Niels Prip – Blog

There have been a few questions about changes in theology over the last 20 years. Since I am now an older man, I have seen and experienced quite a bit of change over the years in my own beliefs, as you all are now experiencing. Let me first say, this is normal. As you all mature, have families and deal with issues, you change. “Your senses are being trained to discern good and evil Heb 5:14”. In my early days of coming out of the Jesus Revolution, we young people had an attitude toward older people. I did see these same things coming out of BRSM and FIRE. In our youthful zeal, we had the attitude God was anointing us as a new generation, WE had the anointing. I co-pastored a church in 1977 that was a charismatic church, I was 27 at the time. The average age of our congregation was 17 years old. It took me about three years to realize that I needed to sit under some older men that I knew, so I left the ministry to attend another church. Over the years I began having the realization that there were many men of God who were not charismatic and but had a powerful anointing. I was reading books by Leonard Ravenhill, Watchman Nee, AW Tozer and others. I stayed away from the current charismatic books that focused on the gifts of the Spirit, tongues, prophecy and other sorts of charismatic teachings. It did strike me, that after going to a Billy Graham rally, that this man had an anointing from God and was not charismatic. Charismatics would criticize AW Tozer because he didn’t have the Spirit. They would say, “Just think how powerful he would be if he had the Spirit”, Leonard Ravenhill called those people out saying, “Show me one charismatic preacher who could write a book like Tozer”. If you read Tozer’s books, he believed in the infilling of the Holy Spirit. I you read DL Moody’s book Secret Power, it is all about him receiving the Spirit, just not in the charismatic way. We must realize that all through history there were great men and great movements that were led by people who were not filled with the Holy Spirit in the same way that charismatic circles teach. People like Jonathan Edwards, Andrew Murray, DL Moody, William Booth, George Fox, Augustine, George Whitefield and the Wesleys all had a level of the Holy Spirit that gave them power for ministry. John Dowie had a huge healing ministry in the late 1800’s, long before the Azuza Street revival, and he did not embrace it. We need to ask the question; how did these men get power with God? Secret power comes from secret prayer. So rethinking your theology is a good thing, we need to mature as we learn to discern.

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