What You Need To Know About the Holy Spirit
Chuck Sligh
(Part 1)
TEXT: Acts 1:4-8 – “And, being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me. 5 For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.
6 When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? 7 And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. 8 But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.”
INTRODUCTION
There is a lot of confusion about the Holy Spirit today. Our Pentecostal and Charismatic brethren (and I do consider many of them brethren in the Lord, notwithstanding my criticisms of some of their teachings) believe that there is an experience after salvation which they call the “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” and that the evidence of this baptism (they say) is speaking in tongues. I believe this teaching is erroneous because of a basic misunderstanding of what the Bible teaches about the Holy Spirit.
Well, who exactly IS the Holy Spirit? What really is this experience they call the “baptism of the Holy Spirit”? Is it a second work of grace that takes place after salvation? Are you missing an experience that could revolutionize your life and provide you with a shortcut to spiritual victory? Is it manifested by speaking in tongues or the performance of miracles? Finally, what does the Holy Spirit actually DO in our lives?
We want to answer each of these questions in the next three messages in our study of the book of Acts. Let me begin by saying that I am not in any way denigrating the commitment and devotion of those who may disagree on this matter. Some of the best Christians I have ever known are Charismatics. There are Charismatic and Pentecostal friends of mine who have contributed to my life in ways that will last for eternity, and I love them dearly. So please understand that I am not calling out my brethren as heretics. This is simply a family argument among family members who are still committed to one another in love.
With that said, let us look at who the Holy Spirit is, and when He came. Next Sunday and the following Sunday we will explore what the Holy Spirit does in the world and in our lives.
I. FIRST, LET US CONSIDER WHO EXACTLY IS HOLY SPIRIT
There are two simple yet profound things you should know to understand who the Holy Spirit is:
1. First you may have noticed that I refer to the Holy Spirit as HE instead of IT. That’s because the Holy Spirit is not an impersonal force, but A TRUE PERSON—a real personality.
That’s why we generally prefer to call Him the Holy “Spirit” in today’s vocabulary, instead of the Holy “Ghost” as it is found in the King James Version of the Bible. Today, the word “ghost” conjures up Casper the friendly Ghost or some scary entity from the other world, so we call Him the “Holy SPIRIT” to capture the real meaning of the Bible word.
Now in reference to the Holy Spirit, the Bible speaks about a real person, with all the attributes of personality—
He has a mind.
He thinks.
He has a will.
He has emotions.
He forbids and permits and speaks and loves.
He prays.
He can be angered and grieved
All of these are characteristics of a person, not an impersonal force.
2. Second, in reference to who the Holy Spirit is, not only is He A PERSON, but He is also GOD.
He’s the third person in the Trinity; one of the persons of the one triune God. He’s every bit as much God as God the Father and God the Son. The Bible teaches that there is only one God, but He exists in three persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
You say, “Brother Sligh, how can that be? How can three persons be one God?” I say, “I don’t know. I cannot understand it; I cannot explain it;— but that’s what the Bible teaches.” You say, “But that defies my understanding.”
Well, there are many things about God that defy our puny, limited, finite, human understanding. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church said, “Bring me a worm that can comprehend a man, and then I will show you a man who can comprehend the triune God.”
The Bible is full of references to the deity (which means the “divinity”) of the Holy Spirit. It repeatedly ascribes the same characteristics and attributes to the Holy Spirit as are attributed to God the Father and God the Son. For instance—
The Holy Spirit is OMNIPRESENT, which means everywhere present) (Psalm 139:7)
He is OMNISCIENT, which means all-knowing (1 Corinthians 2:10-11)
He is OMNIPOTENT, or all-powerful (Genesis 1:2)
He is ETERNAL (Hebrews 9:14)
He is CALLED GOD in Acts 5:3-4
And in many passages in the Bible the Holy Spirit is SAID TO BE CO-EQUAL to the Father and the Son.
So, with regard to WHO the Holy Spirit is, we see that He is a PERSON, not an impersonal force; and secondly, He is GOD—the third person of the Trinity.
II. LET’S CONSIDER SECOND WHEN THE HOLY SPIRIT CAME – Acts 1:4-5 – “And, being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye have heard of me. 5 For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.”
Jesus told His disciples to wait and tarry for the promise of the Father. The promise was that Jesus would baptize them with the Holy Spirit. That little phrase is one of the most misunderstood, confused, and misinterpreted statements in the Bible.
Illus. – I remember when I was in my first year of college. I had gotten away from the Lord and knew something was missing in my life. Then one day I met a couple of college students who were “Jesus Freaks. They told me that what I needed was the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” It was fine to be saved, they said, but that’s just step one in the Christian life After that I needed a second experience—the baptism of the Holy Spirit—which would help me overcome all my failures in the Christian life and turn me into the Christian that God wanted me to be.
I had been having a lot of defeat in my Christian life, and the idea that I could have some super-charged experience and then become a super-Christian really appealed to me, as it would any Christian. Now I had been taught better, but I got sucked in anyway. So, in all sincerity, I prayed to God for the baptism of the Holy Spirit and a few weeks later I spoke in what I was told were tongues. I joined in the movement and was an active Charismatic for almost a year.
The problem was that what I prayed for, I ALREADY HAD according to the Bible. Also, as we’ll see later on in Acts, what I thought was speaking in tongues was not at all what the Bible calls speaking in tongues. And to my dismay, I found myself more defeated in my Christian life than ever before.
Something was wrong. The problem was that I had started with 2 wrong premises—namely that I, as a born-again believer, did not already have the baptism of the Holy Spirit and, secondly, that it was something that I had to ask God for. So it’s very important that you understand these issues so that you are not led astray into erroneous teachings or unscriptural practices like I was.
Now—there is a very important key that unlocks the secret of this whole matter of the baptism with the Holy Spirit. That key is found in the original language in which the Bible was written. Without getting too technical here, let me just say that the key is found in the fact that the Greek word for “baptize” here is in the punctiliar passive future tense.
You say, “The what?”---The punctiliar passive future tense. I know that’s a bunch of mumbo-jumbo to you, and you’ll never need to remember that term, but here’s what’s important about this that you SHOULD remember: The punctiliar passive future tense was used in the Greek of an action that was to take place in the future at ONE particular time, ONCE FOR ALL. (REPEAT)
In other words, Jesus was saying this: “John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit—at one particular time, once-and-for-all.”
So, when was this once-and-for-all event that Jesus promised would happen? It happened on the Day of Pentecost, as we will see later in Acts 2. The baptism of the Holy Spirit was a once-in-history event—which took place on the Day of Pentecost—was NEVER to be repeated again. When the Holy Spirit was given at Pentecost, ALL BELIEVERS IN ALL AGES were baptized with the Holy Spirit. In other words, it’s not something that happens to individual Christians over and over again at the request of the recipients. Rather, it’s something that happened involuntarily to ALL believers collectively at a single moment in history—an act which the believer has no active part in receiving.
So if you’re saved here this morning, you have ALREADY been baptized with the Holy Spirit. It’s NOT in an experience after salvation, as our Charismatic and Pentecostal friends teach, and not even something that occurs on the day of your salvation, as is commonly taught by many Evangelicals. It happened one time—once and for all on the day of Pentecost almost two thousand years ago.
Spiros Zodhiates, one of the world’s best living New Testament Greek scholars says this:
The baptism in the Spirit by Christ of every believer into His body is a historical event similar to His incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and coming again. Christ did it once-and-for-all when He sent His Holy Spirit…in Acts….It is not something that we experience, but something that Jesus Christ did once-and-for-all in joining all believers [in all ages] into His body.” (Spiros Zodhiates, The Hebrew-Greek Key Study Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1985), p. 1403 in his notes on 1 Corinthians 12:13 (emphasis mine).
If you’re saved today, you’ve ALREADY been baptized with the Holy Spirit! You can’t ask for and receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit because it’s not something you have an active part in receiving Jesus already baptized you in the Holy Spirit—and every other believer in the church age—2000 years ago on the Day Pentecost. Praying for the baptism of the Holy Spirit is like asking for your inheritance from your parents when they had already given it to you five years ago. – They would look at you and say, “What are you talking about? I’ve already given you your inheritance. I can’t give it to you twice.”
You can look throughout all the Bible and you’ll find that, though the Bible does command us to be REPEATEDLY FILLED with the Holy Spirit (which simply means to be CONSTANTLY CONTROLLED by the Holy Spirit), it NEVER commands us to be BAPTIZED with the Spirit. Why? Because it was already done two thousand years ago.
APPLICATIONS
So we have seen two main points so far this morning:
We looked first at WHO THE HOLY SPIRIT IS. – He is a person and He is God.
Second, we examined WHEN HOLY SPIRIT CAME. – He came on the Day of Pentecost, as we will see in detail in a couple of weeks when we study Acts 2.
Next week and the week following we will look what the Holy Spirit does in this world and in our lives as believers. But this morning, let’s make some personal applications to our lives from what we have learned this morning. (We don’t what to just fill our minds with facts about the Bible without making some kind of personal, practical application to our lives and to our hearts):
1. First, if the Holy Spirit is a person, do you know this Person?
That’s another way of saying, “Do you know God?” because, remember, the Holy Spirit is god. Do you know God?... not “Do you know ABOUT God?” or “Do you have a religion?” or “Are you a member of a church?”—But do you KNOW him. Do you know him personally!
In other words, have you been born into God’s family by being saved? Do you have the Holy Spirit living inside you? If not—or if you’re not sure—then I hope that you will come to know God personally today by being saved so you can go to heaven.
2. Second, be careful about quick-fixes in your Christian life.
There are many things in Christianity that purport to give you a boost in the Christian life—that will supposedly make you leap from Christian babyhood to instant spirituality.
Our Charismatic friends talk of “being baptized by the Holy Spirit.”
Some religious groups (like the Nazarene and Methodists) talk of a “second blessing” that comes after salvation, not related to the baptism with the Holy Spirit.
Some say you can jump to the head of the pack by attending some seminar, or by understanding some esoteric doctrine in the Bible, or through the teachings of a particular man or woman of God.
Brethren, ALL of these are false hopes that leave believers discouraged and disillusioned when the boom falls and people realize that they are no better—or at best only marginally better—Christians than they were before.
Illus. – I shared with you earlier how I had got involved in the Charismatic Movement. I remember going home to Okinawa, Japan, where my parents were missionaries, after that first year of college and found myself very unstable in my Christian life and facing tremendous defeat in several areas of my life.
After returning home, I was persuaded by my very concerned parents to take a semester off from my university studies to figure out what was going on in my Christian life. I thought to myself: I ought to be a stronger believer than ever after getting the “baptism of the Spirit” and by speaking in tongues, etc.
But, in fact, I was at the lowest point ever in my walk with God. I remember getting into God’s Word more than at any time in my life. The more I got to know God in His Word—the WHOLE OF HIS WORD, not just the portions that deal with spiritual gifts and the Holy Spirit—the less I seemed to have an emotional need to speak in tongues. After about six months of in-depth study of the Word and sweet fellowship with the Lord, I decided to stop speaking in tongues altogether, and never have since, except to demonstrate it to the curious.
It was in the Word and in obedience to its precepts that I began to grow and mature in the Christian life and get victory over sin in my life. In that time of struggle, I learned one of the most important keys to the Christian life….
That is that there are NO SHORTCUTS to Christian maturity.
I remember reading two verses in Isaiah 28 (which I would like for you to turn to now) that God used to show me this truth. It’s Isaiah 28:9-10 – “Whom shall he teach knowledge? and whom shall he make to understand doctrine? them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts. 10 For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little.”
What was Isaiah saying? He was saying that there’s not a single experience that will catapults you to spiritual maturity Spirituality is never a giant leap—
Precept must be upon precept.
You must learn line upon line.
You learn a little here, and a little there.
Maturity is a multitude of tiny steps—one after the other.
Each previous one is necessary for the next one.
You cannot jump too many steps at a time.
Illus. – The Holy Spirit matures believers like a cheese maker matures cheese—slowly but surely until the time is ripe—and not before.
So the question for you is not “Have you received the baptism of the Holy Spirit” or the second blessing or the latest seminar, but…
Have you been in the Word this week?
Have you been obedient to God this week?
Have you been in the Lord’s house so you can hear the Word preached and taught so you can grow in the Lord?
Have you spent time with other believers in a homegroup or small group Bible study to be challenged and strengthened in your faith.
Have you had a steady input of godly things rather than a steady diet of the world’s entertainment?
THESE are things that ultimately produce growth. We are changed a little bit more each day we as we learn God’s Word and obey what it says. God help us to work at it patiently day by day, and not look for some magic bullet that we think will be a shortcut to spirituality.
In fact what you think is a magic bullet really short-circuits God’s plan for your life. So be patient; be faithful; keep on keeping on; study the Word; be faithful to God’s house; hang around Christians; have godly input in your life.
THESE THINGS mark the road to spiritual maturity.
