Witnesses to the Filling of the Holy Spirit

 

Gathered by Don Williams

 

D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Pastor of Westminster Chapel in London and the greatest Reformed preacher of the last generation in England writes, “The essence of a revival is that the Holy Spirit comes down upon a number of people together, upon a whole church, upon a number of churches, districts, or perhaps, a whole country.  That is what is meant by revival.  It is, if you like, a visitation of the Holy Spirit…an outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  And the terms are interesting because you see what the people are conscious of is that it is as if something has suddenly come down upon them.  The Spirit of God has descended into their midst, God has come down and is amongst them.  A baptism, an outpouring, a visitation.  And the effect of that is that they immediately become aware of his presence and of his power in a manner that they have never known before. I am talking about Christian people, about church members gathered together as they have done so many times before. Suddenly they are aware of his presence, they are aware of the majesty and the awe of God. The Holy Spirit literally seems to be presiding over the meeting and taking charge of it, and manifesting his power and guiding them, and leading them, and directing them.  That is the essence of revival.

 

“Revival can only happen to a man who has got life.  It means revivifying. The church has lost her power, and is given the power again.  He gave her the power at the beginning.  He goes on repeating this. That is revival, and God, I say again, has kept His church alive and going by this succession of revivals throughout the centuries.

 

“To me…there is nothing that is more urgently important than this.  Do you believe in revival…? Are you praying for revival?  What are you trusting?  Are you trusting in the power of God to pour out His Spirit upon us again, to revive us, to baptize us anew and afresh with His most blessed Holy Spirit?  The church needs another Pentecost.  Every revival is a repetition of Pentecost, and it is the greatest need of the Christian church at this present hour.  Oh, may God open the eyes of our understanding on this vital matter, that we may look to Him and wait upon Him until in His infinite mercy and compassion He once more sends down from on high the power of the Holy Spirit upon us.”  Selections from Revival

 

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“When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.  Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.  They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.  All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.” Acts 2:1-4

 

1.       John Wesley, Journal, Jan 1, 1739 [The Wesleys became the great evangelists of the 18th Century Evangelical Awakening in England.  George Whitefield became the great evangelist of the Great Awakening in the 13 Colonies before the Revolutionary War. These men, along with many others, changed the face of the English speaking world.]: “Mr. Hall, Hinching, Ingham, Whitefield, Hutching, and my brother Charles were present at our love feast in Fetter Lane with about 60 of our brethren.  About three in the morning as we were continuing instant in prayer the power of God came mightily upon us, insomuch that many cried out for exulting joy and many fell to the ground.  As soon as we were recovered a little from the awe and amazement at the presence of His majesty, we broke out with one voice, ‘We praise Thee O God, we acknowledge Thee to be Lord.’”

 

2.       Jonathan Edwards [Edwards was one of the leaders of the Great Awakening in the 13 Colonies before the Revolutionary War. Many scholars hold him to be the greatest intellect produced on American soil.  He became President of “The College of New Jersey” which is today Princeton University.]: “ As I rode out into the woods for my health, in 1737, having alighted from my horse in a retired place, as my manner commonly has been, to walk for divine contemplation and prayer, I had a view that was for me extraordinary, of the glory of the Son of God, as Mediator between God and man, and His wonderful, great, full, pure and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle condescension.   This grace that appeared so calm and sweet, appeared also great above the heavens. The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thoughts and conceptions, which continued, as near as I can judge, about an hour; such as to keep me a greater part of the time in a flood of tears, and weeping aloud.  I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone; to love him with a holy and pure love; to trust in Him; to live upon Him; to serve Him and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity.”

 

3.       Charles Finney, 1821[ Finney was a lawyer in upstate New York and became the best known evangelist of the 19th Century in the United States. He also became the President of Oberlin College in Ohio], “But as I turned and was about to take a seat by the fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost. Without any expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my mind that there was any such thing for me, without my recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned by any person in the world, the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul.  I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through me.  Indeed, it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love….  I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan me, like immense wings; and it seemed to me, as these waves passed over me, that they literally moved my hair like a passing breeze.

 

“No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my heart.  I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I should say, I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart.  These waves came over me, and over me, one after another, until I recollect I cried out, ‘I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me.’ I said, ‘Lord, I cannot bear any more,’ yet I had no fear of death.” [

 

4.       Dwight L. Moody [Moody was the great evangelist of the latter part of the 19th Century in the United States.  Moody Bible Institute and Moody Press are enduring witnesses to his spiritual impact on the nation after the Civil War]: “I began to cry as never before, for a greater blessing from God.  The hunger increased; I really felt that I did not want to live any longer.  [D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones comments, He had been a Christian, and not only a Christian, but a minister, and in charge of a mission for some time; he was getting conversions, but still he wanted more.]  I kept on crying all the time that God would fill me with His Spirit.  Well, one day in the City of New York – Oh! What a day, I cannot describe it; I seldom refer to it.  It is almost too sacred an experience to name.  Paul had an experience of which he never spoke for 14 years.  I can only say, God revealed Himself to me, and I had such an experience of His love that I had to ask him to stay his hand.”

 

5.       Billy Graham [Graham is the great evangelist of the 20th Century.  He has preached to more people than any other person in the history of the church]: Stephen Olford, English Baptist Preacher writes of praying with Billy Graham as a young man.  “I gave him my testimony of how God completely turned my life inside out – an experience of the Holy Spirit in his fullness and anointing.  As I talked, and I can see him now, those marvelous eyes glistened with tears, and he said, ‘Stephen, I see it, that’s what I want.  That’s what I need in my life.’” Olford suggested they “pray this through,” and both men fell to their knees.  “I can still hear Billy pouring out his heart in a prayer of total dedication to the Lord.  Finally, he said, ‘My heart is so flooded with the Holy Spirit,’ and we went from praying to praising.  We were laughing and praising God, and he was walking back and forth across the room, crying out, ‘I have it. I’m filled.  This is the turning point in my life.’ And he was a new man.”

 

6.       Michael Cassidy [Graduate of Cambridge University and Fuller Theological Seminary, founder of African Enterprise, major African evangelist in this generation]: “…sleep would not come to me.  Instead, quite out of the blue, the spirit of praise came upon my soul. All seemed to be released.  All seemed to be freedom.  Hour after hour I praised my God in unrestrained and restrainable doxology and song.  In words of men and angels I rejoiced… No fatigue visited me that night.  All my senses were vibrantly alive to God.  The Holy Spirit was blessing me.  Wave upon wave, it seemed.  Flow upon flow.  He seemed to be bubbling up from within, surrounding from without, ascending from below and descending from above.  Somewhere in the early hours of the morning I said to myself, ‘I don’t know the correct biblical name for this, but this is the experience I’ve heard others talk of.’”

 

7.       G. Robert Jacks, Professor, Princeton Theological Seminary, personal letter, Feb. 10, 1997: “I had been corresponding for nearly two years with a young (30 y.o.) Finnish theology student wannabe.  Marko Jauhianinen by name.  He has a marvelous website of Christian materials including much on renewal and revival, which captivated me.  I emailed to thank him, and we’ve developed a very close brother/father-son relationship. He is a Vineyard person, and in the process of knowing him many of my Presbyterian blinders were blown away to an awareness of a God considerable more “God!!” than I had ever experienced.  At one point we began talking about gifts of the Spirit.  Not your usual parlor conversation for your typical Presbyterian, I know.  He said he thought he had this gift or that gift.  And I basically responded “Duh!,” not being terribly well steeped in such matters.

 

“Last April (the 18th, about 8:30 am) we were chatting on IRC (Internet relay chat). In case you don’t know about IRC, it’s like having a telephone conversation in print.  We were talking about spiritual gifts.  He said he had spoken in tongues, and I said I’d never experienced that.  Never been in the kind of setting where that was done.  He asked if I wanted to hear more about it.  Moments later he was saying, essentially, ‘Shut up, I’m going to pray for you.’ (He was not quite that crass)  What followed was my shaking, weeping, sobbing ‘Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!,’ gasping for breath, and practically falling out of my chair.  I felt this incredible sense of the presence of Christ.  And an incredible sense of love.  All while being prayed for over the Internet!  Afterwards, he said some people would call my experience ‘Baptism in the Spirit’, some would call it ‘being filled by the Spirit’, some would talk about ‘being touched by the Spirit’, etc.  I only knew everything was different from what it had been.  Everything.”

 

7. Carol Wimber [Wife of John Wimber, leader of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship]: “By 1976 I was teaching women’s Bible studies around and about Orange County…. I was still disturbed about our local congregation.  “Lord,’ I would ask in my prayers, ‘what’s wrong with the church? Why are so many people wandering away…?’  I wasn’t prepared for how God would answer my prayers.  I might have gone on in that flourish of activity if it hadn’t been for a disturbing dream that I had in September….  In the dream I was preaching….  There was a large crowd.  My topic was the gifts of the Holy Spirit. I considered myself an expert on the subject.  After all, for years I was responsible for running off members who practiced gifts like tongues, healing or prophecy – gifts I considered dangerous and divisive.  I was preaching through my well-rehearsed seven-point sermon when, at the final point a sensation like hot electricity hit my head, traveled down my body, then up and out of my mouth.  I awakened speaking in tongues.  I was so troubled by the dream and experience of speaking in tongues that, like a bag of sand with a hole in it, my confidence and self-assurance drained away.  ‘Perhaps,’ I thought, ‘I don’t know as much as I thought I did about the Christian life.’….  The pressure of these thoughts built up, culminating a few weeks later in my falling on my bed in tears. ‘O God,’ I cried out, ‘if all that stuff [meaning spiritual gifts like tongues and healing] is from you, then I have barely known you all these years.’  There was a long silence.  Then I sensed in my heart a gentle answer: ‘You’re right.’  I was so devastated that I stopped teaching, resigned from the church board, and stopped giving my opinion about anything spiritual.  I abandoned all that I had been devoted to for so long and hid out at home for three weeks, weeping and repenting of my attitude toward God and his Spirit.  Today I look back on that experience as a ‘personality meltdown,’ a breaking of my self-will that was so profound I have never been the same since.”

 

7. Don Williams: “In the mid-70’s, a graduate student at [The] Claremont [Collages] came into my life…. As our friendship developed, Steve expressed his concern for me one day: ‘Don, you need the power of the Holy Spirit in your life.’ Immediately my early warning system went on alert.  Years before, I had been pursued by some charismatics in Hollywood who took me to small gatherings where they laid hands on people and, I supposed, told them to pray “banana” backwards.  Sensing that they wanted me as a trophy for their religious enthusiasm, I wrote them off as a part of the Hollywood fringe.  Now here it was, back again. 

 

“My response to Steve was to blandly admit that all of us need more of the Holy Spirit, but he would not accept my dodge.  Periodically he brought up the subject, and I listened tolerantly….  Then one night…I allowed him to approach the subject of the power of the Spirit again and even to read a few standard passages from the Book of Acts concerning the coming of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2), the pouring out of the Spirit during the Samaritan mission (Acts 8), Cornelius’s conversion by the Spirit (Acts 10), and Paul’s imparting the Spirit to John the Baptist’s disciples in Ephesus (Acts 19).  In each case the power of the Spirit was evident, manifesting itself in gifts such as prophecy and tongues.  I listened docilely and then we said, ‘Good night.’

 

 

“The next morning I awakened and spent some private time in prayer and Bible reading.  Then it happened.  The first thing that I noticed was that my fingers and toes began to tingle. As these physical sensations increased, my pulse sped up and my breathing became shortened.  I sensed something (or better, Someone) coming over me.  I responded with both fear and excitement.  What was going on? Was it last night’s spaghetti sauce?  Or was God trying to do something more in me?  I knew as I sat before my roll-top desk that I had to make a decision.  Either I could go with what was happening to me, or I could shut it off.  I recall praying, ‘Lord, if this is you, if you want to do something more in my life, then I give you permission to do it.’ The sensations now increased and I had a great urge to go somewhere to be alone and pray.

 

“Across town was a spot in the Glendale hills near my childhood home where I had often retreated as a new Christian.  I quickly drove there and, carrying my Bible, hiked up the firebreak.  Seated now amongst sage and sticky monkey, I began to pray.  An urge engulfed me to praise God.  As I spoke out this urge, joy exploded within me.  My love for Jesus was inflamed and poured from me in tears and laughter.  The ecstasy (and that is what it was) increased until English with its grammatical structure could no longer adequately express my feelings.  As this point, it was as if God gave me a tool for praise and I began to babble my joy in syllables incoherent to me.  The language flowed and as I spoke deliriously I thought with my mind how foolish and stupid all of this was.  I was so glad to be alone.  Nevertheless, it was wonderful, liberating, releasing.  For perhaps the first time I was really worshiping the Lord with ‘Joy unspeakable’ (I Pt 1:8).

 

“In these hours which seemed like minutes, I was anointed by the Holy Spirit.  He came upon me and filled me like that fountain of living water that Jesus promised in John 7:38.” Signs, Wonders and the Kingdom of God, pp.12-14

 

 

 

A.W. Tozer, pastor, preacher and devotional writer on the reality of the Spirit

 

 

“The doctrine of the Spirit is buried dynamite.  Its power awaits discovery and use by the Church…  The Holy Spirit cares not at all whether we write Him into our credenda in the back of our hymnals; He waits for our emphasis. When He gets into the thinking of the teachers, He will get into the expectation of the hearers.  When the Holy Spirit ceases to be incidental and again becomes fundamental, the power of the Spirit will be asserted once more among people called Christians

 

“Personal experience must always be first in real life.  The most important thing is that we experience reality by the shortest and most direct method….  Knowledge by description may lead on to knowledge by acquaintance.  May lead on, I say, but does not necessarily do so.  Thus we dare not conclude that because we learn about the Spirit we for that reason actually know Him.  Knowing Him comes only by a personal encounter with the Holy Spirit Himself.

 

“How shall we think of the Spirit?….  He is a person, endowed with every quality of personality, such as emotion, intellect and will.  He knows, He wills, He loves, He feels affection, antipathy and compassion. He thinks, sees, hears and speaks and performs any act of which personality is capable. 

 

“One quality belonging to the Holy Spirit, of great interest and importance to every seeking heart, is penetrability. He can penetrate matter, such as the human body. He can penetrate mind; He can penetrate another spirit, such as the human spirit.  He can achieve complete penetration of and actual intermingling with the human spirit.  He can invade the human heart and make room for Himself without expelling anything essentially human.  The integrity of the human personality remains unimpaired.  Only moral evil is forced to withdraw.  [For example]…we place a piece of iron in a fire and blow up the coals.  At first we have two distinct substances, iron and fire. When we insert the iron in the fire we achieve the penetration of the fire by the iron. Soon the fire begins to penetrate the iron and we have not only the iron in the fire but the fire in the iron as well…  [Thus] the Spirit penetrates and fills our personalities and we are experimentally one with God.

 

“Christ taught not the coming of the Holy Spirit and power, but the coming of the Holy Spirit as power, the power and the Spirit are the same.  Our Lord, before His ascension, said to His disciples, ‘Tarry in the city of Jerusalem until you are endued with power from on high.’  That word ‘until’ is a time-word; it indicates a point in the relation to which everything is either before or after.  So the experience of those disciples could be stated like this:  Up to that point they had not received the power; at that point they did receive the power; after that point they had received the power.

 

“’You shall receive power ‘(Acts 1:8) By those words our Lord raised the expectation of His disciples and taught them to look forward to the coming of a supernatural potency into their natures from a source outside of themselves.  It was to be something previously unknown to them, but suddenly to come upon them from another world.  It was to be nothing less than God Himself entering into them….  This was and is a unique afflatus, an endowment of supernatural energy affecting every department of the believer’s life and remaining with him forever….  It is spiritual power.  It is the kind of power that God is….  At its purest it is an unmediated force directly applied by the Spirit of God to the spirit of man.

 

“I want to boldly assert that it is my happy belief that every Christian can have a copious outpouring of the Holy Spirit in a measure far beyond that received at conversion, and I might also say, far beyond that enjoyed by the rank and file of orthodox believers.” From A Treasury of A.W. Tozer (Christian Publications Inc., 1980) (Excerpted from Tozer’s The Divine Conquest)

 

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