setup "Learning How to Wait"
background music "A New Song"
error of stoicism "Those who are with us are more than those who are with them" 2 kings 6:16
This is a story about getting to know the Holy Spirit. Everybody's story is different, because God interacts with His us in ways perfectly suited to our individualities. But this is mine, and I hope it encourages you.
Soon after getting married, my husband and I took the new members' class offered at our church. Ours is a non-denominational, whole-Bible believing, charismatic church. It is the least "traditional" church either Andy or I have ever been a part of, but in the emphasis on Spirit-filled, whole-life worship, we recognized the opportunity to be stretched in new ways that have been very good for our spiritual growth over the past seven years.
It was in that class that I first heard of the "baptism of the Holy Spirit" as something more than what I had yet experienced. To make a distinction: when we say 'yes' to Jesus, immediately the Spirit lives in us, our Promise to remind us that yes, we now belong to Christ. The baptism, on the other hand, may or may not happen at the start of our walk with Jesus, and is His pouring out of supernatural power on us to minister to other people or to testify of the work of Christ in and around us. It is always given so that we may bring glory to God and build up the body of Christ--NEVER to seek glory for ourselves.
Anyway, my initial reaction to this concept, after recognizing it throughout scripture, was essentially to feel gipped: how was it possible to have been a Christian for TWENTY YEARS and to never have HEARD of this thing? I was raised to understand the Holy Spirit as a member of the trinity, but essentially irrelevant to the present-day Church. And there are plenty of churches who treat the Spirit this way still--and even condemn the charismatic movement as being completely fabricated--but I need to tell you that those believers are missing out on Someone VITAL.
And though we can't fully comprehend Him, He's actually not as weird as most of us have believed.
Trust me. I'm a skeptic.
For many years after my conversion I never used any ready-made forms [of prayer] except the Lord's Prayer. In fact I tried to pray without words at all--not to verbalise the mental acts. Even in praying for others I believe I tended to avoid their names and substituted mental images of them. I still think the prayer without words is the best--if one can really achieve it. But I now see that in trying to make it my daily bread I was counting on a greater mental and spiritual strength than I really have. To pray successfully without words one needs to be "at the top of one's form." Otherwise the mental acts become merely imaginative or emotional acts--and a fabricated emotion is a miserable affair. When the golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift? But He does not give it--anyway not to me--day in, day out. My mistake was what Pascal, if I remember rightly, calls "Error of Stoicism": thinking we can do always what we can do sometimes.
-C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
