1,82 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Das E-Book Pentecost Rejected; And Its Effect On The Churches wird angeboten von Charles River Editors und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
revivalism; protestant; baptist
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 144
Ähnliche
PENTECOST REJECTED; AND ITS EFFECT ON THE CHURCHES
Aaron Merritt Hills
LACONIA PUBLISHERS
Thank you for reading. If you enjoy this book, please leave a review or connect with the author.
All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.
Copyright © 2016 by Aaron Merritt Hills
Interior design by Pronoun
Distribution by Pronoun
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Pentecost Rejected;
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1 PENTECOST REJECTED, AND THE EFFECT ON THE CHURCHES
Chapter 2 THE DENIAL OF THE HEART-CLEANSING WORK OF THE HOLY GHOST
Chapter 3 WHAT THIS PENTECOSTAL BLESSING IS, WHICH PEOPLE ARE REJECTING, AND HOW IT MAY BE RECEIVED OR OBTAINED
Chapter 4 PENTECOST RECEIVED RESULTS IN WALKING WITH GOD IN SEPARATION FROM THE WORLD
PENTECOST REJECTED;
AND ITS EFFECT ON THE CHURCHES
By
Aaron Merritt Hills
Author of
Life and Labors of Mary A. Woodbridge
Holiness and Power
Pentecostal Light
Food for Lambs
The Whosoever Gospel
Life of Charles G. Finney
A Life of Martin W. Knapp
Office of God’s Revivalist,
Mount of Blessings
Cincinnati, O.
DEDICATION
TO THE WATCHMEN ON THE towers of Zion who are troubled by the spiritual dearth of Israel; and to the seeking souls who are hungering and thirsting for God, and are eager to obtain all that Jesus has purchased for them with His blood, not yet knowing how great is their heritage in Christ,
—this book is lovingly and prayerfully dedicated, by
The Author.
PREFACE
WEARY WITH MULTIPLIED COLLEGE LABORS, and having just completed the biography, “A Hero of Faith and Prayer,” I read last May an article in one of our popular magazines, “The World’s Work,” giving a table that shows, from the published statistics of the leading Protestant denominations in America, that there is a lamentable dearth in Zion, and that a spiritual decline is creeping like a paralysis upon the Churches. That table I reproduce in the first chapter, with comments made by denominational leaders. It aroused my inmost soul like an alarm-bell in the night. The Spirit of God instantly moved me to write a book pointing out to the pastors and editors and denominational leaders the seat of the difficulty, the nature of the disease that is preying upon the vitals of the Church of Christ. Oftentimes these leaders are reached through the people, who get the mind of God first. The real cause of our leanness is: “The Neglect of Pentecost.” The followers of Christ have ceased all too generally to repair to the sacred chamber and seek with importuning prayer for the Baptism with the Holy Ghost. The holiness which that baptism would impart is largely wanting in Christian experience; and therefore the enduement of power is so generally withheld from our Churches. The result is this awful dearth in Zion, and the consequent famine of souls. To correct the evil by pointing to the inexhaustible fountain of grace, and leading back to the “Pentecost Neglected,” this book has been written, with the hope that God will use it to His glory.
Texas Holiness University,
Greenville, Texas,
August 12, 1902
CHAPTER 1 PENTECOST REJECTED, AND THE EFFECT ON THE CHURCHES
SO LONG AS THE EARLY Christian Church frequented the Pentecostal chamber, her career was one of unbroken triumphs. While her leaders were sanctified, and her preachers spoke their gospel messages with the power of the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, the march of her progress was steady and irresistible; nothing could stay her triumphant course. While the early Christians were taught to look forward to a second sanctifying work of grace by the baptism with the Holy Spirit as the normal Christian experience, their zeal was unflagging; their life was pure; their courage was perfect. The cross and the sword could not make them halt, the dungeons were bowers of bliss, and the roar of the hungry lions in the amphitheater was like a bugle-call to glory and honor and immortality. The Church, while it repeated and renewed its Pentecosts, was full of an irresistible energy, and moved to conquest against the powers of darkness, “fair as the moon, glorious as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners.”
It was not until the Pentecostal chamber was forsaken, and its experiences discounted, and the leaders of the Church began to trust to the natural rather than the supernatural, and substituted oratory, and scholarship, and genius, and Pagan pomp, and governmental friendship for the baptism with the Holy Spirit and the Enduement of Power, that the Church fell.
History repeats itself. As Pentecost was rejected then, so it is being rejected today. Not very long ago the denominations were so widely separated that one of them might possess a great truth, and the leaders and earnest workers of the other never hear of it. It is not so much so today. Great truths overleap denominational bounds, and spread everywhere. Once the Methodists were almost alone in their advocacy of the great truth of holiness or sanctification as the privilege of all believers, a second work of grace subsequent to regeneration, a heart-cleansing wrought by the baptism with the Holy Ghost. John Wesley declared that this was the great truth which the Methodist Church was chiefly raised up to propagate. But this truth has crossed the bounds of that denomination now, and finds its advocates in nearly every great Church in the land. The list of the writers and authors in the various Churches is really too long to give. Hence it has come about that very much light on the subject of holiness has shot through the darkness everywhere, and the leaders of the denominations, and the more intelligent and widely read, know not a little about this great truth of sanctification.
Moreover, holiness bands and holiness campmeetings are becoming so numerous as to be at everybody’s door. A goodly number of well-edited holiness papers and magazines also are now being published and well circulated everywhere. Thus a very considerable fraction of Christian people, it they do not have clear and accurate views of the Pentecostal blessing, at least do know that holiness, sanctification, that something discussed so much in the Bible, has also many advocates, and teachers, and witnesses among living men. A subject which God so strenuously pushes to the front in His Revelation challenges attention. God has honored the preaching of the Pentecostal blessing, the gospel of full salvation, with such displays of power, such demonstrations of the Holy Spirit, that all thoughtful people have rational grounds for believing that there is something in this holiness movement besides gush, hypocrisy, and fanaticism. The doctrine of a possible deliverance from sin through the baptism with the Spirit has earned respectful attention rather than contemptuous rejection. Light has come; and its reception in many quarters and by many minds has been scarcely more hospitable than that which was given to Him who was the Light of the world. The Man of Calvary “came to His own, and His own received Him not:” likewise His representative, the Holy Spirit, has come to His own, the Church of our day, offering Pentecostal blessing and power; and He in turn is being frequently and widely rejected. Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But, in the case of not a few today, they do know what they do. They are intelligently, knowingly, coolly, consciously, deliberately rejecting the Holy Spirit’s Pentecost.
The mighty Finney once said something like this: “There was a time when ministers were not enlightened on some great evils of the day, and God used them, notwithstanding their neglect of some great moral reforms; but now light has come, and duty is plain, and God will not greatly use those who refuse to walk in the light and do their duty. Show me, if you can, one minister who neglects the temperance reform, and then is blessed with revivals!” I believe, if Finney were with us today, and were preaching with the old-time fidelity and power, he would say in the same spirit: There was a time when ministers did not know that it was their privilege to receive the baptism with the Spirit in sanctifying power; but now light has come, and God will not greatly use and bless with revivals those who refuse to investigate and walk in the light and seek their Pentecost. Show me a minister who has knowingly rejected this blessing to whom God is giving many souls!
The sad signs of the times in the religious sky are unmistakable. Hon. H. K. Carroll, the Government statistician, says: “It is evident from the statistics that all the Churches are passing through a period of unusual dullness. As a whole, they are making progress but very slowly. In finances they are thriving with the country; but the results of religious work are discouraging.”
Earnest Christians ought to hide their faces in shame, when an able and friendly secular magazine, “The World’s Work,” begins a grave article as follows in this May, 1902: “We often hear that the day of the Christian Church is fast waning, and that it will cease to exist save as a relic of the past; and during the past two or three years, in representative gatherings of the leading Christian denominations, the questions of waning interest and declining strength have been discussed in all seriousness and sadness over and over again. From all parts of the country, and from other countries, too, come reports of empty pews, a decrease of Sunday School scholars, depleted treasuries, and a waning of religious enthusiasm.”
Another magazine headed an article last year as follows: “The times spiritually are in a twist, and knotted—gotten so by the tremendous force of secularized religion and false philosophy. No wonder that the world for which Christ died is perishing; no wonder that it is hard, perhaps was never so hard before, for any one to ‘stand fast in the faith delivered once for all to the saints.’ Instead of bravely, but lovingly and with emphasis, proclaiming those “life and death” truths, “Sin and Salvation,” which are, in the last analysis, the only essential and fundamental factors in preaching, the American pulpit, in many important centers of population and influence, is seemingly content to deal out to soul-hungry men and women, as sermons, stale but adroit decoctions of unfaith and misfaith in the integrity of the Old Book, mixed with moral platitudes, and glossed with conservatism, which is but another name for compromising surrender of the gospel verities, counterfeiting the truth for popularity and pay.”
The bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church have a wide and comprehensive outlook, and continually hold their fingers on the pulse of Church-life. They say: “The gulf between capital and labor threatens the Church on both sides, from that of the rich and that of the poor. The submerged tenth has been allowed to pass out to other agencies, the Church seeming to have gotten above its business. The Church has suffered on its borders from the thin speculations and vagaries of Christian Science. The powerful campmeetings of the olden time have substantially passed away, and the home has been demoralized by light literature and the amusement craze. The heart-searching that once prepared the way for the great work of revival is often avoided as the fanaticism of a past age, and revivals themselves often ridiculed as the ephemeral phenomena of shallow natures. In some sections criticism is extended to everything sacred, until the children are robbed of their respect for the Church, and the Church robbed of their presence. Higher criticism attacks the Bible itself, denying its supernatural character and Divine authority. While this higher criticism is limited to a few centers, yet its influence is filtered down through much of our literature, taking the authority out of the teaching and the power out of the preaching. The Bible loses its Divine authority; sin loses its fatal sting; the law loses its sanction; and God’s government is reduced to a few rules concerning aesthetics. These are among the principal symptoms indicating the famine that enervates our Zion. We are retreating when we should advance at double-quick to keep abreast of the rushing events of our time.
“We have one dire disease—Spiritual famine—lack of the witness of the Spirit, lack of personal experience, lack of spiritual power; and the symptoms are many and various, but the disease is one... The moral and spiritual forces, necessary for the building of great and Christlike characters have been sidetracked by the dominant forces of worldliness and selfishness.” (The Pentecost Century, September, 1901)
In my reading I have come across the following statements, which, I presume, are correct, and which sadly corroborate the testimony of the bishops. In 1897, in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, there was only one convert to ninety-four members; in the Methodist Episcopal Church, North, but one to one hundred and thirty-one. In 1898, I have read (I hope it is a mistake) that the Methodist Episcopal Churches, North and South, with an aggregate of four million members, sustained an aggregate loss of eight thousand members; and that, in 1899, the Methodist Episcopal Church, North, lost twenty-one thousand, nine hundred and four members. Another authority says there was an actual loss of nearly four thousand. It seems incredible, and does not quite tally with other figures yet to be given. But all statements are sad and alarming. For instance, a paper of last week, (May 22, 1902,) informs us that the eleven thousand preachers of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for the last four years have not averaged annually one convert apiece.
It almost makes one’s heart stop beating to think that ministers, who are the spiritual descendants of Wesley, Coke, Asbury, McKendree, and those fathers of Methodism who swept over the land like cyclones of Holy Spirit power, are now reduced to such appalling barrenness.
But the Methodists are by no means alone in this trouble. Dr. Burrows, of the Regular Baptist Church, South, says: “The year 1899 has not been noted for any great increase in membership of the Churches.” Dr. Dunning, speaking for the Congregational Church, says: “The denomination is making little progress temporarily, and even in some respects is retrograding.” “This denomination fell from a gain of nineteen thousand in 1895 to less than two thousand in 1900. Never in its history has there been such a falling off as has occurred since 1894.” Dr. Beard, in an address a year ago, said of the Congregational Year-Book for 1900: “There is not a cheerful page in it. In it we learn that through the efforts of six hundred and thirty thousand members, with a cash outlay of $7,000,000 for home expenses, there was received during the twelve months a net addition of only 1,640. In Massachusetts, with a membership of one hundred and thirteen thousand, and a cash outlay for home expenses of $1,630,000, there was during that year an actual loss of five hundred and eighty-eight members. At the National Council lately held in Portland, Me., there was reported a net loss for the triennial period of thirty-two thousand one hundred and three members in the Christian Endeavor Societies.”
Dr. Roberts says: The progress of the Presbyterian Church is not so rapid as in former years. The real reason appears to be the lack of spiritual vigor in all the Christian denominations.”
All denominations, both those that are esteemed liberal and those also that are rigidly orthodox, except those that are re-enforced by immigration, show a steady and alarming decline in the rate of increase, as the following table shows:
Think of those twenty-one branches of the Christian Church, comprising the bulk and power of the Protestantism of the United States, having their net gain decrease from nine hundred and five thousand in 1895 to two hundred and thirty-seven thousand in 1900! What could be more humiliating or more sad? It is enough to cause mourning in earth and heaven, and to wake up a jubilee in hell!
