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Originally Posted by OBW
I'm not sure that it was entirely or always the Spirit that was leading in those days. A lot of the time it was just like some of those Pentecostal groups getting "high" on the S/spirit..
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How much of it was self and how much was God? "Look, everybody; I can scream louder than you all!"
But I still think that screaming the name of Jesus sure beat doing shots of Jack Daniels down at the pool hall. That's why I don't mind the Pentecostal experience -- maybe it can help to transfer people from the darkness to the light. Remember all the screaming and crying and rolling around when the demons were ejected (Luke 4:33-36; Mark 1:23,24, etc)? We had our own local church variation on that. Crying out is not bad.
And consider how many came to Jesus with guile.
'Look, an Israelite in whom there is no guile!' presupposes that the others had it. They were sons of Jacob the schemer indeed. And so we all were: that's one of the points of the redemptive story. The Samaritan woman at the well, with her schemes and pre-occupations. And Martha:
"Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset over many things." Yet they all got saved.
Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
It was already a mess. Just a different looking mess. One that we liked instead of one we didn't like.
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Yes; that is perhaps the problem in a nutshell. We were condemning someone else's mess and asking God to forgive our own. And we should already know how that turns out -- Jesus made it abundantly clear.