“Jesus replied, ‘Your mistake is that you don’t know the Scriptures,

and you don’t know the power of God’.” MK 12:24 NLT

Jesus made it very clear to His disciples that only those who know both the scriptures and the power of God are living according to His design and purpose. It is not either/or, but both/and. If we are completely honest with ourselves, we would have to say that we have not handled this tension very well. Christians have often had to choose between one camp or the other. Will I gravitate towards the “Word-based” group or the “Holy Ghost, power people”?

Beloved, can we decide once and for all that we are for both?! We do not have to sacrifice one for the other! We CAN have our cake and eat it too. We CAN be scholars and yet wake up speaking in tongues. We CAN have a ministry that witnesses healing and deliverance and not bow to the altar of “strange” fire.

Our church has begun a movement called #365, which mobilizes people to read the Bible through in a year. When I consider how Biblically ignorant this generation of Christians is, I say Hallelujah. This generation has no excuse for ignorance, for we have access to more knowledge and tools and education than any generation before us. I once gave a New Testament to a man in China on Monday. He came back on Friday to return it to me. I was deeply disappointed, so I asked him why he was giving it back. He simply said, “because I have finished it.” God have mercy! He wasn’t even a believer, and yet there as many, many Christians who have believed in the Lord for years and have never even finished the New Testament, much less the whole Bible.

I have been reading about Revival history, of movements, of revivalists, for the last several months. There are many features which characterized every past revival, and without fail one of them was an all-consuming passion for the Word of God. I just listened to the testimony of former Muslim Nabeel Qureshi say that for the first 20 years of his life whenever he got into debates with Christians, none could show him from the Word of God where Jesus said that he was the Son of God. Is it any wonder that people will follow after the hypergrace teachings of a Joseph Prince, or fall prey to universal salvation, or no hell, or other unbiblical yet popular opinions. We must know the Scriptures. Jesus said so.

One of the most striking facts of past moves of God is the inability to strike this balance, or to sustain it over time. An example of this can be taken from a mighty outpouring of God’s Spirit around 1800 in the newly established states of Kentucky and Tennessee. So powerful were these “camp meetings” held for days leading to weeks in the open air of these frontier regions that an eyewitness account wrote:

“At one time I saw at least five hundred swept down in a moment, as if a battery of a thousand guns had been opened upon them, and then immediately followed shrieks and shouts that rent the very heavens.”

One of these preachers, Barton Stone, wrote detailed accounts of the manifestations of the Spirit’s power. I cannot highlight the detailed descriptions of each here, but he called the manifestations “exercises” which were common occurrences. They were:

* The Falling Exercise
* The Jerks
* The Dancing Exercise
* The Barking Exercise
* The Laughing Exercise
* The Singing (i.e. in the Spirit) Exercise

Barton Stone went on to become the founder of The Church of Christ denomination, which no longer reads the records of these things by their own founder, nor do they encourage or embrace them when they come. They have run to the “Word” camp and found “safety” there.

We must also know the power of God. Most of you reading this know something of the power of God. Granted, we might know more ABOUT the power of God than we actually know the power itself, but at least we identify with this camp. While that is a good start, many of us are more spectators than we are actually participants. We say we know the power because we listen to Bill Johnson, or because we fell on the floor at a Rodney Howard-Brown meeting. I’m just now reading the book God’s Generals: The Revivalists, and I am under deep conviction because I am measuring myself against those who didn’t just plug into a toy car battery. These men and women were wired to the state power station!

I want more. I want more Word. I want more power. I want more of Jesus. I want more of the Holy Spirit. Pentecostals in the early days disdained the heady, proud, and powerless preachers of the traditional churches of their day, and in doing so threw the baby out with the bathwater, rejecting theology and advanced education. Thank God that stigma is past, and we now have some of the world’s most learned Biblical scholars and historians who come from the “power-based” camp. This is as it should be, for in these last days, as the winds of Revival are stirring again, these words of Jesus will be staring us right in the face.

Beloved, let us be a people of the Word, and a people of power. Let us be the generation who will not only experience the power of God, but who will witness a sustained move of God worthy of the Master who gave His life to redeem a Bride who is without “mistake”, yes, without spot of wrinkle. Amen.