10/14/2026
You do not have to denounce your charismatic experiences to value biblical truth.
Somewhere along the way, we have created a false divide between being deeply rooted in Scripture and passionately pursuing the presence and power of God.
But the truth is, we were never meant to choose between the two.
You can love sound doctrine and still believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit. You can be committed to rightly dividing the Word of Truth and still believe that God speaks, heals, delivers, and encounters His people today.
In John 4:23–24, Jesus tells us that the Father is seeking those who will worship Him in spirit and in truth. Not one at the expense of the other, but both.
I believe we must also recognize that God desires the surrender of our whole selves in worship. This includes our minds, our hearts, our emotions, and our passions. Our emotional expression is not automatically evidence of spiritual immaturity, just as the absence of emotion is not automatically evidence of spiritual maturity.
God created us with the capacity to feel deeply, to rejoice passionately, to weep in His presence, and to respond to Him with every part of our being. The goal of biblical worship is not to suppress these expressions, but to surrender them to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
Paul reinforces this in 1 Thessalonians 5:19–21 when he instructs believers not to quench the Spirit, not to despise prophecies, but to test all things and hold fast to what is good.
Notice that Paul never instructed the Church to reject spiritual manifestations simply because discernment was necessary. Instead, he taught them how to properly steward what God was doing.
This is something our generation desperately needs to recover.
We should never have to abandon biblical truth to pursue spiritual experiences, but neither should we feel pressured to deny genuine encounters with God to be considered biblically grounded.
The answer to spiritual excess is not spiritual absence. The answer to poor doctrine is not the rejection of supernatural ministry. The answer is a Church that is both grounded in the Word and sensitive to the Holy Spirit.
We need sound theology.
We need spiritual discernment.
We need genuine encounters with God.
We need worship that engages our hearts, minds, emotions, and passions.
And none of these should be enemies of one another.
The hope and the prayer is that we would become a people who are neither afraid of the supernatural nor careless with the Scriptures.
A people who refuse to manufacture encounters, but also refuse to dismiss what God is genuinely doing.
A people who understand that emotionalism without truth can lead to deception, but intellectualism without heartfelt devotion can leave us with knowledge that never moves us to worship.
We do not need less of the Holy Spirit to become more biblical. We need to become more biblical in how we recognize, pursue, and steward His work.
The Word and the Spirit were never meant to be separated, and our hearts were never meant to be absent from our worship.
