Gifts, Miracles, Mystery, and Mysticism

The night everyone around me was weeping, nothing happened to me. Years later I met the man who had wept hardest in that room. He fell apart six months afterward, chasing the next conference, convinced God had left him when the feeling did.One man was shaken because he experienced nothing. The other because he experienced too much. Both were asking the same question: where do I actually stand with God, and how would I know?The church has offered two scripts. One treats gifts and encounters as the evidence of real faith. The other files the whole subject under "e;excess"e; and moves on. The warm side lost the ability to test. The cool side lost the ability to expect. And most believers learned to keep quiet about what happened to them—or about the fact that nothing did.This book takes gifts, miracles, mystery, and mysticism and re-sorts them around the gospel. Tongues you pray without understanding. Healing you asked for and did not receive. Gifts turned into a ranking chart. Miracles reported by other religions. And the decisive difference between the mystery Scripture proclaims and the mysticism that quietly replaces it.It refuses to dismiss experience. It refuses to make experience the point. And it argues that only from the center—a crucified and risen Christ—does any of it find its proper place.