You may well need to yet receive the Holy Spirit

Is the Holy Spirit WITH you, or IN you?

“And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever – the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells WITH you and WILL be IN you. I will not leave you orphans;  I will come to you” (John 14:15-18).

“And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, ‘which,’ He said, ‘you have heard from Me; for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with [better: “IMMERSED IN”] the Holy Spirit not many days from now.’ Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, ‘Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’ And He said to them, ‘It is not for you to  know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has COME UPON you …’” (Acts 1:4-8).

“When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. And they were all FILLED with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:1-4).

“Then Peter answered, ‘Can anyone forbid water, that these should not be baptized who have RECEIVED the Holy Spirit, JUST AS WE HAVE’” (Acts 10:46-47).

In the first passage above, from John, Jesus makes it clear, to those who had already set everything to become His followers, that there were TWO ways in which his disciples can be in relationship with the Holy Spirit: one in which He is “WITH” you and one in which He is now “IN” you. The following three passages described when and how that transition occurred: at their Pentecostal event.

This Pentecostal event did not happen just once: the Book of Acts describes His Spirit’s being received four different times (Acts 2, 8, 10, 19). In Acts 19, Paul makes it clear that you will REMEMBER this event (“DID you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed”). These four different occurrences ought to make it clear to anyone that the Holy Spirit is NOT “always received” when a person becomes a Christian – even if you are GOD’S version of “Christian.” And it also ought to be clear that whenever you do receive the Holy Spirit, you will REMEMBER when it happened: how could you NOT remember the entrance of a “power” that was not there before? Paul confirmed that truth to the Galatians, that it was an event that they actually REMEMBERED happening: “This only I want to learn from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?” (Galatians 3:2). He was asking them, like he asked the Ephesian disciples, to REMEMBER that event. That implies that if you CAN’T remember the event, it is because it has not yet happened! When you meditate on those passages, and the outburst of Spirit-caused gifts that followed, does it not seem sort of like a Holy Spirit version of getting struck by lightning or sticking a safety pin into a wall socket? And that remembered event did not happen only in Acts 2: what is promised by Jesus and described in Acts is clearly His NORM for all His true followers in all ages, no?

When I was led to make the decision back in 1972 to surrender to Jesus and to the His apostolic writings, it became VERY obvious to me that this Pentecostal promise was yet to be fulfilled in me. The only way people can be confused about this obvious “elephant in the living room” is if they have been brainwashed by churches and traditions to believe that everyone who has “accepted Christ” has therefore ALREADY “received the Holy Spirit.” How could a non-brainwashed person draw that conclusion after reading and pondering the details of those four descriptions in the Book of Acts – regarding the Holy Spirit’s “filing,” there was NOTHING “automatic” happening in the book God had inspired – In Acts 2, they waited 9 days after His resurrection to receive the Holy Spirit. In Acts 8, the newly converted and baptized Samaritan disciples had to wait a few weeks or even months to have hands laid upon them and receive the Holy Spirit. In Acts 10, Cornelius and his household were not even given opportunity by God to confess Christ or be baptized before the Spirit sovereignly FELL upon them. And in Acts 19, Paul came upon Ephesians who were already disciples of Jesus, but had not had the opportunity to openly confess Him in baptism; they were then baptized and received the laying on of hands, and THEN they received the Holy Spirit. So how can anyone in a right mind argue from those examples such an idea that you “always receive” the Holy Spirit when you “believe in Jesus.” THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING AUTOMATIC ABOUT THE RECEIVING OF HIS PROMISE!

When you surrender to Jesus and become a serious disciple under His authority, your relationship with the Holy Spirit is (as Jesus said in John 14) in one in which He is “with you” – inspiring you, drawing you, shaming you, teaching you…  The Pentecostal event in Acts 2 did not change that, even for truly surrendered disciples of Jesus – Think about those Samaritan disciples in Acts 8 and the Ephesians in Acts 19! They were true Christians who had not yet received the Holy Spirit. So why would you think anything would be different in our day? It is BRAINWASHING not solid Biblical exegesis that makes people think that way. And to make things even worse, that which Protestants consider “accepting Christ” today does not even need to include embracing the details of the Sermon on the Mount when they [supposedly] “accept” Christ! My own teenage “conversion” was like that, and Satan was later able to work his way through the many cracks in my “conversion armor” to cause great damage to my relationship with God.

So, this is my question for you: assuming that you HAVE surrendered to Jesus without conditions or compromise, and assuming that you DO have a childlike trust in the Word of God – assuming all of that, has your relationship with His Holy Spirit YET shifted from “WITH” to “IN”? To sense the good things that have happened to you – even WITHIN you – since yielding to Jesus is no argument that you have already received the Holy Spirit. Can you not imagine deep changes that had certainly occurred within His disciples throughout the three years of being with Him and yet only being “with” the Holy Spirit prior to their Pentecost? THEY were “with” the Holy Spirit, and so were you and I!

In my true conversion in 1972, when I realized that I had not yet “received” the Holy Spirit – Peter’s own words, remember – I did not feel as if I were a fraud or a “second-class” Christian. I simply realized that I was now in the same place that the 120 disciples were in Acts chapter one, and that the Samaritan and Ephesian disciples were before their receiving of the Holy Spirit. So, I simply laid hold of His Pentecostal promise, sought Him earnestly, went through three months of rather deep (yet delightful) stretching by my Father, and then was surprised by Him at a December retreat, during which hands were laid upon me and His Spirit filled me and has remained within me to this day. HALLELUJAH!

Any wounds, fears, and corruptions that you bring to your Pentecostal event do not make you a phony Christian – think of all the chewing out of disciples that you read about in the New Testament (e.g., Galatians, Revelation, Hebrews, et cetera). But now – after your Pentecost – you have Him working on you from “within” in a degree and power than you did not have when He was still “with” you. A converted conscience feels shame when we fall into sin; but NOTHING feels more shame than the conscience of one who has received the Holy Spirit. Same goes for delight, hope, tenderness, mercy, righteousness, peace, and joy!!!

It is very important for you to understand that virtually all of the recipients of the Epistles written by Peter, James, John, Jude and Paul were PENTECOSTALLY experienced Christians. Those four Pentecostal descriptions in the Book of Acts are merely representatives of what the APOSTLES considered the “gospel,” a “good news” that necessarily included the wonderful, experienced “receiving” of the Holy Spirit, an experience that they continually remembered, as I now do. THOSE Pentecostally-experienced Christians are the “you” to whom Paul said in his many passages, such as, “In Him YOU also trusted, after YOU heard  the word of truth, the gospel of YOUR salvation; in whom also, having believed, YOU were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, to the praise of His glory” (Ephesians 1:13-14). Like me, you probably have assumed that all of such passages applied to you after you had become His disciple – which would be precisely as if those in Acts chapter one assumed that the Pentecostal promise had already been fulfilled.

So, I encourage you to press on to inherit the promise that Jesus still gives to ALL who yield their trust, obedience, and affection to Him. Just be like that small child who delightfully holds on to the father’s promise of the most wonderful party they have ever imagined. Don’t get analytical and start worrying about whether his previous parties for you were “valid.”

But from clear Scriptural evidence, this is very, VERY clear: IF YOU CAN’T REMEMBER IT, IT HAS NOT YET HAPPENED!