Wade in the Wonder: How Words can Fail Us
Me: [singing the melody of a worship song] “Tongues of fire...”
Them: You know it wasn’t actual fire at the Pentecost, right?
Have y’all ever met someone (or been that person) just chomping at the bit to derail the flow of a spiritual moment in the name of exegetical deep dives over diction? I’m not talking about the ones who coax a conversation toward God-glorifying, Biblical foundations to further edify the movement of a Spirit-led discussion.
I’m talking about the theological scholars who have just full-on lost the wonder in the linguistics. Rather than be transformed by the Holy Spirit through a message, they get caught up on diction and syntax. They pull us aside after we’ve publicly shared our testimony because we could’ve used a better analogy to describe God’s redeeming love for us. They make us question our whole salvation because we misinterpreted a verse in Psalm 37. They listen to a vulnerable, 2-minute excerpt of a 30-minute sermon from a “popular” pastor and deem them a forever false teacher thereafter. And in exasperation we wonder if they’d be one of those people who tells the worker at a bistro the proper way to lay the cheese triangles on their sandwich (or is that just me?).
I use these specific examples (except the bistro one) because I’ve witnessed how these tactics are more harmful than helpful when it comes to a fellowship of Christians. Look, I am all for ensuring that we reject false teachings. They are harmful in our spiritual walk and prevent us from truly knowing God’s heart and having one like His. However, we should also be aware of the hinderance that our over-analytical and sometimes hypercritical spirits can have on our individual and collective, Spirit-guided journeys. Truth: God is God. God is Jesus. God is the Holy Spirit. The Bible is the Word of God. When we fail to acknowledge the sovereignty of all of these factors (someone is going to burn me for using the word “factors,” I just know it), that imbalance of understanding manifests in our words and actions.
What does that imbalance look like practically? One way is that we devalue the power of the Holy Spirit. Example: we devalue the work of the Spirit when we think it is limited by one fallible man’s teachings. It is not. There’s one pastor whose sermons I’ve come to learn a lot from over the last several years. And I know that the growth that the messages have encouraged is not illegitimate, just because some people disagree with how he preaches. In a similar instance, I’ve witnessed a friend completely unmoved by one sermon while others leave with their lives thoroughly shifted, after hearing the same exact words.
The same goes for music. Christians call for boycotts of songs because they don’t agree with a specific adjective describing God’s love. To a greater point, they come to find that they are at odds with certain practices of the worship band’s home church, and now renounce the gamut of work from that band. I mean, can we really say, that the upward glorification of God from their artful words, over all of these years that we’ve sung them, was illegitimate because of shaky theology we just realized existed from an article we read last night?
No, not always. Because where God is glorified, where our hearts are united in love for and obedience to God over anything else, there is where the Holy Spirit indwells. The Spirit will reveal God’s heart and mind to us. For our entire lives, we will continue to get to know God more and more (hopefully) but will never fully know Him. Our experience of God will change. We will be wrong at times. We will be as right as humanly possible at other times. But that does not de-legitimize journey that gets us to that point. Seeking and knowing the truth through studying of the Bible and archeologic context is important. In fact, I love and encourage such. But we have to be careful not to lose the wonder in the linguistics. That is what it means to let the Spirit lead. We make our thoughts, knowledge, and actions subject to God first and welcome the refreshing breath of the Holy Spirit who will move in ways sometimes beyond our understanding.
In love and veritas,
Chioma