(I am aware that my blog entries can sometimes be on the long side. Sometimes I try to break that up with sub-headings and pictures. On this occasion it wasn’t right to do either. I just had to write, what was in me to write. This is a long piece, but I hope the words will carry you along.)
Talking about the Holy Spirit is not really that easy.
It is easy in the sense that I could very well talk about the Holy Spirit in the same rapt manner that I talk about other passions in my life. Yet I know that as I wax lyrical I can end up baffling and alienating those who listen as well as receive rather patronising remarks as if I was the looney in the room.
Yet I am compelled to write about an experience with the Holy Spirit, because it remains so special and the Holy Spirit is so important – crucial to my wellbeing, that it was fitting to share something on it.
My upbringing lead me into many spirited occasions. Though my church background wasn’t fully embracing of the charismatic, it certainly had strong leanings in that direction and is often placed within the Pentecostal tradition. As such I was used to hearing and seeing people ‘move in the Spirit’.
This usually consisted of people behaving in a manic fashion, getting all ecstatic and whooping and hollering. They would act as if they cannot control themselves. Eventually others would restrain from causing bodily harm to themselves and those around them.
I remember as a child being frightened of this sort of behaviour. Even the whooping and hollering and crying got me scared. Scared because this was not the typical behaviour I’m expecting from these people.
So when people talked of the Spirit and being in the Spirit these kind of scenes were brought to mind.
Sadly people didn’t talk about ‘being in the Spirit’ that lead to times of true heartfelt repentance of sinful ways and towards acts of Kingdom proclamation and demonstration so that the world would know that Jesus is real, Jesus is the Messiah and Jesus is the King. Sadly people didn’t talk about ‘being in the Spirit’ when marriages on the brink of divorce were healed, when children who wandered far from home were reunited with their parents. Sadly people didn’t talk about ‘being in the Spirit’ when they spoke of people from varying and sometimes warring ethnic backgrounds would put that aside to embrace each other as brother and sister in Christ.
I believe God spoke to me through His Spirit to encourage me to take the step of baptism, but actual growth in Christ was somewhat stunted for the initial years as I got mired in ‘worldly pleasures’ and treated the baptism as a rite of passage to be accepted by the church membership. This lead to living two lives, one for the religious folks and then the other darker life that no one need know about.
This carried on without any conviction on my part for a few years. I knew the ropes at church and at times was emotionally moved by what was happening in some services. I knew my ‘dark’ activities weren’t right, but persisted anyway.
Yet an encounter in recognising the Spirit of God in me took place in the summer of 1997. I started university in 1996 and so this was the first summer that I spent away from home as I did a university related work placement. I was staying with a church friend and so frequented the congregation of which he was a member. We met at a Church of England place known as St. Luke’s. A typical ye olde type church structure.
As well as the services on the weekend, there was also the midweek prayer meeting. One evening we attended it. I had not been feeling anything untoward in my life, because to that time I was contentedly carrying on with my double life and enjoying the freedom I now had being out from under the roof of my parents. I was working and getting paid well. I was getting along with this new congregation and the church friend was being brilliant. So there was nothing to indicate it was time to have a close encounter of the divine kind.
Yet I remember sitting in the chair near the back as we sang songs to the Lord and then one in particular triggered the encounter.
My stubborn will at last hath yielded;
I would be thine and thine alone
And this the prayer my lips are bringing
Lord, let in me Thy will be done.
(Refrain) Sweet will of God, still fold me closer,
Till I am wholly lost in Thee
Sweet will of God, still fold me closer
Till I am wholly lost in Thee
I’m tired of sin, footsore and weary,
The darksome path hath dreary grown
But now a light has ris’n to cheer me
I find in Thee my Star, my Sun
Thy precious will, O conqu’ring Savior,
Doth now embrace and compass me;
All discords hushed, my peace a river,
My soul, a prisoned bird set free
Shut in with Thee, O Lord, forever,
My wayward feet no more to roam
What pow’r from Thee my soul can sever?
The center of God’s will, my home
It was not the first time I had sang the song. I had sung it many times before. On this occasion, however, I was not singing the song. The words were talking to me, and then they were talking for me,
My stubborn will at last has yielded, I would be thine and thine alone
And then … and then the tears. The tears that welled and then flowed. No sound. No cries. No whoops. Indeed by this time I had to sit down whilst everyone stood to sing the song. I sat with head bowed and eyes closed, but nevertheless the stream of tears did not end.
As the song spoke for me I heard those words again –
Till I am wholly lost in Thee.
I pictured myself falling into a sea of white and being so totally submerged in it that no one could see me anymore. And when I emerged, they could not see me anymore, all they could see was the white. Totally embraced. Totally submerged in the blessed Holy Spirit of God. Totally. No me left. Only Him and in Him there I was, and yet it was Him. When people looked at me, they saw Him.
Even now writing my recollection of it, those tears flow.
Some think it’s important to speak in other tongues when you are baptised in the Spirit. I don’t think so. I think it is important to realise the change in you when you’ve had such a spiritual encounter. And as the words of the song echoed and reverberated in my being and I sensed the full embrace of God by His Spirit, I knew something new had happened, something different had happened. They were my words, of my heart’s desire to completely lost in Him.
Being sick of sin? That was new. Feeling accepted by God, fully forgiven and now empowered to live in such a way that when people saw me they only saw Him? That was all new. Desiring the things of God and more still desiring God Himself in such a rich way and so passionate for others to dive fully into the fullness of Christ? That was all new. It was more than a feeling. It was a heart’s yearning and a soul’s conviction.
The prayer meeting that evening was pretty ‘spirited’ anyway, so I wouldn’t expect anyone to notice anything particularly special with what was going on with me. But I know I left a very different man to the one that came in. My relationship with myself and my relationship with God was very different.
I did not experience complete deliverance from the things that I had got messed up in. I did experience a nagging conviction and the real help to have a hatred for those sins I had previously embraced.
I spent many a time low in the valley and made some seriously wrong moves, but there was also the very real knowledge that the presence of God that had so embraced me as I sang til I am wholly lost in thee, had not forsaken me.
He had not let me go.
He remained and emerged to lift me from whatever pit I found myself in because now I was conscious of a new relationship with God in Christ by His Holy Spirit.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
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