This Bible Verse Scares Me... and Excites Me. It's VITAL for us to get it.
There's a passage of Scripture that equally scares and excites me.
Paul writes, "Do not quench the Spirit" (1 Thessalonians 5:19, ESV). A more literal rendering would be: don't put out the Spirit's fire.
That's not a suggestion. It's a warning — and an invitation.
What Scares Me
We — fallen people — have the ability to impact the measure of the Sovereign God we experience. I use the word Sovereign because God can do anything. Anything. But He chooses to operate through and collaborate with His people. There are exceptions and occasions, but God saw fit to give redeemed humanity the most precious gift in all creation: the Holy Spirit.
Revival is not a matter of waiting for something to come "one day, some day."
Leonard Ravenhill confronts this head on:
"Theologians there are who insist that revival is a sovereign act of God, independent of human agency. This cannot be so. The whole stretch of human history since Pentecost is against this view. How is it that explorers never find a Christian community unless the missionary has been there? If God works without men, then why did he tell the disciples to tarry until they be endued, then say, 'Go ye?'"
— America Is Too Young to Die, 78-79
God is moving. The Holy Spirit is here, willing and ready. How are we treating Him? Are we quenching Him? Are we putting out the Spirit's fire, afraid of what may happen if He's granted free rein?
What Excites Me
It scares me that we can put out His fire. But it excites me — as it should all of us — that we can also create space for the Spirit to move without restraint or restriction.
It's time to remove the barriers and let the King of Glory in.
The last thing I want is to be at war with God, imprisoning the Spirit because of my preferences. A move of God is here and available — now. I've seen it. I've tasted it. I just witnessed it firsthand in three services at Shiloh Christian Ministries in Sierra Vista, Arizona.
I believe we saw God move powerfully because the leaders were hungry for the Holy Spirit. They placed no restraints on what phenomena was allowed or forbidden. They honored the Spirit's movement and gave preference to whatever God had on His agenda — even when it was off the script.
The Day of Visitation
The move of God is available… but some miss it completely. Not because the Sovereign God chose to "pass them by" — please hear the urgency in this — but because the Master was moving, He was present, He was at work, in unusual ways, as it was in the days of Jesus. And as the Spirit moved, communities of people simply decided to pass Him by. They chose to miss their day of visitation, because quite frankly, the visitation of God is messy. It’s different than we anticipated or expected.
Jesus wept over Jerusalem for exactly this reason:
"Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes… because you did not know the time of your visitation."
— Luke 19:42, 44, ESV
The tragedy was never God's absence. It was a people who couldn't recognize Him when He showed up looking unfamiliar.
What Visitation Looked Like
Throughout the Gospels, when Heaven touched earth, it never looked tidy:
People ripping the roof off a house to lower their friend down to Jesus for healing (Mark 2:1-5)
An unclean woman crawling through a crowd, desperate just to touch the hem of His garment (Mark 5:25-34)
Blind Bartimaeus shouting louder and louder while the crowd told him to be quiet — refusing to let decorum silence his miracle (Mark 10:46-52)
A sinful woman weeping at Jesus's feet, wiping them with her hair, scandalizing an entire dinner party with her worship (Luke 7:36-50)
A tax collector climbing a sycamore tree like a child, too desperate for an encounter to care how it looked (Luke 19:1-10)
An upper room filled with the sound of a mighty rushing wind, tongues of fire, and men speaking in languages they never learned (Acts 2:1-4)
Every single one of these moments was uncomfortable for somebody. Every one of them offended someone's sense of order. And every one of them was the presence of God breaking into the room.
A Weekend That Made It Real
I saw this play out firsthand in three services at Shiloh Christian Ministries in Sierra Vista, Arizona. Six to seven hundred people came hungry across the weekend. Twenty gave their lives to Jesus. People walked out healed of trauma and delivered from the long-term effects of accidents. Young adults were baptized in the Spirit and fire — commissioned as voices for their generation.
None of it was tidy. None of it followed a script. And that's exactly the point.
The Question Worth Sitting With
So here's what I keep coming back to: are we the kind of people — the kind of churches — who make room for that? Or have we, without realizing it, built such tightly managed environments that the Spirit has nowhere unscripted left to move?
Quenching the Spirit rarely looks like outright rebellion. More often, it looks like control. Comfort. A preference for the predictable over the powerful.
Let's be the kind of people who welcome the Spirit's move in our lives and in our gatherings — however He chooses to show Himself. Because the fire is available. The only question is whether we'll let it burn.