During his three years of travelling and teaching, Jesus Christ had told his followers that the Holy Spirit would come to them after he had gone. He also told them that they would do more miraculous things than he had. The idea of the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts was not new to the Jewish people. Ancient Jewish writings from centuries before the birth of Jesus referred to them.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams In the years which followed the events at Pentecost, spiritual gifts — sometimes described as signs and wonders - were commonplace within the growing Christian church. Their use began to diminish in the 4 th century. The Bible lists the spiritual gifts that are seen among charismatic Christians. These are set out in the Bible book, 1 Corinthians.
They include: healing people; speaking in tongues; interpreting what those tongues mean; prophesying; having miraculous powers; wisdom and knowledge. Charismatic Christians might also show other outward signs that God is doing something to touch them in a deep, spiritual way. This might be laughing, crying or even falling over. These occurrences might seen strange to an onlooker but they are accompanied by a deep sense of joy, happiness or peace.
These spiritual gifts bring a fresh dynamism to churches — strengthening the faith of believers in Jesus and encouraging others to discover Christianity for themselves. But Christians also believe it is important to test these signs and wonders — to be sure they truly are from God. Spiritual gifts among believers were a trademark of the early years of the Christian church as it spread around the Mediterranean and beyond.
The accepted practice was for Christians to place their hands on a new believer and ask God to fill them with his Holy Spirit. This method is still used today. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.
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Purchase Subscription prices and ordering for this journal Short-term Access To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above. This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. View Metrics. Email alerts Article activity alert. He is not greeting the pews and the pulpit here; he is greeting the people who make up this small gathering of believers.
Consider the evangelist who spends thousands of dollars preparing for an evangelistic event. He leases a large stadium, has posters put up all over the city, and has his face plastered on billboards on all the major highways. He checks and rechecks to make sure that the lighting and the sound system are in perfect working order. Finally the time for the meeting arrives. He goes out to preach, but finds every seat is empty. Determined to be faithful to his calling he preaches his sermon anyway, to tens of thousands of empty seats.
At the end he gives the invitation to receive Christ, but strangely none of the seats makes its way to the front. He has not engaged in evangelism. He has created the illusion of evangelism. Without people there is no evangelism, without people there is no church, without people ministry does not exist.
The Beatles once had a hit song called Eleanor Rigby , which deals with lonely people. In the lyrics you find these words: "Father McKenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear; no one comes near.
We must have some version of divine charisma. Jesus had it in spades. As we read the gospels we find the phrase "the multitudes" used over and over again, to describe the countless thousands of people who gathered around Him wherever went.
In the early chapters of Mark's gospel we find numerous references to the enormous crowds that were nearly omnipresent throughout His ministry:.
Arthur Wallace has labeled this phenomenon divine magnetism. This was more than the typical charisma created by pretty faces and pleasing personalities.
This was the Son of God, addressing the deepest longings and ministering to the most desperate needs of men and women. This was the magnetism of the Holy Spirit working through an entirely yielded vessel, the Lord Jesus Christ. People came from everywhere, not to hear Him tell jokes, not to listen to Him sing songs, not because He was handsome or was giving out coupons for free merchandise, but because Jesus was the "the brightness of God's glory and the express image of His person.
To meet Jesus was to experience God. Jesus' charisma was evidenced not only by the multitudes that thronged Him, but in individual situations as well. When God's time had come for Jesus to begin gathering disciples around Himself it was very simply done. Jesus went about Galilee finding men of God's choosing and telling them, "Follow Me.
Jesus once said, "No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him," and surely the Father's ability to draw people to Jesus was powerfully at work in his brief three years of ministry in Israel. At one point Jesus tried to escape the huge crowds by getting into a boat and cutting across the Sea of Galilee.
But the crowds weren't about to go home, and the Bible tells us, " But the multitudes saw them departing, and many knew Him and ran there on foot from all the cities. They arrived before them and came together to Him " Mark Some might consider all of this irrelevant to their own lives. Their thought would be, "Sure Jesus drew the crowds, but I am not Jesus. I don't heal the sick. I don't speak with His eloquence. I do well to keep my own family around me, without trying to attract anyone else.
No, we are not Jesus, but Jesus does live in all of us who have put our faith in Him. And the point of the Christian life is "Christ in us. It is to abide in Him and trust Him, so that He begins to express His nature, His gifts, His love, and yes, His divine charisma through us. It works a bit differently with us, however. Jesus was magnetic in every area. He drew people through His miracles, through His teaching, through His personality, through His love, through every aspect of who He was and what He did.
We get only a part of the package. When we are born again through faith in Jesus, His nature is given to us, but we find that not all of His gifts and not all of His charisma will be manifested through us.
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