Holy Spirit Renewal Ministries

HOLY SPIRIT RENEWAL MINISTRIES   Empowering The Church To Fulfill Her Destiny In Christ

"And you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you!" Acts 1:8a MAKE PLANS NOW  HOLY SPIRIT CONFERENCE 2016 at Green Lake Conf. Center Register HERE What people are saying about the  Holy Spirit Conference and HSRM:  "This [conference]  has been the most amazing & power-filled week I've ever had! God has truly targeted HSRM & is MOVING! My body is being healed finally after many years of chronic pain & fatigue. I feel alive finally!! I can move & walk & run without intense pain! Hallelujah, thank you Jesus!!  This past year He has awakened me & stirred my heart. He's given me a heart that truly loves people & I am seeing what He feels! God is beyond amazing!! This HSRM has touched my life so powerfully! God bless all!" A.M. "HSRM has forever changed my life and my family! We are thankful for the work of God taking place with HSRM and at Green Lake. We now feel that we are armed and dangerous with the Holy Spirit, for the glory of God the Father and the perfect sacrifice of Jesus Christ! Amen!" C.H. "We've been so blessed that it would take fifty ages or more to begin to share all we've been given through HSRM. For sure, we have been renewed every year. Our sons loved Green Lake... We appreciated all they received from the youth program and ministry to them. Much of who they are today has been due to our weeks at the  Holy Spirit  Conference. The relationships we have formed there have taken us around the world; our world has been enlarged and our understanding of "God's family" has increased because of this experience." L.P. LIVE THE ADVENTURE ~ LIVE by the Spirit, WALK by the Spirit, LOVE by the Spirit! "...the Love of God is poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us." Rom.5:5     From a gas station food court worship service to a theological seminary to strategic leadership meetings, from church buildings and conference settings to foreign nations and radio programs, Holy Spirit Renewal Ministries' presence and influence is expanding and sought after. Co-directors Dr. Clay Ford and Dr. John Piippo faithfully respond to the call to preach, teach and exhibit the full gospel message of power and love.  News from Dr. Clay Ford:  "Cheri and I had a wonderful meeting and fellowship/ lunch with Dr. Fausto Vasconcelos and his lovely wife Dione in Falls Church, VA. Fausto is the Director of Mission, Evangelism, and Theological Reflection for the Baptist World Alliance.  Truly rich fellowship and prayer with this couple! They are originally from Brazil, where Fausto was the pastor of a mega-church of 3,700 members. It's exciting that we have friends in common from Cheri's and my ministry in Brazil in August 2013. Looking forward to what God wants to do in the future. MARAVILHA!!! OBRIGADO!!!"      ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ HOLY SPIRIT CONFERENCE 2016 Green Lake Conference Center JUNE 26-JUNE 30 More Than a Conference, It's a Family! What about inviting another family to be your guests at the 2016 conference?  It will change their life! "HIS EMPOWERING PRESENCE" Experiencing the Fullness of Joy Robby Dawkins Bob Hazlett  FIVE DAYS IN JUNE THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE! The Green Lake experience is so powerful because we are not just a conference- we are family! Come and experience the love and the joyous celebration that accompanies the incomparable presence of our amazing God. Great ministry for adults, kids, youth, young adults, and professional clergy, and we have amazing spiritual growth, fellowship, and ministry opportunities for everybody! SPECIAL OFFER: Get the whole recorded 2015  Holy Spirit Conference on flash-drive for $25!             THAT'S RIGHT -- get all 39 messages and workshops, plus workshop outlines, on a flash-drive for only $25 now. For more information please contact Eugene Purdy at epurdy@mchsi.com or 319-283-4990           CONTACT INFORMATION Rev. Ed Owens, HSRM Chairman Rev. Norelle Lutke, Assistant Director Drs. Clayton Ford and John Piippo, National Co-Directors Email: edgarowens@sbcglobal.net, nlutke@gmail.com  Phone: 517-887-0988 Facebook: Holy Spirit Renewal Ministries; Clayton Ford Website: hsrm.org click  Mailing Address: HSRM, 5455 W. Willoughby Rd, Lansing, MI 48911

The Facebook "Age of 'Like'" & the Escape From Pluralist Hegemony

From the top of Masada, looking down towards the Dead Sea in Israel

Imagine you are in a room and the lights are on. You think: I am in a room and the lights are on. You believe this. Which means you believe this statement is true, because a "belief" is just that; viz., a statement that a certain state of affairs obtains.

The statement I am in a room and the lights are on is true, not just "for you" but for everyone past, present, future, whenever and wherever they are. If someone thinks this statement is false they are simply wrong. That is the nature of truth, logically. Truth marginalizes, necessarily. 

This idea that a "statement" is a sentence that is either true or false, and if true is true for everyone and if false is false for everyone, is arguably the central idea I try to get across in my MCCC logic classes. This is hard and stunning and even revolutionary to students who have been post-modern brainwashed into thinking that "truth" is "subjective" and some things are "true for me but not for you." (Known, in logic, as the subjectivist fallacy" - see here, and here.) 

The subjectivist fallacy has especially blinded the millennial generation in America. Millennialist Zachary Fine eloquently expressed this in a recent nytimes essay "My So-Called Opinions." Pluralism has caused millennials to be "plagued by indecision." Pluralism rules, and Fine is feeling oppressed. He writes:

"Pluralism has come to be an ethical injunction, one that calls for people to peacefully accept and embrace, not simply tolerate, differences among individuals. Distinct from the free-for-all of relativism, pluralism encourages us (in concept) to support our own convictions while also upholding an “energetic engagement with diversity, ” as Harvard’s Pluralism Project suggested in 1991. Today, paeans to pluralism continue to sound throughout the halls of American universities, private institutions, left-leaning households and influential political circles."

The subjectivist fallacy fuels and inspires pluralism. "The art critic Craig Owens once wrote that pluralism is not a “recognition, but a reduction of difference to absolute indifference, equivalence, interchangeability.”" (Ib.) Truth-claims and qualitative judgments are "seemingly interchangeable."  Thus, the idea of the relativity of truth and value. Facts and claims to objectivity have been jettisoned. "In college today, we continue to learn about the byproducts of absolute truths and intractable forms of ideology, which historically seem inextricably linked to bigotry and prejudice." (Ib.)

The American idea (influenced by European Derrida-type thinking) has done harm to critical thinking. Hence my logic students, some of whom cannot believe that statements make objective truth-and/or-value claims. French sociologist of science Bruno LaTour wrote that “Good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on.” Because of this Fine writes that "some of us are finding it increasingly difficult to embrace qualitative judgments." (Ib.)

Welcome to the Facebook Age of "like" where  a "commitment to even seemingly simple aesthetic judgments have become shot through with indecision." 

This "seems especially odd because in our “postcritical” age, as the critic Hal Foster termed it, a diffusion of critical authority has elevated voices across a multitude of Internet platforms. With Facebook, Twitter and the blogosphere, everyone can be a critic." (Ib.) Everyone is "right" and all things are "true," for somebody. How oppressive to tell someone  they are wrong!

This democratization of truth, this "equal access" approach to value, renders moral judgments irrelevant since sameness prevails. Fine observes:

"Perhaps most crucially, the pluralistic climate has confused stances on moral judgment. Even though “difference” has historically been used, according to the philosopher Cornel West, as a “justification for degradation and a justification for subordination,” we millennials labor to relish those differences and distances separating individuals, exalting difference at all costs.

We anxiously avoid casting moral judgment. Because with absolute truths elusive, what claims do we have to insist that our moral positions are better than those of someone from a different nation or culture?"

Zachary Fine the millennial was born into an illogical world of deconstructionist différance where epistemological sameness prevails. He's seeking refuge from the "pluralist storm," hoping to not remain crippled by indecision and hop[ing] to one day boldly stake out [his] own claims, without trepidation."

Ontological Argument for God's Existence

For my MCCC Philosophy of Religion students.

"Atheism" Is Irrelevant in Israel

30% of Jews in America believe in God.

80% of Jews living in Israel believe in God.

In Israel the term "atheism" is irrelevant.

See this article from the Jerusalem Post - "Why Are There So Few Atheists in Israel?"

Multiverse Theory As a Baffling Article of Faith

I'm reading Worlds Without End: The Many Live of the Multiverse, by Mary-Jane Rubenstein. Multiverse theory - the idea that there are trillions upon trillions of universes - is postulated so as to do an end run around the stunning fine-tuning of our universe, which includes the cosmological constant, represented by the Greek letter lambda (Λ). As physicist Bernard Carr has said, "If you don't want God, then you better have a multiverse." (Rubenstein gives two reasons for the origin of multiverse theory: 1) scientific developments; and 2) philosophical expediency.)

Rubenstein writes:

[With the multiverse] "the necessity for a God figure is gone; as the Atomists realized 2,500 years ago, the multiverse hypothesis does not disprove God’s existence—it just takes his most significant job away through the twin powers of infinity and accident. That having been said, the multiverse replaces God with what is perhaps an equally baffling article of faith: the actual existence of an infinite number of worlds, eternally generated yet forever inaccessible to us. The multiverse, then, becomes its own kind of theological postulate even as aims to unsettle all theological postulates." (Op. cit., 17-18)

Praying Is Gaining Access to the Power of God

Bolles Harbor, Lake Erie, Monroe

I meet many people, including pastors and Christian leaders, who struggle to find time to pray. My seminary teaching tells me that 80% of North American and European pastors don't have much of a prayer life. Why not? I think the reasons for this are:

• They don't know what prayer is. Or...
• They know what prayer is but do not really believe it. Or…
• Their material prosperity allows “no time to pray” and creates the illusion of not needing to pray. Or…
• Their lives have become so cluttered with many things to “do” that they have little time for just “being” with God.

If prayer is what it claims to be then someone who truly believed in prayer would pray. Why? Because praying is talking with God. God and I are to be doing things together.

God and I, dialoguing!!![1] Are you kidding me?! If this is real only a fool would not pray. If this is not real then you won’t see me praying, even in a foxhole.

Dallas Willard writes: "Prayer is God's arrangement for a safe power sharing with us in his intention to bless the world through us”[2] In praying I interact with God. God shares his power with me. Pause at the enormity of this. Who in their right mind would not have time for this?

As I respond to prayer, God empowers me with his power to bless the world. That would be cool and helpful, if only it was true.

Sometimes I read things like this and feel guilty. OK. But guilt feelings mean nothing if action does not follow. Where there is unbelief there is no action. Guilt without action is equivalent to confession without repentance.

The sign that I believe in prayer is that I pray, a lot. What I need is belief. Belief must be cultivated in me. God will not simply download belief into me. The way to increase in belief is to choose a life of praying.

I learn prayer by praying. I keep praying and discover that my unbelief morphs into belief. Then I find time for praying.

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[1] I’ll give this three exclamation points, one for each member of the Trinity.

[2] Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.

Grand Opening of Redeemer's Education Wing Tomorrow Morning!

The Family Room in our new educational facility.

Tomorrow morning at Redeemer (2/7/16) will be a great celebration as we open up our new Educational Facility.

Many Redeemer people have helped with this project. Thank you!

This is a 5500 sq. ft. building with a large Family Room (1200 sq. ft.), with audio-visual capabilities and worship stage.

A kitchenette and bathroom.

A meeting room.

Nursery plus three more classrooms  -  all spacious and beautifully and creatively decorated.

A large storage room.

We've also redone some of our parking lots, put a new roof over the entire church building, and some other additions.

We are reconstituting one of the old classrooms into a large adult classroom with audio visual capability. Another old classroom will be a conference meeting room, and a room for nursing mothers and counseling.

Another classroom will be a storage room.

The loft in our gym/fellowship hall has been transformed into a youth room.

And, from a vision God gave me, one of the old classrooms will be transformed into a Praying Room.

We'll celebrate these things tomorrow morning, with some testimonies, plus a very cool slide show with photos from groundbreaking to completion.

Our Redeemer kids will be having Sunday Church Time in the new building tomorrow.

I thank God for it all and am looking forward to all God will do in the days to come!

(More on) Francis Beckwith on Abortion

In Bangkok

If your position on abortion is that it is the taking of a human life (a person's life) then you will (unless you have no heart at all) be passionately against abortion. That's my position. Of course I am influenced here by my Christian theistic worldview. But non-religiously I am most influenced by the work of Francis Beckwith, who is Prof. of philosophy and jurisprudence at Baylor University. Beckwith's Defending Life:  A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice is the book to read for a non-religious, philosophical and legal argument against abortion.

Beckwith's argument is: (See Answering Arguments for Abortion Rights: Part One - The Appeal to Pity)

1.    The unborn entity is fully human from the moment of conception.

2.    Abortion (narrowly defined) results in the intentional death of the unborn entity.

3.    Therefore, abortion entails the intentional killing of a human being.

Assumption: Human beings have a right to life.

Exception: “If, however, there is a high probability that a woman's pregnancy will result in her death (as in the case of a tubal pregnancy, for example), then abortion is justified. For it is a greater good that one human should live (the mother) rather than two die (the mother and her child). Or, to put it another way, in such cases the intent is not to kill the unborn (though that is an unfortunate effect) but to save the life of the mother. With the exception of such cases, abortion is an act in which an innocent human being is intentionally killed; therefore, abortion should be made illegal, as are all other such acts of killing.” (Beckwith)

Some claim to be both pro-life and pro-choice, expressing this as follows: "I'm personally against abortion, but I don't object to a woman who wants to have one if she believes it is the right thing to do." But this is odd and inconsistent.

Beckwith writes:

·         The problem with this statement is that it doesn't tell us the reason why the person claims to be personally against abortion.

·         Most people who are against abortion are so because it is the taking of a human life.

·         This is a strange, seemingly inconsistent position, “since the assumed reason why he would be personally against abortion is the same reason why he should be against publicly permitting it, namely, that an entity which is fully human has a right to life.” (Beckwith)

·         Beckwith writes: “After all, what would we think of the depth of an individual's convictions if he claimed that he was personally against the genocide of a particular ethnic group (e.g., the Jews), but he added that if others thought this race was not human, they were certainly welcome to participate in the genocide if they so chose? What I'm getting at is simply that the nature of some "personal" opinions warrants public actions, even if these opinions turn out to be wrong, while other opinions (e.g., one's personal preference for German chocolate cake) do not. Thus, it makes little moral sense to claim that one is both pro-life and pro-choice.”

See the entire essay, where Beckwith shows that the following pro-abortion argument fail logically because they commit the "appeal to pity" fallacy.
- Illegal abortions are dangerous (so we must legalize abortion)
- Arguments from economic inequity
- Arguments from population, poverty, and financial burden.
"This is not to minimize the fact that there are tragic circumstances with which our society is all too familiar, such as the poor woman with four small children who has become pregnant by her alcoholic husband. But once again we must ask whether or not the unborn entity is fully human, for hardship does not justify homicide. In such cases, those in the religious and charitable communities should help lend financial and emotional support to the family. And it may be wise — if it is a case of extreme hardship — for the woman to put her baby up for adoption, so that she may give to others the gift of parenthood."
- Argument from the deformed child. Beckwtih writes: "This is not to deny that there are tragedies in life and that having a handicapped child is often a difficult burden to undertake. But I think it is important to realize that if the unborn entity is fully human, homicide cannot be justified simply because it relieves one of a terrible burden. Though it may be hard to accept, I believe the following principle is fundamental to correct moral reasoning: it is better to suffer evil rather than to inflict it. If this moral precept were not true, all so-called moral dilemmas would be easily soluble by simply appealing to one's own relief from suffering. But in such a world the antidote would be worse than the poison, for people would then have a right to inflict suffering on another if it relieved them of their own. This would be morally intolerable." 

Holy Nothingness As the Precondition for Divine Everythingness

In his second letter to the Corinthian church Paul defends his credentials as an apostle and a messenger sent from God. The new Corinthian Jesus-followers look at him and find it hard to believe he is who he says he is. They thought, writes N.T. Wright, that “an apostle needs to be a showy leader, a flowery and entertaining speaker, with personal charm and flattery, like the kind they were used to in their culture. What Paul ultimately wants to say to them is that all these things are nothing…  compared with the lifestyle which embodies the gospel of Jesus.” (N. T.Wright, Paul For Everyone: 2 Corinthians, 32-33)

Paul, by his own estimation, is unimpressive. Paul writes:  I have made a fool of myself, but you drove me to it. I ought to have been commended by you, for I am not in the least inferior to the “super-apostles,” even though I am nothing. (2 Cor. 12:11) 

How can someone who is a "nothing" not be inferior to everyone? The answer is that Paul's "nothingness" is a "holy nothingness," a "sacred insufficiency." This brand of nothingness is a necessary precondition for divine everythingness.

Paul views himself as unqualified, in himself, to minister in Jesus' name. But Christ, in Paul, is sufficient. Paul writes: Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. (2 Cor. 3:5) Christ, he writes, has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant. (2 Cor. 3:6)

The reality of the "new covenant" is that God has placed his desires, not on tablets of stone (the old covenant), but within the hearts of all who embrace Christ. Now, amazingly, Christ-followers "partake of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). As Paul writes in 2 Cor. 5:17: if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. 

All this is in fulfillment of the God's promise of a new covenant, as expressed in Ezekiel 36:26: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. God's Holy Spirit, in us, is the reason we have confidence and are "sufficient."

In Paul we see this pattern:

1. I am nothing
2. This drives me to rely on God
3. I can do all thing in Christ, who dwells in me and strengthens me

Years ago Linda, Dan, and Josh went with me to Singapore, where I taught at a Chinese seminary for 20 days. Good friends of connected us with David and Sue Pickard of Overseas Missionary Fellowship. David was the director of OMF, which used to be China Inland Mission, founded by Hudson Taylor. David and Sue had us over for dinner. It was Josh's birthday and they had prepared a birthday. David showed us Hudson Taylor's Bible. That was an awesome moment. Taylor was taken out of his comfort zone and used of God even though he was out of his depths. How was this possible? Taylor said: “God chose me because I was weak enough. God does not do his work by large committees. He trains somebody to be quiet enough, and little enough, and then uses him.”

I love how Oswald Chambers expresses this truth: “God can achieve his purpose either through the absence of human power and resources, or the abandonment of reliance on them. All through history God has chosen and used nobodies, because their unusual dependence on him made possible the unique display of his power and grace. He chose and used somebodies only when they renounced dependence on their natural abilities and resources.”

I must become a nobody so that Christ can become Somebody in me.

Praying for Faithfulness in Small Things

Lake Erie, Sterling State Park

Today, like most days, will be a day of small things. My prayer is to be faithful in those things. I am a small person interacting with small people.

God can turn a small thing into a big thing, should he want to. It's up to him. But my focus is not to be on faithfulness in "big things." If I am not faithful in small things I cannot be trusted with big things. I don’t believe God is evaluating things by "small" and "big." Be faithful to God's calling. That's all I need to do.

Faithfulness is qualitative, not quantitative. If I fail to love those in my own environment I cannot be trusted to love others. I cannot be interested in "swimming with the big fish"; rather, I am a little fish called to swim with whomever God brings into my life.

Jesus tells us that “He who is faithful in a little” is the one who will be rewarded much.[1] C.S. Lewis put it this way. “This then is the great secret. Good and evil both grow at compound interest. That is why the SMALL things you do each day are of such infinite importance. It is the small things that will turn you into either a heavenly or hellish creature.”[2] 

Who dares despise the day of small things...[3]

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[1] Luke 16:10

[2] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.

[3] Zechariah 4:10