soul, if thou wilt but believe.’ I instantly submitted to the operation of the Spirit of God, and my poor soul was set at liberty. I felt as if I had got into a new world. I was certainly brought from hell’s dark door, and made nigh unto God by the blood of Jesus. I was the first person known to shout in that part of the country. A grateful sense of the mercy and goodness of God to my poor soul overwhelmed me.
Benjamin Abbott began preaching in New Jersey in 1773. He describes his conversion like this: “The word reached my heart in such a manner that it shook every joint in my body; tears flowed in abundance, and I cried out for mercy, of which the people took notice, and many were melted into tears.”
Peter Cartwright (1785-1872) attended a meeting in early 1801 where the “power of God was wonderfully displayed” and “Christians shouted aloud for joy.” He wrote:
To this meeting I repaired, a guilty, wretched sinner. On the Saturday evening, I went with weeping multitudes and bowed before the stand and earnestly prayed for mercy. In the midst of a solemn struggle of soul, an impression was made on my mind, as though a voice said to me, ‘Thy sins are all forgiven thee.’ Divine light flashed all around me, unspeakable joy sprung up in my soul.
Austin Taft was taught that Methodist preachers were “full of wild fire” and that it was very dangerous to hear them preach. At a prayer meeting in Huron County, Ohio in 1833, Taft writes, “Eternity with all its dread realities opened up before me and it’s impossible for any pen to describe the awful agonies of my mind. It is beyond all human description.” Taft continues:
It seemed to me I had already entered the dark abodes of eternal night, and right here something seemed to whisper to me — that there was mercy for me. I stopped and listened for a moment. What a word — mercy for me. It was the best news I ever heard. From that moment my faith laid hold upon the Savior’s promises with an unguiding grasp, and I saw a light in the distance far above my head, which grew brighter as it came near, and when it reached me I fell to the floor as quick as the lightning flash, and that moment was filled with the fullness of God. Old things passed away and all things became new. My happiness was complete….And I remained motionless for 45 minutes without power to move a muscle. My good Presbyterian father thought I was dead and talked of sending for the doctor.
Although these testimonies may strike some modern observers as highly-charged exaggerations, it seems very clear that they were exposed to the terror and joy of a God who shakes mountains and blesses children.
How would our perception of God be different if we were friends of the prophet Isaiah? What would we say to the friend sitting in your living room explaining that he saw “the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory’” (Isaiah 6:1-3)
As he attempts to retell the experience, he tells you that at the “sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke” (v. 4). You can see the holy terror in his eyes even as he tries to describe the indescribable. Then he blurts out with a cry, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty” (v. 5).
Once again, the explanation for such an encounter is difficult to process. How do we explain Daniel’s breath-taking encounter with an angel (Daniel 10), the glorious radiance on the face of Moses (Exodus 34:29-35), or the life-giving anointing on Elisha’s bones (2 Kings 13:21)? Rather than embracing the mystery and sovereignty of the God of the Bible, we often work overtime to domesticate him so that we can comfortably maintain the illusion that somehow we hold the upper hand in the relationship.
“It is time for Christianity to become a place of terror again,” writes Michael Yaconelli in his recent book DANGEROUS WONDER, “a place where God continually has to tell us, ‘Fear not’; a place where our relationship with God is not a simple belief or doctrine or theology, but the constant awareness of God’s terrifying presence in our lives. The nice, non-threatening God needs to be replaced by the God whose very presence smashes our egos into dust, burns our sin into ashes, and strips us naked to reveal the real person within.”
Yaconelli points out that religious leaders in the days of Jesus had the same tendency we have today. “The Pharisees wanted Jesus to be the same as they were. His truth should be the same truth that they had spent centuries taming. But truth is unpredictable,” he writes. “When Jesus is present, everyone is uncomfortable yet mysteriously glad at the same time. People do not like surprises — even church people — and they don’t want to be uncomfortable. They want a nice, tame Jesus.”
Over the years, Jesus has been re-formatted into a cross between Ghandi and a sentimental, doe-eyed host of a Saturday morning children’s show. We superimpose his image upon our pet political dogmas or water him down so that our sin does not seem so bad. “How did we end up so comfortable with God?” asks Yaconelli. “How did our awe of God get reduced to a lukewarm appreciation of God? How did God become a pal instead of a heart-stopping presence? How can we think of Jesus without remembering His ground-shaking, thunder-crashing, stormy exit on the cross? Why aren’t we continually catching our breath and saying, ‘This is no ordinary God!’?”
2. THE TRANSFORMING AND RENEWING OF CHRISTIANS
As the former president of Syracuse University, Daniel Steele was one of the leading theologians for the 19th century holiness movement. On November 17, 1870, he had a powerful experience that shifted his priorities and transformed his life. In describing his baptism in the Holy Spirit, Steele says that he “became conscious of a mysterious power exerting itself upon my sensibilities. My physical sensations, though not of a nervous temperament, in good health, alone, and calm, were indescribable, as if an electric current were passing through my body with painless shocks, melting my whole being with a fiery stream of love. The Son of God stood before my spiritual eye in all his loveliness.”
Have we experienced the “fiery stream of love” Steele describes? While each of our experiences will differ greatly, there can be no question that all of heaven longs for us to know and experience divine love.
“I know for the first time I realized ‘the unsearchable riches of Christ.’ Reputation, friends, family, property, everything disappeared, eclipsed by the brightness of his manifestation,” maintains Steele.
He seemed to say, “I have come to stay.” Yet there was no uttered word, no phantasm or image. It was not a trance or vision. The affections were the sphere of this wonderful phenomenon, best described as “the love of God shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Ghost.” It seemed as if the attraction of Jesus, the loadstone of my soul, was so strong that it would draw the spirit out of the body upward into heaven. How vivid and real was all this to me! I was more certain that God loved me than I was of the existence of the solid earth and of the shining sun. I intuitively apprehended Christ.
In the manifest presence of God, we are given a more accurate understanding of his penetrating and extravagant love. We are given the grace to intuitively apprehend Christ, and our concept of his holiness deepens.
The prolific Methodist evangelist E. Stanley Jones (1884-1973) was one who discovered the palpable presence of God. Before graduating in 1906 from Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky, he experienced a remarkable event.
“Four or five of us students were in the room of another student, Jim Ballinger, having a prayer meeting about ten o’clock at night,” recalls Jones. “I remember I was almost asleep with my head against the bedclothes where I was kneeling, when we were all swept off our feet by a visitation of the Holy Spirit. We were all filled, flooded by the Spirit.” Although none of the students there spoke in tongues, he emphatically states: “Everything that happened to the disciples on the original Pentecost happened to us.”
He admits that he was “tempted to tone down what really happened, or to dress it up in garments of respectability by using noncommittal descriptive terms. In either case it would be dishonest and perhaps worse — a betrayal of one of the most sacred and formative gifts of my life, a gift of God. To some who have looked upon me as an ‘intellectual’ it will come as a shock. But shock or no shock, here goes.”
Being willing to be misunderstood, Jones writes, “For three or four days it could be said of us as was said of those at the original Pentecost. ‘They are drunk.’ I was drunk with God. I say ‘for three or four days,’ for time seemed to have lost its significance.”
Basking within the glorious presence of God, E. Stanley Jones — who would later become one of Methodism’s most cherished cross-cultural missionaries to India — was swept off his feet and became inebriated within the love and peace and righteousness of a merciful God. What was the fruit of the experience? “I was released from the fear of emotion. I had tasted three days of ecstasy — drunk with God,” testifies Jones. “And yet they were the clearest-headed, soberest moments I have ever known. I saw into the heart of reality, and the heart of reality was joy, joy, joy. And the heart of reality was love, love, love.”
This life-altering revelation of the love of God draws us into a deeper walk and a more fruitful ministry. Take, for example, the extraordinary example of Phineas F. Bresee (1838-1916), one of the co-founders of the Church of the Nazarene. He describes an unforgettable encounter with a holy God one evening while he was sitting near the opened door of his parsonage.
As I waited and waited, and continued in prayer, looking up, it seemed to me as if from the azure there came a meteor, an indescribable ball of condensed light, descending rapidly toward me. As I gazed upon it, it was soon within a few score feet, when I seemed distinctly to hear a voice saying, as my face was upturned towards it: “Swallow it; swallow it,” and in an instant it fell upon my lips and face. I attempted to obey the injunction. It seemed to me, however, that I swallowed only a little of it, although it felt like fire on my lips, and the burning sensation did not leave them for several days.
Taken as an isolated incident within the life of this holiness preacher, this experience would leave us all with a great deal more questions than answers — something that God seems quite content to do within our lives. Nevertheless, Bresee goes on to explain that there came within the experience “into my heart and being, a transformed condition of life and blessing and unction and glory, which I had never known before. I felt that my need was supplied.” Although he admits that he said very little publicly in relation to the encounter,
there came into my ministry a new element of spiritual life and power. People began to come into the blessing of full salvation; there were more persons converted; and the last year of my ministry in that church was more consecutively successful, being crowned by an almost constant revival. When the third year came to a close, the church had been nearly doubled in membership, and in every way built up.
Interestingly enough, Henry Clay Morrison (1857-1942), the founder of Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, had a very similar experience. He was outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, with his friend, Dr. Young. After debating whether or not to draw some revival meetings to a close, Morrison felt the presence of God.
“Doctor,” said Morrison, “I feel the power of God here in this room right now.”
Later he testified: “At that instant the Holy Ghost fell upon me. I fell over on the divan utterly helpless. It seemed as if a great hand had taken hold upon my heart, and was pulling it out of my body. Dr. Young ran across the room caught me in his arms, and called aloud, but I could not answer.”
Morrison says that just “as I came to myself and recovered the use of my limbs, a round ball of liquid fire seemed to strike me in the face, dissolve, and enter into me. I leaped up and shouted aloud, “Glory to God!” Dr. Young, who was holding Morrison in his arms, threw him back on to the couch and said, “Morrison, what do you mean? You frightened me fearfully. I thought you were dying.”
“Why did you act that way?” asked the doctor. “I did not do anything, Doctor,” said Morrison, “the Lord did it.” Morrison testifies to being “lifted up so closely in touch with the supernatural that I had but little thought of material things. I was floating in what seemed to me a fathomless sea of peace and joy.”
Dr. Young was indignant and cautioned him not to become a fanatic. Nevertheless, Morrison’s ministry was transformed. He reveals that “under my preaching, while I was under the baptism of the Spirit, there was an almost irresistible power. It was never so at any other time. And if we as preachers would keep so close to God as to be ever under this influence, would not his word truly ‘run and be glorified’ and a veritable Pentecost be repeated in these later days?”
3. OFFENDING THE MIND TO REVEAL THE HEART
Whenever I hear the call for the return of New Testament Christianity I am always reminded of the haunting story of Ananias and Sapphira found in Acts 5. This is the story of the husband and wife who sold a piece of property in order to help out the church. In the process, they both lied to the Apostles (and to the Holy Spirit, according to Peter) about how much money they were keeping for themselves. When Ananias heard Peter’s rebuke, he fell down and died. About three hours later, the same thing happened to his wife, Sapphira. “Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events,” says the Scripture.
Now, this is New Testament Christianity. And quite honestly, it is terrifying. The holiness of God is not something to be treated lightly. I recalled the Ananias and Sapphira story as I was reading Abel Steven’s HISTORY OF AMERICAN METHODISM, published in 1867. He writes about the persecution that early Methodist preachers faced in Salem, New Jersey, during the Revolutionary War.
A profane club of the town continued the persecution, in burlesque imitations of the Methodist worship, but was suddenly arrested by an appalling occurrence in one of their assemblies,” reports Stevens. “While they were amusing themselves with jocular recitations of hymns and exhortations, a female guest rose on a bench to imitate a Methodist class. “Glory to God!” she exclaimed, “I have found peace, I am sanctified; I am now ready to die!” At the last word, she fell to the floor a corpse. The club, struck with consternation never assembled again, and Methodism became eminently influential in the town and all its vicinity.
Two-hundred pages later, in the chapter dealing with the period of 1796-1804, Stevens recounts another similar incident. This time, Henry Boehm is quoted as reporting on the opposition the Methodists faced in Reading, Pennsylvania. He says that while some men were meeting together,
a young man undertook to mimic the Methodists. He went on to show how they acted in their meetings. He shouted, clapped his hands and then he would show how they fell down. (The Methodists in that day would sometimes fall and lose their strength.) He then threw himself down on the floor, and lay there as if asleep. His companions enjoyed the sport; but after he had lain for sometime they wondered why he did not get up. They shook him in order to awake him. When they saw he did not breathe, they turned pale, and sent for a physician, who examined the man, and pronounced him dead. This awful incident did two things for us: it stopped ridicule and persecution; it also gave us favor in the sight of the people. They believed that God was for us.
It goes without saying that these are not exactly the kinds of stories that we want to share with non-believers in order to persuade them to turn to Christ. Nevertheless, this kind of ominous power is part of the package. “The same love that can ravish us can also consume us by its flames,” observes John White. “And though the idea of being ravished in the flames of holy love may sound poetic, even romantic, we are not sure whether we want such a dangerous kind of love.”
The perilous nature of God’s presence in our midst is still true, even if it makes us uncomfortable. “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions,” observes novelist Annie Dillard. “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.”
There is no telling what Annie Dillard would have thought of the Cane Ridge camp meeting held in Bourbon County, Kentucky. In August of 1801, there were crowds estimated from 10,000 to 25,000 gathered. The Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright testifies that he saw “more than a hundred sinners fall like dead men under one powerful sermon, and I have seen and heard more than five hundred Christians all shouting aloud the high praises of God at once; and I will venture to assert that many happy thousands were awakened and converted to God at these camp meetings.” What was the response of the onlookers? “Some sinners mocked, some of the old dry professors opposed,” recalls Cartwright, “some of the old starched Presbyterian preachers preached against these exercises, but still the work went on and spread almost in every direction, gathering additional force, until our country seemed all coming home to God.”
Cartwright reminds us that God will do it however he wants to do it. No matter what the mockers or theologians say or think, God is free to do it however he wants. In describing the common revival phenomena of involuntary bodily jerking, Cartwright stated: “I always looked upon the jerks as a judgment sent from God, first, to bring sinners to repentance; and, secondly, to show professors that God would work with or without means, and that he could work over and above means, and do whatsoever seemeth to him good, to the glory of his grace and the salvation of the world.”
Marching under the banner of “Blood and Fire,” the Salvation Army insisted on going to the least, the last, and the lost. Founded by William and Catherine Booth in the slums of London in 1865, they pursued holiness in their private lives and preached Jesus in the streets. Within Salvation Army history, there emerged a peculiar phenomena known as the “glory fits.” During one meeting led by Commissioner Elijah Cadman, “about a hundred persons were in ‘glory fits.’” According to Cadman, people came up to the leaders saying, “I don’t believe in this,” and while speaking “fell under the strange manifestation of the Divine Presence.” Cadman explains that the “glory fits” were “ecstacies during which the individuals affected were insensible, usually silent, and remained thus for one, or many hours….The prostrations were commoner in Holiness services and nights of prayer. Medical and other means devised to control or restrict the symptoms were useless.”
Cadman described the experience as:
nothing but a complete conquering of the body by the soul in its reach upward to its Creator and Redeemer. It is the condescension of Infinite Love in Christ to so uplift it to Himself for a foretaste of joy with Him in Heaven.”…We could not say when, where, or how they would occur, and we certainly did not know how God worked — we only saw them as signs of His Presence. People were more curious and bothered about them, of course. That’s the way of the human mind. But conversion is much more of a miracle; that is the entire change of a nature and its inclination in a moment, the instantaneous shutting of the door on the power of the Devil and sin, and the opening of blind eyes to the reality of God, His Christ, and Salvation.
Cadman resigned himself to the fact that a sovereign move of God was bursting out in his midst and that it is best to allow the Lord to have His way. He also realized that God was more than willing to offend the mind to reveal the thoughts of the heart.
THE FRUIT OF GOD’S PRESENCE
It is not my intention to make the case for curious revival phenomena such as jerking, laughing, trembling, or falling. It is my intent, however, to make clear that there is a certain unpredictability when we encounter the holiness of God. Strange things can and often will occur. Nevertheless, the most important element of the power encounter with God is to produce good fruit in the lives of those whose hearts are steadfast after him (Matthew 7:20).
Within particular seasons throughout John Wesley’s entire life, he saw people weeping, violently shaking, crying out, losing consciousness, falling down, and occasionally becoming uncontrollably agitated during his meetings. In response to one who was concerned about the “strange work” that occurred in his meetings, Wesley testifies: “I have seen (as far as a thing of this kind can be seen) very many persons changed in a moment from the spirit of fear, horror, despair, to the spirit of love, joy, and peace; and from sinful desire, till then reigning over them, to a pure desire of doing the will of God. These are matters of fact, whereof I have been, and almost am, an eye or ear witness.”
Wesley continues: “I will show you him that was a lion till then, and is now a lamb; him that was a drunkard, and is now exemplarily sober; the whoremonger that was, who now abhors the very garment spotted by the flesh.” Wesley judged by the “whole tenor” of their lives and called these people his “living arguments.”
He then offers the following remarkable explanation for the outward signs:
Perhaps it might be because of the hardness of our hearts, unready to receive any thing unless we see it with our eyes and hear it with our ears, that God, in tender condescension to our weakness, suffered so many outward signs of the very time when he wrought this inward change to be continually seen and heard among us.
Wesley was 81 years old when he recorded the following episode at one of his meetings: “After preaching to an earnest congregation at Coleford, I met the Society. They contained themselves pretty well during the exhortation, but when I began to pray the flame broke out: many cried aloud; many sunk to the ground; many trembled exceedingly; but all seemed to be quite athirst for God, and penetrated by the presence of his power.”
What a scene that must have been in 1784, fully 45 years after the Wesleyan revival began to set England ablaze with the fiery holiness and love of God. Wesley records the phenomenal occurrence almost nonchalantly, as if it was merely one more Methodist meeting.
When Wesley prayed, he says that the flame broke out. That same fire of God’s holiness is available to us today. But we must be like the men and women in Wesley’s meeting: “athirst for God, and penetrated by the presence of his power.”
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Steve Beard is the editor of Good News magazine and the founder of Thunderstruck Online. This essay first appeared in the book, Power, Holiness and Evangelism: Rediscovering God’s Purity, Power, and Passion for the Lost (Destiny Image Publishers 1999). The unpredictability of encountering a holy God
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