The Holy Spirit: Does What We Know About Him Actually Matter? (Part 3)

If you are a Christian, then you ought to call the Holy Spirit “he” rather than “it.” The Spirit is not  an invisible power or force, but a person who thinks, communicates and decides. And you ought to agree that the Holy Spirit is God. On that point, Scripture is very clear. For example, Acts 5:3, Peter said, “Ananias,… you have lied to the Holy Spirit.” One verse later, Peter adds, “You have not lied to men but to God.”

Many sincere and devout believers talk about “the secret of living a Spirit-filled life.” We want to experience the Spirit’s power. We want our pastors to deliver Spirit-filled messages. We want to have Spirit-filled worship, Spirit-filled Bible studies, Spirit-filled prayer, and so on. All of this is well and good. But overuse of this language can depersonalize and disrespect the third Person of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is not a quality or condiment that enhances our efforts and activities. The Holy Spirit is God himself. Instead of looking for that secret ingredient, we ought to be asking, “Where is the Holy Spirit moving, and how can I walk in step with him? How can I relinquish control of my activities and life to him?”

How we speak of the Holy Spirit really does matter. John Wesley was an eminent preacher and theologian of the 18^th century, a man who was greatly used by God during the first Great Awakening. He developed a teaching of “scriptural holiness” that was not well received during his lifetime. A century later, a small group of Christian preachers and writers latched on to this teaching and vigorously promoted it as “the secret” of the victorious Christian life. Wesley occasionally spoke of a “second blessing” that comes upon some believers. One of his successors, John Fletcher, developed this idea further and equated it with baptism by the Holy Spirit. Fletcher began to speak of conversion as a two-step process. In the first step, the person believes in Jesus Christ and receives from God the full remission of sin. In the second step – which may happen some time later or perhaps not at all – the person receives the second blessing of the Holy Spirit which brings him to a fuller and more perfect state of purity. This thinking contributed to a number of movements in Britain and the United States –the Keswick “Higher Life” movement, the Holiness movement, and Pentecostalism – and God used the men and women involved to bring about genuine spiritual growth and revival.

But the modern-day legacy and fruit of the Wesleyan/Fletcher teaching on the Holy Spirit seems to be mixed. Many scholars of the Reformed tradition have criticized this thinking as imprecise, sloppy and unscriptural, and it seems to me that these criticisms are valid. It is true that the apostles experienced the blessing of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, which came some time after they believed in the risen Christ. A temporal separation between faith in Jesus and the arrival of the Holy Spirit is also mentioned in the “Samaritan Pentecost” of Acts 8:17. But these appear to be unique events that are not repeated later, and the two-stage view of conversion is not supported in the Epistles. In Paul’s presentation of the gospel, the state of belonging to Christ is equivalent to being indwelt by the Holy Spirit (Ro 8:9).

I know that God sometimes pours out the Holy Spirit on disciples of Christ. He can fill them with the Holy Spirit anytime he chooses (Ac 4:31). He can send a second blessing, a third blessing, a fourth blessing and so on, but he doesn’t have to. On the other hand, Scripture is quite clear that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is a general promise given to everyone who follows Jesus (Jn 7:37-39; Ac 2:39). Understanding this does have implications for your personal walk of faith. If you think of conversion as a two-stage process, then you may hunger for that “second blessing” and wonder why it doesn’t come. Two-stage thinking will inevitably set up a two-tiered hierarchy within a church in which some believers are considered to be Level-1 Christians, inferior to their brothers and sisters who have achieved the coveted Level-2 status. I find no support for this anywhere in Scripture, and the potentially harmful effects seem obvious.

Basically, this is what I think happened. John Wesley witnessed authentic outpourings of the Holy Spirit at various times and places. But he and his followers did not accurately reconcile those experiences with the teachings of Scripture; they misunderstood what was happening and generalized from those experiences in inappropriate ways.

At one time or another, I think we have all been guilty of that. Someone experiences God’s life-changing work (e.g., a healing) in a certain way in his life or in his church. Because that experience is so genuine and powerful, he begins to think that this experience is normative – what “should happen” in other times and places – and wants this experience to be reproduced elsewhere. But that generalization is often inaccurate. The paths and circumstances by which people come to faith in Christ and grow in Christ are truly varied. The Holy Spirit works differently in different people and in any given person at different times. He works differently across churches, cultures and generations. The Holy Spirit is truly unpredictable. Whenever we try to put him in a box and say “this is how he always works,” he seems to go out of his way to prove us wrong. We ought to recognize, welcome and applaud the genuine work of the Holy Spirit whenever and wherever we see it. But we should also be extra careful before we claim that any particular work of the Spirit is “how it’s supposed to be.”

In the next article, I will describe some other ways that our beliefs and assumptions about the Holy Spirit will profoundly impact our lives of faith. Stay tuned…