Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4111. Water baptism does not sit in the same fixed relationship to the Holy Spirit’s coming everywhere we look in Acts, and that surprises people the first time they notice it. Sometimes the Spirit falls before water baptism, sometimes after, and once, through the laying on of apostolic hands, considerably after. If you try…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4103. Spirit baptism and water baptism are related closely enough in the New Testament that Christians regularly confuse the two, but they are not the same event, and keeping them distinct actually protects both doctrines rather than diminishing either. Spirit baptism is the Spirit’s own act, placing every believer into the body of Christ…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4102. receiving the Spirit is exactly what the disciples appear to be doing on resurrection evening, when Jesus breathes on them behind locked doors and says, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit,’ and yet the scene raises a genuine puzzle that deserves careful, patient handling rather than a quick answer. John records the moment in a…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4099. Receiving the Spirit is exactly what Paul asks these Ephesian men about in Acts 19:2, and the answer they give has been fought over ever since, mostly by people looking for support for a doctrine Luke was not trying to teach. “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” Paul asks, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4077. The laying on hands appears repeatedly in the Acts narratives connected to the Spirit’s reception, and I want to work through those specific passages carefully, because the pattern is genuinely more varied than a single, simplified formula for how believers receive the Spirit today. Getting this right matters, because some traditions have built…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4060. Spirit baptism and the filling of the Spirit get muddled together constantly in popular teaching, and the confusion is not simply academic, because getting this distinction wrong has produced entire movements built on the idea that some believers possess the Spirit more fully than others. I want to set the two side by…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4166. The doctrine of initial evidence is the classic Pentecostal teaching that speaking in tongues is the necessary first sign that a person has been baptised in the Holy Spirit, so that anyone who has not spoken in tongues has not yet received this baptism. It is one of the defining doctrines of the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4014. The baptism of the Holy Spirit is one of the most misunderstood doctrines in the modern church, and few subjects have caused more confusion, division and quiet discouragement among sincere believers. Some are taught it is a second blessing they must seek after conversion, others that it is proved by speaking in tongues,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4002. When do we receive the Holy Spirit? I want to answer that we receive the Holy Spirit at the moment of saving faith, fully and permanently, and not at some later crisis that divides Christians into the haves and the have-nots. That is the short answer, and I am convinced it is the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 04036. The phrase second blessing describes the belief that there is a definite work of grace beyond conversion, a later crisis experience in which the believer is lifted onto a higher plane of the Christian life, often identified with a baptism in the Spirit understood as separate from and after salvation. The idea has…