Duncan Christian Reformed Church
The Baptism of the Holy Spirit
Jesus promises to baptize us with the Holy Spirit (Acts 1:4-5). The book of Acts is basically a description of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, what it looks like. One of the words used to describe this action of the Spirit is the word “pour.” So Peter makes this observation: “Exalted to the right hand of God, he (Jesus) has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear” (Acts 2:33). The words “poured out” tell us what is meant by Holy Spirit baptism. The fact that Peter says that people could “see and hear” this action tells us that this is something that we can expect to experience.
Much can be said about this, but in this piece I want to simply write to you about the love of God in Christ Jesus. How do we know that God loves us? How will we be able to tell? Martyn Lloyd-Jones points to three ways we can know this.
- 1.We can know God loves us because he tells us so in his word. We can read Romans 5:5, for example, and reflect on it. “We arrive at the assurance by a process of reading, understanding, self-examination or self-analysis.” The children's song sings it simply: “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
- 1.We can know God loves us by testing out our lives to see if they recommend themselves as having this deep heart-knowledge of the love of God. “We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, 'I love God,' yet hates his brother or sister, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother or sister, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:19-20). If we are unable to love others unless we are first loved by God, the test is simple: do we, with the love God pours into our hearts, love those around us who are sometimes decidely unloveable? If we can't generally affirm this, we have to wonder if we really know the love of God ourselves.
- 1.We can know God loves us because God himself, through his Spirit, gives testimony of it in our spirits. Edward Elton describes this witness of the Spirit. It is an “inward secret and unspeakable inspiritation of the Spirit; the Holy Spirit of God inwardly, secretly, and in an unspeakable manner informing our hearts and inwardly persuading us that God is our Father, and pouring into our hearts a secret, wonderful and unspeakable sweet sense and feeling of God's love to us” (quoted in Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable).
Jesus tells us how to receive this knowledge from God. He says the most important thing we can ask for from God is the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:13). Have we asked?
Pastor Walt Vanderwerf