Revival Blog

This was written by Loren Sanford. and posted at Openheaven.com. I have read some good stuff of his. I saw his parents in Toronto.

The following is an excerpt from an email I wrote to one of my church members who asked what we had been praying for in the previous Monday night prayer meeting. I felt moved to post it here as a prophetic call to a serious course correction among those of us who love to see the Spirit move.

“I have been calling us to a new simplicity and purity. What we have had is an intrusion of extra-biblical stuff posing as “revelation” and established fact that has no place in Scripture. The effect has been to create a division between two groups of people – the elite who have this special knowledge that they believe makes them mature or more gifted vs. those who don’t have that knowledge or who don’t have that attitude about themselves. The latter group simply lays down their gifts and eventually goes away.

I’m convinced this is the reason why churches where the Spirit is allowed to move are almost always small while the seeker sensitive churches tend to be large. The seeker sensitive churches are entirely accessible, simple and intelligible, untroubled by esoteric knowledge gained from extra-biblical sources. Charismatic churches have endless barriers of weirdness built from all that extra-biblical nonsense that passes for truth. People turn away from the barriers and go where things are simple and intelligible. So while they don’t allow for the things of the Spirit, the seeker sensitive churches grow and charismatic churches don’t.

It’s all so unnecessary. We can have both worlds, but we’re going to have to stop accepting as truth these things that have no basis in God’s Word. We’re going to have to stop making things so mysterious and complicated. For instance, never did Paul send in an advance prayer team to spiritually map a region, study its history and identify its territorial spirits so that the gospel would be successful there. Never did he do silly things like bury communion elements in the ground. Never does any human being in Scripture summon demonic powers into the heavenly court for judgment as I’ve heard done so often in recent days. Nowhere are we given authority to convene any heavenly court. Several times recently I’ve heard it stated as fact that if you’re a cancer survivor you have more authority to pray for cancer. Nonsense. We’re healed by his stripes, not by surviving the disease we’re praying to heal. These are just a few examples of the kind of thing that has infiltrated us and every other charismatic church I know.

It’s time to come back to the simplicity of doing things the way they are modeled for us in the Bible. We ask. God does. The words don’t need to be perfect. The revelation doesn’t have to be complete. We just have to talk to our Father.

So I’m calling us to a new purity of devotion and a simplicity of approach that makes it all so much more accessible to the average guy and that doesn’t create a spiritual elite that kind of puts everyone else down. Our average Joes and our timid ones have simply laid down their gifts and walked away.

But that’s changing. The more I’ve spoken this into us the more people have picked up their gifts and begun to walk in them. Sharing dreams. Visions. Words. Praying aloud. Having fun again. Growing again. I think we probably spent 45 minutes last Monday talking through all this – and some bit of time today as well. It’s healing our fellowship. God shows up just as He did before, but it’s sweeter and more restful. People feel safe to take the risk and move forward.”

Edited by Loren Sandford on 09/01/2005 at 9:52pm

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