Danny Lovett's rod of the spirit: a journey into the spirit-filled life

Danny Lovett, a professor at Temple University is viewed as a controversial figure within religious evangelism. He has taught, lectured and written about how to effectively empower us with the spirit of Christ and how to use His power to motivate our witnessing. In the majority of his literature he focuses on many specific themes. For his book "Rod of the Spirit" his primary focus is on the theme of power. Lovett presents power as the culmination four spiritual energies and uses it to illustrate how we can harness the Holy Spirit to work in our lives concurrently with our role as Christians. The interplay between religious faith and our relationship to God is the key to accurately interpreting this work. In the following review we will examine in detail how Lovett effectively explains how we can extract the most out of our faith and how to interconnect our Christian selves with our physical being. We will conduct a Chapter-by-Chapter analysis followed by an overall critique of the book.

Rod of the Spirit" begins with an introduction to Lovett's beliefs on the power of the Holy Spirit. He explains in his first section that the most important thing we have to realize is the powerful effect of Christ's love for humanity. We as human beings living in a physical world often forget this power precisely because we have to negotiate through so many different barriers that mitigate and blunt our faith. However, Christ's love for us is the greatest and most powerful gift that one can receive, and once we have recognized his glory, Lovett argues that we should never take granted this privilege. He acknowledges that at many times it might seem that there are aspects of our faith where sacrifice and physical elements might seem too much to overcome and we ignore our worship. This is a fatal mistake because we should never cease to acknowledge the present of the Holy Spirit. This is especially important in our witnessing and active ministry, because the only way to truly convince the "lost" of our intentions and to infuse them with the passion to find Christ is to communicate the power of Christ and the Holy Spirit. The way we can do this is to manifest the existence of that power within ourselves by dedicating ourselves to Christ's power. In sum, this section articulates the distancing from Christ that many of us experience on a daily basis as a result of the consistent grind of living. However, this is a slippery slope result because as we slip further away from how we should worship we lose the effectiveness of our ministry and we lose the zeal to spread God's words. Therefore, it is important to reexamine our commitment to Christ and in so doing discover the power of the Holy Spirit and allow it to renew and rejuvenate us completely.

The most important theme of the second section is how we as believers must act to entrench the Holy Spirit and allow Him to communicate His power to us. The power of the Holy Spirit affects us all differently, but the effect is universal in that we become energized by His power and ultimately we experience a feeling of spiritual rebirth. Before we can walk with God and begin articulation of his work through ministry and witnessing, we have to place God firmly within our lives as both a spiritual and physical presence. If we do not do this at the very outset than the overall effect is that we lack the ability to connect with the Holy Spirit, and in turn our faith will suffer. When the Holy Spirit does not "infest us," we are not allowing Christ to take control of our lives and control our fates. This is dangerous because it steers us further and further away from God as we begin to view our physical life, and our spiritual life as divided and separate. Only when we conform to the Power of the Holy Spirit can we ultimately subjugate ourselves to God's dominion and as a result experience the full effects of spiritual rejuvenation and acceptance of Christ's sacrifice for us. In effect, Lovett argues that we must live for God before we can experience the full rewards of being in his stewardship.

In the next section he clarifies a definitional conflict. He argues that the Holy Spirit is not a religion as we think of it. He defines religion as the "void of religion" or as something that is a vacuum force that needs to be filled. Religion is then something that people who are "lost" from the faith experience because they are constantly trying to look for a different and alternative path to Heaven or through worship of a false god. As true believers our duty is to continuously reflect on our own lives to ensure that we are not attempting to fill this "void of religion." The reason that this void might occur is if we begin to place greater emphasis of our physical lives rather than our spiritual being. When this happens we are effectively splitting our beliefs and placing value in a false idol. Therefore if we can continuously examine ourselves and look at whether or not we are walking with the Lord, then we will ensure that we do not steer away from the correct path towards Heaven. Many times we forget that spiritual worship and our relationship with God is not a one-time revelation, but it is something that we must maintain and rejuvenate throughout the entirety of our lives, therefore we must think of worship as a marathon rather than a race, and preserve the sanctity of the Holy Spirit.

The following section articulates that if we keep our faith with Jesus, then his power will infuse into our very beings. Rejuvenation can be a constantly experience because the power of the Holy Spirit is infinite, therefore if we can keep our minds and hearts directed towards the Lord then change will inevitably happen in our lives. It is an often-made mistake to believe that God cannot affect some of the aspects of our lives, and therefore we have to deviate from our worship in order to pursue worldly goals. In actual fact, God has complete control over our lives and that it is only our impatience that creates this perceived void. Therefore, we have to be vigilant in our beliefs and in doing so we can create a strong spiritual bond with the Holy Spirit and change within our lives will come through his power.

The allegory that Lovett uses as the title of his book is the ancient Rod of the biblical era. This Rod appears in the bible as a seemingly innocent tool used by the likes of Sheppard's and other herdsmen, but in fact it holds deep symbolism within the Bible. The Rod is used by God in the Old Testament as a symbol for change and performance of miracles precisely because it is a tool of the common men. It is used as symbol for authority and as a means of defense against the unjust and unfaithful. It serves as a universal symbol because possessors are of every kind and station in life from the poorest beggar to the richest merchant. Therefore the Rod of the Spirit is actually the channeling of God's power into us and his way of working His will in this world through us. Thus, Lovett argues that when we infuse ourselves through the symbolic "rod of the Spirit" what we actually become is an individual conduit for God's will on this planet. Thus, we can use the Rod of the Spirit as an empowering tool to perform the work God in this world and to create greater spiritual rejuvenation in ourselves. Thus the symbolic nature of this Rod is in fact the faith that we bear within ourselves. If we are faithful than the power of the Holy Spirit will be ever present and in doing so God can trust that he can perform his greater plans for humanity through us. It is this bridging of trust that is central to Lovett's book because it fully articulates his vision for how Christ will operate through us.

In his concluding section Lovett articulates the completion of his message, that as human beings we are the conduits of God to perform change and betterment in this world. Often we lose track of what is actually important because of the distractions of the physical world, and when we become sidetracked that is when we lose the effectiveness of the faith. We should always be at peace with God and trust in him to provide and protect us. Our spiritual belief and Christ's sacrifice and protection is not a "fall back" from our physical pursuits, rather it is a reflection of who we are as individuals in worship. We should stand by the Holy Spirit in both times of need and times of plenty to prove our faith, only in this way can we gain the greatest redemption and fully experience the power of Christ in our lives.

Overall we are the vessels by which God does his work in this world, and this is ultimately the most important thing that we can do, therefore to interfere in his overall plan by asserting that our physical demands and ambitions are greater than God's grand plan is representative of false worship.

The goal of the author is obvious to write about how we have veered away from Christ through our pursuit of daily ambitions and to remind us that as faithful worshippers we have to understand and respect the message of God to the fullest. Furthermore, he wants us to understand that the Power of the Holy Spirit is eminent in all of us and that we can use this as a conduit to advance ourselves in both our spiritual and physical selves.