They said the "H" name!

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve arrived back in Iowa on Easter Sunday and all my time seems to have been taken up by tax preparation and doing my part to get the amusement park up and running. Now that all of that is behind me, let me tell you about another interesting experience that I had on the trip back north.

We had stopped to visit friends in St. Louis, and to attend "An Evening with Joel Osteen". On Sunday we visited the Rock Hill Baptist Church where our friends went, and where I had attended on Sundays in the past when we were working in St. Louis. I should mention that I grew up in St. Louis, near the community where this Church is located.

That evening, we attended Rock Hill's youth service because they were having a special guest speaker. The speaker was a Dr. Jackson (sorry, I forgot his first name already) who was a young man, about 30's ish, who had formerly been a biology professor in a college somewhere who had been fired for teaching creationism, and now goes around giving talks like this to high school and college age young people. He was extremely intelligent, extremely witty, and very interesting. If you are interested in what he has to say, e-mail him at drjxn2004@yahoo.com and ask to be put on his e-mail list. But he is not what I wanted to tell you about.

As I said, this was a youth service, led by the Church’s young people, and I was very impressed by what I saw that night. The young folks did a tremendous job of leading the service. They had their own praise band, about four pieces and singers as I recall. As I looked around the room I counted about forty of the youth, with about twenty or so of us oldsters mixed in. Granted, this was a special service, but I couldn't help but think back on the days of my youth at nearby Mapelwood Baptist Church. At the time I was there, Maplewood was one of the five largest Southern Baptist churches in the Greater St. Louis area, and we were known for being one of the more "dynamic" churches in St. Louis. Yet we would have considered it fortunate if we could get a half-dozen of our young people out for something like this. I couldn’t help but think that if we had been a youth group like this one at Rock Hill, we could have turned Maplewood, if not the whole St. Louis area upside-down for Christ!

This youth group at Rock Hill was like nothing I have seen recently in a church this size (about 5-600, according to my friends) and I was truly blessed to be able to watch them as they sought to worship and grow in the Lord. At one time they were talking about a mission trip of sorts that they were going to make to help another church whose youth group was just starting and had about seven members. And then, if I wasn’t impressed enough already they sang a song in which they said "the H name"!!!!! Sorry, I can’t tell you the title or the author. I just quickly scribbled down the words

"Holy Spirit take control,
fan this flame within my soul"

Have you ever noticed how afraid many Bible believing Christians are to so much as say the name, "Holy Spirit", let alone acknowledge Him as the guide of their life? I remind you that I am not a "charismatic" or anything like that, yet I am in agreement with the late A.W. Tozier who accused many evangelicals of denying the Holy Spirit to the point that we do not deserve to call ourselves trinitarian. For example, I visited the well known blog, sbcoutpost, recently. There was a lot of good stuff on that site, but I ran a search of the site for the phrase, "Holy Spirit" and got only three hits. All three of these were in scripture passages that were being quoted for reasons other than to talk about the Holy Spirit.

At this meeting at Rock Hill, it was not just lip-service. These young people seemed genuinely interested in letting the Holy Spirit take control of their lives. I hope that the folks at Rock Hill realize what they have going on in their midst. If the Lord should delay His return for yet another generation, His Church will be in good hands with young folks like these.

Thanks for sharing this moment with me today.