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Text to Shoemaker Sermon Charismatic People
3240-LP Side 2, Band I CHARISMATIC PEOPLE Samuel M. Shoemaker What do you think is the greatest thing that can ever happen to a human being in this wor;d? You might say it's to find a great human love and enjoy it all your life. You might say it's to find a great task suited to your abilities and give yourself td it with all your powers. You might even say it is to experience a great spiritual awakening and conversion. But I think there's something beyond any of these. And I think that it has become increasingly a charismatic person. Now what does that mean? The word "charis" in the New Testament is b@st rendered as grace. The word "charisma" is best understood as a gift of grace--a gift that is either stirred up or conferred by the coming into the life of grace. And grace--what is that? Grace technically means the merciful and unmerited kindness of God, especially as regards forgiveness and sal- vation, but it's Zome to mean the whole field of God's relation to us. His constant influence upon us. The helps of His Holy Spirit in daily life. A charismatic person then is one over whose whole life grace is poured out. And this grace affects other people. It may manifest itself in some special gift like healing or spiritual influ- ence, but the particular gift is often almost lost sight of in the consciousness that we are here in the presence of something which blesses and heals and restores and gives hope and that this has come to be usually associated with the wonderful work of the Holy Spirit. Now don't confuse this with being theologically or even morally upright and correct. We've all seen people who be- lieve all the right things and follow the straight and narrow and they're as far from being charis- matic as if they'd been full-fledged pagans. The good-will people, the Sermon on the Mount and Golden Rule people, may or may not be a charismatic people. How easily do some of these mor- ally fine and theologically correct people become sensorious and narrow, giving off nothing of the abounding grace and love and forgiveness of God--driving away the healing and transforming and reconciling powers which men need more than they need bread or sleep. You can't will your- self into being a charismatic person, although you can use your will to keep yourself from being such a person because it requires your consent. There is always a great overall mercifulness about charismatic people. Self -righteousness cannot lie down in the same skin with this grace. What causes this then? Is it a matter of personality? Yes and no. A charismatic person is always a human personality in touch with the Holy Spirit. This needn't be a brilliant personality. Intellectual brilliance can be a deadly enemy and rival of the charismatic, though it's not always so. This need not be a bright and shining personality to be- gin with. Rather does the charism bring brightness and shininess into the otherwise perhaps drab and commonplace personality. The human personality here involved must be given rather than gifted- -dedicated rather than highly endowed. But this dedication must not be of the strain- ing, effortful variety, but rather of the gay and nonchalant variety after the fashion of St. Fran- cis of Assisi, who must have been one of the most charismatic men that ever lived, spreading the glamour of the grace of God wherever he went. And by the way as I wrote that down, I al- most spelled that 11h11 in the "he" with a capital 111411, so radiant and Christlike was St. Francis. It appears that God has hidden gifts within each one of us which are meant to be stirred up when the Holy Spirit touches them or else they're gifts that He brings with Him when He comes. It is this yielded, pliable, flexible, unselfconscious human personality, given over in a glad kind of surrender to the Holy Spirit that produces a charismatic person. This can never be resident permanently in anybody like the color of his eyes or the length of his legs. This is as dependent on current contact with the Holy Spirit as the light over your desk is dependent upon the imme- diate current of electricity. A given personality of almost any old kind, plus the Holy Spirit sought and found again and again, this is what seems to create the charismatic personality. I must say some more of what surrender to the Holy Spirit means in this case. Forget trying to be good or believe all the right things for the moment. Realize that God wants to come to you in abundance of pardon and mercy and grace so that you are healed and whole again. That He wants to pour out through you some of this grace to other people, especially in the ways associated with Charismatic People--Page 2 your particular personality. Now we can prevent this from happening by refusing to be a fool for Christ's sake or to take a chance or to look a little absurd or to risk a failure--say at making a simple talk about what our faith means to us. Charismatic people keep seeking their steering directions from the Holy Spirit--not from the opinions of men. All kinds of fear are the deadly enemies of the charismatic and we must let the charismatic drive them out or they will drive out the charismatic. There can be no co- existence between these two. The willingness to be used--to be an agent or instrument, to spread this radiance and joy rather than to try to accumulate it to ourselves, is the one sure way to find it. I suspect we mustn't look too directly at the gift at all or be too much concerned with whether we have it or we don't have it. If we keep looking to the Holy Spiiit for grace and direc- tion unto other people for their needs and hungers, we may slip into the position of mediation be- tween them and the current will begin to flow. This may far often be the case with melted and even weak people than with frozen and strong people. The morally self -righteous can hurt with their requisitions layed upon other people. The charismatic seem to offer unknown and unrecog- nized possibilities which heal and do not hurt. The blazing eye and the clenched fist and the curl- ed lip make poor companions for the charisma, but the sympathizing silence, the willingness not to have all the answers, the complete feeling of identity with other people in all that they suffer, these make very good companions for the charisma. Now and then you'll find either a professional charismatic or someone who seeks the gift for the power that it bestows upon the possessor of it. You know the story of Simon in Acts 8--he saw the power of the Holy Spirit given through the laying on of the apostles I hands and he offered them money if they'd give him this same power and Peter had to say, "Thy silver perish with thee because thou has sought to obtain the gift of God with money. Thou has neither part nor lot in this matter. Repent. " Now there are people through whom it appears that a very continuous stream of power pours. They are not always people whom the orthodox churches approve of, but some of them are right within the orthodox churches. I suspect that these men and women have to exercise a very spe- cial care lest they treat the grace of God like a commodity that can be turned on and off. I'm sure they need again and again to surrender their gift to God and pray to use it not for their own gain nor glory. We must beware of a reputation for spiritual power. I'm sure that grace must ever be as fresh and current as electricity. For the electricity to be on means that power from the dynamo is continuously pouring out into and through the wires. Current in both meanings of the word. Now these charismatic people are the most moving, the most truly useful--in some ways the most attractive people in the world, but they're also among the most disturbing for they give the patent lie to so much of the dead respectable customs by which most of us run our lives. If they are right, we're wrong and the light that's in us is darkness. For they do not proceed by lum- bering attempts to be good--they proceed by the intuitions and motions and inspirations of the Hbly Spirit. Frequently they're really much smarter than highly rational people and much more practical than people whose stock in trade is thinking themselves practical. The charismatic has many a short cut from sheer inspiration that the intellectual and the scientist and the rationalist knows nothing about. Hence these people bless those who receive them in their inspiration but they cause conviction in those who reject them. Conviction of sin often arises most pointedly in us when we see in someone else the very quality we know we should have in ourselves. Jesus was the most charismatic person that ever lived. He shed about him nothing but healing and love and truth and grace and yet the scribes and Pharisees, the professional religions of His day, came to hate Him. Why? Because His life judged them. They ought to have been letting through the same kind of power but they weren't. It would be true to say that Jesus was crucified for be- ing such a great charismatic. So don't be surprised if this provokes ridicule and hostility when you begin letting it happen to and through you. Not long ago a worldly woman with a life long physical affliction was both converted and healed. Her family, her social register friends were curious, skeptical, outraged. They taut- ed her, twitted her, but they can't let her alone. For there is the clear healing and the new life I I ~ ~ Charismatic People--Page 3 staring them in the face. She writes, "My doctor says my health is perfect and will I wear a placard around my neck saying I am his patient. I smile and tell him he is wonderful, and he is, but I don't tell him he had very little to do with my new health. 11 1 suppose she doesn't feel he's ready for it yet, nor can take the challenge of a healing that is charismatic in origin. You see, there is an antagonism, not only between the worldly and the spiritual people, but also be- tween the conventionally religious and the charismatics. I think this woman probably has always had a great gift for spreading love and peace and healing. Now this has been hooked up with the Holy Spirit and power is flowing. Some are glad and some are mad. Why is it so? I don't know but it always is. We've spoken at length not long ago about the various gifts of the Holy S@irit. Already in the young church these had emerged and they were found sufficiently repetitious to classify them. Things like speaking in tongues and words of knowledge and of wisdom, faith, healing, prophesy, discerning of spirits and tongues. Some of these seem a little remote from us today but some are as contemporaneous as Castro. We all know the great new rise of healing movements.. Some nonsense has been talked, some extravagant claims been made but, that God does heal cer- tain people through other people, seems evident to any honest observer. While these healings are sometimes notably specific, I wish we might include within the great word "healing" those transformations of personality which take place deep in the subconscious, those which enable people to accept themselves without futile and unending guilt. Reconciliation, not only with others, but with themselves and with life and with the world about them and with God. So many are uneasy and lonely and afraid. God seems very far from them. That they may first know God as He shows Himself in the concern and healing power of another human being. For all the pride that lodges in the contemporary mind, what lodges much more often in the contemporary heart is lonliness and fear. You've met people that made you feel good. This may have been more than a pleasant flash of cheer. This may have been that you were met by someone with a charisma of healing. For others the gift is the impartation of faith. When you come around such people, it isn't that you shelve all of your intellectual difficulties or have them all answered, but rather that when you're with these people you know their possession of obvious radiant power is not an accident. They become themselves better arguments for faith than any that the scholars can give you. You don't so much learn faith from them as you catch it. You are drawn into sharing with them in such an experience as real prayer. "Their spiritual essence prevades you"--to use a phrase of Henry Drummonds. You don't so much come to believe intellectually in God or Christ or the Holy Spirit as you begin having experience of Him with someone who knows Him. It isn't the arguments that convince us and get down to our roots--it's some almost irresistible gift that God has given these people. They didn't especially try to convince us--they were themselves with us. They let their faith manifest itself and it drew us like a magnet. And finally, don't put such people in a category from which you rule yourself out. CategorieE mean fences and fences mean exclusion and there is no exclusion in God's great charismatic gifts except the exclusion of those who exclude themselves - -even God can't include them. When any- one thinks of himself or herself as belonging to some charismatic category, I suspect he'll soon find himself out of it, unless he continuously comes back to the Holy Spirit for renewal and fresh grace. There are hidden gifts and spiritual possibilities within us all that go far beyond anything welve ever known and the world is impoverished for the want of the manifestation of those same gifts. Don't strive to be a charismatic person. For goodness sake, don't wear the heavenward look and the folded hands and the other fake poses of the fake spirituals. Let yourself go into the hands of God. Pray to Him to stir up the gifts He's given you. Pray it not for your own sat- isfaction, but for His Glory and the needs of people about you and of aU men everywhere. And then in the next situation where you find yourself, let things begin to happen and in the next, and in the next, until the Holy Spirit begins positively wearing a channel through you, and you're find- ing a meaning and a joy in living that you never thought were possible this side of Heaven. ~ ~
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