Transposing Spirituality

Modern music keyboards have one function novice players use and look like experts. They will learn playing music on one key very well. Then, with that knowledge they will transfer that key combination to any other key through the transpose key. They thus can accompany a singer whatever key they are singing on if they have a musical ear.

By the way guitarists have done the same all the time though it is called bridging.

The said experts will be however crippled when they are given a piano or organ as they do not have such keys.

Sadly, many instrumentalists are of that type and they will boast of their expertise and not even want to learn playing on other keys.

This is a spiritual post, however and I am not talking about music. I just want us to learn from these armature instrumentalists to get some spiritual lessons.

Have you ever looked at prophetic books?

Some are so full of imagery and others of words. Some are agricultural and others tend to business. Some are soft and pleading while others are rough and brutal.

Yet they all came from the same source, the God of Abraham.

Yet you will hear a minister teaching bluntly that imagery is the only way God can speak to His people. Another will teach that God will always plead with His people while another will teach that God is always angry.

They each want to impose their understanding of God to the people they lead instead of leading them to discovering God for themselves.

That God speaks through dreams is not in doubt. That He must speak through dreams is a very dangerous assumption. Just because He speaks or has spoken to you through dreams does not block Him from speaking to others using a different medium. Just because He has given you many visions does not disqualify those who have never seen one from hearing from God. Just because He has sent angels that you saw does not make the one who has never seen an angel unspiritual.

God does speak to those who are listening and He is found by those seeking Him. How He does it does not depend on you, whoever you are. Your experience is valid, but only as your experience.

Do not impose it on anybody else.

I love hearing testimonies and encourage believers to write them. In fact I have published a few.

But a testimony is not a statement of faith. Nor should it be used to formulate a statement of faith.

In fact, one fatal error in using an experience to formulate a statement of faith is the reality that it trashes any other experience that does not agree with theirs.

Take the Pentecostal movement for example. Instead of searching the Bible to formulate their statement of faith, they looked for a verse to justify their experience and now use their experience to disqualify anybody who does not share their experience from a deeper faith experience as if it is their preserve.

The validity of their initial experience has never been in doubt. The revival that proceeded from that experience is also not in doubt.

Using that experience to interpret the scriptures and the Christian life is the whole problem.

You see, by limiting the filling of the Holy Spirit to Acts 2: 4, we are blocking any other experience, worse still, even in the Bible itself. In fact that verse does not even describe the tongues they speak as theirs lean toward the ones the Corinthian church was being warned against and not the Acts 2 one.

What about the filling in Exodus 31? What about the one in Acts 4: 8, 31 among others?

You see, the Holy Spirit chooses how He will fill whoever seeks God. His purpose is to glorify Christ, not your denomination. He therefore can’t be constrained to perform according to your professions or confessions. He is God, not you.

I would be more comfortable if they used Galatians 5: 22, 23 since that is the clearest evidence of the Holy Spirits’ presence as it agrees with what Christ Himself said, ‘ye shall know them by their fruit’.

When God speaks to you or reveals Himself to you, stop being dogmatic about it. Do not use that experience to judge the validity of anybody else’s experience.

Use scripture for the same.

I will never dispute someone who claims a spiritual experience. I simply apply scriptural tests to qualify it or otherwise.

I will repeat something I have written elsewhere.

One time in pursuit of a spiritual experience (for lack of better words) I had an experience that was so vivid I can remember it to date over thirty years later.

But then I applied the scripture test and discovered that there was no satisfactory explanation for that experience. I was therefore constrained to trash it though I could easily have written a book about the same.

But it does not invalidate the experience and the lessons God taught me. It just means that the experience God gave me was of my own private interpretation in my pursuit of God, not an experience for wholesale application.

Yet many would go ahead and build altars around such experiences and look for verses to justify them as I have mentioned. And of course I am grateful to God that I had spiritually mature accountable partners to help me use scripture to understand the same.

Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come. (1Corinthians 10:11)

There are many other incidents in the Bible characters’ lives that are not recorded simply because God knew that the experience would not be necessary for our instruction. Remember that it was the same with Jesus’ works?

And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name. (John 20: 30, 31)

Remember this in the next chapter?

And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen. (John 21:25)

Your personal experience is simply that, personal. Do not make it universal.

There are two main types of prayer in the Bible. There is the corporate prayer that is called the prayer of agreement and there is private prayer that Christ called the closet.

Where did this prayer of everybody talking (even shouting) at the same time come from? Worse still, why has it become the norm in prayer meetings that one will appear unprayerful if they do not join in the noise?

I for one do not make such noise in prayer. Among the things the experience I have mentioned above taught me is not to make noise at God especially in the presence of people. I can pray loudly when I am alone and still do when I am alone on the mountains or in the wild when I am alone with Him. I composed many songs when I was a singer in those prayer times.

But I am simply unable to focus in a crowd when everybody is fighting to be heard and will opt out of prayer meetings when I know they will be such as I know there will be very little prayer involved for me. And I am assuming I am just speaking for me. But allow me to speak anyway.

Yet I love the closet and can be there for hours. I will leave my family asleep and go to the closet that is somewhere in my house and enjoy that prayer time and leave there refreshed. I might get there feeling sleepy and the sleep disappears after a short time on my knees.

I do not know whether you know that music to some makes prayer very difficult if not impossible as their systems get caught up with the ‘move’ of music instead of catching the mood of prayer. Where will such a person go to benefit from corporate prayer? That distracting music could be the one played before prayer (what is normally called praise and worship) or the instrumental accompaniment to prayer. I for one cannot play any instrument and pray and so would not attempt to see how far I can get into prayer playing an instrument.

I am not trashing the efficacy or power of your style of prayer. I am just saying it is not the only one. Give the others a chance to enjoy their prayer times also. That is what Romans 14 talks about.

Could you be terming people prayerless when it is the imposition of your brand of prayerfulness that chases them from your prayer meetings?

I will repeat that I am not trashing the validity of your experience. My problem is with your trashing other experiences.

I will also add something I have written elsewhere on the blog.

Job’s miserable comforters were not judged for speaking wrong and wicked things. Their statements are as spiritual as those of the other person. In fact nobody quoting from the book of Job checks to know who made what quote. Most of their statements were right and scriptural.

What made them wicked was that they imposed their revelation and experience on Job. They simply misrepresented God in Job’s case. They transposed their spiritual experiences to Job’s situation.

That was their problem. And it will be our problem too if we elevate our spirituality above that of the others as we are playing God.

The son Hannah was praying for when she was rebuked for being drunk by Eli with his brand of spirituality was the one who was sent to report judgment to the same Eli. I pray that something similar be never repeated with our generation.

Eliab who rebuked David for pride, arrogance and negligence when he was asking about Goliath later depended on the same David when things became too hot.

And Joseph who was hated by his brothers for his dreamy nature became the salvation for the same brothers.

Our responsibility as ministers is to nurture people’s spirituality, not to guide it. We should allow God to lead His people wherever He wants without placing our caveats on Him as He will very easily crush us to perform His will with His people.

Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen. (Matthew 28: 19, 20)

We are supposed to teach them to hear God’s voice clearly so as to obey it completely. And that means setting our traditions and preferences aside.