P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

LEFT OUT AT DISNEYLAND

Have you seen infomercials on TV for these double-CD praise-and-worship albums? Huge congregations are singing “Shout to the Lord” or “Shine, Jesus, Shine,” and riding the roller coaster of spiritual emotion. If the Holy Spirit’s job is to bring such ecstasy, why does He pass some Christians by?

Have you ever felt like complaining to the Holy Spirit for never sending you on the same roller coaster rides other Christian friends enjoy? I recall back in the 1970s, during what many called the “Jesus Movement,” or “Jesus Revolution,” and there were always photos of young new believers emerging from the salty water in a Pacific Ocean beach baptism, their faces aglow in ecstasy, their eyes closed in prayer or brimming with tears. There was a contemporary song back then, “Jesus Makes Me Higher” . . . (than I’ve ever been before.) Street preachers promised: “Instead of getting high on marijuana, try Jesus Christ. He’s the best trip of all.” And maybe you knew people who had a kind of LSD experience in church — but it never happened to you.

There was a cover article in the May 7, 2001 issue of Newsweek, written by Sharon Begley, entitled “God & the Brain: How We’re Wired for Spirituality.” And she starts off telling about a neurologist named Dr. James Austin; he was at a train station in London, a Sunday morning, 1982, looking over at the river Thames. And then this happened:

“Austin suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever experienced. His sense of individual existence, of separateness from the physical world around him, evaporated like morning mist in a bright dawn. He saw things ‘as they really are,’ he recalls. The sense of ‘I, me, mine’ disappeared. ‘Time was not present,’ he says. ‘I had a sense of eternity. My old yearnings, loathings, fear of death and insinuations of selfhood vanished. I had been graced by a comprehension of the ultimate nature of things.”

Well, that’s an interesting story. But the cold reality is that only between 30 and 40 percent of people surveyed — and studies on this go back to the 1960s — have had, even once or twice in their lives, an experience where they feel “very close to a powerful, spiritual force that seemed to lift you out of yourself.” More than half of us are restlessly waiting in the roller coaster line at God’s Divine Disneyland, feeling nothing, experiencing emptiness, praying to a blank wall, while other people sway back and forth at a Calvary Chapel while the praise band plays “Shine, Jesus, Shine” and “Jesus, What a Beautiful Name,” pray in tongues, or are able to truly sense God while they’re meditating.

I want to say this right here: friend, you haven’t gotten stuck in a Voice of Prophecy time warp, because it’s a deliberate decision on our part to still be studying the Christian experience of adoption here for a fourth consecutive week on the radio. And now for a 16th straight radio program, we’re continuing to gratefully open up the pages of this book, Knowing God, by Dr. J. I. Packer and find powerful truth there. But as we keep on studying how you and I are sons and daughters of God — and how truly REAL that biblical principle is — all of a sudden the issue turns to roller coasters and emotional Christianity.

We’re in the middle of a list of five important things that the doctrine of adoption does for us as children of God. And here’s the third one:

“Our adoption,” Packer writes, “gives us the key to understanding the ministry of the Holy Spirit.”

And many of us raise our hands right here and say: “Yeah! This is what I don’t get. Why does my next-door neighbor, or the person sitting two pews up from me, seem to be so bathed in emotional joy, and I don’t feel a thing? Why can they listen to a 40-minute sermon and say, ‘Amen! Amen! Praise the Lord!’ 50 times, and I keep glancing at my watch to see when church is going to be out?” Going back to that Newsweek article by Sharon Begley, are some of us just NOT wired for spirituality? Does the Holy Spirit simply bypass some houses when He makes His weekly rounds?

James Packer addresses, first of all, what we do KNOW about the work of the Holy Spirit.

“We are all aware that the Spirit teaches the mind of God,” he points out, “and glorifies the Son of God, out of the Scriptures; also, that He is the agent of new birth, giving us an understanding so that we know God and a new heart to obey Him; also, that He indwells, sanctifies, and energizes Christians for their daily pilgrimage; also, that assurance, joy, peace and power are His special gifts.”

We know all of these things because the Bible says them. But, Packer then confesses, many people get puzzled because there’s nothing in their own life they can think of that matches up with this list! Energizing? Joy? Peace and power? “Even when the Scottish bagpipes play ‘Amazing Grace,’ I don’t feel a thing,” someone sighs. “What is wrong with me?”

In the summer of 1908 a man named Frank N. D. Buchman happened to be in a place called Keswick, England, attending a summer conference. There was a woman preacher there, waxing eloquent about the Cross of Jesus. He abruptly saw that “I,” or ego, was the huge center of his life; self had been everything to him, and now self had to go. “The big ‘I’ had to be crucified” is how the writer of the story, Karl Olsson, put it. And here, in his own words, is what happened to Mr. Buchman:

“I remember one feeling very vividly. It was a vibration along the spine as if a strong current of life had been infused into me; it came at the same time as my complete submission, in fact, at that very moment. What followed this sense of electric shock was a vertigo, as if I had been placed in the center of an earthquake.”

And you know, this was a very real experience. Some people decided that Buchman was one of the great historic mystics, right up there with Plotinus and Tolstoy. A longtime personal friend of Mahatma Gandhi, he founded the Oxford Group, which was a Christian type of theocracy, people dedicated to following God’s will absolutely. In 1938, the group moved beyond its Christian roots and was transformed into a worldwide organization called Moral Re-Armament. Through it all, however, the expression “Keswick experience” came to signify this kind of spiritual “rush” or physical/spiritual ecstasy, where something divine gives you a 7.2 jolt on the Richter Scale.

So what do frustrated Christians do who never seem to feel anything like this, who see a great gap between what they see as the Holy Spirit’s work and their own humdrum life of pale religion? Here’s what Packer says about it:

“Naturally, such Christians feel they are missing something vital, and they ask anxiously how they may close the gap between the New Testament picture of life in the Spirit and their own felt barrenness in daily experience. Then, perhaps, in desperation they set themselves to seek a single transforming psychic event whereby what they feel to be their personal ‘unspirituality barrier’ may be broken once and for all.”

In other words, the chase begins. Others are riding the Christian Colossus roller coaster, and they want to as well. So they look for that one breakthrough feeling or fireside chapel miracle moment:

“The event may be thought of as the ‘Keswick experience,’” Packer writes, “or ‘full surrender,’ or ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit,’ or ‘entire sanctification,’ or ‘sealing with the Spirit,’ or the gift of tongues, or (if we steer by Catholic rather than Protestant stars) a ‘second conversion,’ or the prayer of quiet, or of union. Yet even if something happens which they feel able to identify with what they were looking for, they soon find that the ‘unspirituality barrier’ has not been broken after all, and so they move on restlessly to something new.”

In other words, one wild ride in the Spirit is not enough. Soon they want another one, and a bigger one. And friend, Christian life honestly can descend into a search for more tears, more drums, more swaying, more falling on your face or being “slain in the Spirit,” more emotion and an ever-bigger and bigger high. “Many are caught in these toils today,” Packer very forthrightly tells us.

I remember an episode a few years ago on the sitcom, Everybody Loves Raymond, where Debra, played by Patricia Heaton, wanted Raymond and the kids out of the house. Nobody knew why. Was something wrong? Ray was worried, so he snuck back over and looked in the window. Lo and behold, Debra was crying! For no reason! She simply felt like crying. “Having a good cry,” as the old expression goes. She knew a book she could read, and some music she could play, which would bring her to tears. Her own little Long Island “Keswick experience.” And she told Ray: “Sometimes a woman just feels like crying. Just because.”

We often fall into the trap of saying: “A good sermon is one that makes me laugh — or cry. I want to feel something.” And we blame the Holy Spirit if our Christianity isn’t very emotional.

We’re out of time, but tomorrow our study is going to bring us some wonderful news. Dr. Packer encourages us with these words:

“What help is needed here? The light shed by the truth of ADOPTION on the ministry of the Spirit gives the answer.”

We’re going to find that it’s not the Holy Spirit’s job to take us to Disneyland; it’s His job to simply take us Home.