Our first guest speaker came to large group today! Pastor James Lee, who recently founded a church in San Marino, was passing out fliers on campus a few weeks ago when he ran into Peter Ngo. Peter gave me his flier and I contacted him about speaking at large group. We met over lunch and this talk is a result of that discussion and related to a book he's written. (I bought a copy from him; ask me if you want to borrow.) These are the notes that I took.
Pastor James was ordained in a conservative Presbyterian church and went to a conservative seminary, so it wasn't until he went on a sabbatical to Kona, Hawaii, at a YWAM Discipleship Training School that he was exposed to the more charismatic notion of God speaking to him. Right when he landed, he felt a burning from the Holy Spirit of the need to confess his sins. He took his wife aside, and they'd been married for 13 years but he still had a lot of unconfessed, hidden sin. He confessed it to her and she forgave him completely, something he was afraid wouldn't happen. When the Holy Spirit convicts you, it breaks down any barriers. For the next two weeks, he was confessing more and more sins to his wife, and she started confessing to him, too. The Holy Spirit is absolutely holy; he convicts us of all of our sins.
James can say this was the Holy Spirit in hindsight because it was fruitful. You can never know that something was the Holy Spirit except for its fruit. After confessing to his wife all of these things, he was convicted by the Spirit to reveal to his 13-year-old son that he had been conceived out of wedlock, and that some of his relatives had wished that he had not been born. Afterwards, James' son prayed for them and asked that this particular sin stop in his generation, not knowing that it had been a problem in the previous two as well. He also told them that as long as he could remember, he had an inner voice that was telling him that he shouldn't exist. There are also harmful voices. Fortunately, you can immediately recognize a voice as not from God if it is against life (John 10:10).
With that as introduction, James jumped into a biblical defense of hearing from God today. He started in Jeremiah 31:33-34. This is describing the new covenant, how God will write his will on the hearts of not just the prophets but the average believers. In Numbers 11:26-30, Moses also prophesied that all of God's people would be prophets, which would be fulfilled in Acts 2, as Peter would preach in Acts 3. We are all prophets, priests and kings, after Jesus who was the true prophet, priest and king. One of the hallmarks of the Reformation was that we can communicate directly to God, that God will hear us individually. James asked, why not the other way? Why can't we hear from God individually?
There is a systematic theology called cessationism that says that God speaking ended with the death of the last apostle, John, in 95 AD. There is one thing that has ended: The canon of Scripture has been completed. Everything that comes to us today must be subordinate to the Scriptures, which are perfect. Moreover, there's nowhere in the Bible that says that prophecy and such things will cease, save one passage: 1 Corinthians 13:8-13. Here we learn that prophecy, tongues, and supernatural knowledge will all cease when the "perfection" comes. We might think that this word for perfection refers to the completion of the canon, but everywhere it's used in the Bible, it's referring to moral perfection like Jesus had. No, this is referring to the Second Coming, when we will all be made morally perfect.
When you are discerning the voice or will of God, test it. This is what 1 Thessalonians 5:20-21 says to do. In his book, James gives several methods of confirmation such as independent confirmation and fulfillment. But this is best illustrated through stories...
In Hawaii, James also received the call to go to China. He and his family moved there, but he was told by the Spirit that he should wait for an opportunity to come to him. He taught English and was a chaplain for several English teacher/missionaries there but wasn't involved in any ministry himself. Then about a year into it all, a church pastor there asked how they could reach the university students. James knew why the university students weren't going there because he was talking to them: The worship was old-fashioned, the congregation was mostly farmers, the teaching wasn't relevant, etc. He suggested that they start up an English-speaking service and gathered his teacher/missionaries together into a worship team, a drama team, relevant teaching, and they opened the doors to an English-speaking service there just two weeks later. About a hundred students came and multiple ones were saved every Sunday.
Then the SARS epidemic came and shut everything down. The government disallowed churches from meeting and there was no travel anywhere. So James decided to start a revival on the campus itself. He knew that he would have to get it approved by the Communist party secretary in charge of the school, but he knew that if you had the right connections and money you could get something like this approved. Sure enough, it was approved and they started an outreach to students that looked like a rock band. The students were a captive audience -- they couldn't leave the campus -- and they saw hundreds of them come out and meet the Lord.
Right when all of this was going on, though, James received a Word from a brother saying to look at Jeremiah 24, where God is calling his people back to their homeland. Then his wife also received Zachariah 10, with a similar tone. They read this as independent confirmation that God was telling them to leave China and return to the US. But there was a problem: They had already agreed to teach English there for a year. James asked the non-Christian university founder if he could back out of the disagreement. If something is truly from the Lord and related to a particular body of Christ, the leadership will confirm it. Love is more important than hearing, unity than vision, and character than charisma. If the leadership disagrees, submit for the sake of unity.
But the university founder agreed to let them go. So in the middle of the revival, in the middle of the SARS epidemic, they boarded a plane to California via Beijing. There was no one in the airports and they kept pointing IR guns at your forehead to see if you had SARS. And you really didn't want to have a fever and get sent to the SARS hospital, where you might actually get sick. But they made it back to California. Two days later, they heard from a friend that the government had found out about the revival on the campus and had been looking for the person who had started the whole thing. God had plucked James out of China at just the right moment. Fortunately, no one was implicated and he was able to return a few months later.
God still does speak today. Yan Choi commented that that is a peculiar reading of those two passages, taking them completely out of context. James agrees; seminary professors would be throwing up their hands. But he saw the fruit of it in that he avoided being captured. That's also how a lot of the New Testament works. Matthew in particular seems to quote the Old Testament without concern for context or even similitude (e.g. Matthew 2:23).
Alright! Those are all of my notes. We didn't have much of a chance for a discussion afterwards, and we might be extending large group to allow for more of that. Next up: I'll be talking again, this time about faith. My title is: Faith, Not Blind Faith.
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