Your experience on how you recieved the baptism of the Holy Spirit

This thread is awesome. I loved every testimony. I'm also glad to type up my own, just for my own records, since I haven't previously done so.

So I was in university at the time, a Junior. I was raised in a basically atheist household. However, I got saved my Junior year a month or so before getting baptized in the Holy Spirit through the witnessing of three friends (who I love dearly).

I was involved in a charismatic, non-denominational campus ministry at my school, and they had an event called "Spiritual Operations", which was a teaching about the gifts of the Spirit, prophecy in particular. I had previously heard people praying in tongues, but I didn't really know much about this area (although I was open to just about everything). It was funny, because during the seminar, our campus minister mentioned the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and I'm thinking, "I know baptism, I know Holy Spirit, but what's the conjunction?"

Anyway, after hearing some teaching about prophecy, we pair everyone in the room up with someone they don't know, including me, to prophesy over each other. I get a couple really cool, dynamic words for the other person (another story in its own right). Later that night prophesy over others. So I'm active in some of the gifts of the Spirit, even though I haven't been baptized in the Holy Spirit (as far as I know).

Later, I find that I can "think" in tongues, but I'm not capable of praying in tongues yet. That is, I could hear the words in my mind, but for some reason I couldn't vocalize them. It felt like my tongue was heavy/thick and just not dexterous enough to make the sounds. I had known others who fell into the "God will move my tongue" trap, so I was actively trying to pray in tongues, but I simply wasn't capable. One day after a leadership meeting for this campus ministry, the campus minister asks me if I'm praying in tongues yet, I explain the above, and he prays for the release of the Spirit. I feel the Spirit moving over me (I didn't feel it physically, but it was like I was imagining myself feel it, if that makes any sense), and it was a really cool experience. I didn't pray in tongues then because I was nervous about "performing" or whatever, plus other people were in the room talking/whatever. However, the minister and I both knew what happened, since he could feel the Spirit as well. I was totally confident after that point I could pray in tongues, and I've never had difficulty doing it since.

Immediately afterward I go to a music practice room and dance around the room singing in tongues for 1-2 hours; fantastic experience. I do that a couple more times, pray in tongues more, and that pretty much jump started my prayer life.

I now have many, many stories of the Spirit changing my life powerfully through praying in tongues, prophecy, etc. I can clearly see different seasons in my life where God was focusing on dealing with different things through my time praying in tongues, including cutting off sin/bad attitudes, opening up the Word to my understanding, and increasing my love for Him and others, among other things. Words cannot describe my thankfulness to Him. I am fully confident that my relationship with God would not be nearly as strong if it weren't for the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Feel free to put on the website, Daniel from Washington state.

P.S.: In the "Find a Spirit-filled church" section, you can also add www.everynation.org. Not a denomination, but they are Spirit-filled and multi-national (and the campus ministry mentioned above is with Every Nation).

got saved at 7

got deceived at 21

About 10 years later God delivered and baptised me with His Holy Spirit after a lot of darkness and sin had touched my soul. I still don't know if it was being baptised or God intevening but for the sake of this thread will call it being baptised in the Holy Spirit because things certainly changed 180 degress after that.

God is merciful

God healed a lot when He poured His Holy Spirit of love into the depths of my soul, He's still doing a clean up job

God is awesome

steven07 said:

Jim,
are you saying that everything that Christ had and God has to offer he gave to us as soon as we were saved? You don't believe there are different levels of blessing?

I don't mean this as a debate.. I'm just really wondering what you think.. sorry if it sounds that way..

Also, even Jesus was baptized by the Spirit (by man and Spirit) and the apostles and those the apostles spoke to.. THIS is what I really want to know.. If Jesus had both baptisms why not we? If those the Apostles spoke to needed water and fire.. why not we?

Click to expand...

No, I don’t believe that Christianity is a tiered system of blessing. I believe Christians mature, of course, and are able to sort out their beliefs better and learn wisdom from trial and error, etc., but I believe ever believer is blessed to the hilt—given the whole package—when they come to Christ. The key verses that tell me this are (I repeat) …

Why would God wait to fill us with His Spirit? Who needs to be Spirit-filled more than a new believer? When were you ever more willing to share your faith than the week after you came to Christ? When were you ever more usable in the kingdom? Then, bad teaching and a few bad experiences drained our spirit of our enthusiasm and put us in our prisons of inactivity. Most of us long for the eagerness we had the first week we set out on our pilgrimage.

IOW, I believe we start out with the whole package. We are saved, filled, baptized in the Spirit and gifted with every spiritual gifting from day-one. Then we run out of gas along the way and think that there must be more somewhere ahead, another “level of blessing” in the future, rather than just tapping in to what we have already have been given … right from the start.

IMO.

~Jim

If you'd like to use my testimony on your site, help yourself.

The day after I got saved, I was baptized in the Holy Spirit. It was a rather profound event to me, but I wasn't seeking it or even asking for it. I really didn't even know to seek or ask for it.

I was returning from a week at a summer Bible camp, had gotten off the bus and was walking across a Sears and Roebuck's parking lot with my duffle bag on my shoulder. As I walked across the busy parking lot, I was telling the Lord how awesome He was and then I said the words, "I want everybody to know You like this!"

I might as well have been lightning struck...I dropped to the street, completely helpless. As I lay on the pavement, an intense surge just consumed me, inside and out. Some of what the "surge" was felt like radiant power, but much more of it was discernable as a language. I honestly don't know if I spoke the language or not, and to be honest, I personally don't care so much about that. I do know that I heard it.

Some of what was said has been revealed to me in the Spirit, I believe there is still more of it that hasn't been interpreted yet. A part of the message I did get was, "You are My son, this day I have begotten you. Now ask Me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance."

The hard part for me was that I was FIRED UP!!, but my church didn't believe in that sort of thing...so it wasn't nurtured well in the early years.

I feel I need to repeat, I was/We were baptized in the Holy Spirit and made to drink of the Spirit the instant I was/we were saved:
Since at the very moment I was saved I was baptized, filled with and given every gift of the Holy Spirit, as well as reborn, completed, justified, redeemed, sanctified, made holy, adopted, freed from condemnation, anointed, reconciled and rooted, the experience was overwhelming.

The moment we receive Christ we are given the whole package, not in increments but at once.
Every believer is baptized in/with/by/of the Holy Spirit. We don’t have to wait for it, struggle for it, tarry for it, or yearn for it. We were baptized by/with/of/in the Holy Spirit the day we became Christ’s.

~Jim

Like every other born again believer, I received all of the Holy Spirit there is to receive at the moment I was born again.

I received Christ in 1972 while aboard the naval destroyer, the USS Noa (DD 841) three months prior to my discharge. Someone told me about a house fellowship on Jacksonville Beach, and so I walked into the house one night while there was a meeting in progress. Everyone was singing in tongues.

I had no idea what that stuff was I was hearing, and still I remained through the rest of the service. A few days later, I returned to visit those who lived in that house and a brother talked to me as we sat on the back porch facing the beach.

Ron explained to me about the baptism of the Holy Ghost and asked me if I would like to pray to receive it. I did just that and with very little coaxing spoke in tongues. A few days later, Ron and I were walking on the beach when he asked me if I'd been baptised in water. I replied in the negative, so he asked me if I'd like to do it then.

Into the water we walked up to our waists upon which time Ron leaned me over and baptised me in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and the name of Jesus. It was the most thrilling time in the Lord for me in those days. Full of anticipation, hope and deliverance. I basked in it for at least a couple of years when God began to use unexpected trials to draw me to a deeper commitment. He is always faithful to turn all things for the good.

David
Tampa, Florida