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• ESPAÑOL: ¿Has sido llenado con el Espíritu Santo?

Hi, my name is Dean Smith and in this podcast, I want to talk about the importance of being filled or baptized with the Holy Spirit.

A strange thing happened to me, years ago, while I was attending seminary. The school I attended had an interesting theory about the Holy Spirit and the gift of tongues. It was simply, ‘Seek not, forbid not.’

In other words, it did not forbid the gift of tongues, but neither did it encourage them.

The reality was however that the major emphasis was ‘seek not.’

Now I had been saved in a charismatic church that strongly believed in the gift of tongues and spiritual gifts and I was still attending that church while at seminary. It was a Jesus people hippie church, the oldest person who was 25 at the time was the pastor.

But as I continued at seminary I started developing a negative attitude towards those who spoke in tongues. I looked down on the gift and them.

I remember the evening I was attending one of our church’s home prayer meetings. I had been a Christian for a couple of years and had never been filled with the Holy Spirit and I felt an inner urge that I needed to do this.

I asked for prayer and several people gathered, around me, laid their hands on me, and began to pray and suddenly the Holy Spirit fell upon me.

I felt what can only be described as an inexplicable Joy. And then a strange thing happened.

I felt this burning sensation, without pain, start in the pit of my stomach and slowly began to move its way up my stomach and my throat.

I had no idea what was happening. But I had my suspicions that this was the gift of tongues. So I pushed back this sensation and it stopped. It appeared again a few seconds later, and I pushed it back a second time.

If this was tongues, I was having nothing to do with it.

Over the next few days, this inexplicable Joy continued.

At the time, I was volunteering at a Christian book table at our local university. As I sat there, I still had this overwhelming joy and that burning sensation appeared again, and as I had done before I pushed it back down.

Nothing much happened until I saw one of the members of our church, Wolfgang with his trademark hippie look, long blonde hair, and full beard, walking down the hallway of the university.

As I was being distracted, the burning sensation returned, but this time it was traveling three to four times faster than it had before and zipped up my stomach, my throat, and out of my mouth and I was speaking in tongues before I had a chance to stop it.

And, then, I felt the Holy Spirit say to me, “Now you are numbered among them.” I was now one of those who I had previously despised.

I am sharing this because I believe the Holy Spirit is beginning to move in a new way and it is more essential than ever we have the Holy Spirit power in our lives.

In John 14:12, Jesus said that anyone who believed in Him would perform greater miracles than even the Lord did, and then four verses later connected this promise to the coming of the Holy Spirit.

If we are going to perform greater miracles than Christ, then we need the Lord’s source of power as well. When Jesus was on Earth, He set aside His deity and functioned fully as a man empowered by the Holy Spirit.

When John the Baptist baptized Jesus in the water, we are told that the Holy Spirit descended on Christ in a visible form like a dove.

John writes that Jesus had a full measure of the Holy Spirit in John 3:34 and Luke states that Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit in Luke 4:1.

It was through the power of the Holy Spirit that Jesus performed miracles.

When Jesus cast an evil spirit out of a man in Matthew 12, the Pharisees tried to discredit the miracle by claiming Jesus cast out the demon by a more powerful evil spirit, Beelzebul.

Jesus replied quote, “It is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons” (Matthew 12:28).

When the woman with the issue of blood touched the hem of Jesus’ garment and was instantly healed, Jesus said “Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me” (Luke 8:46). That power leaving Jesus’ body was the Holy Spirit.

If we are to perform greater miracles than even Christ, then we need the power of God in our lives. Like Jesus, we need to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

And that is what happened when the Holy Spirit fell upon the disciples in the Upper Room on the Day of Pentecost.

But notice what happened. Luke writes in Acts 2:4 that quote, “They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.“

Like Jesus, the disciples on the Day of Pentecost were filled with the Holy Spirit.

Now there was more happening than just tongues because we read that not only were people bewildered by what they were seeing, but some mocked the disciple, and made a strange accusation.

Luke writes in Acts 2:13, “But others mocking said, “They are filled with new wine.”

They accused the disciples of being drunk and this was so noticeable that Peter felt he needed to address this accusation by stating, “For these people are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day.”

Peter had been caught totally off guard by what was taking place.
He didn’t deny what was happening but came up with the feeble excuse that it was too early in the day for them to be drunk.

Now, if you are walking through a mall and heard someone speaking in a different language, would you immediately turn and say ‘Oh, they must be drunk.’

No, you would only accuse someone of being drunk, if you saw the classic symptoms, slurring, stumbling, erratic behavior, blood-shot eyes,. These are the hallmarks of someone drunk.

So why were the disciples accused of being drunk on the Day of Pentecost? Though we are provided no specific details, something else must have been happening.

My wife and I were at a church conference during the 1990s. We were experiencing what was known as the Toronto Revival or Blessing. I don’t know how many have heard of this. But during this time, there was a massive outpouring of the Holy Spirit, probably similar to what we saw on the Day of Pentecost.

At the conference, I remember watching one of the elders of our church, become so drunk in the spirit, he couldn’t even stand. I mean looking at him you would think he had been drinking alcohol all night.

He couldn’t stand and was crawling along the floor on his hands and knees. His words were slurred and he was dribbling saliva. His eyes were bloodshot. Anyone looking at him would have thought he was drunk, but he was not drunk from alcohol, he was overwhelmed by the Spirit of God.

During the Toronto Blessing, the Holy Spirit was so strong during church services that it would cause people to collapse to the floor which we refer to as being slain in the Spirit.

At times, you had to watch where you were walking as there were so many people sprawled on the floor because of the power of God.

Sociologist Margaret Poloma describes being slain in the spirit as quote “the power of the Holy Spirit so filling a person with a heightened inner awareness that the body’s energy fades away and the person collapses to the floor“.

Now we may look at these types of things as being quite strange, but they were common in past revivals.

For example, it was common to see people being slain by the Holy Spirit in the First Great Awakening which took place in Europe in the 1700s, and the Second Great Awakening which hit America in the early 1800s as they often talk about it in their writings.

John Wesley, who led many of these revival meetings, described it this way in his journal, quote:

“Many of those that heard began to call upon God with strong cries and tears. Some sunk down, and there remained no strength in them; others exceedingly trembled and quaked: some were torn with a kind of convulsive motion in every part of their bodies, and that so violently, that often four or five persons could not hold one of them… I immediately prayed that God would not suffer those who were weak to be offended.”

We even see examples of this in paintings of the revival meetings. In an engraving of a Methodist revival meeting created by Jacques Gérard in 1819. It portrays a meeting underway and in the foreground, people singing and praying over a man who had fallen on the ground.

Another drawing from around 1830 pictures of people attending a revival meeting and we clearly see a man catching a woman who is falling.

All I am saying is when the Holy Spirit is moving in power things start happening.

We see it occurring in the Bible. In Ezekiel 1:28, the prophet fell down on His face when he encountered the Glory of God. In an encounter with a Godly angel, Daniel said his strength left him and he fell to the ground speechless. Later during that same encounter, we see Daniel crawling on his hands and knees trembling (Daniel 10).

When King Saul encountered a company of prophets, we are told that the Spirit of God came even on him, leading him to strip naked and lie on the ground for most of the day in 1 Samuel 19:24.

Most commentators state that he was probably not completely nude, as the word can describe just taking off of armor and outward clothing, but most also agree with the famed Old Testament Bible Commentators, Kiel and Dilitzsch that Saul was in an “ecstatic state of external unconsciousness.”

Saul was not drunk, he was on the ground because of the power of the presence of God. When the Holy Spirit moves on people, strange things can happen.

In the New Testament, we see two distinctive and unique works of the Holy Spirit that are available to Christians because of the work of Christ on the cross.

The first is the work of Grace that comes with being born-again when we believe in Jesus for our salvation. Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5).

When we believe, the Holy Spirit plays a critical regenerative role in this process.

However, there is also an important second work of Grace which involves being filled or baptized with the Holy Spirit.

It is a distinctive second act that takes place after salvation when we are filled and empowered by the Holy Spirit like the disciples were on the Day of Pentecost.

This filling of the Holy Spirit is evidenced several times in the Book of Acts. I want to look at a couple of them.

The first involves Philip in Acts 8. We are told that after the death of the church’s first martyr, Philip went to Samaria and preached the Gospel. But more than that having been just filled with the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, he showed up with Holy Spirit power.

We read that demons were being cast out of people and many lame and paralytics were being healed. As a result of the demonstration of the Holy Spirit’s power, people were getting saved and water baptized.

But Luke added since the Holy Spirit had fallen on any of the new believers, the apostles sent in Peter and John:

We read:

“Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent to them Peter and John, 15 who came down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit, 16 for he had not yet fallen on any of them, but they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. 17 Then they laid their hands on them and they received the Holy Spirit.“

But I like how Luke explains it. He says Peter and John prayed and laid hands on the Samaritans and quote “They received the Holy Spirit,” which flowed out of Peter and John as they laid hands on them.

We see the same thing happen in Ephesus, in Acts 19, when Paul encountered 12 men who Paul immediately knew something was missing in their lives.

They had been baptized by John the Baptist, so Paul baptized them in the name of Jesus meaning they believed in Jesus and were born again and then we read what happened next quote:

And when Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they began speaking in tongues and prophesying. Acts 19:6:

“After Paul laid hands on them they were filled with the Holy Spirit and manifesting two spiritual gifts, prophecy and tongues.”

The problem with these two stories is that we are only seeing senior apostolic ministries in action.

This is why we need to look at a third incident involving the Apostle Paul, after his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus when he first believed in the resurrected Christ and was born again.

After being struck blind by the encounter, Paul, who was then called Saul, was led by the hand to Damascus.

While Saul was in Damascus, the Holy Spirit spoke to a disciple called Ananias in Acts 9:12 telling him to lay hands on Saul and pray for him to be healed of his blindness.

We read:

17 Then Ananias went to the house and entered it. Placing his hands on Saul, he said, “Brother Saul, the Lord—Jesus, who appeared to you on the road as you were coming here—has sent me so that you may see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 19:17)

After Ananias laid his hands on Saul, he was not only healed but instantly filled with the Holy Spirit. Though not specifically mentioned here, in his letter to the Corinthians, it was obvious that Paul spoke in Tongues and prophesied.

Though Paul would go on to write several books of the Bible, Ananias is never mentioned again. He never wrote a book in the Bible. He wasn’t a pastor, evangelist or an apostle. He was just an everyday Joe, who was filled with the Holy Spirit and powerfully used by God.

As he laid his hands on Paul, the Holy Spirit flowed out Ananias, empowering Paul who became the most dominant force in the early church for the next several years.

This means each of us can pass on the Holy Spirit to others. This means each of us has the power inside us to change the world.

So if you are saved and have never been filled or baptized in the Holy Spirit, you need to seek out Spirit-filled believers and have them lay hands on you and pray for you.

And if you already have been filled, but are feeling a bit dead spiritually, you may need to rekindle your relationship with the Holy Spirit

In Ephesians 5:18, Paul writes, “Do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit.” The word filled is in the present imperative tense, which means be continually filled with the Holy Spirit or keep on being filled with the Spirit.

This verse suggests that we can sometimes spring a leak so to speak.

If your flame has gone down, you need to rekindle your relationship with the Holy Spirit. Paul told Timothy to stir up or rekindle the gift that was in him through laying on of Paul’s hands in 2 Timothy 1:6-7.

This is done by praying for a greater release of the Spirit in your life and even by activating your spiritual gifts, such as speaking in tongues. You may even want to have Spirit-filled people lay hands on you.

The fact is we all need more of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Thanks for joining me on this podcast, and we will talk to you again.