One of my readers questioned me about my charismatic view of “a 2 stage receiving of the Spirit (if that’s what you mean), but essentially one of the problems that I would have with that is that it is not a unifying experience. By it’s very nature such a view creates a group of Christians who have had it and a group who have not. And that seems to me to need some serious scriptural backing when, as Stott says, it is proclaimed to be a unifying experience, some all Christians have.”
What I would say here is that a unifying experience has to be just that an experience. It seems to me that we cannot reduce receiving the Holy Spirit into something theoretical that happens at the point someone makes some kind of decision to follow Christ. There is no doubt that there are many professing Christians who lack any real sense of a “presence” or “relationship” with God. How we can say that they have “received” the Holy Spirit is beyond me. Of course if they have any kind of saving faith then the Spirit has indeed been operational in their heart – but are they aware of this?
To me the so-called “2nd experience” is actually often the first real experience of God. Receiving the Holy Spirit is about God pouring out his love into our hearts in such a way that we know we are his and that God is no longer an abstract principle we believe in but a person we relate to who is alive and active in our lives. Gifts of the Holy Spirit (which we will get to I promise!) flow from that experience. But we miss out seriously if we jump from our need of Gods gifts straight to learning about them and seeking them without realising that the gifts point to the giver.
My passionate call is for a Christianity in which God is allowed to be God. A faith which reaches out to God in an active sense expecting him to move and relate with us! Ours was never meant to be a merely intellectual faith – not that the intellect should be despised of course! Some random thoughts on baptism with the Holy Spirit I collected a while back might also be of some interest in thinking about this point. So, I delay further, but I hope this groundwork will be of some help when we finally get to the gifts themselves!
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