Divine Disturbance

I stopped one day at the “Grain Pit” of the Board of Trade Bldg. in Chicago. I saw persons frantically waving their hands, holding up different numbers of fingers, raucously shouting at the tops of their voices, and every so often, for no seeming reason at all, they would literally fall on one another as their excitement grew stronger and stronger. Here, it seemed were men possessed!

There was a day which we sometimes call the Birthday of the Christian Church, in which the disciples were so excited, and the reports of what happened that day so spectacular, that we can scarcely accept it. There was a divine disturbance, during which ordinary persons became extra-ordinary and moved out to proclaim their faith.

Dr. Toyohiko Kagawa, a great Japanese Christian leader, once said, “It is a shame for a Christian to be ordinary. There is something within that will make him out-of-the-ordinary and not ‘run of the mill’.” Sometimes, non-Christian persons look upon our proclamation of love, and of turning the other cheek, and they say, “Those Christians are mad!”

They said of Dr. Albert Schweitzer, “The man is mad” as he dedicated four Ph.D’s to the natives of Africa. This was not madness, but the Spirit’s disturbing of a man until his talents became tools in the hands of Almighty God.

There is a classic story about the Cape Cod farmer of New England who was shingling his house on a very foggy day, and he shingled right off into the fog. Many persons go “shingling off into the fog” in their understanding of the Holy Spirit. In their fanatic zeal, they do the very opposite of that which the Holy Spirit commands us. They find causes that separate them from their fellow-Christians, whereas the Spirit on that special day of Pentecost came to transcend all barriers of nationality and language and to bind all together in love for Jesus Christ.

God is always trying to break through into life…yours and mine. The Spirit of God has been at work since the very time of creation itself, brooding over the face of the deep. And yet we confess how little we really know about the Holy Spirit.

Ask a sailor “What is the wind?” Of all people, he should know. But he will answer, “I cannot say. All I know is that when I feel the wind blowing, I raise my sails, and it takes me to the far-off harbor.” Ask a Christian, “What is the Holy Spirit?” Of all persons, he or she should know…and yet the reply may come, “I cannot say. All I know is that when I feel the breath of God upon me, I open myself to it, and it lifts me up and carries me to the far-off shore.”