The Spirit-filled Life
There is a huge difference between knowing the Holy Spirit and receiving it. Roland Hegstad writes of his experience.
When I first met the Holy Spirit, in my boyhood, it wasn’t under conditions conducive to confidence.
He was introduced to me as the “Holy Ghost,” which had all manner of strange and scary connotations.
But by the time I was baptised as a youth, I knew all about Him. I had the doctrine down; I knew that the Holy Spirit:
- was present at the creation of our world (Genesis 1:2)—the active agent in re-creation of sinners also (John 3:5)
- is Christ’s representative on earth (John 16:7)— to receive the Holy Spirit was to receive Jesus (John 14:16-18)
- is both the divine Comforter (John 14:16, 17) and divine Disturber (John 16:8)—“disturbing” us by reproving sin through the voice of conscience; comforting us by bringing our rebellious spirit into harmony with the law of God, which He writes on our hearts (Hebrews 10:15, 16)
- is our teacher (John 14:26)
- gives power (Acts 1:8)
- purifies (2 Thessalonians 2:13)
- helps develop a sanctified character (Galatians 5:22, 23)
- gives us gifts or “tools” to enable us to do a unique work (1 Corinthians 12:4)
- and, as the Spirit of truth (John 16:13), guides us to truth (John 16:13).
All these facts I knew when I was baptised.
But what a chasm there is between knowing and receiving!
Before baptism, I disliked a classmate. When I came up from the water, supposedly a “new creature,” as the Bible puts it, I disliked him still, and let that dislike rule my words and attitudes toward him.
Before baptism, I’d wrestled with sin and had been thrown by impure thoughts.
Afterward, though I tried new grips and new strategies, sin squeezed me in its old holds, and pinned me to the canvas. It was twoand- a-half years of struggle and defeat before the Holy Spirit led me gently through a night of prayer into a dawn of victory, and I experienced the joy of the 50- kilogram weakling who exercises unseen muscle to throw his heretofore unbeatable opponent.
As God’s Word promises, I’d received power after the Holy Spirit came on me.
constant need
But one infilling of the Spirit doesn’t suffice for life.
My testimony needs to be that today the Holy Spirit has baptised me anew—which is one way of saying that we have surrendered our will to God, and that we are permitting the Spirit to direct us.
Christ in His humanity was continually receiving a new baptism of the Holy Spirit from the Father. Every morning the Lord awakened Him to anoint His lips with grace, that He might speak the good news of salvation with power.
Few promises of the Bible are more thoroughly documented than the baptism of the Holy Spirit:
- “He will baptise you with the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 3:11, NEB)
- “He [Christ] . . . baptises with the Holy Spirit” (John 1:33, RSV) and,
- “Be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18, KJV).
It would be a strange kind of Christian who, faced with such emphatic affirmations, would reject the doctrine of baptism by the Holy Spirit. The tragedy is that so many Christians go so many years with so little power. We should know that Jesus our Saviour has pardoned and accepted us; and we should wait as did the early disciples, until, like them, we receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Then it is that living for Christ becomes a joy!
That’s the way it was with me, when I let the Spirit take over the steering wheel of my life. For months I seemed bathed in joy. When I went to bed, my last thoughts were of Christ; I awakened with a smile, confident that God would bring me new victories through the day.
And He did! For when we receive the Holy Spirit, we receive power!
who has the Spirit?
Can we know that we have the Holy Spirit? Some Christians today insist that one who has not spoken in “tongues” can’t have received the Spirit. That is, that the gift of tongues is the necessary sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.
But the Bible doesn’t support such exclusivity.
Gifts of the Spirit, says Paul, are divided by the Holy Spirit—“He gives them to each one, just as he determines” (1 Corinthians 12:11).
When Zacharias was filled with the Holy Spirit (see Luke 1:67, 68), he prophesied.
When the Spirit descended on the disciples, what was the result? They spoke “the word of God boldly”—not with tongues, but with boldness! (Acts 4:31).
In only three of the 18 major accounts of baptisms of the Holy Spirit are tongues mentioned, and in each case it was in order to get the spreading of the gospel off to a good start—the divinely endowed ability to use a foreign language.
The phrase “baptism of the Holy Spirit” suggests that we’re immersed by the Holy Spirit into Christ ( baptism is a transliteration from the Greek, and means “to immerse”). Matthew records what happened at Christ’s baptism in the river Jordan. As He was coming up out of the water, “heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove . . . on him” (Matthew 3:16).
“Then he saved us—not because we were good enough to be saved, but because of his kindness and pity—by washing away our sins and giving us the new joy of the indwelling Holy Spirit whom he poured out upon us with wonderful fullness—and all because of what Jesus Christ our Saviour did so that he could declare us good in God’s eyes” (Titus 3:5-7, TLB).
Scripture uses a number of figures other than baptism to describe the Spirit’s entrance into a person’s life, including the promise of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:33); the gift of the Holy Spirit (verse 38); receiving the Holy Spirit (Acts 8:17); being filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:4); and, being endued with power (Luke 24:49). The baptism of the Holy Spirit, then, describes what happens to an individual when he or she first experiences (or experiences with renewed intensity) the presence and working of the Holy Spirit.
On one point the Scripture leaves no room for doubt: There is no such thing as a “Spiritless” Christian. The assumption of the disciples as they wrote to new churches is that their members had the Spirit; there is no recognition of an underprivileged group lacking the Spirit and a privileged group having it. Paul wrote to the church in Rome, saying: “If anyone doesn’t have the Spirit of Christ living in him, he is not a Christian at all” (Romans 8:9, TLB).
All Christians must be Spirit filled. It is the Holy Spirit who communicates Christ to us. Christ doesn’t acknowledge us to be His unless we know the reality of the Holy Spirit living in us.
As the Spirit leads us from spiritual childhood to maturity, Jesus increasingly becomes the centre of our life, for the Spirit introduces us to Him, immerses us in Him and, at last, loses us in Him— “For there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
beautiful invitation
And how does one receive the Spirit and His gifts? Simply by responding to an invitation: “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20), Christ says.
To receive Him is to receive the Spirit; to receive the Spirit is to receive Him. Indeed, we could not respond to the invitation were the Spirit not motivating us. First evidence of the Spirit’s presence may be simply our awareness that we are outside of Christ and that He is inviting us in.
The form of the invitation itself—a knock at our heart’s door—communicates our potential to refuse the Spirit entrance. He gives us the motive to invite Him in, but He will not overrule our will.
And we have something to do in cooperation with Him if we want Him to stay, for He will not reside in a dirty house. If the Spirit consented to stay in an unrepentant thief, murderer, adulterer or liar, He would be sanctioning sin.
Through the grace given us by the Spirit, we may achieve victories that because of erroneous and preconceived opinions, our defects of character, our smallness of faith have seemed impossible.
Indeed, it is only through the Spirit that victory can be ours. The prince of evil can be held in check only by the power of God channelled to us through the Holy Spirit.
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