I Asked God, Am I Baptised in Your Sight?

Is the baptism of the Holy Spirit received at the moment of conversion? There are two processes involved in becoming a Christian, receiving Jesus as Saviour and being baptised in the Holy Spirit. Many Christians believe that these two processes occur at the same time. There are some Bible verses which seem to support this point of view. If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ he does not belong to Christ. (Romans 8:9.) After hearing the message and believing it the Ephesians were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit as a deposit for their redemption. (Ephesians 1:13,14.) When Peter preached in Caesarea the Holy Spirit came on the people as he was still speaking. The apostles were amazed when the Holy Spirit came on non-Jewish believers for the first time (the first Christians were all Jews) and they began worshipping God using the prayer languages which the Bible calls the gift of tongues. (Acts 10:34-48.) It seems an open and shut case that Christians receive the Holy Spirit and have their sins forgiven by Jesus their Saviour at the same time.

The belief that the Holy Spirit is received at the moment of conversion causes a practical problem. It leads to a feeling of 'I received the Holy Spirit when I was converted, thank you very much, and I don't need to worry about it anymore.' It is also contradicted by another story in the Bible where Philip was preaching the gospel in Samaria. Here the people believed in Jesus and were baptized in water and then, some time later, Peter and John arrived to pray for them to receive the Holy Spirit. (Acts 8:4-24.) God doesn't have to do things in the same way or in the same order every time. He can deal with different people in different ways. No one is a Christian unless they have been born again of the Holy Spirit. (John 3:1-8.) Some people become Christians straight away. For others it is a gradual process. When Peter was preaching in Caesarea there were plenty of Christians around that people could pray with and it was easy for the new Christians to join in as everyone prayed in tongues. In Samaria Philip is preaching there on his own. There are a large number of people who are followers of Simon the Sorcerer who have become Christians. Their knowledge of what they are doing would be very limited. When I became a Christian I had gone to my first counselling session and read my small Journey Into Life booklet on how to live the Christian life. I knew that Jesus had forgiven my sins and that I needed to pray and read the Bible every day and that I needed to join a church. That was as much as I could understand in one day. I must have read the page in booklet on the Holy Spirit but had not taken it in. All of these things were completely knew  and there was a limit to what I could learn in one day.

The Bible tells the story of a man called Apollos who was preaching and teaching accurately and courageously about Jesus. He had been baptised in water but not baptised in the Holy Spirit. When Priscilla and Aquila met him they explained these things to him. (Acts 18:23-28.) When the apostle Paul came to Ephesus he met a group of a dozen Christians. They had all been baptised in water. Many of these people might have been baptised in the days before Jesus' death and resurrection either by John the Baptist or by the disciples of John the Baptist. The Holy Spirit only came on the day of Pentecost forty days after Jesus ascended to Heaven. Paul asked the Christians in Ephesus, 'Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?' They replied, 'We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.' Paul laid hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit. They began prophesying and praying in tongues, speaking in their own language and in other languages as God spoke through them.  (Acts 19:1-7.)

Aimee Semple McPherson founded one of the biggest Pentecostal churches in America during the First World War. It is still there today. She met people who insisted they had the Holy Spirit because they were powerful preachers or effective evangelists. Apollos was a powerful preacher and he didn't have the Holy Spirit. She asked one woman if she had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The woman replied that she had no idea what the baptism of the Holy Spirit meant but was sure that she had. She was sure that she had all that God had for her. We must always be humble. None of us have all that God has for us. I am sure that I have the Holy Spirit but would still like to have more of his power in my life. In the 1960s the baptism of the Holy Spirit was called the second blessing. The first blessing was when you received Jesus as your Saviour. The second blessing was when you received the Holy Spirit. The preacher Alan Redpath was asked if he believed in the second blessing. He said yes, he believed in it, but wouldn't they let him have a third, a fourth and a fifth and to have it every day? We receive the Holy Spirit only once but we may be filled with the Spirit, or refilled, at any time.

I don't see praying in tongues as being a necessary proof that someone has been baptised in the Holy Spirit. Aimee Semple Mcpherson did and called this the Biblical evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I think we are too ready to demand Biblical evidence and to try to prove things. I don't want to be divisive and the use of praying in tongues as the acid test for the Holy Spirit has been very divisive. I attended a counselling session with Ian Smale in 1981 in which we were told to ask God if we were baptised in his sight. I think this is a much better approach. Encourage the Christian to ask God to guide them as to whether they need to be baptised in water or in the Holy Spirit. We all experience baptism in different ways. The very next day after I had asked God if I was baptised in his sight my church youth leader asked if I had ever thought about being baptised as an adult in water. I was baptised in water six weeks later. I had been christened as a baby but this is considered by many Christians to mean nothing. A baby is too young to understand. To those brought up in a traditional church (I wasn't) infant baptism might still have some meaning but I still would consider it inferior to baptism as an adult. It is not uncommon for some Anglican Christians to be baptised twice, as a baby and then as an adult. Total immersion is also the Biblical method of baptism and is preferable to sprinkling. We are buried in baptism and brought out of the water into the resurrection of Jesus. We consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God. (Romans 6:1-11.) I asked God to give me the Holy Spirit every day for seven days. As I was walking through the park the next weekend I knew I had received it. There was a feeling of God's presence which I had previously only felt when I was sitting with my friends in church and now I had it all the time. There was no one else there and I did not pray in tongues. I had never heard of praying in tongues. It is likely that if you receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit among a group of Christians who are worshipping God together and praying in tongues, you will join in with them praying in tongues. This is how people usually receive the Holy Spirit and it seems to be the way most people received it in the Bible. It is very unlikely you could receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit without knowing what it is and even less likely that you wouldn't feel anything. Aimee Semple McPherson said that you should be able to remember the time and the day. For me it was December 8th 1981, two days before my fifteenth birthday. It is a sudden dramatic experience when God's spirit comes to dwell in your body. You will feel it. You will remember it.

I prayed in tongues six months later after reading about it in a book. I sing in tongues and that was how I experienced the gift. I felt as if God was singing to me in tongues to the tune of songs I had heard on the radio. I was fifteen years old and had never heard anybody speaking in tongues. My tongues are still sung to a tune but not to the tune of a pop song. I spent some time praying with an African man who had a similar way of praying in tongues. I enjoyed praying with him. Some other Christians wouldn't accept my praying in tongues because I sing in tongues. The standard method of prayer in tongues is to pray in the languages of men and angels (1Corinthians 13:1) and then to have the tongue interpreted by another member of the church so that people can understand it (1Corinthians 14:27,28.) But there is another type of tongue that is a worship tongue, your own personal prayer language. Singing in the Spirit is mentioned in Scripture (1Corinthians 14:15.) We are told to speak to one another in psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord in our hearts and always giving thanks to God for everything. This is long before the days of the printing press and they were not singing hymns from a hymn book. They must have been singing in the Spirit. They must have been singing in tongues. (Ephesians 5:18-21.)

The gift of prophecy is like the gift of tongues. It is possible for a prophet to predict the future. In the Bible Agabus predicted the famine in Samaria (Acts 11:27-30) as well the apostle Paul's imprisonment in Jerusalem (Acts 21:10-14.) I have experienced prophetic words about the future. I had a dream about the Jesus Army community house we lived in being hit by an earthquake and it survived because the building was designed to withstand an earthquake. Our congregation is still together after the momentous events of the last seven years, the BBC news reports, the police investigation and the court cases, in spite of nearly all the other congregations that were part of the Jesus Army having closed down. The Bible says that in the last days your young men will have visions and your old men will dream dreams. (Acts 2:14-21.) Most of the early Pentecostal churches didn't put a very great emphasis on the prophet's ability to predict the future. In our generation we have become too sensational. We want to know what God is saying about the covid pandemic, the election or the next time our country is going to have a revival. Television focuses on the controversial and the spectacular. This has led to many false prophesies. When one of Jesus' disciples asked, 'Do you intend to restore the kingdom of Israel at this time?' Jesus replied, 'It is not for you to know the times and seasons which the father has determined.' (Acts 1:6,7.) Predicting the future was never the main purpose of prophecy in the church. It is not foretelling as much as forth telling. The main purpose of prophecy is the encouragement and edification of the church. Those who speak in tongues edify themselves. Those who prophesy edify the church. (1Corinthians 14:1-5.) If a tongue is given in a church meeting it must be interpreted. Prophecy is like speaking in tongues and interpreting at the same time, speaking under direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Amy Semple Mcpherson preached sermons which were completely unprepared. She was once taken to a meeting where she didn't realise that she was actually the speaker. Suddenly led to the stage in front of hundreds of people, she began to speak under direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It was a very uplifting message about how the Holy Spirit had been removed from the church throughout most of history - many Christians believed that spiritual gifts like healing, tongues and prophecy were only for Biblical times - but now the Holy Spirit was coming back. Since that time there has been a greater acceptance of the baptism of the Holy Spirit and of spiritual gifts and they are known in most churches. They are no longer the controversial and divisive subject that they were a hundred years ago. The Holy Spirit has been given back to the church.