I’m excited and excited some more and even excited beyond being excited. (Did that make any sense?) What’s all of the hullabaloo (betcha haven’t seen that word in a while) about? Our new Access Church small-group semester launches this Sunday. (www.access.tv/groups) Starting next Wednesday at 7 AM at Chick-fil-A, I will begin a journey leading a group of men through the book of Acts, discovering this blueprint for how the Holy Spirit wants to minister in His dispensation. In the Fall, we will explore chapters 1 through 12, and in the Spring, chapters 13 through 28. It will be life-transforming!
Wait, there’s more excitement. Beginning Friday next week, men and women will join me at 7 AM at Chick-fil-A as I use Lester Sumrall’s The Gifts and Ministries of the Holy Spirit to show how to work with the Holy Spirit through His gifts. I believe that you will agree that this teaching is so, so, so needed today. Paul wrote the Corinthian church that they were not to be ignorant of spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12:1) and were to earnestly desire these gifts (1 Corinthians 14:1). These admonitions are true for today, aren’t they!
Oh, how I wish that you could join me for these two small groups. You know, you could move to Lakeland, Florida, and join me on Wednesdays and Fridays.
Speaking about spiritual gifts, allow me to share John Wesley’s concern about the lack of the gifts of the Spirit in the Church. This quote is taken from Dr. Frank H. Billman’s The Supernatural Thread in Methodism: Signs and Wonders Among Methodists Then and Now (Lake Mary, FL: Creation House Press, 2013),165.
When asked once why the gifts of the Spirit, manifest in the early church, had disappeared, as if the church had no more need for them, Mr. Wesley responded: “It should not be reasoned that the absence of such in the church (eighteenth-century Church of England) reflects the reluctance of God to give, rather the reticence of the church to receive.”
I can’t close without sharing this quote.
The real reason the gifts of the Spirit are missing from the church is because we have been satisfied without them. ~Gordon Lindsay’s Commissioned with Power (Dallas, TX: Christ for the Nations, 2001),16.
Nothing more needs to be added. Billy……
