Featured My Life Journey through the Lens of My Charismatic Experiences

AustinC: "Utterly false. Any Mormon who reads the 66 books of the Bible will see that the God of Scripture is vastly different from the god of Joseph Smith. Feelings do not define truth. Facts fuel our feelings, but feelings never fuel facts. If you fuel yourself on feelings you will quickly burn out and stop functioning by faith."

AustinC: "You entirely miss Paul's point. Paul is addressing Christians who are being taught that they need to live their lives by the law, not by grace. They are being told that they can only experience God through the law, not by grace through faith.
Deadworm, your demand for an experience in order for God to be relevant in a person's life is simply a twisted variation of the Judaizers works experience. You are preaching a message that Paul would call "Anathema."

Unlike you, I've read non-biblical sources on the Judaizing Christians and know how they defend their version of the faith. But you miss the point: it is precisely because the Galatians are drawn away from life in the Spirit that they succumb to the demand for circumcision. Paul's challenge is the remind them of their initial "experience" of the Spirit that was accompanied by "miracles" (3:3-5), experiences which are a standard expectation in Paul's conversion theology. Though such experiences may vary, Paul routinely insists that claims to have the Spirit must be backed by an experience of divine power. Readers will notice how Baptists have ducked the Pauline texts quoted that demonstrate this point. Baptist claims based on cerebral faith without an experience of power to have the Spirit can amount to wishful thinking no different than Mormon claims of inner confirmation of the truth of Mormonism. God is sovereign and the Holy Spirit doesn't jump just because Baptists crack their whip!
This thread is need to demonstrate further what a truly charismatic life in the Spirit can be like.

 

(5) I was Best Man in Dallas's wedding and after the honeymoon, he invited me over for dinner, after which the 3 of us went down to his basement to play table tennis. To explain what happened next, you need to understand how speaking in tongues can be a gateway to other gifts of the Spirit. The tongues speaker has no control over the flow of his words, something that is also true of praying in the Spirit in one's own language.

Dallas announced that he was going deer hunting with friends in northern Manitoba the next day during the week between Christmas and New Years. I suddenly found myself involuntarily saying, "Don't! Because if you do, you will die!" Dallas was evangelical, but not Pentecostal by experience, and he reacted angrily: "You're one of those anti-hunting people, aren't you?" I replied, "No, I don't hunt myself, but I have nothing against hunting, but the danger you're facing has just been revealed to me." Dallas doubled down on his belief in my anti-hunting stance; so the evening ended badly.

When I found myself prophesying Dallas's death, I seemed to see his skeleton as I spoke. Of course, I had wanted that evening to be a pleasant affirming encounter with friends, but the Holy Spirit had other plans. I found out at our church's New Year's Eve service that my prophecy had come true. Dallas was riding his snowmobile in the wilderness of northern Manitoba when he hit a bump that caused his rifle to discharge into his shoulder. He bled to death before his friends could get him to a doctor.

(6) Ted, Frank, and I use to have lunch at the Princeton Seminary refectory. Ted was a very bright young scholar with a great sense of humor who had just been accepted into the doctoral program in New Testament at Cambridge University in England. I wanted to apply there too, so I went to Ted's dorm room to ask to borrow his Cambridge catalogue. When he gave me the catalogue, I suddenly sensed his skeleton and somehow knew he was about to be killed. This thought was so distressing, I struggled to put it out of my mind. When I returned to Princeton from Christmas vacation, I learned that Frank and Ted had planned to drive to Ohio, where they both lived. But Frank drove too fast on the freeway onramp and hit a telephone pole. Frank broke his arm, but Ted was killed, just as my prophetic premonition had alerted me.

I have had many such prophetic premonitions and will share some joyful and edifying examples in this thread. Here is the important point for verification: none of my premonitions have ever failed to come true! They are truly supernatural because God allows me to get outside of time and see the future.

 

NOTE THAT SALTY HAS CLOSED DOWN MY TONGUES THREAD ON THE GROUNDS THAT POINTS HAVE BEEN REPEATED. BUT I HAVE REPEATED THESE POINTS BECAUSE THEIR BIBLICAL BASIS HAS BEEN DUCKED AND THIS IS A DEBATE FORUM. MORE IMPORTANTLY, I HAVE YET TO MAKE SOME OF THE MOST IMPORTANT EXEGETICAL POINTS! AS EXPECTED, THIS ILLUSTRATES THE BAPTIST POLICY, "WHEN YOU ARE BEING REFUTED, CENSURE!"