RLJ-1436 JOHN S. TORELL MARCH 23, 2014
PART 7: THE STORY OF PENTECOST
WHO IS IN CONTROL? THE HOLY GHOST OR MAN?
God has given mankind a free will and is still there after a person is born again and sealed by the Holy Spirit. In the time after Pentecost, every believer in Christ wanted to be possessed by the Holy Spirit. Acts 2:38-43
The power of the Gospel was slowly lost as there were few born again Christians from around 300-1500 A.D. Most people were under the control of the Roman Catholic Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church and the other remnant churches in the Middle East, Southern India and Ethiopia were Christian only in name. They had church memberships but no one was born again.
MARTIN LUTHER
The first truth of the Gospel to be restored was salvation by faith in Jesus Christ. Martin Luther brought back the truth in 1517 that a man must be born again and has nothing to do with church membership. John 3:3-8; Ephesians 2:8-10
This caused a furious response from the Devil as he used all the power he could muster in the organized apostate churches to persecute anyone who dared to preach that a man must be born again. Millions of born again Christians were murdered from that year until the killing slowed down in Europe some 300 years later.
ADULT WATER BAPTISM THROUGH IMMERSION
As God used Martin Luther to shatter the monopoly that the Roman Catholic church held for more than 1,200 years, the Holy Spirit began to move among what was known as Protestants or Lutherans and awakened them to the second truth that a born again believer in Christ needs to be baptized in water through immersion. Infant baptism is not biblical. Matthew 28:19-20; Romans 6:1-4
It was strange when Roman Catholics and Protestants joined forces to persecute the newcomers on the block, who became known as Anabaptists. They were hanged, burned at the stake and strangled. The favorite method of killing them was to have men, women and children shackled with chains and weights and taken out on a lake and cast overboard. The weight of the first person would drag the next person over the boat until the whole group had been dragged into the water.The persecution tapered off by the late 19th century as thousands of believers in Christ joined the Baptist movement and the Lutherans learned to tolerate the Baptists but did not like them.
THE MORAVIANS
In 1722 Count Nikolaus Zinzendorf purchased a large estate in Saxony, Germany and invited persecuted Christians to come and settle on his property. It was here that the Holy Spirit moved and the third truth of the Gospel was restored, the baptism of the Holy Spirit. This was not well received by Protestants, Catholics and Baptists. The result of the baptism of the Holy Spirit among the Moravians, as they became known, resulted in an intensive missionary outreach. John Wesley encountered Moravian missionaries during his return from the American colony of Georgia in 1737. Not only did Wesley learn that he needed to be born again, he also learned of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
When he attended a Moravian meeting in London, Wesley was convicted by the Holy Spirit of his sins and prayed to be saved and born again. This transformed him, and shortly after his conversion to Christ, he left for Germany and stayed at the Moravian home base and returned to England in September of 1738. He had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit while in Germany and this was the necessary fire to get the Methodist revival going that would sweep over many nations. Acts 1:4-8
THE FIRE SPREADS
Several prominent ministers and missionaries were baptized in the Holy Spirit about 100 years later like Charles Finney and D.L. Moody, Hudson Taylor (founder of China Inland Mission), Charles T. Studd, who first served in China under Hudson Taylor and then later founded the Heart of Africa Mission. Thousands of young men and women who worked under these men were baptized in the Holy Spirit and continued to spread the fire wherever they went.
TOPEKA, KANSAS
Up to 1900, the interest in the baptism of the Holy Spirit had created a holiness movement in the United States which emphasized divine healing. A young preacher by the name of Charles F. Parham (1873-1929) had pastored a Methodist Church from 1893-1895. Pursuing divine healing and the baptism of the Holy Spirit, he left the Methodist church and started Bethel Healing Home in 1898 with his wife. For the next few years he ministered in Topeka, traveled and spoke at a number of holiness centers in the United States. In 1900 he returned home and enlarged the ministry by adding a Bible school with the express purpose of teaching the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
On January 1, 1901 the power of the Holy Spirit came down on a student named Agnes Ozman, who began to speak in tongues just like on the day of Pentecost. In a few days Parham and all his students had been baptized in the Holy Spirit and a new Pentecostal movement had been born.
Parham thought that the breakthrough had finally come for the restoration of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He named this fresh move of God for Apostolic Faith Movement (AFM) with the goal to start AFM churches and fan the fire.
However, just four months later, Satan squashed the move of God through negative newspaper articles and few people were being baptized in the Holy Spirit. When Parham thought all had been lost, the Holy Spirit fire fell again two years later at a revival meeting in the mining town of Galena, Kansas in 1903.
People flocked to the meetings to hear about salvation, the baptism of the Holy Spirit and divine healing. The fire did not take off among the educated church goers but hard working miners and their family received it with joy as thousands were saved and filled with the Holy Spirit.
The newspapers in the small mining towns around Galena featured large write-ups on the many healings that people experienced as Parham and his people received public recognition that God was at work.
ON TO TEXAS
God led Parham to the Houston area in Texas in 1905 to preach and plant AFM churches as many of the newly baptized people fanned out to do missionary work.
He opened a Bible school in Houston, where students enrolled in a ten week training period. If they were not already baptized in the Holy Spirit, they were sure to be when the ten weeks were up. One of the men that attended was the black holiness evangelist William J. Seymour (1870-1922).
312 AZUSA STREET, LOS ANGELES
Just like in the Book of Acts, the believers that had been baptized in the Holy Spirit were called by God to start traveling to different parts of the United States. On February 22, 1906 William Seymour arrived in Los Angeles and was asked to pastor a small storefront mission. He preached the first Sunday morning sermon on the baptism of the Holy Spirit but the church rejected the message and fired him that afternoon.
He didn’t have any money to travel back to Texas and was forced to continue living with the church family that had given him room and board. They allowed him to hold Bible studies in their home. People would come and go and this continued until April 9, 1906 when Seymour had a private prayer meeting with Edward Lee, the man in whose home he was living. Lee had a vision of meeting with Jesus’ apostles and they showed him how to pray in tongues. As they were praying, the fire of the Holy Spirit fell on Lee and he began to speak in tongues.
After their prayer time, Seymour went to an evening meeting at another home in the area and shared the news that the Holy Spirit had fallen on Lee. As the small group listened, the Holy Spirit suddenly fell upon them and they all began to speak in tongues. Just like on the day of Pentecost, the news spread like wildfire and people started to show up and ask for prayer.
Within a week the numbers of believers baptized in the Holy Spirit had grown so that Seymour and his leaders rented a rundown house at 313 Azusa Street, which for the next seven years would draw preachers, evangelists, men and women from all over North America and Europe who wanted to be baptized in the Holy Spirit.
With the healing and the fire of the Holy Spirit, the news began to spread and the Los Angeles Times sent a reporter to a meeting. He wrote a negative report but it backfired on the paper and droves of people started to come. As a result, some of the churches in the area opened their doors and the revival flames were burning so hot that the Devil could not extinguish them. The Holy Ghost baptism had once again been restored to the church of Jesus Christ.
A WORLD WIDE MOVE OF GOD
Thomas Barratt (1862-1940) was a Norwegian Methodist/Episcopal pastor who had heard of the revival in Los Angeles and came for a visit in 1906. When he came back to Oslo, Norway, it didn’t take long for the people in his church to receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Lewi Petrus (1884 1974) was a young Swedish Baptist pastor who heard of the revival in Oslo in 1907 and decided to find out what it was all about. The result was that he was baptized in the Holy Spirit and it didn’t take long before the entire Baptist congregation in Lidkoping also experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit and was speaking in tongues.
The result was that scores of Swedish Baptist pastors traveled to Lidkoping, received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and turned their Baptist churches into Pentecostal churches.
Hundreds of Spirit filled believers from Norway and Sweden took the Pentecostal message to Finland, Russia, Germany and many other nations in Europe. Ministers from England traveled to Los Angeles, and brought the Holy Spirit fire back home with them. The single event that started with a woman in Topeka, Kansas had spread throughout the world; over time the Pentecostal message spread into India, China, Africa, Australia and every part of the British Commonwealth.
In the United States a number of Pentecostal denominations were born; among them were the Assemblies of God in 1914 and the International Church of Four Square Gospel in 1923.
MAN-MADE DOCTRINE
When the Devil realized that he could not stop the baptism of the Holy Spirit, he fell back on his old weapon, “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Matthew 13:24-30
The United Pentecostal Church International (UPC), also known as an “oneness church,” is a denomination that evolved in 1945 when two denominations merged into one. This was the merger of the Pentecostal Church Incorporated and the Pentecostal Assemblies of Jesus Christ. Prior to this merger, there had been earlier mergers of different groups dating back to Azusa Street in 1906.
The UPC churches will not baptize converts in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but only in the name of Jesus. They also teach that you are not saved if you do not speak in tongues. Now, in order to stay saved, a person must live a holy life and adhere to a number of man-made rules.
Women must be wear dresses, abstain from make-up and jewelry, cannot cut their hair, etc. Men cannot use alcohol, tobacco or any other paraphernalia. Young men and women must abstain from any public display of affection. Breaking any of these rules will send a church member to hell.
Today there are altogether more than 700 Pentecostal denominations and thousands of independent Pentecostal churches. In 2002 it was estimated that the Pentecostal movement in the world had some 279 million members.
The Charismatic movement from the 1960s was a blessing but it also brought in some wild manifestations as seen at the Toronto Vineyard Church in Canada, the wild barking and laughing and incoherent behavior at the Brownsville revival in Florida, and the horrible manifestations of Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland and their followers.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
There is no doubt that God moved upon Martin Luther, the Anabaptists, John Wesley, Charles Finney, D.L. Moody, Charles Parham and William Seymour.
What went wrong with the Pentecostal movement? They deviated from the Bible and added man-made doctrine. Many church leaders in the Evangelical and Pentecostal churches had no formal theological training, no knowledge of Biblical history or the early church customs that came out of Israel.
They superimposed American culture upon the Scriptures and came up with horribly wrong theological conclusions that are now firmly entrenched in the denominations:
- Jesus was crucified on a Friday.
- A Hebrew wedding was paid for by the father of the groom, not the father of the bride.
- Not understanding the difference between the Moral Law, Practical Law and the Sacrificial Law.
- Teaching that a person is saved by grace but he is kept saved by his good works and holy living.
- It was the same crowd on Palm Sunday that hailed Jesus as the Messiah and came back on the day of his arrest and cried to have him crucified.
THE TRUTH
If you want to be a true follower of Jesus, you must believe and practice the following:
- Salvation is by grace, not by works. Ephesians 2:8-10
- Every believer in Christ should be baptized as a believer, not including infants, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Matthew 28:18-20
- Every believer in Christ should be baptized in the Holy Spirit. Acts 2:4-8
- When there is a need, a believer in Christ should be able to cast out demons from people who are demonized. Luke 9:1-2
- When there is a need, pray for the sick. Luke 10:1-2; 9
- Share the Gospel at every opportunity. Matthew 28:18-20
- Forgive those who have hurt you. Matthew 6:14-15
- Live a holy life. 1 Peter 1:14-16
Do you have an ear to hear with?
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