‘DID YOU RECEIVE THE HOLY SPIRIT WHEN YOU BELIEVED?’
Acts 19:1-7 “While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples and asked them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?’ They answered, ‘No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.’ So Paul asked, ‘Then what baptism did you receive?’ ‘John's baptism,’ they replied. Paul said, ‘John's baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.’ On hearing this, they were baptised into the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. There were about twelve men in all.”
This is such a fascinating incident which casts such light on the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the church. It has important lessons to teach us. The apostle Paul walked the long road to Ephesus and on arrival he looked out for and found the few Christians in the city. He soon discovered that they had a rather limited knowledge and experience of God. For example, they had never heard of the third member of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit. Perhaps these men had visited Jerusalem; maybe that had been on a pilgrimage to one of the feasts, and while they were there they heard of John the Baptist and the mighty work of God going on in the wilderness near the river Jordan. They attended his preaching with thousands of others and they were converted, repenting of their sins, and then they had been baptized by John. That could well have been their background, or perhaps one of John’s disciples had traveled and reached Ephesus and began speaking to people so that finally a dozen men were converted through that man’s testimony.
Paul met with these believers and one of the first questions he asked them is whether they received the Holy Spirit when they believed. No. They were not aware of the Spirit at all. What baptism had they received? “John’s,” they told him, that is, they had become disciples of John, believing the message that John preached, following John’s teaching to the letter. Here were people who knew nothing of the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Events had occurred which had passed them by. There were those few Japanese soldiers who lived in uninhabited jungles on lonely islands in the Pacific long after the war with Japan had ended still ready to fight for their Emperor, taking pot shots at anyone who came near their dens in the forests, quite unaware that their country’s war with the Allies and the U.S.A. was long over.
How could these men be Christians and yet not have received the Holy Spirit? They certainly were ‘Christians.’ We are told plainly that they were ‘disciples’ and whenever that word is used in the book of Acts it always refers to Christians. They were Messiahists; they believed what John the Baptist had preached, that soon the Messiah would come and he would baptize with the Holy Spirit. He had pointed out Jesus of Nazareth to some of his disciples and he had said that Christ was the Lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world. They believed all this, but then they reached the edge of their knowledge. They did not know that on the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit had been poured out on the church in Jerusalem. They did not know that from that time onwards every Christian has had the Holy Spirit, or we could say that the Holy Spirit has every Christian. That is very clear in the Bible isn’t it? The Christian life begins with a new birth which is of the Spirit. We are “born of the Spirit” (Jn. 3:8). The apostle says that, “if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ” (Roms 8:9). Paul stands in solidarity with the entire congregation in Corinth – that troubled church – and he says to them, “We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God,” (I Cor. 2:12); “we have each received him, all of you, and me as well, the Spirit who is from God.” He says to the Galatians that the promise God made to Abraham is now fulfilled, “so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit” (Gals. 3:14). What is the means by which we receive the Spirit? We trust in Christ. Not by works; not by agonizing and fasting, but simply by faith alone in the Saviour alone. We have learned that at Pentecost Peter’s great message was, “Repent and be baptised, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Turn from you sins in the name of Jesus as the means of receiving the Holy Spirit.
These disciples at Ephesus had made no progress in understanding or in experience after the baptism of John. Think of the difference between them and the brothers Simon Peter and Andrew who had also once been disciples of John. They had been instructed by John and baptized by him, but both of them needed to meet with Jesus and be baptized by the Spirit that he poured out on the day of Pentecost. John’s baptism was a preliminary baptism; it was an outward sign of the inner change of a repentant heart. Of course the Spirit of God was at work in John’s preaching and baptizing and so had affected them, but people can experience the work of the Spirit while knowing very little or nothing about the Trinity or about the person and work of the Holy Spirit. That was the case with these twelve men. They had the Spirit in that they had repented, they turned from their sins and they also met together with other like-minded disciples – they weren’t loners - but there were black spots on their theological vision. They were men with an imperfect grasp of the Christian faith.
I think we can say that these twelve men had received the baptism of John the Baptist too late. What I mean by that is this, that the baptism of John was valid as a preparation for the coming of Christ and for his work, but when our Lord had finished his work, had ascended and was pouring out the Spirit then the only valid and authorized baptism after that was the baptism that Jesus gives, the baptism of the Spirit in Jesus’ name.
So these twelve men in Ephesus could tell Paul quite naively, “We’ve never even heard that there was a Holy Spirit.” They knew nothing whatsoever about Pentecost. Now please understand that does not mean that they were total strangers to the operations of the Spirit as the one giving repentance and energy to serve and worship God in newness of life. Rather they were like Old Testament believers, who were acquainted with the ministry of the Spirit in creation, and also in inspiring the prophets, or again in his comings upon kings and priests for their work. Those Old Testament disciples knew that Jeremiah and Daniel and Joel had spoken of a future event when the Spirit would come in the days of the Messiah. They knew that King David had prayed that God would not take his Spirit from him. The Ephesus Twelve would have known those truths from the teaching of the Old Testament but also as part of their own experience of becoming real disciples of the Lord. They knew that a spiritual change had taken place in their lives. Now Paul challenges them. The indwelling and sanctifying and empowering work of God the Spirit which every other Christian in the world had received at Pentecost and ever since that time – had they received him too?
So here were twelve men who were regenerate by the Holy Spirit, who showed some marks of being true disciples through that same Spirit, but these men were missing out on the indwelling of the Spirit in all his fulness, just as Old Testament believers also missed out on his fulness. In many ways the twelve in Ephesus were like Abraham, Moses, David and all those heroes listed in Hebrews chapter eleven. They all were living by faith in the Lord, and were saved by grace, but the believers of the Old Testament and the twelve men of Ephesus did not have the power and influence of the Spirit at the level experienced even by the youngest believer today. In the Old Testament the Spirit worked sporadically through some favoured individuals, prophets, priests and kings, but now when the Lord Christ pours him forth he works in and through the entire church, old and young, man servants and maidservants, every man jack of them are baptized by one Spirit into one body. All of them in the whole world had received the Spirit of God . . . except these twelve men. They were the only Christians in all the world who had not been baptized by the Spirit. They are like that Japanese soldier out of touch with headquarters, living with his tiny group of fellow soldiers until one by one they succumbed to jungle fever and died. Just one is left but then he is rescued and educated in the truth. He then knows what all the world knows, that the war has ended.
Again, remember where this takes place, in Ephesus on the eastern coast of what is today Turkey, hundreds of miles away from Israel, in a Gentile nation which had been ruled by the god of this world since the fall of man. They were inhabitants and citizens of the kingdom of darkness. Then the Son of God had come into the darkness of our world to change it, and this evil empire and its evil overlords had to witness his triumphant life, his cross, resurrection, ascension and Pentecost. What a difference this was going to make for the whole world. Now the work of the Spirit, through the gospel, was energizing the kingdom of Christ and spreading it throughout the world. The people that dwelt in darkness saw a great light. The New Testament gospel was brought to Ephesus by Paul and it began to sort things out.
2. WHAT DID THESE TWELVE DISCIPLES LACK?
They were certainly men who were lacking some important gifts and operations of the Spirit. I am affirming that they did know something of the indwelling and influence of the Spirit though perhaps not by that name. They had faith, repentance, discipleship and fellowship, but there were three graces they had not yet received;
i] They lacked the inner witness of the Spirit giving them full assurance of faith. They had not yet been sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. The Spirit had not yet borne witness with their spirits that they were children of God. If you took the 800 mile voyage back eastwards from Ephesus to post-Pentecost Jerusalem and talked to any twelve Christian men in that city you wouldn’t find a single one who had any lack of assurance of his interest in the Saviour’s blood. None of them in the church in Jerusalem was living in any uncertainty regarding his spiritual privileges or ignorant of his relationship with the Lord, but the Ephesus twelve had no comfort that a finished work of reconciliation had been done for them by the Messiah; they had John’s baptism and no further.
ii] They lacked the outer witness of the Spirit giving them power to testify and evangelize. Years have gone by since Pentecost, and yet how strong had the church in Ephesus become? It numbered twelve men, that’s all! Then a single man full of the Spirit of God, the apostle Paul, arrives, and stays working there for two years and what is the consequence? “All the Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord” (v.10), and “the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power” (v.20). That is what the fulness of the Spirit has done for Paul. Think of what the state of the disciples was before the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost. Peter had been asked by a teenage girl if he belonged to Christ and he angrily denied he ever knew that fellow. All the apostles were making sure the door was locked after they entered a room because they were afraid of who might burst in and arrest them. Even on the hill of ascension forty days after the resurrection, after there’d been many meetings with the risen Jesus, some of the disciples were still doubting. They lacked the courage to witness. They didn’t have the ability to preach, however, what a sea-change as soon as the Holy Spirit came upon them at Pentecost, they were no longer ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ, preaching it in the heart of Jesus-hating Jerusalem, unafraid of what men would do to them.
iii] They lacked the miraculous sign gift of languages that everybody in the church in Jerusalem had received when the Spirit of God came down upon them. This was the great sign of the movement of the Spirit far beyond Jerusalem, now going out and out to the uttermost ends of the earth. The world would soon be full of people and tongues of every land declaring the wonderful things of God in their own languages. So that miraculous gift of Pentecost – the foreign languages - had to appear here too, maybe especially there in distant Ephesus. Paul placed his hands upon them, in other words, it was an apostle – an authorized representative of the Son of God - who deliberately touched them, and it was then that the Holy Spirit came upon them and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. These converts were 800 miles away from Jerusalem, but they weren’t second class Christians. They were Gentiles, and yet they had the identical Holy Spirit poured out upon them with this same miraculous gift as had fallen upon the church in Jerusalem, so that from Ephesus the gospel went out into all their area (as verses ten and twenty tell us). So chapter nineteen of Acts is about the mighty spread of the gospel reaching the important city of Ephesus and then penetrating throughout the surrounding province of Asia. Chapter twenty deals with the gospel going yet further, into Macedonia in Greece (Acts 20:1) with plans to take it even further even into Syria (Acts 20:3). The world is being reached for Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, and the sign of that for the twelve in Ephesus and for ten times that number in Jerusalem at Pentecost was the same, the gift of Gentile languages.
My question for you today is the same as Paul’s, whether you received the Holy Spirit when you believed. You say, ‘Yes,’ and having studied the person and work of the Holy Spirit that is surely the only answer to the question a Christian can give. Let me ask you to consider what you are affirming, that by the Holy Spirit you have become a partaker of the divine nature. You claim to have illimitable access to God the Holy Ghost who indwells you, the third person of the Godhead, who affects every part of your being. Having the Holy Spirit you are complete in him. Then my follow up question is this, that as this is true, why are you lacking in important gifts and graces and the inward testifying work of the Holy Spirit?
i] What of the Spirit’s fruit? Why is the fruit of the Spirit just as small and fixed as it was some years ago? Too many of you are like that. Why isn’t Christ-likeness more evident since the Spirit of Christ indwells you by your own confession? “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gals. 5:22). “Paul is speaking of one indivisible fruit in nine particulars—love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and temperance. None of the virtues he mentions can exist alone. Each leads to the others. Love, first to God and then to others, satisfies the soul and naturally leads to joy or delight in our Saviour and His salvation. This joy yields peace, that is, a sense of security and assurance in Christ that gives the quality of tranquility or serenity to life. Peace enables us to exhibit longsuffering: if we are at peace with ourselves we will be patient with others. We will therefore show gentleness or kindness, which in turn will manifest goodness, or a character of moral worth that seeks to do good. Any person who displays such spiritual fruit will always face difficulty and opposition in this world of sin and trouble. He will need the grace of faith, or faithfulness and firm continuance in His godliness. If we enjoy the fruit so far described, we will certainly not lack this firmness of commitment to Christ. This faithfulness, though it will be sorely tested by life's adversities, will render us meek, for meekness is a submissive acceptance of God's sovereign dealings with us. Meekness will in turn produce temperance, or a life of self-control, not one blown about by all the changing pressures we encounter” (Alan Cairns, The Fruit of the Spirit, Ambassador 2002, p.14). Did you receive the Holy Spirit when your believed? Then where is the fruit?
ii] What of the Spirit’s Gifts? What of the Spirit’s enablings, and enduments? Let me just remind you of some of them. I am thinking in the first place of such a gift as the discernment of spirits. Why isn’t that more evident in more of you? What would having such a gift imply? It would mean a moral and theological dimension in your life created and sustained by the Spirit of God but also constantly nurtured by you. Do you have the gift of the discernment of spirits which shows itself in your being wise, fair, open-minded, long-term in your thinking, not being a hyper-critic, but also not being gullible and naive? Are you ready to assess a pastor-preacher who has come to preach with a view to becoming your minister in your congregation? Have you the capacity to wisely judge such a visiting preacher to be a suitable man to occupy this gospel pulpit?
Don’t you agree with me that the gift of the discernment of spirits is in very short supply amongst evangelical Christians? Think of the terrible errors of judgment that have been made by men you once greatly esteemed; they have started off down the wrong road; they are teaching weird teaching; they have picked up what I call ‘funny ideas.’ Also such misjudgments can be made by entire congregations – churches which once seemed to be centres of orthodoxy. The preacher whom that congregation called has become like Samson who has pulled the whole edifice down around them destroying himself and themselves in the process. Don’t we know of churches like that that have virtually committed suicide? Where was their discernment? How many in that congregation received the Holy Spirit when they believed? Did that minister receive the Holy Spirit when he believed?
Again, what of the gift of illumination? Maybe that preacher and then his congregation heard some new teaching that they had not heard before and were fascinated by it, but there is an old saying that if it is new it is not true, and if it is true it is not new. Why in the world did they swallow it? What of the Holy Spirit’s gift of illumination? Why is it that new movements arise and get accepted with such rapidity? For example, there is one that suggests a totally new perspective on the teaching of the apostle Paul on justification by faith, and orthodox men and seminaries and publishing houses bow down before it and embrace it. Incredible. Why do men in eminent theological colleges write books which blatantly deny confessional truth? Where is the spiritual gift of illumination? Did those men receive the Holy Spirit when they believed?
We think of the collapse of Christianity in Europe a century ago and we normally consider the Spirit withdrawing from the pulpits, taking authority from preaching. Yes, but he also withdrew from the pew and took away illumination from elders and deacons. How many in those congregations received the Holy Spirit when they believed? If they say, “We did,” then where did their understanding of God go? Where did the grasp of so basic a doctrine as the imputation of Christ’s righteousness go? Why was error allowed to be preached unchallenged? Why was so much revealed truth never preached to the people? Why were books in the Bible and truths that God had taken such pains to give us ignored? Who are we to ignore what God has said? Were not these things of high priority a century ago, and are they not of high priority today? Where was the gift of illumination? Did they receive the Holy Spirit when they believed?
iii] What of assurance through the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit? When I ask you did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed I would desire a better response than, “I hope that God has begun a good work in me.” Why is there uncertainty still? Why is there the presence of somber, unsure church attenders in the professing church? Where is the assurance of pardon, and the experience of the comforting operations of the Spirit who takes what we need out of Christ and shows it to us? Where is the power and boldness to witness for Christ in a Christ-hating world? I know it is always good to meet people who are concerned about their souls and the things of God, but there is such a reality as the witness of God’s Spirit with our Spirit that we are children of God, that love of God shed abroad in our hearts.
So I have mentioned the fruit and the gifts and the internal witness of the Spirit and I have sought to probe you concerning the strength of the Spirit’s work in you in these crucial areas. My conviction is that we have tended to restrict the work of the Holy Spirit to the new birth while ignoring the other aspects of his work and those workings are utterly indispensable. They are workings which only he can do, and which the church today needs greatly, I mean gifts for Christian service, especially the ability and courage to evangelize. The Holy Spirit has taken up his residence within the church in order to reach out to the whole dying world with the gospel. We all pay lip service to this fact, but we are failing, aren’t we? That doesn’t mean that other Christians aren’t failing, but I am more interested in my own failures in personal evangelism. I am afraid that evangelism does not have the high priority in our lives that it merits. Do we consider the great day of judgment, and all mankind gathered before the Lord, and ourselves too, and the great separation taking place, the bliss reserved for those who’ve loved and served Christ, and fearful judgment on the rest? Why doesn’t that reality affect us more? Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?
4. LET US CRY TO GOD FOR MORE OF THE SPIRIT’S WORK IN OUR MIDST.
We read the Acts of the Apostles and there is a difference in the dynamism and self-sacrifice and tireless service of the Lord evident in the early church that is different from the professing church today. Then there were riots and anger when the gospel was preached. Then there was great growth and a rich life of faith; it is described in these pages. Compared to theirs the life of the professing church today is poorer, but my greater concern is my own defensiveness when I say these things, when I begin to look for excuses for my spiritual poverty, when I start to say, “That is just the way it is,” as if we can only expect an anaemic and weak spiritual life in our church in 2008. That is how many people in the professing church think. Few of them are longing for better times. How many are praying for God to visit us in blessing? How many of us are regularly bringing our acknowledged deficiencies to the Lord in fervent and persistent prayer?
There is what an earlier generation called the ‘break-through’ work of the Spirit in individuals, in the young people and in the church. Don’t you feel that our own congregation needs a spiritual break-through so that there will be regular conversions from the world? Don’t many need a new reality of spiritual life because at present they seem to be stagnating? Don’t you suspect the defensiveness that can hear questions like that and begin to feel resentment about such preaching? Aren’t you concerned to hear some reluctant justifications for the old patterns of formal religious life that different men and woman will give? We are comfy with our spiritual routines and we don’t want them to be upset. Did you receive the God the Holy Spirit when you believed? Are you really satisfied with your own spiritual attainment so that you no longer long for more? Do you even think that the low level of the spiritual life of many is not only normal but actually better than those who speak with assurance that, “My beloved is mine and I am his”? Do you feel suspicious about everyone who speaks with more assured and joyful faith? Do you think of them as victims of pride and self-deception? Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? Are you imagining yourself to be wrapping yourself in a mantle of humility while others are covering themselves in superficiality and delusion, and that is the reason you give for considering yourself to have received the Holy Spirit when you believed?
Yes, life in the Spirit begins with, “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and that means we have faced up to our own sin and weaknesses, and we have gone to God and asked him for mercy and life. “Nothing in my hand I bring; simply to thy cross I cling.” My only plea is that Jesus has both lived and died that I might have life. I have no other foundation but that. I see my own remaining sins and weaknesses and I say, “How could I possibly get to heaven without the righteousness and blood of Jesus Christ, God’s Son?” But then that also means that having gone in my poverty to Christ that in Christ I am rich; I am full; I am complete and need nothing more, and that is my gospel testimony. “I am the chief of sinners,” but I don’t stop there, for I go on to say that from God Jesus Christ has been made unto me my wisdom, my righteousness, my sanctification and my redemption. The Son of God is mine in all the glory of his person and in the perfection of his finished work for me, and that is my testimony. Whose testimony is that? The mere Christian’s; the poor man who believes into Jesus Christ, he can and must say this, because the word of God demands that he confess it. This is his testimony to the world, not that he is a dreadful man, limping and staggering through life, but that Jesus Christ is a great Saviour.
What I am doing is pleading with you to get beyond the first principles of salvation. Don’t restrict the work of the Holy Spirit to a bare minimum, to no more than what is absolutely necessary to get to heaven. The Bible demands more, the church requires more and the age we live in needs more. Please don’t think that as long as you are converted, and your sins are forgiven and you turn up in church on Sundays with a believing heart that you have enough because you possess the one thing that is needful. The new birth and conversion are not the sum total of the Christian life; those things are the beginning. There is the whole growing relationship with the Lord and the whole growing relationship with the Lord’s people. The Holy Spirit equips you for communion with God and service of God’s people. He begins with the gift of the Spirit in the new birth and saving faith in Christ and then he empowers you to be a blessing to others. We are first the object on which the Holy Spirit homes in, regenerating and illuminating, and then we become the object through which the Holy Spirit works to benefit our neighbours. Is the Spirit working through you to touch others? Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? I am saying that the Spirit works in us to save us, and he also works through us to benefit others and you cannot really separate these two blessings. If they are separated then the spiritual life languishes and stays at a low level.
Please take no comfort concerning your own low level of spiritual progress from the sovereignty of the Spirit, that he distributes his gifts and graces as he sees fit. Never use his sovereignty to make excuses for your own disobedience. You have not, the apostle says, not because God is sovereign to refuse, but because you don’t ask. Do we find anywhere in the Bible the Holy Spirit saying that he would rather see God’s people starve than feast? Not anywhere. Would he rather see us shrink than grow? Where does it say that the Spirit is pleased when believers in Christ get just a taste of their only comfort in life and death? Is it to God’s glory and honour that we keep on groping in the dark, and shuffling and limping along at this poor dying rate? Are we not told to rejoice in the Lord always and are again told to rejoice? Is it not his delight when we rejoice in him?
Paul looked at these twelve men, such fine disciples, but in many ways such beginners in the faith, and he jolted them to question themselves when he asked them whether they had received God the Holy Spirit when they believed. He put his hands upon them and they became normal Christians. They became the founder members of a mighty congregation, but that was not the end for them. Some years later, when Paul wrote to this congregation he still wanted these twelve to make more progress and mature and know more of the Spirit’s work in their midst – as he longed for that in the whole church. He prayed that the Lord would grant them according to his riches in glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man, “so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge - that you may be filled to the measure of all the fulness of God.” (Ephs. 3:16-19). That must be our longing also, and it must never ends. If we received the Holy Spirit when we believed then it will be our constant, earnest prayer to be strengthened with the might of God’s Spirit in our inner man. A few years later Lord Jesus looked at the church in Ephesus and this was his conclusion; “I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first” (Rev. 2:4&5). There is the choice before us of growing under the mighty influence of the Spirit or of forsaking our first love.
Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? “How can I tell?” you ask. There are two ways in which we can answer this question; the first is to read the description of those who possess the Spirit of God in the Bible and examine ourselves. For example, God says that if we love our fellow church members in Christ then that proves we have the Holy Spirit. Again, if I love to read the Bible and hear the Bible preached then it is a sign that I have the Holy Spirit because the Bible is the Spirit-inspired book. Again, if I love holiness it is a sign that I have the Spirit of holiness. Again when the Lord asks me, “Do you love me?” then I reply,
“Lord, it is my chief complaint that my love is cold and faint.
Yet I love Thee and adore; O for grace to love Thee more.”
Only the Holy Spirit can constrain me to love the Lord Jesus. Not one person could love in that way without receiving the Holy Spirit. We refer to that way of arguing as the ‘practical syllogism.’ A syllogism is a way of reasoning. The practical syllogism is this: God says that those who have received the Holy Spirit love fellow Christians. But I love Christians. Therefore I must have the Holy Spirit. That is a legitimate way of reasoning, in such a ‘practical syllogism.’ We look for evidences that can only be created by the Holy Spirit, such as love of the Lord’s Day, hatred of sinning, love for the Lord Jesus Christ, and we conclude that those attitudes can only have been created in our lives by the Holy Spirit. So I have him! The world would certainly never have created such attitudes in me, and so I conclude that I have received the Holy Spirit.
But there is a higher level of answering that question of whether we have the Holy Spirit than the one we get from logic, and that answer can come upon us quite suddenly. Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings, or while he is listening to a sermon, or while he prays, or while he is sitting in his chair and looking at his garden, or even when he is driving along in his car. There can come a direct witness to our own spirits that we are God’s children, and it can be a heaven on earth experience, sublime and strengthening and even, in the words of the Westminster Confession, ‘an infallible assurance.’ It can make a martyr strong to face the flames the night before he is taken to the stake, and go on to sustain him while he burns. Latimer could urge Ridley, as they were chained to their stakes and the wood was set on fire, to be of comfort and play the man and light a candle in England that would not be put out. Latimer had said a little earlier, “When I live in a settled and steadfast assurance about the state of my soul methinks I am as bold as a lion.” That assurance could make Martin Luther stand firm in Worms before the inquisition of the threatening papacy though there were as many devils in Worms as slates on its roofs. That could make the early Calvinistic Methodists in Wales stand firm when people threw stones and dead cats and filth at them as they preached in market squares. They had confidence in God; they knew they had received the Holy Spirit when they had believed.
We are living in an age when we need to ask God for a greater measure of this assurance that we have the Spirit than we have ever had before. More and more of this holy boldness; it is the gift of the Holy Spirit bearing witness with our spirits that we are the sons of God.
17th August 2008 GEOFF THOMAS