Michael Patton: "I Was Going to Preach This, But the Holy Spirit Lead Me to This" and Other Stupid Statements

A caveat for preachers from Parchment and Pen.

Does my title give me away? So much for being coy with my proposition. Let me say that this post is going to get me in trouble with some dear friends who preach God’s word every week. My message to them: Bear with my critique. I pray that my thoughts will be considered as “wounds from a friend”—a very fallible friend.

Here, let’s start this way. Have you ever heard someone (probably a preacher or teacher in the church) say something like this:

“I had prepared all week to teach on __________, but the Holy Spirit changed my lesson at the last minute.”

I have. Dozens of times. The idea it conveys is that the particular message that was prepared was not of God (at least at that time) and this new message was most certainly of God. In fact, the new message is miraculously of God! Why? Because I did not really prepare for it. It must have been God who prepared it. “I just step back when that happens and let God do his thing. Who am I to interrupt God?”

Can I say something? (Wait, let me hide behind something first . . .There.) That is a stupid statement!

Greater Works Than These

The New Testament closes on a note of anticipation. Jesus proclaims, “Surely I am coming soon.” The church responds, “Amen. Come Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20). There is a very good reason why the end of the biblical narrative leaves us with this sense of anticipation. The Old Testament was not complete until it was made incarnate in Jesus Christ. Likewise, the New Testament is not complete until it is made incarnate in the same Jesus Christ through the work of the church, which has been given the same Holy Spirit which empowered Christ during his earthly ministry. The mission of the church is to continue the work of the Incarnation until the kingdom of God is fully consummated. This is an urgent, and profoundly eschatological, task. If the New Testament ended on a note of consummation, then the church would have no sense of urgency but would, instead, basically become an apologist for the present age. Unfortunately, much of the church seems to have become precisely that.

But there is a much more pervasive threat to this sense of urgency and it is, in many ways, connected with the misunderstanding of biblical apocalyptic language. The result is a one-dimensional understanding of the second coming and, inevitably, the pessimistic, fatalistic, defeatist attitude so prevalent in our dispensationalist-saturated evangelical pop culture. “We can only do so much until Jesus comes,” is an all-too-common attitude.

Jesus said, "Truly, truly I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do because I am going to the Father" (John 14:12). If the church has been empowered by the Holy Spirit to do “greater works” because Jesus has returned to the Father, where did we come up with the idea that “we can only do so much until Jesus comes?” It is by no means far-fetched to suggest that many who have adopted such an attitude are victims of a clever and nefarious deception.

Even the fact that Jesus has returned to the Father does not mean he has left us to fend for ourselves. He promised, “I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20b) and “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:18).

Leo the Great, in a discourse on Christ’s ascension, observed:

Even the blessed apostles, though they had been strengthened by so many miracles and instructed by so much teaching, took fright at the cruel suffering of the Lord's passion and could not accept his resurrection without hesitation. Yet they made such progress through his ascension that they now found joy in what had terrified them before. They were able to fix their minds on Christ's divinity as he sat at the right hand of the Father, since what was presented to their bodily eyes no longer hindered them from turning all their attention to the realization that he had not left his Father when he came down to earth, nor had he abandoned his disciples when he ascended into heaven.

So, if the church is empowered by the Holy Spirit to do “greater works” in continuing the Incarnation than even Christ did during his earthly ministry, and Christ himself, while having ascended to the right hand of the Father, is nevertheless still among us, how are we to appropriate a holistic understanding of the Church's eschatological hope? N.T. Wright, in his book The Millennium Myth (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1999, pp. 40-41), offers a well thought-out answer.

The very first Christian writer known to us, the apostle Paul, wrestled with this question and came up with a clear solution. The hope arrives in two stages. Jesus' resurrection was the prototype, the beginning and the model of the new world that is yet to be. His coming out of the tomb into a new life was the personal, close-up equivalent of the Israelites emerging from their slavery in Egypt. The hope is that God will eventually do for the whole creation what he did for Jesus; God is at work in the present, by the Spirit of Jesus, to prepare the world for that great remaking, that great unveiling (that great apocalypse, in fact) of the future plan.

But that future, when it arrives, will not mean the abandonment of the present world, but rather its fulfillment. The whole creation, says Paul, will be liberated from its present enslavement to the forces of decay and death. You don't liberate something by destroying it. All the beauty, all the goodness, all the pulsating life of the present creation, is to be enhanced, lifted to a new level, in the world that is to be. There is no room here for the dualism that goes with so much apocalypticism. Rather there is a strong incentive to work, in the present, to anticipate the new world in every possible way. Those who are grasped by the vision of God's new world unveiled in Jesus' resurrection are already sharing in that newness, and are called to produce, in the present time, more and more signposts to point to this eventual and glorious future. (Emphasis added.)

The centerpiece of God's redemptive plan is, of course, Jesus himself. Thus, the ongoing fulfillment of God's plan is seen not in “events” such as the conflict between Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East, but in our growing relationship with Christ. Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for, behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (Luke 17:20-21).

The kingdom of God begins when Christ is enthroned as Lord of our lives, his Holy Spirit transforming our whole being into his image and likeness. The more we outwardly manifest this inward reality through “lives of holiness and godliness” (2 Peter 3:11), making our lives those “signposts” of God's glorious future, the more we begin to see the kingdom breaking forth into our midst, and the closer we come to its full consummation.

So, as we, the church, continue the redemptive work which Christ began, knowing that Christ has promised always to be with us and has given us his Holy Spirit to empower us for witness and ministry, we pray, “Come, Lord Jesus!” It is a prayer for vindication; for redemption; for sanctification. It is a prayer for full, complete and eternal salvation on the personal, corporate and cosmic levels.

Come, Lord Jesus and make me complete.

Come, Lord Jesus and make your Church complete.

Come, Lord Jesus and make your whole creation complete.

“Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!”

More Than Mental Recall

In promising the Holy Spirit to his disciples, Jesus said, "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you" (John 14:26). To the Western mind, "remembrance" means mental recall, thinking back on some event from the past. But in the Hebraic culture of Jesus and his first disciples, "remembrance" had a much deeper meaning.

To "remember," in the Hebraic sense, is to have the event constantly before you. In bringing to their "remembrance" all that Jesus had said to them, the Holy Spirit would not merely remind the disciples of Jesus' teachings. He would be keeping them aware of the very presence of Jesus constantly in their midst and leading them into a deeper understanding of the truth God the Father had revealed in and through the life, death, and resurrection of his Son.

God's true dwelling place is with his people, those redeemed by the blood of Jesus and empowered by the Holy Spirit. In "remembering" the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the church, empowered by the Holy Spirit, continues the work of salvation which Jesus began, to the end that, in all things, God may be glorified.