Baptism of the Holy Spirit

Introduction

Acts 1:4–5 ESV

And while staying with them he ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which, he said, “you heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

I want to preach to you this morning on a subject that I have never preached on before. The Baptism of the Holy Spirit.

It seems odd to me that I have never before preached on such an important subject, but the truth is that I have simply never before felt led to do so.

This week, however, I have felt burdened to teach on it and to do so in a way that I have never before heard it approached.

This is a Pentecostal church, so I assume that everyone here has probably heard sermons on the Baptism of the Holy Spirit before, and it is likely that most, if not all of you, have experienced it.

So why is it that I feel such a pressing need to teach on it?

What I feel the Lord saying to His church is that, though we have been indoctrinated and filled with the Spirit, that we have barely scratched the surface of what it truly means to be baptized in the Holy Spirit.

We have watered down and cheapened the baptism of the Spirit and relegated it to something far less than it really is.

We often have a very one dimensional view of what the Baptism really is.

Sadly there are a great number of Pentecostals who got so fixated on the idea of tongues as the initial evidence and they never moved past speaking just to prove they got it.

And even those of us who moved past that and experienced the spiritual gifts and have felt His presence stirring us in services, have seldom dipped a toe into the deep end of what God desires for us.

What I have to share this morning is a call to go deeper.

God wants us to take off the floaties and wade into the deep waters with Him.

The Baptism of the Spirit isn’t about speaking in tongues or getting excited and running laps or falling out in a service. Its so much more.

History

As some of you may know, my Masters Degree is in Biblical and Theological Studies, but my emphasis is in Church History.

I love the history of the Church and following the development and growth of the Faith as the Spirit has worked through His church to reveal Himself to us throughout the ages.

We see the truths that He has emphasized in different eras and how they have built a foundation that the next generation builds upon as we grow and learn about Him.

The truths that we hold and proclaim were built upon a foundation laid by those who came before us.

The nature of God’s revelation is that He reveals Himself and His truth to us and grows us in a certain area and then He builds upon that truth and reveals new facets of that truth to us that we did not previously acknowledge.

The trick is to hold onto the truth that God has given us and not to simply abandon it and forget about it when He brings the new aspect into focus for us.

When we lose the solid foundation our truths were built upon then they become shaky and are less secure. They often become skewed or incomplete and we end up having to go back around the mountain again as God needs to reestablish the truths we have lost along the way.

What I feel God wants me to do this morning is to trace the roots of the doctrine of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit to glean from what He emphasized in the past, embrace what He has done in more modern times, and then to look ahead to where I believe God is taking us in the next level.

John Wesley

The baptism of the HS is what is often referred to as Second Blessing theology

It is the belief that there is a second blessing or experience of empowerment by the Holy Spirit subsequent to salvation.

The first blessing is obviously salvation, but proponents of a second blessing believe that there is something more for the believer beyond salvation and a lifelong process of sanctification. There is a subsequent encounter with the Holy Spirit in which the believer is radically transformed

The Pentecostal idea of second blessing theology can be traced back to John Wesley.

This isn’t as surprising as it might seem when you realize that Pentecostalism was largely birthed out of Methodism and the Holiness Church denominations that were rooted in Methodism.

Despite the link in lineage, the Second Blessing looked much different in Wesley’s teaching.

If you study Wesley’s life and ministry, you will see evidence of spiritual experiences occuring in his meetings that would fit in quite well in a modern Pentecostal revival meeting, but Wesley was far from a Pentecostal.

He taught a second blessing experience in the form of Entire Sanctification, sometimes called Christian Perfection.

He believed that there was a second blessing experience in which the Holy Spirit gave the believer total victory over sin and empowered the believer to no longer sin.

Now in order to do this he had to define sin a little differently than many people define it. He taught that sin was the willful and deliberate act of rebelling against God.

In other words he believed that when one recieved this second blessing he would no longer willfully and deliberately break the law of God.

The entire emphasis for Wesley was on holiness and sanctification of the believer.

It was actually this doctrine of Entire Sanctification that was first coined as the Baptism of the Holy Spirit about a generation after Wesley by one of his followers.

The term was not universally picked up and used by all methodists but it did catch on and began to circulate among many methodists and holiness preachers.

Evolution of the Second Blessing

Over time methodist and holiness ministers began to seek another experience of blessing for empowerment to minister.

At first this was seen as a third blessing. One was first saved, then they were given entire sanctification, and then they recieved power to minister more effectively. They must be in this order. If one did not yet have victory over sin, then he could not receive the empowerment for ministry

There was much debate over the years of whether there were three distinct experiential blessings or if the second and third blessings occured at the same time and there were really just two blessings.

The major emphasis throughout the following decades, however, remained the matter of holiness, with empowerment merely being an extra bonus.

As we get closer and closer to Azusa there became a greater emphasis on personal empowerment and holiness of life began to become the lesser emphasis.

Azusa

When Azusa finally exploded and the Pentecostal movement was birthed, the power of the Holy Spirit became firmly rooted at center stage.

God moved powerfully and dramatically and the gifts of the Spirit, especially tongues, drove the movement as did the excitement and boldness of the new Pentecostals.

As the church became more and more divided over the Pentecostal phenomenon, Pentecostalism broke from its traditional place as an arm of the methodist/holiness denominations and the movement became more and more defined by its distinctives.

As Pentecostals were rejected and attacked by the other denominations they held fast to their experience and built there identity around it.

We fell short

The Pentecostal outpouring was a tremendous and magnificent move of God, but I fear that we fell short of what God truly has for us.

We were so busy defending our experience and seeking to be accepted by the rest of the Church that I fear we failed to continue progressing forward and that we may have even compromised along the way by embracing elements of fundamentalist theology that brought us acceptance from other denominations but stifled what the Spirit was attempting to do in and through us.

On one hand we largely lost sight of the emphasis of empowerment for holy living and on the other hand we didn’t progress beyond tongues and empowerment for ministry to move deeper into the things God has for us.

A new era

In the decades since Azusa we had the Jesus Movement, the Charismatic movement, the Third Wave renewal and several other waves of Holy Spirit focused moves of God. As a result Pentecostals are no longer the shunned fringe movement accused of being demonic that they once were.

Because all these years later we are still speaking in tongues and so are a lot of them.

The Charismatic/Pentecostal branch of the Church is the fastest growing segment of the church

We no longer find ourselves in a defensive battle trying to merely survive and defend our experience.

We are in a new era and with new opportunity to restore the foundation of our past, hold fast to what God has done in the present, and to finally embrace what God still has for us in our future.

Casting the vision