David Noakes begins his chapter, offering a personal and biblical perspective of renewal.

This article is part of a series, republishing the 1995 classic ‘Blessing the Church?’ (Hill et al). Click here for previous instalments.

The history of Israel tells us that again and again the Hebrew nation, despite the Law, despite the warnings of the prophets, walked in ways of their own choosing and not in the ways of God.

They chose the way of the flesh, the way of self-will and disobedience, in preference to the will of their God; they chose to compromise and to make an accommodation with the spirit of the world in which they lived, to worship not only the God of Israel but also the false gods of the surrounding Gentile nations, and to walk in the ways of the world from which God had called them to be separate.

The final outcome we know: disaster and exile, from which the promised return is only now taking place.

The Church, likewise, in every era of her history has faced the same basic problems and the same moral choice. The pressures and the subtle attractions of the world-system which surrounds God's people confront us daily with the need to distinguish the ways of God from the ways of the world, and to make the choice to walk according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh; to walk in the will of God to the exclusion of the clamouring demands of the flesh in the form of self-will and self-indulgence.

The climate of the present age in which we live is, however, perhaps, the hardest to withstand which the Church has yet encountered.

The Spirit of the Age

In the society of the Western nations, the spirit of this age is one which seeks and demands the instant and the spectacular. The world's heroes are those who display outward charisma; their often morally bankrupt character is regarded as irrelevant. Instant success in the forum of materialism or of entertainment guarantees a man wealth and the status of a celebrity.

The pressures and the subtle attractions of the world-system which surrounds God's people confront us daily with the need to distinguish the ways of God from the ways of the world.

The achievements of electronic circuitry and other scientific advances have made commonplace instantaneous results in many fields of daily activity, and have brought intolerance of all that depends on plodding, painstaking labour to achieve its results.

In this disposable society, enduring results are not necessary; all is ephemeral. Tomorrow we will throwaway yesterday's wonder and get the new and better one which will by then be being offered.

Such attitudes, and the spiritual atmosphere which they engender, bring only death to the church which begins to accept and to embrace them. No longer is it seen as acceptable that “through faith and patience [we] inherit” the promise of God (Heb 6:12); we must have it all now. No longer is the discipline of waiting upon God and waiting for God regarded as relevant, but instead we want to be like the world. We crave for instant and spectacular results.

The spirit of the age has deluded us into thinking that the Church ought to be experiencing heaven on earth, here and now, forgetting the plain teaching of Scripture that this cannot be until the return of Jesus (1 Pet 1:3-7). We are encouraged to live in expectation that all problems should be speedily swept away, that financial hardship and ill-health should be eliminated; to believe in a magic-carpet type of Christianity in which we may rub the Aladdin's lamp and summon forth the genie who will do all our bidding for our comfort and prosperity, forgetting the teaching of Scripture that “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22).

As Clifford Hill has stated in previous instalments of this series, it was into an age in which this sort of spirit was coming increasingly to hold sway that the charismatic renewal movement was born in the years leading up to 1960. The fear of the Lord was being replaced by contempt and disregard for the moral law contained in his word, which was coming to be seen as an unnecessary restriction upon a society which had never had it so good.

The spirit of the age has deluded us into thinking that the Church ought to be experiencing heaven on earth, here and now, forgetting the plain teaching of Scripture that this cannot be until the return of Jesus.

The British Charismatic Renewal Movement

The beginning of the charismatic renewal movement in Britain can be dated to the conferences convened by Arthur Willis and David Lillie, the first taking place in 1958.

This new move of the Holy Spirit had the potential to revitalise and revolutionise the Church, bringing about whole-hearted repentance, a return to the ways of God as revealed in his word, and a thoroughgoing and radical revolution in church life bringing back a quality of Christian corporate living scarcely seen since the 1st Century. Or, alternatively, it could fall under the influence of the spirit of the age and the ways of the world in which it found itself.

Sadly, the evidence tells us that the latter tendency has largely prevailed. In few places has the self-sacrificing quality of life of the early Church been re-established, and there has been nothing which could be seen as having the character of revival.

In the Church as a whole, numbers have continued to decline, biblical standards of morality have been abandoned wholesale, and the British nation has turned farther and farther away from God, while the Church has embraced the spirit of the world and has been sapped by it of spiritual vision and vitality.

To watch the unfolding of the history of the charismatic renewal movement has been for me a matter of great personal sadness. Having spent the early years following my conversion under the influence of sound evangelical doctrine, a foundation for which I shall ever be grateful to God, I received the baptism in Holy Spirit in 1967 as a result of a sovereign action of the Lord on a train travelling to Brighton to transact some business!

The charismatic renewal that started in Britain in the 1950s had the potential to revitalise and revolutionise the Church.

Following this unlikely-seeming event, I was introduced to the supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit, all of which I believe wholeheartedly are not only valid today, but will become of increasing importance to the Church in the days which are to come: days not of comfort, but of pressure; not of dominion, but of conflict and persecution; not of ease, but of the refiner's fire; days of turmoil and upheaval when God will be shaking all that can be shaken, both among the nations of the world and also in the professing Church. 

Days of Preparation

Believing this to be so, I perceive the times in which we are living as being, for the Church, days of preparation. I have come to understand God's purposes in renewing the activity of the Holy Spirit among us as being to strengthen the Church for the days to come, re-establishing our foundations upon Scripture, teaching us again how to live corporately as the early Church did, renewing the closeness and intimacy of our relationship with himself, and empowering us to be fearless and unshakeable witnesses to the truth of his word.

Possibly the most important single purpose of God in this visitation of his Spirit was to renew our understanding, and hence our outworking, of the corporate life of the Body of Christ. The Church has for generations been crippled in her functioning by our Western-style individualistic way of life, which has been such a feature of Protestant Christianity.

Vital though the Reformation was, it brought with it also this disadvantage: rooted in the Renaissance, with its rediscovery of Greek classical thought, philosophy and literature, the Reformation brought into the Protestant Reformed churches a Hellenistic view of life which is profoundly different at many points from that of the Hebrew.

To the Hebrew minds of those who formed the early Church, corporateness was instinctive; it was a concept built from the very beginning into the structure of the Hebrew nation descended from Jacob. Hence to them, the concept of the Church as a corporate entity presented no great problem of adjustment in their thinking; it was easy for them to understand its structure in the light of concepts such as that of the Body of Christ, or the corporate Temple made of living stones. They were able to understand their oneness in Christ in a way which the Greek-thinking mind does not easily grasp.

I believe we need urgently to let God renew our Western way of thinking in this whole matter, for it is only in the context of the commitment to one another which is established by a corporate understanding of the Church as the Body of the Lord Jesus that we shall be able to stand firm and glorify him when the days of testing are upon us.

God's purpose in renewing the activity of the Holy Spirit among us has been to strengthen the Church for the days to come.

It is significant that the chief purposes of the five-fold ministry appointments of Ephesians 4, and of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit specified in 1 Corinthians 12-14, are to build up the corporate Body of Christ in such a way as to bring strength and unity and to equip us as members of that Body to be able to carry out the purposes of Jesus, the Head.

By the late 1990s, more than 35 years after those earliest beginnings of the charismatic renewal movement, this had really not happened. There were a few notable exceptions, but most of the Church had made little or no progress towards the corporate unity in Christ which brings forth the quality of Body-life of which we read in the early chapters of the book of Acts.

Ishmael or Isaac

In the mid-1970s, during a time of heart-searching and of questioning over the developments of the newly-introduced doctrines of discipling and shepherding, which had operated to destroy a beautiful work which God had been doing among a group of deeply-committed Christians, I sought God for enlightenment and found that I was being drawn in the scriptures to the account in Genesis of the activity of Abraham in bringing forth first Ishmael and then Isaac.

I began to realise that embedded in that story was a great spiritual principle. Both Ishmael and Isaac were born as a result of Abraham's faith in believing God's promise that from his offspring would come blessing to the nations of the earth. The initiative in the whole matter came from God; of that there was no doubt. Abraham's response was one of faith. Yet the end result brought not only fulfilment and joy; but also tragedy and sorrow, heartbreak and strife, and an enmity which continues to cause conflict in the Middle East to this very day between the descendants of Ishmael and those of Isaac.

Why did this mixed result emerge from Abraham's belief in a promise of God which was intended only for blessing and not for evil? The reason lies in Abraham's failure to understand that the Lord who had made the promise had also already chosen the method of its outworking.

When we receive revelation from God of his intentions and purposes, there are two possible ways of responding: the way of the flesh, which seeks to work out God's purpose as quickly as possible in the ways of human wisdom and ability, or the way of the spirit, which hears from God but then waits for him to reveal further his chosen time and means of fulfilling his intentions.

Abraham, then, was faced with the option of these two different types of response to the revelation of God's purpose. God was going to do what he had said, and he was going to do it in his own time and in his own way; but how was Abraham going to co-operate? Would he “by faith and patience inherit the promise”? Would he display the maturity which he later showed when he was willing to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah, believing that God would still fulfil his word even if humanly that had been made impossible? Would he be willing to wait in faith for a further 14 years until God's appointed time for the birth of Isaac, the promised heir?

Abraham did not wait. How much strife and suffering could have been avoided if only he had! Instead, he and Sarah applied their human wisdom and understanding and decided how, since Sarah was barren, they could accomplish the purposes of God and bring his promise to fruition. They decided how best to help God out in the doing of his own work.

When we receive revelation from God of his intentions and purposes, there are two possible ways of responding: the way of the flesh, or the way of the spirit.

In spiritual terms, they were deciding how the flesh could achieve the Spirit's work. But this is by definition impossible: nothing which is of the flesh, of man's self-will, can ever please God or accomplish his will. What Abraham and Sarah were planning was an unholy mixture of the revealed will of God with the activities of the flesh in seeking to bring the revelation into being.

At Sarah's suggestion, Abraham acted on human initiative and sought, successfully, to produce offspring from the body of Hagar, Sarah's maidservant. This offspring was, of course, Ishmael, who was to be the root from which sprang the Arab nations; but he was not the heir whom God had promised.

Hagar was Egyptian. We must not miss the significance of this, for in Scripture Egypt is a type of the world-system out of which the Christian has been saved. Abraham, acting in the flesh, had employed the ways which the world could offer in seeking to carry out God's purpose but it was to no avail. Ishmael was not the fulfilment of God's promise. When the fulfilment, Isaac, was manifested 14 years later, he would come as the result of a miraculous sovereign work of the Spirit of God. God would not use the methods of either fleshly wisdom and endeavour, nor would the ways of the world be involved in any way. It is always so with God.

He would visit Abraham and Sarah in their extreme old age and by the power of his Spirit, having waited until humanly it was beyond possibility, he would bring forth Isaac from their marital union.

A Parallel in Today’s Church

From this account, contained in Genesis 15-18 and 21, I began to understand that God was speaking of a parallel which was and is taking place within the charismatic renewal movement.

Ishmael stands for that which men's wisdom and activity can bring forth in the flesh by way of fulfilling God's purpose. Isaac, however, represents the true fulfilment of the Lord's revealed intentions, a work which his Spirit alone can accomplish, for which men must wait for God to act at his own time and in his own way.

The principle embodied in the account of how first Abraham produced Ishmael and then God brought forth Isaac remains true today. God asks us to cooperate with him in the outworking of his purpose through our exercise of faith, patience and humble obedience, refusing to fall into the trap of supplementing or even replacing God's work by our own human efforts.

The alternative course is that of human endeavour, prompted by a degree of awareness of what it is that God purposes to do, but with insufficient knowledge of his chosen method and too much haste to await his further revelation.

The first way of responding brings blessing and life.

The second has within it from the beginning the seeds of its own demise because that which is born of human striving and wisdom is of no value in accomplishing the purposes of God. To seek to organise God's work for him leads eventually to failure, disillusionment and confusion, and finally even to deception and error.

God asks us to co-operate with him in the outworking of his purposes – not to supplement or even replace his work by our own human efforts.

I believe that since the 1970s, God has been indicating that within the charismatically-renewed churches we have in various different ways been producing Ishmael and not Isaac. God gave in the late 1950s to David Lillie and Arthur Wallis a vision of how the fresh visitation of the Holy Spirit was intended to bring about a return of the Church to a structure and a way of life which we find revealed in the pages of the New Testament, particularly in the books of Acts and Ephesians.

It was of a corporate body of God's people functioning together in such a way that through them, by the powerful working of the Holy Spirit, would be brought glory to God in the Church (Eph 3:21) and a revelation to the world of the true character of the Lord Jesus; a body of people separated as the early Church was, neither relying upon the world nor compromising with its ways. That was the vision which was communicated to the key leaders who attended those early conferences.

Sadly, what we now see is so far from the purity of vision as to be almost unrecognisable, and the reason is that the ways of the world have infiltrated deeply into the charismatic renewal movement. We have been invaded in a variety of ways by the spirit of the age in which we live.

Next week: How the world has infiltrated the Church.

Clifford Denton offers some reflections on Good Friday.

This weekend we will celebrate the most important event of all history, an event only to be equalled by the Lord Jesus' return to bring the Kingdom of God fully in. It is more important than the created universe (Luke 21:33). As deep as was the Flood to drown a sinful world, deeper still is the love of God who sent his own Son into the world to redeem from sin all who would believe.

The sky darkened, the earth shook, the curtain in the Temple was torn from top to bottom and many saintly people rose from their graves as Jesus defeated the power of sin and death on that eventful day (Matt 27:45-56).

What Abraham Looked Forward to!

2,000 years before, Jesus' sacrifice had been foreshadowed when God said to Abraham, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you" (Gen 22:2).

God had already, in the most dramatic way of cutting a covenant (Genesis 15), made a promise that depended only on his own faithfulness, that Abraham's offspring would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and dwell in the land promised to them by God. Isaac was the son of promise through whom this line would come in the physical sense, yet God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son on a mountain in the Moriah range.

Just at the point of Abraham's making the sacrifice, an angel intervened and Isaac was spared. A ram was sacrificed instead (Gen 22:13). Under Abraham's knife was not just Isaac but all who would descend from his physical line. The ram was the substitute. The ram died and all the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were able to live. The principle of substitution began.

Abraham looked forward in faith to see how God would fulfil his covenant responsibility, spending his life living in tents but waiting "for a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God" (Heb 11:8-10).

When God provided a ram for sacrifice instead of Abraham's son Isaac, the principle of substitution began.

The Passover Sacrifice

The covenant pathway was never easy for Abraham's descendants, as Joseph found when he was taken captive to Egypt, followed by the entire family of Israel (Gen 37-50). 430 years later, when the nation of Israel had grown whilst in captivity, Moses was chosen to lead Israel out of Egypt.

On the night chosen by God, henceforward to be celebrated annually as Passover, one of the prescribed Feasts of Israel, God judged the sins of Egypt but preserved the Israelites who through faith, family by family, each sacrificed a lamb and painted their door-posts with its blood (Ex 12).

This principle of faith was to be engraved into the consciousness of all Israelites. They were soon to be taught what was right and wrong in God's eyes through the Covenant at Sinai, to know the path of forgiveness through the sacrifices of the Tabernacle and Temple ministries, though still to have no permanent remedy for sin (Heb 9:1-10).

A Temple on Mount Moriah

The City of Jerusalem was founded by King David when, about 1,000 years after Abraham, Israel had settled in their Land (2 Sam 5:6-10). Since then, Jerusalem has been the chief city in the world for God to centre his purposes. David longed for a Temple so that the ministry of the Tabernacle from the wilderness years could have a permanent centre.

He purchased the land on the same mountain range where Abraham had taken his son Isaac. This was the place where the angel of death was commanded by God not to destroy Jerusalem on account of David's sin in taking an unlawful census (2 Sam 24:16-17). David's son Solomon built the Temple on the threshing floor of Ornan (Araunah) on Mount Moriah (2 Chron 3:1). The worship and sacrifice centre of Israel was completed.

1,000 years after Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac on Mount Moriah, King David purchased land in the same area for the building of God's Temple.

It was destroyed at the Babylonian captivity in 536 BC, rebuilt by Zerubbabel on return from captivity, 70 years later, and modified by Herod into a more ornate structure. Central to the life and hopes of Israel for all these long years was the covenant with Abraham, the Feasts (including Passover) and the substitutional sacrifice for sin through the blood of the lamb.

Jesus the Messiah

Though there was an expectation for a coming Messiah to Israel, it was beyond human intellect to put all the prophecies together to see clearly how God would fulfil his promise to Abraham. A king from the line of David was eagerly awaited, with most Jews expecting a saviour to come in glory and raise an army against the occupying Romans of Jesus' day. Without the revelation such as Peter had at Caesarea Philippi (Matt 16:13), they did not understand that Isaiah pointed clearly to a suffering Saviour (Isa 53), accurately fulfilled by Jesus on the Cross.

He entered this world as God's only Son, echoing the experience of Abraham and Isaac so long ago. He grew up in the Jewish tradition, totally representing the nation, and ministered for three and a half years in fulfilment of all the scriptures pointing to Messiah. Then, riding on a donkey as a man of peace, with a clear climax to his ministry soon to occur, he descended the Mount of Olives and crossed the Kidron Valley to the City of Jerusalem.

With great expectation palm branches paved the way for the coming King of the Jews – as some recognised him to be. Yet only he knew how the rest of the scriptures would be fulfilled. He was, with the crown of thorns, the ram in the thicket that replaced Isaac, the saviour of Israel through substitutionary sacrifice. He came to be the Passover lamb that for all those years had pointed to him.

With the crown of thorns, Jesus was the ram in the thicket that replaced Isaac, the substitutionary sacrifice, the Passover lamb.

Perfect Sacrifice

He shared the traditional evening Passover meal with his disciples ensuring that they would remember that this was now to be shared as a memorial to him. The next day at the time of the Temple Sacrifice - one sacrifice for all the people - he willingly died on the Cross to release all who would accept his sacrifice for their sin – one Lamb for the entire family of faith.

The night before, in all Jewish homes there had been a service of remembrance of the first Passover and the atoning blood of the lamb. All history right up to that night prepared the way for the intercessory prayer from the Cross of the dying Saviour – "Forgive them Father for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34) and his victorious cry of "it is finished" (John 19:30) that still echoes to us across the centuries. No-one knows the exact spot where it took place but this too was on the range of hills named Moriah.

Today

All over the world the Jews still celebrate Passover in the traditional way, ending the seder with "next year in Jerusalem". There is an ongoing desire for God to complete the promises made to Abraham. Those with eyes opened by the Spirit of God see how all the prophecies and the types and shadows of Israel's history were fulfilled in Jesus. It was far more than a release from the captivity of the Egyptians, the Babylonians or the Romans that he came to accomplish – it was freedom from the chains of sin that ensnare us all.

Those with eyes opened by the Spirit of God see how all the types and shadows of Israel's history are fulfilled in Jesus.

The Gospel went to the Gentile world and the Christian Church increased in numbers, fulfilling the promise to Abraham that his seed would be as countless as the stars in the sky and sand on the seashore. Grafted into believing Israel we too celebrate Passover whenever we take communion. It is unfortunate that Christians renamed Passover as Easter and moved the date slightly so that Easter always falls on a Sunday. Nevertheless, on Good Friday, as it is called, Christians around the world will be celebrating the Lord's death on the Cross once more.

Remember the history of it all as you pass around the bread and the wine reading Paul's injunction:

For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which he was betrayed took bread; and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "Take, eat; this is my body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of me." In the same manner he also took the cup after supper, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death till he comes. (1 Cor 11:23-26)