D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones on baptism in the Holy Spirit: Joy unspeakable.
Chapter headings:
- Baptism with the Spirit and regeneration
- Blessed assurance
- Something that happens to us
- Filled with the Spirit
- The sense of His presence
- Joy, love, and understanding
- Bold to speak
- Baptism with the Spirit and sanctification
- The sealing of the Spirit
- Something worth striving for
- Receive the Spirit
- Seeking the baptism with the Spirit
- When discouragement comes
- Blessed are they that mourn
- The church and Pentecost
- The way to revival
Includes many stories of people's experiences of the Spirit.
On this baptism being a separate, experiential event to conversion…
You can be regenerate [i.e. a Christian] without being baptised with the Holy Spirit… The baptism with the Holy Spirit is always something clear and unmistakable, something which can be recognised by the person to whom it happens and by others who look on at this person.
On being certain that you’re saved…
It is a terrible thing, not only a wrong thing, to confuse saving faith with full assurance of faith… What the Holy Spirit does is make real to us the things which we have believed by faith, the things of which we have had but a kind of indirect certainty only. The Holy Spirit makes these things immediately real.
On how it is impossible to prescribe what baptism in the Spirit should be like…
All these variations [of how the Spirit comes to people in Acts] establish the lordship of our Lord Jesus Christ in this entire matter. It is He who is the giver, it is He who is the baptiser. He does so in His own way and in His own time, and we must never lose sight of this all-important principle.
But on what we should expect…
There is not always the noise but there is always the sense of glory, the sense of awe, of the majesty of God; a sense of power, an assurance of salvation. It always leads to greater joy, and always gives boldness to witness.
On why being filled with Spirit is more important than good training and good planning…
[Jesus tells the disciples, surely the best-trained men ever, to stay in Jerusalem until the Spirit fell on them, Acts 1:4] when you look at it like that, you see how utterly ridiculous it has been for the last hundred years for us to put all our emphasis upon academic teaching and learning, as if that is the thing that is most essential to make a preacher… Are you trusting the organising power of the church? Or are you trusting in the power of God to pour out His Spirit upon us again, to revive us, to baptise us anew and afresh with His most blessed Holy Spirit?
On waiting patiently to be filled…
We are a people who always desire some short cuts, some easy method, some kind of ‘package’ blessing. And that is one of the great differences between the Christian literature of this present century and of the Christian church up to about the middle of the last century. People would seek a blessing for years before they received it. But there was purpose in it all; God was dealing with them and leading them along a given path. You will never know the heights of the Christian life without effort.
On the superlative joy of being filled with the Spirit…
The only thing beyond the experience of the baptism with the Spirit is heaven itself.
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