Pentecost Starts Right Now

[HKHaugan]

Reluctance, indifference, apathy, guilt, pride, shame, withdrawal and denial; the spiritual droppings of fear that inhabit the heart's withdrawal from its created design to be consciously spiritual, personal and relational. They are the symptoms making up part of the fig leaf obsession covering our individual aloneness. They are buttressed by the invented conclusions we make about how we can best deal with our life in the world around us. Those conclusions come from our experience of pondering our pain and pleasure. They become the means by which we handle our emotional, physical and spiritual challenges. They influence the choices we make from one moment to the next. They are the attitudes we develop as defensive barriers against perceived threats to our identity, our physical well-being and our social survival. The Bible sums all that up in one word, strongholds.

Strongholds are the attitudes we build to justify how we think, relate and act. They are the unseen ideas that motivate how we want our physical presence to be evaluated and accepted. Stronghold is a good word to describe attitudes because they are really strong and they have a solid hold on us. They are self-sourced, self-rationalized and self-controlling. What makes them so pervasive and invasive is the fact that they are spiritual in substance. They are spiritually constructed because we are spiritual beings having the power to choose what we think and how we act. Much of what we do outside of God is emotionally based reaction to momentary needs. The focus is immediate solution instead of dependence on a long term spiritual value structure that embraces our emotionality.

The spiritual droppings of fear with which we began are the substance of those immediate reactions we undertake when faced with choice. Choice places us on the front line of judgment by others. The playground of 'what-if?' is treated like a minefield (What if I say or do the wrong thing?). By the way, what if is the devil's playground to get you separated from God so you think you are in control. We get lost in all the contingencies we come up with and usually discover they are more self-deceiving than self-protecting.

As an example, observing the whole political arena is an exhibition of coming up with choices that seek to please as many as possible. Whether or not the choices are true is irrelevant. What is relevant is survival at any cost. On a personal level all of us find ourselves under that gun every day. The temptation to withdraw is always there. We may think we have no leverage in comparison to the influence of social, professional and political leaders. But in fact we are more influential because having Jesus in our hearts and the Holy Spirit motivating us we become the unseen bedrock of what really goes on in any society.

Paul, in his second letter to Corinthian believers, reveals the nature of strongholds as pretensions, personal assumptions made apart from God and His Word (10:4-5). There he also directs our handling of them, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God and we take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.”

However, there is one stronghold we are to bury in our heart (e.g., Ps.27:1, Jer.16:19). The Lord Jesus is that stronghold, our rock and our salvation, the only stronghold we need. It's all about faith in Him for our every next moment, event and occasion wherever we are. When our mind, heart and spirit rest in Jesus it is the Holy Spirit who does the demolishing of our self-conceived strongholds which are those attitudes, opinions and conclusions I make apart from God and His Word. With Him I can take those thoughts captive. This is our personal Pentecost, our daily experience of the Lord working in us. John 16:5-15 is our bedrock Scripture for His work freeing us from our bondage to fear.