2 Corinthians 6:6; By the Holy Spirit (2)
2 Corinthians 6:6 By pureness, by knowledge, by longsuffering, by kindness, by the Holy Ghost, by love unfeigned,
How can we discern the leading of the Holy Spirit? The warning in Jude 3 to “earnestly contend for the faith once delivered to the saints” was most pertinent for saints after Christ ascension at the founding of the first church (Acts 1:9-10), how much more pertinent it is today for Christians living in the last of the last days (1 Peter 1:20), two thousand years later, where the signs of the imminent return of Christ are manifested fully (Matthew 24), splashed in headline news daily to herald the His second coming, the greatest event in human history yet unfulfilled. Natural disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, famine and pestilences proliferating. Israel, God’s covenant nation is back in the Promised Land for the past 70 years and flourishing. The warning of false Christ and false prophets was sounded three times (Matthew 24:4-5, 11, 23-24). Making a survey of Christendom today, a Bible-believing Christian cannot but agree that there is a falling away (2 Thessalonians 2:3) from the fundamentals of the faith, with the rise of the Pentecostalism, Charismatism and the Ecumenical movement. How do Bible-believing churches today engage in missions and church growth that is not Pentecostal, Charismatic and Ecumenical? How can a Christian evaluate the methods of church growth “experts” like Cho Yonggi [1] and John Wimber [2] with highly successful mega-churches to prove their methods.
The secret of power that is begotten for church growth and missions, observed the late Rev Dr Tow Siang Hwa, is simply the work of the Holy Spirit through obedient men and women heeding the Lord’s command to go into all the world and preach the Gospel. It is the founding of Bible-believing God-honouring churches, standing on the Word of God against the floodtide of the end time apostasy now sweeping around the world.”[3]
[1]David Yonggi Cho is a Korean Christian minister. He is Senior Pastor of the Yoido Full Gospel Church (Assemblies of God), which is the world’s largest congregation, with a membership of over 800,000 in 2006. “Wikipedia Encyclopedia.” Online Edition, last modified 03:40, 17 December 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Yonggi_Cho; Internet. Accessed 21stDecember 2006.
[2]John Wimber (born February 25, 1934 in Kirksville, Missouri, died November 17, 1997) was a charismatic pastor and one of the founding leaders of the Vineyard Movement. Wimber took an approach to the Charismatic which was somewhat different from that of peers and predecessors. This new approach led a friend, C. Peter Wagner, to coin the phrase, “The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit” to describe the concept he taught (and to some current labels with their pre-set negative connotations). The Third Wave differed from classic Pentecostalism and the Charismatic movement, foremost, in their approach to speaking in tongues. Whereas the previous groups had emphasized the gift of tongues as the only evidence for the baptism of the Holy Spirit, Wimber and those he influenced emphasized that it was just one of the many spiritual gifts taught in the Bible. This teaching revolutionized what was a major theological stumbling block to some mainstream evangelicals (the idea of “spiritual gifts” in our present-day world), and Wimber held influence with a number of them, most famously Jack Deere, C. Peter Wagner, and Wayne Grudem. Gordon-Conwell Missiologist J. Christy Wilson also mentions Wimber in his book “More to be Desired Than Gold”. “Wikipedia Encyclopedia.” Online Edition,last modified 16:53, 17 December 2006.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wimber; Internet. Accessed 21stDecember 2006.
[3]Timothy Tow, Forty Years on the Road to Church Growth, (Singapore: Christian Life Publishers), 153.