(Image by SeeMidTN.com (aka Brent) via Flickr)
Here’s a good article by Don Finto: “Gifting and Character”
Here’s the ‘money’ quote from the middle of the article:
“Character and gifting are different. This is why we can sometimes see extremely gifted-of-God men and women who fail morally.
Remember the mightily gifted Samson whose character never matched the gifting. Do not forget David, the murderer-adulterer. Was David anointed? Yes. Gifted? Yes. Did he fall? Yes. Was he restored? Yes. Were there consequences of his failure? Yes. Yet God later described him as "a man after my own heart (Acts 13:20)."”
Response: We have seen a lot of gifted major ministers failing and falling in the last couple of years within Pentecostal and Charismatic circles. I won’t bother to name any since I am sure anyone reading this article probably thought of a couple of them immediately.
‘Gifting’ is so emphasized and such a major part of the Charismatic and Pentecostal moves of God that it seems to almost over-ride character at times. Then the problems come.
We have seen just in recent years alone how certain major charismatic leaders and healers have been protected and their failures hidden from view by those in awe of their extraordinary gifting. Then comes the ‘train wreck’ and everyone who knew better comes out of the woodwork.
You would think that we would learn from the past but it doesn’t seem to work that way for some reason. For example, just after WWII there were a whole slew of major healing ministries that went from town to town in America and did some incredible miracles. They were gifted in a major way but there was no accountability and character was a major problem.
Nearly everyone of those incredible ministries ended up failing and/or teaching weird or false doctrines. It was a major setback for the American church and kept healing and spiritual gifts out of the mainstream for nearly 15 years.
In the same time frame God rose up Billy Graham, a man of extraordinary character. There were a dozen or so ministers from the same time period that were far more gifted than Billy but he excelled in character, was faithful, and God honored him and we all honor him today after a whole generation of incredibly fruitful ministry.
The point is –character matters.
We need both gifting and character for the American church to rise up and become the culture changing agent that it is called to be in bringing on a new era of revival and awakening. *Top
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J.P. Moreland Shakes Up Conference Talking About ‘Bibliolatry"
Talbot Seminary professor J.P. Moreland shook up the recent Evangelical Theological Society conference in San Diego by telling attendees that evangelicals were ‘over-committed’ to the Bible and disregarded other ‘extra-Biblical’ forms of guidance from God. During his address, Dr. Moreland pointed out that evangelical scholars and the movement, as a whole, many times reject:
Comments: As you can well imagine, his address sparked considerable controversy and response from those who were there and hundreds of comments on the Internet. Read Ted Olsen’s article and all the comments that followed. Quite interesting.
What is really shocking, this comes from a major professor from Biola University’s Talbot Seminary. A school which started out and remains squarely in the dispensational camp. Many of its ‘big guns’ in the past have been especially critical of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements.
I have read a number of articles and books by J. P. Moreland in the past and have always found his works to be particularly good in the area of apologetics. We should not look for him to become a Charismatic or a Pentecostal anytime soon, but neither is he a card carrying cessasionalist. He seems to be far more open to the ‘gifts’ than I had ever supposed.
J.P Moreland is a very careful Biblical apologist and philosopher. What’s important here, while his address was about how evangelicals treat the Bible, it is tantamount to admitting that there is really no Biblical basis for the cessasionalist tendencies that have dominated so much of the American evangelical community. *Top
Posted in News Commentary, Spiritual Gifts