What to Do When God’s Promises Fail

What to Do When God’s Promises Fail
Psalm 108

I was talking the other day with a friend who has been an associate pastor in a flourishing Pentecostal church for a year. He did not have a Pentecostal background, but this fact had not seemed to matter, because nothing very Pentecostal remained in this Pentecostal church. It had become indistinguishable from other lively churches outside mainstream denominations. My friend said he had experienced no one prophesying or speaking in tongues or being miraculously healed in his year in the church. That account cohered with impressions I have had from other people and from occasional visits to Pentecostal churches in the United States (the situation is different in the two-thirds world). I am sad about this fact, though I am not necessarily faulting the churches. Prophecy, speaking in tongues, and healing are God’s gifts, not something we can generate. Yet this aspect of the way things are in the church in the West does raise some questions. God once promised to pour out his Spirit on his people (see Joel 2). He isn’t doing so...