Word of Salvation – Vol.24 No.31 – April 1978

 

Super Religious Experience – Part I

 

Sermon by Rev. G. I. Williamson, B.A., B.D. on Luke 1:8-26

Scripture reading: Luke 1:8-26

Psalter Hymnal: 193; 275; 177; 47

 

Have you ever wished that you could have a ‘super-religious experience’ – something that would lift you out of your rut, as it were, and give you a tremendous assurance?  Well, if you have, you are just one of many today.  Take, for example, these people that go along, year after year, in churches that starve them to death.  You know sermons are like food.  You can eat till your stomach is full, and still starve to death, if the vitamins are not in it.  And that is the way it is with much modernistic preaching.  The vitamins of saving truth are not in it.  And so one day a cultist comes along with an open Bible and a burning zeal, and conviction and assurance, and another starved victim of the unfaithful church is drawn like a moth to the flame.

That is one way.  But more and more in recent times, people are staying within – within the unfaithful church that has starved them so cruelly.  And they do this because the popular thing now is to seek the answer within in this new, inward experience, of receiving the Spirit.  So the neo-Pentecostal movement has come into many of the churches.  And many people are seeking in it the ‘super-religious experience’.

Well, beloved, that is very much the way it was in the days of Zacharias and Elizabeth too.  The church of the Scribes and Pharisees was also spiritually undernourished.  And they had their cults too, like the Zealots and the Essenes, and the Dead Sea Scroll Community.  Yes indeed, there were plenty of people around to take advantage of the situation.  And here was an old man, Zacharias and his wife, Elizabeth, and they really did have a super experience.

Just think of it!

Gabriel, one of the archangels, who stands right in the presence of the living God, came down that day to the Temple.  He came while Zacharias was in there doing his priestly duty.  And he spoke to him face to face.  Now, I would call that a super-religious experience!  He announced to them that even though they were of advanced age, they were going to have a son and he would be the forerunner of the Messiah.  Talk about ‘super’!!  Few people in the history of the world could claim anything comparable.  So we do well to take heed of this experience and to notice, carefully, how different it was from the popular concept today.

I.  THE SOURCE

In the first place, then, I would have you to notice that this did not happen to Zacharias because he was seeking something unusual.  No, the Bible says that he was simply doing his priestly service – fulfilling his duty according to divine appointment.  He was doing what we would be doing today if we were making use of the appointed means of grace – faithfully attending the services of the Lord’s Day hearing the faithful preaching of the Bible – and don’t forget that this is what the temple really was.  It was the symbolic preaching of the Gospel.  Well, that is what Zacharias was doing.

And this is something you notice many times in the Scriptures.  Was Moses seeking some great thing when the Lord came to speak to him from the burning bush?  No, it was down in the land of Egypt that Moses was seeking some great thing.  Remember when he wanted to see God’s cause and kingdom on the move again, and how he saw this Egyptian beating this Hebrew slave and took matters into his own hands and killed him and buried him in the sands of Egypt?  Well, it didn’t work out, did it?  No, that is why Moses ended up down there in the desert.  He made a tremendous mistake, and he had many years out there in the desert to think about it.  And it made him humble and meek.  And then one day while he was tending his sheep, the Lord came in that wondrous moment and Moses had his ‘experience’.

Or, take Paul on the road to Damascus.  Was he seeking the ‘super-religious experience’?  No, that was the farthest thing from his mind.  But it was that day that Jesus Christ came down and confronted him, saying, “You will be my apostle.”

So it was with Amos.  He was plowing the field and he had the super-religious experience’.

And there was Martin Luther’.  He wasn’t seeking it either.  No, he was wrestling with the great problem of the justification of sinners.  “How can a sinner like me ever be righteous before God?”  So he went plowing through the book of Romans, and the book of Galatians, and he went on his knees before God with passages such as Psalm 51.  And then, suddenly, the great moment came – the ‘super-religious experience’.

You can go right through the Bible and I don’t think you can find one single instance in which the man who had the ‘super-religious experience’ was seeking it.  On the contrary, everyone of them was doing exactly what Zacharias and Elizabeth were doing.  They were walking in the commandments and ordinances of the Lord except, of course, for Paul.  But they were not seeking they were not pursuing the unusual thing.

II.  THE NATURE

The second thing that I would ask you to notice in this passage is that this ‘super-religious experience’, when it came, was not a thrilling and exciting thing.  Now you might imagine that it would be a great thrill to stand face to face with an angel, even an archangel such as Gabriel.  ‘Oh how exciting and wonderful’ you might say to yourself.  Well, Zacharias didn’t think it was.  No, the Bible says that he was troubled and fear gripped his heart.  It was anything but pleasant, in other words.  When people, today, talk about their ‘super-religious experiences’, they say ‘Oh, how wonderful and thrilling.  How exciting and delightful.’  But Zacharias doesn’t say that.  He says, “I was troubled, I was trembling and fear gripped my heart.”  And you can go right down through the Bible and that is the sort of thing that you find.  A certain pastor once described the difference this way.  When some of the young people of his church were caught up in the neo- Pentecostal movement, they were thrilled and they talked about how exciting it was.  And they turned their faces up to the sky and laughed and cried ‘Hallelujah’.  But then one day, when the Gospel that their own pastor faithfully preached to them began to grip their hearts, it was very different.  They turned their faces down to the ground.  And they began to weep.  And they became very anxious and agitated.  And they said: “What must we do to be saved?”  Well, that is the real thing, beloved.  Remember what Moses did when he really did have the ‘super-religious experience’?  He took off his shoes because he knew that he was standing on holy ground.  And remember what Peter did when he had that experience?  He fell down at the feet of Jesus and said, “Depart from me O Lord, for I am a sinful man.”  And what did Isaiah say when he saw the Lord high and lifted up in His temple?  “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.  Woe is me for my eyes have seen the King.  No, it wasn’t pleasant – it wasn’t thrilling just the opposite, in fact.

Now you must not misunderstand me.  I am not saying that true religious experience is not wonderful.  It is wonderful.  It is the most wonderful thing in the world.  But what I am saying is that it never gratifies the flesh.  No, the Bible teaches us that true religious experience is always unpleasant at the time that it is experienced.  How could it be otherwise?  Should a worm such as you, or I, stand in the presence of a Holy God and feel ‘good’?  Tell me how that could be possible!  When you and I are hell- deserving and He is the Holy One of Israel how then in the world could we stand before Him or even one of His mighty angels and feel good and say, ‘O how wonderful and thrilling’?

No, beloved, not even John, the beloved disciple, could say that.  Remember how he saw Jesus, in that great experience on the island of Patmos and how he was taken up to heaven and saw the Lord Jesus Christ again – this very John who once laid his head on Jesus’ breast?  Yes, says John, I saw Him “and I fell at His feet as one dead”  You see, even for John it was not thrilling, not enjoyable, even though it truly was wonderful.  And I have no doubt that Zacharias and Elizabeth looked back for the rest of their lives and thanked God for that wonderful experience.  But, it wasn’t pleasant at the time.

And neither was my own conversion.  No, it was terrible.  It is always terrible for a sinner to find out that he deserves God’s punishment and that in order to have eternal life he must go and wash in the blood of the Lamb of God.  Any theology or religious movement that comes along and makes out as if the great religious experience of coming face to face with the true and living God is thrilling and enjoyable, cannot possibly be Scriptural.

Listen, young people.  If you’ve had a thrilling experience and you think that this proves you are ‘with it’ spiritually, then wake up.  Learn what it means to be pricked in the heart and to cry out, ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner.’  Then perhaps you can really know something about religious experience.

O yes, there is such a thing as ‘super-religious experience’.  Thank God for that.  And once you’ve had it you will thank God for it forever.  But you will never say how pleasant and delightful it was because that is just what it isn’t.

III.  THE EFFECT

And now, in the third place, I want you to notice what I would call the strange effect of this experience.  In spite of this ‘super- religious experience’ Zacharias still did not believe.  “How shall I know this for certain?” says Zacharias – and remember, Gabriel is standing right there before him.  He is not doubting his own eyes and ears.  He is not saying “I don’t think you are really there, mister angel.”  Not at all.  He knows the angel is really there and that this thing is really happening to him.  Yet he still says “How shall I know this, that I am going to have a son in my old age and that Elizabeth will bear a child?”  So the angel Gabriel says this: “I am Gabriel who stands in the presence of God and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news and behold you shall be silent, unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words.”  Do you see the contrast?  People who talk about ‘super-religious experience’ today are always telling us that faith zooms up like a rocket into the sky when you have this thing in your life.  Some say you have to have a tremendous faith in order to get it.  Others say that you get it first, and then your faith goes up out of sight.  This is the whole appeal of the thing.  This is why so many are misled.  If you get this great experience they think then they won’t have this trouble anymore.  They won’t have to live down there in the valley any longer, like these other ordinary people.  No, once they get this experience, it will be off into the wild blue yonder – above the trials of faith.

Well, I ask you, did that happen to Zacharias?  No, of course it didn’t.  And even if it did for the moment what would it really prove?  Balaam had a ‘super-religious experience’ too.  He went up on the top of this high mountain and he had visions of the glory of the kingdom of God.  Some of the most beautiful prophecies in the books of Moses came out of the mouth of Balaam.  But what good did it do him?

Or again, think of the generation of Israelites that came out of the land of Egypt.  What generation ever had more ‘super-religious experiences’?

Just think of seeing the ten plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea and manna from heaven, and so on.  In all of the Old Testament there was no generation that had more to boast of than they did.  And what good did it do them?  The Bible says that was the number one example of unbelief.  They are held up as the thing we should try to avoid.  So this whole idea that ‘super-religious experience’ is the proof of faith or that it produces faith is completely unscriptural.  The only generation that every saw more wonderful things than that generation in the wilderness, was the generation that was here when Jesus became incarnate.  And yet after all the awesome wonders what does Jesus call them?  He calls them an adulterous and unbelieving generation.

No, beloved, ‘super-religious experience’ does not prove that you have a great faith.  It doesn’t even prove that you have any faith at all.  Zacharias did, of course, `have faith – that is perfectly clear from the fact that the Bible calls him righteous and you can only be righteous with a holy God by faith in the work of redemption.  But the point is that this experience did not come because he was a super-believer.  It did not make him a spiritual superman.

No, it showed that he was a man like the one who cried: “I believe, but Lord help my unbelief.”

IV.  THE RESULT

The final point that I want to bring to your attention is this: there was a long period of time before Zacharias could speak about this experience.  Now of course this was something that God did.  It was imposed upon Zacharias.  But even Elizabeth, who shared in it all, was reluctant to speak.  It was only when Mary came and they talked together, that she shared these intimate things.  Later on, of course, when these things became more widely known and this old woman did have her baby and the lips of Zacharias were unsealed, then they did make a witness.  But the point that I make is that it was far removed from the kind of thing that passes for super-religious experience’ today.  They don’t wait five or six months to talk about it.  No, they begin right on the spot.  They immediately tell how wonderful and glorious their experience is.  Well, that is not the way it was for Moses.  He didn’t say, ‘Well, here I go, down there to the land of Egypt and what a story I’ll tell them!’  No, what he said is, “Lord, I don’t want to go and I don’t want to be the one to witness.  Lord, I just cannot do it.  And what about Paul, after his ‘super-religious experience’ on the road to Damascus?

Did he say, ‘Here I come to Jerusalem and what a story I have to tell you”?  No, the Bible says he went to Arabia for three years.  And only then did he begin to testify about these wonderful things.  Yes, and even then he was reluctant.

He says he is a fool to boast of these things and yet he is driven to it.  Only because there were some who denied that he really was an apostle did he feel that he had to tell them about some of these wonderful things.  But then, when he comes to the most wonderful thing of all – that visit to the highest heaven – he says, “It is not lawful for me to even talk about that.”

You see what I mean?  There was none of this boasting that centres upon the experience itself.  No, you don’t find that in the Bible.  What you find is a sober reason for the hope that is in them, because God has shown them their weakness and frailty, yes, even their unbelief, just as he did with Zacharias.  He didn’t boast for the simple reason that he had nothing to boast about.  Neither did Paul.  Neither did Moses.  And neither do you and I.  And the real test of religious experience is to know just how true this is.  If you really have it you will shut your mouth until you learn to open it only to give all the praise and glory to God.  Just go on and read what Zacharias finally did, say, after six months of silence.  He didn’t talk about himself at all.  He did not say, ‘I this, and I that…!  No, it is ‘the Lord this, and the Lord that.’ ‘He talked about God and the glorious things that God had done.

And right here is where this story is a great blessing to me because I see that there is also hope for a weak person like me.  I don’t need to go seeking after a ‘super-religious experience’.  No, beloved, I only need to walk in the way of the Lord and His appointed ordinances.  If it is His will then to give to me a great religious experience, then so be it but I know in advance that it will not build up my ego, it will tear it down instead.  I am not going to be a bigger man.  I’m going to be smaller and may God grant that in the end I will be so small that I won’t have anything to say about self but only about my wonderful Saviour.  That is the lesson from these two old saints who did have the ‘super-religious experience’.

AMEN.