Core values — Passionate Proclamation
By George O. Wood
Excerpts from General Superintendent George O. Wood’s book, Core Values, will be featured in The Council Today. The complete book is available from GPH.
From the earliest days of our Fellowship, the Assemblies of God has proclaimed Jesus Christ as Savior, Baptizer in the Spirit, Healer and soon-coming King. Proclaiming Christ is the reason we exist. When we talk about the Holy Spirit baptism, when we talk about spiritual gifts, when we talk about fruit of the Spirit, when we talk about any other aspect of the Christian life—we are talking about means to an end. But the end, the reason we exist, is to passionately proclaim Jesus Christ.
JESUS, OUR SAVIOR
There are a lot of people in this world who don’t have a sense of being lost, but God knows they are lost. And the church must know they are lost—lost in the sense they are distant from God, ignorant of God and unlike God.
The church cannot be passive about the lost. Look at the Parable of the Good Shepherd. Ask yourself what church wouldn’t be satisfied if 99 percent of its community were in the fold. But the Good Shepherd drops everything to go after the 1 percent that is not in the fold.
And the reality is, what church wouldn’t be satisfied if 50 percent of the community were in the fold, or even 10 percent? If we as a church don’t share that passion Christ has for the lost, we have missed our reason for being. The lost are why Jesus came to this world. And we must remember that each of us is a beneficiary of His passion for lost souls. He came, seeking to save the lost. Those of us who have been rescued must in turn, by word and deed, proclaim that saving gospel to dying souls around us.
JESUS, OUR BAPTIZER
By word and deed we must proclaim Jesus is the Baptizer in the Holy Spirit. If there is a word that is a good synonym for the word “baptize,” it is the word “overwhelm.” The word baptizo in Greek always means to be immersed. And to be immersed in the Spirit, to be overwhelmed in the Spirit, is part of what this Fellowship has always been about.
Spirit baptism is all about empowerment to take the gospel to an unsaved world. You hear a lot about Spirit baptism, but you don’t see much Spirit empowerment.
If the younger generation does not see in the older generation a connection between Spirit baptism, Spirit empowerment and Spirit fruitfulness, that new generation is going to turn the whole thing off. We must practice a full-orb view of spirituality and the work of the Spirit in our lives. If we only focus on initial experience and don’t have substantial evidence, it’s going to backfire on us.
I wrote an article sometime ago, a ministers letter, on the whole issue of substantial evidence. I see a lot of young people having problems with our Pentecostal distinctive because we in the older generation have focused so much on initial evidence and our young people are looking for substantial evidence of the Spirit’s work. It’s not a question of either/or, it’s got to be both/and.
JESUS, OUR HEALER
We must passionately proclaim Jesus as Healer. He not only heals our bodies, He also heals our emotions and our relationships.
A lot of healing is needed in this broken world. Not a Sunday goes by in our churches but there are people who are broken in spirit. Jesus came to heal, and the church ought to be a healing place. That is why conflict, argument and division in the church are so devastating. When the saints are at odds with one another, it acts like a blockage in the heart, keeping the healthy life of Jesus from flowing.
But Jesus’ ability to heal a broken heart must never be used as a theological cop-out to deny His ability to heal physically. The most compelling proofs of that truth in my life have come through my family. I’m probably a Christian today in part because of those healing miracles.
My sister went to Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, wearing thick lenses in her glasses. I believe she only had about 20 percent vision in one eye and 50 percent in the other. In the Assemblies of God of the 1940s and 1950s, people would pray for you to be healed if you wore eyeglasses. It was not taken casually.
Doris had had it with people praying for her. During a revival at CBC her freshman year, she was kneeling at the altar and she began to have a vision of Christ on the cross. A voice inside her said, Doris, take off your glasses. She ignored it. Doris, the prompting came again, take off your glasses.
Doris resisted. She had been prayed for so many times. But the vision of Christ on the cross persisted.
Doris, she sensed in her heart a third time, take off your glasses.
My sister reached up, took off her glasses and threw them across the platform. But in her vision what she actually was doing was reaching her hand up to take blood from the cross. She put the blood on her eyes. When she came out of the vision she could see perfectly.
I was 10 years old when Doris came home that Christmas from her first semester at Bible school. The change in her was absolutely phenomenal. It not only changed her eyes, but it changed her whole personality.
Often, when I’m talking about healing before an audience I’ll ask for a show of hands of how many can give testimony that at one time or another they have been healed. It never ceases to amaze me the percentage of hands that go up.
We proclaim Jesus as Healer—Healer of body, mind, soul and spirit.
JESUS, OUR SOON-COMING KING
All that Jesus is to us in this life only hints at what He will be to us throughout eternity. At the same time, everything He is doing among us in the here and now is vitally connected to what He wants to accomplish in those endless future ages. Followers of Christ must discern a balance between anticipating Jesus’ return that heralds those future ages and living each day in the present to the fullest.
You often hear people who take an interest in prophecy trying to discern if this generation is truly the last before Jesus returns. I take a more expansive view of prophecy. I believe this is the last generation because it’s the only generation I have. Whether the Lord comes or I die, for me this is the end of time, the last generation.
We need to put the date setting and the speculative scenarios aside and get to the core of the doctrine. At its core, the New Testament simply says, “Jesus is coming.” It is an undeniable reality. It’s as real as gravity.
When Jesus says in Revelation that He is coming quickly or soon, depending on the translation, it’s helpful to go back to the Greek expression. The Greek word is really a measurement of speed at the point of the event. Jesus is promising us, “When I come, it will be all at once. It will be suddenly.”