Receiving Holy Spirit — Keith Hartsell

Great. So this is the final session of the retreat on how can I be filled with the Holy Spirit, or how do I receive the Holy Spirit. And the reason why this is a teaching I love to have predominantly on a retreat setting is because I grew up in a non-Christian home, and then I had the gospel shared with me by some wonderful folks in Alabama when I lived there who were Southern Baptists.

And their first introduction, coming to our door, maybe the day we were moving in and our boxes were being unloaded off the truck, they came to the door, we opened the door, and they said, Hi, are y 'all Baptists?

To which my mom, who loves to blend in everywhere we go, said, Of course we are! And I heard the gospel from them as I began to go to the youth ministry as a 14-year-old at the Baptist church, the only church in town, and really began a vibrant relationship with God starting that year.

I was baptized and really felt like before that moment I did not understand the Bible every time I opened it, and then after that moment I felt like passages became clear. It's the only way I know how to describe it, because I don't think there's that much developmentally changing between the 13-year-old and the 14-year-old in terms of comprehending the Bible.

But it seemed like God was helping me understand the Bible. But by the end of my senior year in high school, I had already come up against several problems in my faith. One being, we did a Bible study in the book of Acts, and a lot of things were going on in the book of Acts that I did not see going on in the church.

Discovering the Charismatic Gifts in Acts

Crazy things. Spiritual practices, and particularly the different kinds of spiritual gifts that the New Testament describes that I was not seeing demonstrated in the church. And when I asked questions about it, the adults around me behaved strangely.

They behaved like I was asking wrong or inappropriate kinds of questions. And I was dating a girl whose mother admitted in the privacy of her home that she secretly spoke in tongues. And when I asked about speaking in tongues in particular, this wonderful Southern Baptist said, That's something those crazy Pentecostals believe.

And they believe that you're not a real, legitimate Christian unless you can't speak in tongues. And so that's just all faceless, so we don't believe in that. And so, to find someone who actually claimed to speak in tongues, I was intrigued and I wanted to know more.

And I said, well, why don't you do it at the church? That's where it should be practiced, right? And she said, oh, I could never speak in tongues in the church. They would kick me out. And I thought, what has the church come to that this is what would happen?

And so I asked all kinds of culture-challenging questions. But deeper than my struggle with understanding the gifts of the Spirit was my own growing sense and awareness of my own need for healing and feeling like there wasn't a way for me to receive healing in the community of that Baptist church because they didn't really know what to offer in terms of healing via the Holy Spirit.

It was simply a read the Bible more and pray more kind of solution to struggles that I was having. So I learned that there was possibly more to the life of being a Christian than I was familiar with at the time.

And so when I got to college, I began visiting Church of the Resurrection and experiencing sort of Bob Weber's kind of description of church, being fully charismatic, fully evangelical, fully liturgical sacramental.

Understanding the Holy Spirit as an Outpouring of Power

And so one of the best ways that I have thought of, actually heard somebody share, to describe the work of the Holy Spirit is how many of you have lived in a home that had a boiler with radiant heat? You have?

Okay. Is it the kind that has like a pilot light for the furnace? Yeah. And then the gas comes on and you hear this whoosh of flame. And all of a sudden everywhere the house starts to get warmer. Is that the experience?

It's in the basement. We don't turn it on.

We can't hear it. You can't hear it? Okay. We can hear it. Whoosh. Yeah. When the heat comes out.

So the way that I've kind of understood the Holy Spirit is when you become a Christian, that pilot light gets lit. There's the gift of the Holy Spirit given to you as a believer. But there are times in your life when you can experience this whoosh of the Holy Spirit, where the circumstances or something that God desires to do or some kind of petition on your own, praying and asking for help, God just breathes.

Not in a sense that it wasn't there before and now it is, but in a sense that there is just a whoosh of power, of warmth, of energy, from the Lord into whatever situation or struggle is going on. And so that's how I would initially describe my experience with the Holy Spirit when I started to go to college and experienced more than just an intellectual understanding of what the Bible described, particularly in these passages in Acts.

Now when it comes to charismatic things, I do think it's really important to say that in the book of Acts, nothing happens the same way twice. And so it's really hard to take from Acts and then prescribe how we ought to do things in the church based on that.

It seemed like Acts was just this wonderful season of exploration and discovery with how God works in the church and how the church has started and grows and how people come to know Jesus and receive the Holy Spirit in the book of Acts.

So none of these passages we're going to read are going to be particularly prescriptive. They're just going to be descriptive of what they observed happened. So sometimes the experience with the Holy Spirit is dramatic.

Sometimes it's not dramatic. So let's read. I'll just have you guys take turns reading the passages on the handout. So it's just double-sided. So does everybody have one? There's an extra one here. Great.

So in Acts, the Holy Spirit came in several different ways. So Acts 2. Travis, why don't you go ahead and read that for us?

Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.

All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Great. So a couple things to describe there. How would you describe this incident of the outpouring of the Spirit? Huh? Visual. It's visual. Very good. I would say this would be one of the more dramatic ways, right?

It's kind of drama-filled. You've got the visual. You've also got the sound. Yeah. It's sensory as a whole. Yeah. It's just really unfamiliar. Wind and fire are described here. So this would not be the quiet, receptive, peaceful method of receiving the Holy Spirit.

This would be the more dramatic. The second one. Julie, do you want to read Acts 8 on the worksheet?

Yeah. When the apostles and Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to Samaria. When they arrived, they prayed for the new believers that they might receive the Holy Spirit.

Because the Holy Spirit had not yet come on any of them. I'm sorry. I didn't do that right. Because the Holy Spirit had not yet come on any of them. They had simply been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.

Then Peter and John placed their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit. Okay.

So we would describe this as the outpouring of the Spirit came with the laying on of hands after baptism. It's a little unusual. But as we go further, it will not always be in the same order. How about you, Jeremiah, for the Acts 19?

When Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples and asked them, Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? They answered, No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.

So Paul asked, Then what baptism did you receive? John's baptism, they replied. Paul said, John's baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.

On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied.

Great. So there is evidence for them of the Holy Spirit being poured out vis-a-vis the speaking in tongues and the prophesying that happened also on the day of Pentecost in the first reading, Acts 2, with tongues and prophecy.

And then the fourth one, Acts 10, Raymond, do you want to read that? While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit came on all who heard the message. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.

For they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God. Then Peter said, Surely no one can stand in the way of their being baptized with water. They have received the Holy Spirit just as we have. Great.

So before baptism. So it's kind of funny, the changing sequence for everyone, which leads you to the question of how then do we help people go through a process if we're at work trying to evangelize the city of Chicago and there are nine million or so people who don't go to church, how do we lead people through a process that will result in their conversion, receiving the Holy Spirit, being baptized, experiencing gifts of the Holy Spirit?

The Holy Spirit’s Work Is Unique for Each Believer

What I concluded after this senior year study in the book of Acts is that the experience is different for everyone and the sequencing of events is different for everyone and that the thing that seems to be common to all of these stories is simply an openness for the Holy Spirit to come.

And so most of these cases people were praying for the Holy Spirit to come and pour out but for others it's the Holy Spirit pours out even as they're open and hearing the message preached by Peter. Acts 10 is literally like the climax of the book of Acts with everything rising up to it and everything falling away from it in terms of the Gentiles coming to faith in Jesus and having the unique evidence of the Holy Spirit upon them before they're baptized because in this situation they weren't even sure that they can baptize Gentiles.

And so it was kind of important that they evidence signs of the Holy Spirit before baptism because the apostles, this is new territory altogether. They had never yet baptized or converted Gentiles to Christianity and this is the first instance.

So it's different for everyone. It leads people to asking this question, how do I know if it's happened for me? What are some of the ways that we experience the outpouring of the Holy Spirit? Galatians 5, do you want to tackle that, Nick?

Galatians 5, yeah.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Great. So the fruit of the Spirit is one of the clear ways set apart by Paul for us to know that if we're growing in any of these particular fruits, it's the Holy Spirit's work in our lives. Also, Acts 10, which we already read, if you look at verse 46, for they heard them speaking in tongues and praising God.

Speaking in tongues is certainly one of the ways, but praising God. Paul talks about if you have the Spirit you can't curse God and if you bless God or praise God, that can only be possible by the Spirit's presence in your life.

So these are ways. And then the speaking in tongues, obviously the Pentecostal, were you a part of a Pentecostal tradition, Travis? Yes. Yeah. Was your experience that they believed you had to speak in tongues to be a valid or legitimate Christian?

More or less. I don't think it would have been explicitly stated that way, but that's sort of the functional way that it seemed to show up.

So we recently had Assemblies of God Church come to us and ask if they could come into Greenhouse this summer. And they had left the Assemblies of God Church pretty much over this idea that this was the principal fruit over all other fruits.

But as charismatic Christians we would say it's one of the ways in which you can experience the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. But I have been with lots of wonderfully gifted, ordained individuals in the church.

And at Resurrection we had a clergy team of about eight and roughly half of them spoke in tongues and the other half didn't. But there was no sense of these are more special clergy than these clergy. Everybody had their own unique gifts that were recognized.

And so it wasn't really seen as a primary or principal gift, just one of the gifts. But a fairly obvious one, whenever anyone speaks in gibberish, it's kind of hard not to notice. When one of my friends was ordained to the diaconate, the bishop went a little crazy and started to pray in tongues over this ordination candidate.

And her father was not a believer. And so of course the family came to the ordination ceremony, a little bit like a graduation rite. And he said after the service was over, it was so nice of that older man to pray for you in Greek or Hebrew.

Which one was it? And she declined to really tell him exactly what had happened. But to him it was just, oh, that's nice that you used the biblical language in praying for my daughter who you ordained.

So not all Christians speak in tongues. Not all leaders in the church, gifted individuals, those who have experienced the life of the Spirit speak in tongues. So it's not necessarily a sign of being filled with the Spirit.

It's also imitatable. So I don't know if there was ever a point in your church, with your experience, that you were kind of uncertain whether this person was speaking in tongues legitimately or not.

Did you ever have that? Yeah, or the whole thing where it's like, oh, you're not doing it? Oh, well just say something and then eventually it'll turn. Yeah, yeah. Just say anything and eventually it'll become speaking in tongues or something like that.

Yeah, so it can be a little imitatable. So the only person who really knows if it's authentic or not is the person themselves. And with all of the different gifts, Paul says in one of the passages, I wish you all could speak in tongues, but more than that, I'd rather you exercise the gift of prophecy, because prophecy builds up the church.

Can I ask a question about this prophecy?

Because my father blessed someone who was 90, and the woman who came and visited him in the hospital, I don't know what country she was from, but she was from some African tradition, and she said, oh yes, and her father came and prophesied for her.

And I was like, I thought my dad blessed her. And that was the first time I heard someone talking about prophecy in a different way.

Yeah, how would you define it? In all your seminary studies, how would you define the gift of prophecy?

So prophets were people who, at least in the Old Testament tradition, spoke either the word of God or the will of God. It could mean a whole different series of things. It could be a person who saw literal visions.

It could be a person who was a visionary. It could be a person who prayed in an intercessory way. It might be what it was. In fact, in Hebrew there's at least three different words. So it encompasses a whole variety.

I think we tend to associate the word prophecy with seeing the future. But that certainly happened. But that was actually a pretty small portion of what biblical prophets actually did. More of it was communicating the will or the word of God, and thus says the Lord.

Yeah, does that make sense? Yeah, because he'd always pray the Aramaic, you know, the Lord bless you, keep you. And they'd spend their time in sharing faith.

So some folks will say something encouraging about another person, and others will call that prophecy. It's kind of, depending on where you're at, what environment you're in, what is the collective understanding of this word, it can vary from group to group.

But Nick's definition is absolutely right on. And biblical, well done.

We just had a midterm the other day, and so it's all, it hasn't fallen out of my head yet.

It's all still jammed in there. Oh, good, good, good. But I'd never heard that interesting. I always thought prophecy was futuristic, Isaiah, Jeremiah. And it's actually related. Rowet is the Hebrew word.

What? Rowet.

Rowet. Is it related to the Holy Spirit? It's an intercessory prophet. Nabi is the general term, and Hosea. Hosea is someone who sees either literal visions or is a visionary.

Yeah. Yeah, so I've loved, when I've taken classes, sort of working through what each of the different gifts of the Spirit are. Like, what are they really? Because you get such diverse descriptions of them.

Sometimes it can be a little hard to know, am I operating in this gift or not? I don't know. If you have the spiritual gift of wisdom, what does it exactly look like for people today? Or discernment. Or a gift of the word of knowledge.

What does that even mean? And so to have these sort of unpacked for us, I think, is really helpful. Because in the sort of non-charismatic world, I think a lot of Christians are exercising a lot of spiritual gifts without knowing it.

But I also reject the idea that spiritual gifts are only the sort of normal. Like, if you have tried to get a spiritual gift inventory and tried to buy one online or something to take, there's a whole group of them that don't include any of the Biblical charismatic gifts.

So it's gifts of administration and hospitality and wisdom. It's sort of like non, what would you call them? The non-supernatural gifts. And I don't think we should exclude any of the gifts that are listed in the New Testament when we think about what are we gifted with and how do we use those gifts to grow and build up the church.

So having Christians learn what their gifts are is important. And it requires a lot of people giving feedback to you. But also, one of the things I think is important is to never impose what we think God is giving us, but rather to propose.

Discerning Prophecy with Humility

So in some charismatic environments, folks will be like, I've got the gift of prophecy and I want to proclaim over you that God has said blah blah blah, X, Y, or Z. And that can be kind of a word imposed upon you.

If you disagree with me, you're not disagreeing with me. You're disagreeing with God.

That's dangerous. And that happens to me. And I think the minister did have the person kind of go into some sort of remediation. It was frightening.

Yeah, you don't want to do that. We don't want folks to do that. We want to propose to them. I don't know if the Lord is saying this or not, but it seems to me like he might be saying X, Y, or Z. How are you hearing that?

Does that sound like that resonates with you? It's sort of communicating with humility that you might have gotten it wrong, and you're letting them sort of discern with you whether this is from the Lord or not or for them or not.

And a lot of that thus saith the Lord imposition on people can be hurtful,.

Especially if it's way off. Well, you want to have a witness. You don't want to be cornered by someone alone. I've had this happen also in prayers where there's one dear. Well, this one friend is very spiritual, but she says prayers in the Holy Spirit, and then she says to me what she feels the Holy Spirit has told her, that if you decide to do this, it's okay, and if you decide to do that, it's okay.

And I was like, whoa! I didn't think the Holy Spirit would talk to me. I did say that.

Even in the biblical tradition, the things that the prophets are saying are not terribly shocking. They're talking to Judah or to the kingdom of Israel who has completely just rejected the worship of God and is worshiping Baal, and they're saying, look, God says you're getting it wrong, and this is not shocking stuff.

If you're the people of God and you're not worshiping God, and the prophet comes and tells you, hey, you're not worshiping God, maybe you ought to try it. Nobody's shocked by this. It's very, very rare that the prophet says something way out of the blue that wouldn't be received by the people.

It's like, oh, of course you're right. It's evident on its face that they are correct, because you are obviously doing, usually in the case of Israel, not worshiping God.

So one of the things that when we did the fall festival and we did that sermon series on prayer, and I talked about listening prayer, that book by Leanne Payne, she really encourages every Christian to be able to set apart time to listen for what the Lord would say.

And sort of what she would characterize or describe as a lower case p prophetic listening, you're just listening for the word of the Lord, whether it comes through scripture or the Holy Spirit, but you're not going to turn around and proclaim it over someone.

It's for you to connect with the Lord, to dialogue with the Lord. And so I like the definition of sharing the word of God or the will of God with people, but also with humility and gentleness. I think that's really important and kind of forgotten in some environments.

What other questions do you guys have about the experience being different for everyone? How do I know if it's happened to me? So how do we guide people through receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit? How do I receive it?

Repentance, Baptism, and Asking for the Holy Spirit

And this may be validating for many of you. The way that scripture encourages us, that we can sort of extrapolate from all of these different sequences, is Acts 2. Let's see, is that Sherry at this point?

Do you want to read Acts 2 for us?

Peter said, Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all.

For all whom the Lord, our God, will talk. Those who have accepted his message will be baptized, and about 3 ,000 more are to be baptized in the Holy Name.

So that's pretty self-explanatory in terms of where do you begin. We start with repenting and being baptized. But not just a baptism like we saw with the disciples who followed John, a baptism of repentance.

They had to be baptized for the first time in the name of the Lord Jesus, in the understanding of Jesus as Son of God, as divine. Nowadays, you have to be baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit because there are a handful of traditions that baptize in the name of Jesus that don't fully recognize Jesus as Son of God.

And so now it's a little confusing to be baptized in the name of Jesus. So the Church has, for the last 1 ,500 years, said you have to be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit so as to rule out any ambiguity or confusion of what kind of baptism you're being baptized into.

So to be baptized in the name of Jesus, in the name of the Trinity, the Triune God, is a joining with Christ in that exchange of sin for righteousness moment that happens for people in a sacramental way at their baptisms.

It can happen in a prayer way before. And again, after baptism, we are always praying for God to wash the sins that we've committed away. Kind of similar to Jesus washing Peter's feet at the Last Supper.

And Peter's saying, you cannot wash any part of me. And Jesus says to him, unless I wash you, you can have no part in the kingdom that I'm leading. And he says, well then all of me. Wash all of me. I didn't realize the stakes were so high.

Throw all my body in there. And he said, no, you've already been baptized. You just need your feet washed. And that sort of, to me, speaks about the need for confessing our sins regularly and doing that sort of spiritual discipline of washing the sins that we've committed.

Not a full baptism every time you sin. Throw me in the water again.

But rather the washing of feet. Yeah? I don't know if you've ever been anywhere where like hurricanes with water would show up and stuff like that. You can't take a shower and all you can do is wash your feet.

You actually feel surprisingly clean. Really? Yeah, there's like no water. Like I grew up in the South, so we had a lot of hurricanes. That's fine. So it's amazing like, I don't know, just as a personal experience.

It's amazing how clean you feel for washing your feet when you can't actually take a shower. Clean anything else. Especially like when you live in the South, it's hot in here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The opposite is also true. I found in a lot of sacramental liturgical churches where they practice foot washing. But because everybody's bathed nicely and wears socks, the foot washing water becomes lint filled.

And then you feel like you're getting your feet dirty. You know?

Sort of the opposite sensation. So you're saying the washing of feet is like another process.

No, it's like confessing our sins and being forgiven on an ongoing basis as Christians. Jesus says you don't need to be washed all over. You've already been baptized. But you just need your feet washed.

So it's talking about the ongoing spiritual practice of confessing sins one to another. Was he being symbolic in any way? I think so. I think he was trying to symbolize several things. He was also symbolizing the servanthood role that he came on to take, that he wants us to do.

He also was communicating the humility in the kingdom rather than the being large and in charge. He was really combining a lot of things in that act. That he did. So first is repent and be baptized. The second one, Luke 11.

I guess we're back to you, Travis. Oh, sure.

So I say to you, asking it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives. The one who seeks finds. And to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in Heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?

Now this is one of the great passages that's repeated a lot in scripture, out of context. So, ask and it will be given to you. So, whatever it is that you want. I don't know, whatever Jeremiah's talking about these days.

Whether it's about a bigger paycheck, or a nicer car, or a bigger house. Whatever you ask for, in his name, he'll give to you. It's often misused, but in this context, the very last verse tells you what this passage is about.

And the last verse is about what? The Holy Spirit. Giving of the Holy Spirit. It's talking specifically about asking for the Holy Spirit, and receiving the Holy Spirit. And that God is like a father who doesn't want to give you bad things, he wants to give you good things.

So, he will always answer the prayer, Lord, I'm asking for the Holy Spirit. He will always answer it. So, the first thing you do is repent and be baptized. The second thing you do is you ask God for the Holy Spirit.

Responding to the Spirit’s Leading

And then third, you respond to what you think the Holy Spirit is doing. So, a lot of times people will ask for the Holy Spirit, and then they'll get a nudge or an intuition about something, and then immediately dismiss it.

Which is kind of funny, because when we ask for the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit comes and suggests something to you, it sort of works against what we're hoping for to simply dismiss what it seems like we're being nudged to do.

So, the story of Philip, the evangelist, being teleported by the Holy Spirit from one part of town to the road, where all of a sudden there's an Ethiopian eunuch in a carriage going by, reading from the book of Isaiah, and at each step of his sort of crazy story, he doesn't know what God wants him to do.

God only gives him a little instruction at a time. Like, I want, I have to go back to the story. But instead of saying there's going to be a guy, he's going to come by in a carriage, he just walks Philip through step by step without giving him any more detail.

And Philip just has to trust and respond to these short instructions without knowing what the overall purpose is. And we tend to like to know everything that's expected of us before I say yes. So if you hear the Spirit say to you, or you ask for God to pour out the Spirit on you, and you hear this thought, you should go down to Kipling Street and wait.

You're like, for what? Tell me what I'm supposed to wait for, or I'm not going. That doesn't make any sense. How do I, I'm supposed to go with my wife somewhere. How am I supposed to explain to my wife that the Spirit told me to go stand at Kipling Street?

So there's this need to know the full purpose of everything that keeps us from really stepping out and following how the Lord would guide us. And so if we want to receive the Holy Spirit and respond, we have to actually step out on some of the things that we're feeling nudged to do.

Take a risk. I believe that when the Lord begins doing this in your life, the risks that He asks you to take are relatively small. They're like risks of slight embarrassment, risks of slight inconvenience, risks of losing a little bit of time from your day.

And that's how you risk it. But then the asks get bigger and bigger as you learn to follow Him and trust Him. And so a lot of folks will pray for the Holy Spirit, receive a kind of nudge and then not respond to it and say, you know, the Lord didn't answer my prayer.

But we believe that He's always answering that particular prayer when you ask for the Holy Spirit. There are several barriers to receiving and responding to the Holy Spirit. I just want to go through and then we'll pray through some of these in our closing time of worship and prayer.

I put on there, what did I put on there? Three? Three barriers? Okay, I'm going to double that and make it six. Six barriers. Because as I was praying through this, I just felt like the Lord was giving me a few more that might be applicable to you all.

Six Barriers to Receiving the Holy Spirit

The first barrier, disbelief. This one is expressed in a lot of different ways. It can be just a micro disbelief. Like I just don't believe that God is speaking to me right now. And so I'm just going to reject the nudge or thought that I had.

But in a larger way, the theological position of dispensationalism or cessationalism that espouses the view that God does not work today like He did in the New Testament. The Holy Spirit does not work the same way today as is described in the book of Acts, is a system of disbelief about the Holy Spirit.

And so if you subscribe to a dispensationalist theological view, you're going to struggle to see or experience the leading of the Holy Spirit in your life. Just because you've chosen to exclude the possibility of the Holy Spirit leading you from your realm of explanations for strange things going on in your life.

My mom once visited a church after I came to college, and she wanted to know that she was visiting an okay church. So she invited me, the seeming expert on churches, to come and check it out. And it seemed like a lovely church, Christian, non-denominational, Bible church.

So I picked up the visitor's brochure, because I know by being a pastor and designing visitor's brochures that they put what you really want to know in those things. So I picked one up and started to read through it.

Most of it sounded pretty good, except for one statement. And that one statement was enough for me to say to my mom, you don't want to go here. Do you want to know what the one statement was? We don't believe in miracles for today.

Even non-Christians believe in miracles for today. Are you kidding me? We don't believe in miracles for today. So I said to my mom, if you ever want a miracle, you're probably not going to get it here.

Because of the ways in which Jesus would say about whole communities, you couldn't perform any miracles here because they had no faith or they didn't believe. Communities that espouse a system of disbelief have a really hard time receiving what God has for them.

I don't know. She's never asked that before. So I don't know. My mother and my father are both mysteries to me. I don't know where they are with the Lord. But to have her ask, I was like, sure, I'll come and check it out for you.