Matt Roberts, a young preacher I met last week,
has built a congregation of 950 in the middle of Mormon country.

U.S.
News & World Report recently released its list of “Top Careers,” an outline of professions
that are expected to be popular in 2011. I was not surprised to find all kinds
of medical jobs on the list—from registered nurse to athletic trainer to
massage therapist—but I didn’t expect to see “clergy.” U.S. News
revealed that the Labor Department expects the number
of religious leaders to climb by 13 percent over the next decade.

One
reason that number will grow is that brave men (and some women) are stepping
out in faith to plant churches in an increasingly unchurched America. I met one
of these courageous souls last week. His name is Matt Roberts; he’s only 32;
and he moved to Ogden, Utah, six years ago to start an
evangelical church in the heart of Mormon territory.

God offers much more than a momentary experience. Let Him totally fill you with His power and turn your life into an adventure.

Years before the Azusa Street Revival, a radical band of zealous ministers crisscrossed the United States advocating a second Christian experience that they called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. These men and women were known as Holiness preachers. They were the spiritual descendants of John Wesley, and like Wesley they taught that sanctification was a work of the Holy Spirit that had to be prayed for and received by faith.

One early Pentecostal pioneer, Benjamin Hardin Irwin, began to teach that a third Christian experience was available to believers. He called it “the baptism of fire” and eventually founded a denomination based on his doctrines—the Fire-Baptized Holiness Church. Irwin eventually stepped into error and began teaching that there are numerous other explosive experiences available to every Christian such as “the baptism of dynamite,” “the baptism of oxidite” and “the baptism of selenite.”

 I refuse to be a Christian pessimist. Here are three
reasons why I can face the future with hope.

Terrorist
bombings. Middle East turmoil. $3.95 gas. Killer floods. Moral breakdown.
Fragile economies.

No
wonder Charlie Sheen is going crazy!

Seriously,
there’s a lot of bad news out there. Negative headlines make people fearful,
agitated, addicted or even sick. But from what I’ve read in my Bible,
Christians should not freak out every time a gloomy cloud settles over us. We,
of all people on earth, should be full of hope.

A few days ago a friend asked me what I thought about a
prophecy from a well-known Christian leader. This man has predicted a financial
collapse in the United States by sometime next year. Other Christians have
foreseen terrorist attacks, assassinations, bread lines and even the total
breakdown of society. My friend asked me: “What are you hearing from the Lord
about the future?”

When someone dies right after you
shake his hand, you realize how close we all are to eternity.

Last
Saturday, in between two sessions at a ministers conference in Virginia, I
noticed an older black man sitting near me. Everyone else in the hotel lobby
was chatting and drinking coffee, but this man was sitting alone—and he seemed
troubled. It was time to go to the next workshop, so I walked over to the guy,
said hello, shook his hand and added, “God bless you, sir.”

No
big deal—just a casual gesture. Or so I thought.

A
minute later there was a commotion in the lobby, and I heard someone say that a
man had collapsed. Paramedics arrived within minutes. People were praying. My
friend Dayton, the host of the conference, asked everyone to clear the area so
the emergency workers could do their job.

What the Holy Spirit did in
the former Soviet Union in 1989 will happen again in Islamic nations.

I’m old enough to remember when the
Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Freedom protesters danced in the streets in Eastern
Europe and Communist regimes fell like dominoes. A huge door of evangelistic
opportunity opened in a region where Christians had suffered unimaginable
persecution.

The fall of the Soviet empire caught most
Christians by surprise. Even though many believers on both sides of the Iron
Curtain had been praying for a spiritual breakthrough, few expected the entire
region to open so suddenly. Many American Christians remained
suspicious—especially those who had warned that Yury Andropov was the
Antichrist. (Oops! Wrong again. He died after being in office for only 15
months.)

We would honor God if we applied these principles to our
praise.

I
consider myself open-minded about worship. My tastes in music are eclectic, so I
love everything from Hillsong choruses and black gospel anthems to classic
hymns and Spanish worship artists Marco Barrientos and Jesús Romero. My
playlist even includes Native American, Nigerian and Iranian worship.

I love
any music that stirs my soul and points me to heaven, so worshipping the Lord
with other believers is one of my favorite pastimes. But there are a few things
I’d like to say to worship leaders. Please don’t take these comments as
criticism but as encouragement from a brother who has “seen it all” when it
comes to the Sunday morning drill.

If you want to avoid becoming
an old wineskin, make sure to keep these five hindrances out of your life.

I got some funny looks 11 years ago when
I told people that I planned to be ordained in a mainline Pentecostal
denomination. Most of my friends were supportive when I explained that I made
this decision because I was looking for accountability and spiritual mentors.
But critics told me I was aligning myself with “an old wineskin.” In their
opinion, any church group that is more than 30 years old has outlived its
usefulness and become a religious fossil.

I chose to reject the fossil
argument—mainly because (1) I know God has the power to renew His people no
matter how old their group is, and (2) even young organizations can become
religious and ineffective, regardless of how trendy and culturally relevant
they pretend to be.

Normally my yard does not crunch when I walk in it. So I got curious in November when I started hearing a distinctive crunching sound everywhere I went. I discovered that the oaks in Florida were producing an abundant crop of acorns—up to four times the normal amount, in fact. Acorns were everywhere—covering sidewalks, driveways and parking lots, filling gutters, and rolling around inside the chassis of my car.

I promptly christened 2010 the Year of the Acorn and began investigating why the trees were dropping so many of the hard, brown seeds. Were squirrels sending a distress signal? Could we use the acorns for food? (I imagined acorn-encrusted tilapia and acorn frappuccinos.) Or was this a sign of global warming?