Back, now, to my time in the Charismatic church. What I saw in that church was a hunger for an experience with a living God. My Charismatic friends wanted God to speak to them. In person. They wanted to speak in tongues, first, to have heavenly communication with God. And after the thrill wore off they wanted God to speak through them, They wanted to prophesy and give words of wisdom.
We gathered together every week expecting God to move in the body. Waiting to see what the Holy Spirit would do.
I can’t speak for the rest of the church but I can say for myself, that mindset was a disaster. My relationship with God did not progress, it regressed. I moved from being overcome by God’s goodness to me, his long-suffering and his willingness to forgive even me, to expecting favors from him and being angry when I didn’t get the favors I thought I should have.
Instead of being open to hearing God in Scripture, I read the Bible topically, searching out every instance of healing and trying to put together a formula for healing. My husband was a quadriplegic and I saw no reason for him to remain in that state. People in the church had gotten “words of wisdom” that he would be healed, and I also thought I heard God say he’d heal Wassie.
A year later, when my husband wasn’t healed even after I commanded him to be healed (yes, I really did. I’m laughing now, but at the time it was not funny. My poor husband.) I got mad at God, stomped my foot like a three-year-old and said, “I hate you.”
I quickly added, “I mean I would hate you if I thought I could get away with it.”
And then I said, “I don’t hate you but the truth is that if you can’t communicate with me, what good are you? What use is a God who can’t speak to me and tell me what I need to know? I thought you said you’d heal Wassie, but you obviously didn’t say it because he’s not healed. So what kind of relationship can I have with a God who won’t or can’t speak to me clearly?”
And then…I am not lying, though you’re going to think I’m making this up…the song “Lay Down Sally” came on the radio. Within moments of my asking God what use he was to me if he couldn’t speak to me, Eric Clapton sang out, “Lay down, Sally, and rest here in my arms. I’ve been trying all night long just to talk to you.”
Make what you want of that.
What I make of it is that God is gracious. He should have slapped me down dead. How dare I say to the God who has always, only loved and blessed me, that I hate him and find him worthless?
Not only did he not strike me dead, he spoke to me through Eric Clapton. And what he said was, “I can talk to you any day of the week using any means I choose, you little idiot. And I have chosen to speak to you through scripture. I have spoken to you. Just because you refuse to listen to me and you make stuff up, telling yourself what you want to hear instead of hearing what I have said, doesn’t mean you can blame me and accuse me of not speaking. And still, even though you have wrongly accused me, I still want you to stay with me. I still will give you rest.”
Lay down, Sally, and rest here in my arms, I’ve been trying all night long just to talk to you.
Those words would have been meaningless except I had read the Bible.
Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.
Oh Jerusalem. Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing.
I heard Scriptural truth in Clapton’s song because for the first time in a long time, I was willing to hear God. I’d hit bottom and had to give in to God’s correction.
I’d been reading scripture and not hearing God when I was reading with my own agenda. And then, when I had to abandon my agenda for our relationship because God refused to be made over in my image, I heard God’s scriptural truth in a rock song of all places.
