The Spirit's Power and Basic Christian Experience

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“A man with an experience of God is never at the mercy of a man with an argument.” I think you are trying to reach your conclusions in scripture through intelligence rather than direct personal communion and experience with GOD as I and many others have over the years, hence the confusion.

You can say that without knowing me or my spiritual experiences? When I was Spirit baptized and spoke in tongues, eyewitnesses starred in awe because, as they later told me, my face was glowing in the darkening amphitheater by the lake where it happened and a Lutheran pastor approached me to say he didn't believe in tongues, but was just there as an interested observer. The anointing on me was so strong that I just touched him gently on the forehead and this skeptic exploded in other tongues!

 

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You can say that without knowing me or my spiritual experiences? When I was Spirit baptized and spoke in tongues, eyewitnesses starred in awe because, as they later told me, my face was glowing in the darkening amphitheater by the lake where it happened and a Lutheran pastor approached me to say he didn't believe in tongues, but was just there as an interested observer. The anointing on me was so strong that I just touched him gently on the forehead and this skeptic exploded in other tongues!

Our experiences in relation to being born again and the filling of The Spirit are to align with scripture. The only exception to this rule would be the original 120 Jewish believers and the Gentile believers in Cornelius's house, since their born again and Spirit-filled events were immediately back to back, which I think was GOD's decision in both events and His signature upon them.

Your doctrinal stances are all over the place biblically, and certainly not from any sort of orthodox Spirit-filled position that many of us would find agreement on, which is sad because Methodists have such a rich Spirit-filled history in their past.

We've gotten people like you on this site before over the years, where they think they understand things better than others and want to discount whole denominations and their doctrines for their newly found insights.

This is the reason why I just went ahead and bowed out from our conversation, I've already seen you before in other people on here.

 

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Our experiences in relation to being born again and the filling of The Spirit are to align with scripture. The only exception to this rule would be the original 120 Jewish believers and the Gentile believers in Cornelius's house, since their born again and Spirit-filled events were immediately back to back, which I think was GOD's decision in both events and His signature upon them.

arbiter01: "Your doctrinal stances are all over the place biblically, and certainly not from any sort of orthodox Spirit-filled position that many of us would find agreement on, which is sad because Methodists have such a rich Spirit-filled history in their past."

And I think you're badly confused and that's why you've opted out of the discussion. So stay tuned for my Signs Gifts thread on Speaking in Tongues, which should clear up some of your misunderstanding. One reason for your confusion is that you prematurely harmonize Luke's theology with Paul's without doing justice to their differences and thus read pneumatology in Acts that isn't there.

 

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THE EXPERIENCE OF WALKING IN THE SPIRIT AND BEING LED BY THE SPIRIT

In Paul's statement on how Spirit baptism incorporates us into the Body Christ, it is easy to overlook the experiential phrase, "and we were all made to drink of the one Spirit (12:13)." What happens when we drink in the Spirit is poetically expressed in John 7:38:

"Let the one who believes in me drink...Out of the believer's heart will flow rivers of living water."

Drinking in the Spirit must be understood in terms of the use of "living water" as a descriptive for flowing water in secular Hebrew usage. Just as divine thoughts and words spontaneously flow when we "pray in the Spirit (Eph. 6:18)," so will the Spirit direct the flow of our lives, when we drink in the Spirit. Thus, in Gal. 5:16, 18 Paul's command to walk in the Spirit means being "led by the Spirit" not only by the spontaneous flow of thought in praying in the Spirit, but by our very way of life. But when we lose touch with this Spirit flow, we lose our "freedom" (5:13) and live mechanically in a contrived way as we begin to "satisfy the desires of the flesh (5:16)."

As we flow with the Spirit, an outpouring of agape love flows through us: "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5)." So "the fruit of the Spirit" is not the result of human striving, but a means of authenticating that we are walking and being led by the Spirit. The word for "fruit" ("karpos") is singular, so the 9 manifestations of the fruit are experienced as a unity or not at all. We don't get to cherry-pick the fruit and claim that the Spirit has given us, say, 3 of the 9 fruits. Paul sums up how we gain access to the fruit of the Spirit in Gal. 5:25:
"If the Spirit is the source of our life, let the Spirit also direct our course."
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"They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, HAVING BEEN FORBIDDEN BY THE SPIRIT TO SPEAK THE WORD IN ASIA. When they had come opposite Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia,
BUT THE SPIRIT OF JESUS DID NOT ALLOW THEM; so passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas. During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia (Acts 16:6-10)."

The physical circumstances and roadblocks in Asia Minor are unknown that persuade Paul and his companions that "the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them" to go into Bithynia. The lesson here is that we can often learn how we are being led by the Spirit through a frustrating pattern of open and closed doors. The turning point at the coastal city of Troas is the call heard in Paul's visionary dream to pursue his mission for the first time in Europe (Macedonia). Jewish literature in Paul's day can warn that visionary dreams are unreliable (Sirach 34:1-6). But Paul's insight that this vision is divinely sent probably emerges from the flow of the living water of the Spirit that, like water, flows best in the path of least resistance.

 

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Time to offer some examples of being led by the Spirit. My first example illustrates how God sometimes prompts us to do something seemingly irrational:

(1) I like to go on long walks in the morning or early afternoon, but never at night. So I was recently surprised when I felt a strong prompting to walk towards Main Street at night. When I arrived, I promptly ran into Clint, a new Christian whom I knew only from casual encounters in the street. He was completely distraught because he had just found his 38-year-old son on his kitchen floor, dead from a Fentanyl-laced drug overdose. Someone had just told him that his son got what he deserved. What a cruel thing to say to a grieving Dad! My presence was needed to be a good listener and to help Clint vent. God knew what He was doing when He prompted me to walk to Main Street.

 

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OTHER EXPERIENCES OF BEING LED BY THE SPIRIT:

(2) When I was a Theology professor, I used to play Bridge with professors from the School of Education. One night, a light-hearted mood had us laughing as we played. I casually suggested that we invite Ellie to join us next time. But the Dean (Paul) replied that it was too soon because Ellie was having a hard time adjusting to the death from cancer of her husband Joe, who, like Ellie, was an Education School professor. Suddenly I found myself saying, "Ellie has just been visited by Joe and is wondering if the experience is real. Tell her I can assure her that it is!"

My outburst illustrates how speaking in tongues can serve as a gateway for other spiritual gifts. I had no control over the automatic flow of words issuing this announcement and, given the jovial mood at the card table, everyone was understandably stunned. Imagine how bad I would look if my pronouncement proved to be nonsense! A curious Paul phoned Ellie to share what I'd said. Ellie replied that she had just had a prolonged waking vision of Joe during which he expressed his love for her and assured her that he was OK in his postmortem spiritual journey. The experience seemed too good to be true and a skeptical Ellie wondered if wishful thinking had somehow conjured up a hallucination. She had kept her experience to herself; so I think my paranormal reassurance was a real reinforcing comfort for her.

(3) Shortly thereafter, the School of Education held a departmental party. Afterwards, Paul contacted me to ask what I thought of Ouija Boards. I discouraged him from playing with a Ouija Board because at times the source of the resulting messages identifies itself as demonic. Paul turned pale because what he hadn't told me was that professors had played with the board at their faculty party until they started getting messages from demons! I think these 2 experiences made my witness to these professors more effective.

 

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(4) I had just finished a tiring year teaching Theology at a Catholic university with overload course sections and I desperately wanted a restful vacation. But my first Friday off was disturbed by an insistent conviction that someone's death was imminent that should postpone my vacation plans. I tried to dismiss this thought as self-destructive paranoia, but the more I resisted it, the stronger and more insistent it got! Soon I began to fear that a family member was might be about to die!

When Monday morning arrived, I decided to ignore this premonition and go out for breakfast. But as I rushed for the door, an inner voice seemed to shout, "Sit down! You're about to hear about the death1" Startled, I sat down next the phone by the door and it immediately rang. The caller was Dr. Whelan, the Chair of the Summer Graduate Program in Theology. She explained that Cassian Corcoran had not shown up on the first day to teach his summer MA course in Pauline Theology. So someone had gone to his oncampus apartment to see whether he had slept in. When he didn't respond, the door was unlocked and Cassian was found dead in bed! Dr. Whelan frantically explained that his grad students were waiting and I was the only professor around trained to teach that course without advance notice. She asked me if I would do it. I agreed, partly because the Holy Spirit had been preparing my heart to sacrifice my vacation time for this very purpose. Teaching that course was a most spiritually fulfilling experience.

 

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(5) I was Best Man in Dallas's wedding and after the honeymoon, he invited me over for dinner, after which the 3 of us went down to his basement to play table tennis. To explain what happened next, you need to understand how speaking in tongues can be a gateway to other gifts of the Spirit. The tongues speaker has no control over the flow of his words, something that is also true of praying in the Spirit in one's own language.

Dallas announced that he was going deer hunting with friends in northern Manitoba the next day during the week between Christmas and New Year's. I suddenly found myself involuntarily saying, "Don't! Because if you do, you will die!" Dallas was evangelical, but not Pentecostal by experience, and he reacted angrily: "You're one of those anti-hunting people, aren't you?" I replied, "No, I don't hunt myself, but I have nothing against hunting, but the danger you're facing has just been revealed to me." Dallas doubled down on his belief in my anti-hunting stance; so the evening ended badly.

When I found myself prophesying Dallas's death, I seemed to see his skeleton as I spoke. Of course, I had wanted that evening to be a pleasant affirming encounter with friends, but the Holy Spirit had other plans. I found out at our church's New Year's Eve service that my prophecy had come true. Dallas was riding his snowmobile in the wilderness of northern Manitoba when he hit a bump that caused his rifle to discharge into his shoulder. He bled to death before his friends could get him to a doctor.

(6) Ted, Frank, and I used to have lunch at the Princeton Seminary refectory. Ted was a very bright young scholar with a great sense of humor who had just been accepted into the doctoral program in New Testament at Cambridge University in England. I wanted to apply there too, so I went to Ted's dorm room to ask to borrow his Cambridge catalogue. When he gave me the catalogue, I suddenly sensed his skeleton and somehow knew he was about to be killed. This thought was so distressing, I struggled to put it out of my mind. When I returned to Princeton from Christmas vacation, I learned that Frank and Ted had planned to drive to Ohio, where they both lived. But Frank drove too fast on the freeway onramp and hit a telephone pole. Frank broke his arm, but Ted was killed, just as my prophetic premonition had alerted me.

Here is the important point for verification: none of my many premonitions have ever failed to come true! They are truly supernatural because God allows me to get outside of time and see the future.

 

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(7) In my senior year at Princeton Seminary I applied for various doctoral programs in NT and had been accepted in a couple that weren't my first choice. I wanted to go to Harvard, but a fellow student had applied and been rejected and assured me I'd suffer the same fate. Then on Tuesday an amazing display of the Spirit happened: George, a Presbyterian classmate whom I barely knew knocked on my dorm door and, with a face radiating warmth, informed me that he had been praying for me and the Lord had assured him that I'd be accepted at Harvard. I hadn't even told him I was applying, but he apparently learned this through seminary gossip. George's words were prophetic in the sense that they immediately conveyed comforting assurance that God would make it happen. The next evening provided one of the most remarkable experiences of my life--a shocking emotional roller coaster ride.

In the early evening Ann came to my dorm room, accusing me of a crank phone call during which I supposedly told her she was too emotionally unstable to be in seminary. She was determined to extract a confession. The guy must have sounded like me! I barely knew Ann but had randomly sat with her and her boyfriend a couple of times in the refectory. It was so frustrating that my sincere denials fell in deaf ears. Then in the midst of her harangue there was a knock on the door to tell me a call had come for me on the pay phone in the middle of the dorm floor. It was the Harvard NT professor who was in on the original discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls and was currently in charge of editing and translating them and their fragments. He informed me that I had been accepted into Harvard with scholarship and wanted to know the precise program I wished to enter. Thank you, God, an thank you, George, for your prayers.

Imagine the emotional brew I was experiencing as I returned to my room to again face Ann. She demanded, "Who was that?", apparently thinking someone had called to warn me she was coming. She was stunned by the timing, and then remarked the blood was streaming from my palm onto my pants. I didn't really believe in Catholic stigmata a the time, but this bleeding seemed a divinely induced sign of my innocence. Ann sheepishly said, "I guess I'd better go now." My only regret is that I never met George again so I could thank him for his prayers.