The gift of the Holy Spirit

[Adino]

Originally Posted by Hoovie

I think we can agree that true believers have eternal life - and it truly is a spiritual gift.

Hi ya, Hoovie... long time no see. I hope all is well.

We need to remember that the moment a spark of spiritual life is ignited in the heart of man is the moment the Spirit abides in him with all its potential. It is Christ in us that lives. He gave his life for us in order to give his life to us in order to live his life through us.

How do you view external evidences of Holy Spirit baptism found in ACTS? Unnecessary? Unique to the Apostolic age? In particular what about Acts 8

I've written a lot concerning this elsewhere in AFF, so I will only briefly share my thoughts here on the matter....

I recognize there are more than one operations of the Spirit. I recognize that these operations of the Spirit are 'received.'

1) We receive the regenerative Spirit of Life when we believe. All who believe are granted the Spirit of Life (John 3:15-16, John 3:36; John 5:24; John 6:40; John 6:47; John 11:25,26).

2) Once the Spirit of Life abides in us we can receive subsequent non-regenerative 'restings,' 'fillings,' 'fallings,' 'comings,' 'movings,' 'blessings,' and/or 'anointings' of that same Spirit as God sees fit for his purpose.

Luke consistently uses OT Spirit terminology to describe this secondary non-regenerative operation of the Spirit in his historic account of the expanding Church. People were "filled," 'fallen upon,' and 'come upon' by the Spirit in the book of Acts as people were "filled," 'fallen upon,' and 'come upon' by the Spirit in the OT.

While select men of the OT experienced this secondary work of the Spirit they did not have the permanent indwelling of the promised Spirit of Life. The possibility for the bestowal of Life only came once Christ had taken away the cause of death at Calvary. Once the sins imputed to Christ had been forgiven, the gift of life could be bestowed to all who believed the Gospel. Christ came that we might have life.

In the NT men who believed were made spiritually alive by the indwelling Spirit and these had the potential to have that Spirit living in them become externally manifest as God saw fit. The signs and wonders of the Spirit bestowed to prophets of old now became a potential occurrence among ALL God's people.

In Numbers 11:16-29 there is an account which tells of God taking of the Spirit which rested on Moses and placing it on the seventy elders. Joshua voiced his concerns and Moses replied with the statement, "Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the LORD'S people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!" The wish of Moses in Numbers 11:29 came true in the NT.

Your answer for Acts 8 is in verse 16. The Spirit had not yet "fallen upon" them. The Spirit "fell on" men in the OT as well (Ezekiel 11:5).

Another point of interest is that the Spirit's work of regeneration is not repetitive, but the non-regenerative operations of the Spirit can be. For example, we see that those who were "filled with the Holy Ghost" in Acts 2:4 were "filled with the Holy Ghost" again in Acts 4:31.

God bless, Bro!

[Adino]

Originally Posted by Pressing-On

Yea, I used to be a Baptist too.

When did you start believing another Gospel?

[Pressing-On]

Originally Posted by Adino

When did you start believing another Gospel?

LOL! Well, I shouldn't have been teasing you on a serious thread such as this.

Let me be honest with you. I feel no witness in my Spirit when I read your posts and I have done so for a long time. Not that I read everything you write, but the things I have read, I feel no connection in my Spirit. When I dialogue I want my spirit to bear witness with what is being written. That is one reason I don't always respond to your posts. I hope you take this in the spirit that I meant it, simply an open and honest response. At this point, after the other thread, I felt it was necessary to share my thoughts here.

Again, if I have offended you, I am sorry for it. I would simply prefer to be honest.

[Adino]

Originally Posted by Pressing-On

LOL! Well, I shouldn't have been teasing you on a serious thread such as this.

Let me be honest with you. I feel no witness in my Spirit when I read your posts and I have done so for a long time. Not that I read everything you write, but the things I have read, I feel no connection in my Spirit. When I dialogue I want my spirit to bear witness with what is being written. That is one reason I don't always respond to your posts. I hope you take this in the spirit that I meant it, simply an open and honest response. At this point, after the other thread, I felt it was necessary to share my thoughts here.

Again, if I have offended you, I am sorry for it. I would simply prefer to be honest.

Absolutely no offense taken, Bro! I just don't tend to allow truth to be as subjective as you seem to think. I prefer objective consideration when I study.

[Pressing-On]

Originally Posted by Adino

Absolutely no offense taken, Bro! I just don't tend to allow truth to be as subjective as you seem to think. I prefer objective consideration when I study.

I'm glad that you were not offended.

On being subjective as we study - I think that all of us participating in any debate have, for the most part, found what we believe to be truth and we stand, solidly, on that truth.

I also do not believe that any of us would go so far as to be totally closed-minded to any scriptures presented - if - those scriptures presented seemed to open up to us a possibility of something we have overlooked or we felt brought further understanding to God's Word. What I believe we would not do is go in a direction that we do not feel God's Spirit leading us.

Of course, there's the rub! Whose call is it? It is ours alone and we must own it. In disagreement, we must be respectful. And I think that for the most part, we have been.

[Adino]

Originally Posted by Pressing-On

I'm glad that you were not offended.

On being subjective as we study - I think that all of us participating in any debate have, for the most part, found what we believe to be truth and we stand, solidly, on that truth.

I also do not believe that any of us would go so far as to be totally closed-minded to any scriptures presented - if - those scriptures presented seemed to open up to us a possibility of something we have overlooked or we felt brought further understanding to God's Word. What I believe we would not do is go in a direction that we do not feel God's Spirit leading us.

Of course, there's the rub! Whose call is it? It is ours alone and we must own it. In disagreement, we must be respectful. And I think that for the most part, we have been.

I once held to the three step new birth position. It was an objective look at the Scriptures and contradictions within the three step view which forced me to take a different stance. Life would have been much easier had I ignored certain blatant inconsistencies.

I agree with you concerning everyone coming to the table with particular paradigms. It is difficult to lay them aside at times, but it seems you agree we should try to do so to the best of our ability. I'm not saying you are not trying to do this. I will say it cannot be said that I've been closed minded in my studies because I've already proven otherwise..... I changed my position of nearly 25 years and it came with difficult consequence. Now, many would say it was not God who led me to my conclusions and I would certainly disagree with this sentiment and only share many of the reasons I cannot in all good conscience hold to the doctrine of my youth. Since I do not believe God is contradictory in his guidance I must believe it is our ignorance which stands in the way of our better understanding Scripture.

I believe if you would truly set your preconceived paradigm to the side you will see that God takes into consideration a man's yet undemonstrated internal faith in the Gospel. God takes into consideration man's FAITH ALONE in the Gospel. This is the point I made using Cornelius which you just didn't seem to grasp in the other thread. God bore witness to a yet undemonstrated faith Cornelius had in the Gospel. God gave Cornelius the Spirit on the sole basis of an internal acceptance of the Gospel by faith ALONE.

Cornelius did nothing in order to merit the gift of the Spirit from God, but believe. God, who gives the Spirit only to those who obey (Acts 5:32), gave the Spirit to Cornelius bearing witness to his faith in the Gospel preached to him by Peter (Acts 15:7-8). God, who knows the heart, bore witness to the internal and yet undemonstrated faith Cornelius had in the Gospel. This cannot, in all honesty, be denied.

I do certainly respect and appreciate your thoughts as I do everyone here on AFF. As always, I remain malleable, but not to the forfeiture of logic.

[pelathais]

Originally Posted by mizpeh

The second thing I was going to write and forgot to is that the signs that accompanied the initial outpouring and baptism of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost in written about in Acts 2 weren't redundantly reproduced over and over again in the book of Acts when believers received the Holy Spirit yet Peter knew when the Gentiles had received the Spirit...for the spoke with tongues and magnified God. So maybe, just maybe, the perceptual signs of the tongues of fire and the sound of the wind was to make this perfectly clear to the disciples that what they were about to experience was the promise of the Father, the sending of the Comforter, the fullfillment of the prophecy of Joel,...the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The wind, I believe, was an allusion to the wind Jesus spoke of in John 3. I'm not for sure what the tongues of fire signifies except that they were individualized over each recipient and each recipient who received the Spirit spoke with tongues.

I'm not talking about the fire and the wind - I'm talking about "speaking in tongues." The people heard the disciples speaking in a variety of known languages. This is something that has never been documented as happening in any of the 20th Century "outpourings" of the Holy Ghost.

The Book of Acts gives a clear and detailed description of the disciples "speaking in other tongues as the Spirit gave the utterance." The description has NOT been repeated EVER in the modern Pentecostal revival.

So... how can we say that what we see today is the same phenomena? It doesn't match up with the New Testament experience. Basing an absolute standard of salvation on such a flimsy premise strikes me as being the height of hubris. I'm sticking with the John 3:36 kind of evidence for salvation.

Originally Posted by mizpeh

Also the argument that because the events in Acts 2 haven't happened to you doesn't mean they couldn't happen somewhere at sometime to someone else unless this truly was a one time thing done by God to inaugurate his new church and covenant and all subsequent infillings of the Spirit were simply accompanied with the visible signs of tongues and prophecy.

It's not just that they "haven't happened" to me - they haven't happened to you either.

It's not a question of "What could happen?" It's a question of "What IS happening."

Acts 2:4-20 is not happening, otherwise you would have been beating me over the head with it already. What we are left with is Acts 2:21; now that IS happening.

How can you prove that today's phenomena of "speaking in tongues" is the same phenomena as the Book of Acts?

Some of the students at Parham's Bible School thought that they had something going on New Year's Eve over 100 years ago when Agnes Ozman was said to have "spoken in the Chinese language for two hours." Turns out they were mistaken about that and even Sister Agnes denounced the "Chinese language" claim.

There is a very ancient phenomena that is described in Greek, Egyptian, Phoenician and Mesopotamian accounts of shamans and prophets "speaking in unknown tongues." This is usually translated as "to prophesy" by scholars of the ancient languages. Is this the phenomena that we observing today? It is a thoroughly attested experience that transcended cultures and languages in the ancient world. (See also 1 Samuel 10:6-12).

Given the uncertainty of just what is happening, I think it would be best to avoid tacking this phenomena on as some kind of standard of salvation.