Most Christians in the West suffer from having had a Western education. I mean by that that our education system is based on Greek philosophy. It's not based on Hebrew thinking, and it's very difficult for us to realize how deeply that affects us. Now the difference between Greek thinking and Hebrew thinking is this. The Greeks could never somehow relate the physical and the spiritual. These two things were kept so far apart that you couldn't ever see them together.
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But the Hebrews said, our God who is Spirit made the material world. So the physical and the spiritual are very close together. Therefore miracles can happen every day.
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Now it's had the effect on Western Christians thinking of saying, a physical event can't have a spiritual effect. That's the basic problem people have with trying to fit water baptism into salvation. They can't see how a physical event can have a spiritual effect, because they can't see any tie -up between the two. But the Bible is full of tie -ups between the two.
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When you take bread and wine at communion, it's just bread and wine. But you could die through eating and drinking. You could certainly be physically ill through taking it, so says my Bible, and it's just bread and wine.
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God has no problem using water to cleanse your conscience because he's the God who made the water, and he's a God who's all -powerful. He can use physical things.
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How much more through water in baptism and through bread and wine in communion you can get through to God? Now then, what's the connection? Well in the last talk I was trying to show you that baptism is a physical event with a spiritual effect. That's no problem to God. It's only a problem to Western Christians with Greek minds.
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We're rediscovering that our bodies can serve God. We've rediscovered aerobic worship. Do you know what aerobic worship is? It's when the leader says, hands down those who want coffee. It's when we use our bodies to worship.
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The Bible is full of people using their bodies, lifting up their hands in prayer, clapping God. The Bible says, clap your hands all you people. People say, oh I don't want to do anything in my body in worship, I just want to worship God with my soul. But the Hebrews worship God with their bodies.
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So they laid hands on the sick, they laid hands on priests, they laid hands on. And the normal way of receiving the Holy Spirit in the New Testament was to have hands laid on. That is the origin of confirmation. But alas, it's lost that meaning.
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Water baptism deals with your past. It buries the past, it washes the past away, it finishes the past, and it leaves you clean and empty. That's a very dangerous spiritual condition. Some of the most miserable Christians you'll ever meet are clean and empty.
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It's vital that once you've got a person cleaned up, that they then get filled. That is why in the New Testament, as soon as they baptized them in water, they then laid hands on them and prayed that they might receive the Holy Spirit.
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If you're just clean and empty, that's a very dangerous position to be in. You become a negative Christian. You say, well I don't smoke and I don't drink and I don't gamble and I don't and I don't and I don't. What a way to live, not doing things. Isn't that miserable? No wonder people are miserable. They don't have the pleasures of sin, and they don't have the pleasure of salvation.
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So God in His wisdom says you need two baptisms, one to deal with the past and one to deal with the future. One to get your life emptied and clean, and the other to get it filled. Too many have been emptied but not filled, and there's nothing replaced, the pleasures of sin.
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They need to enter into the same power that raised Jesus from the dead and that comes from Pentecost. Just as Easter is repeated in the believer's life, Pentecost needs to be repeated. Yet on Whitsunday most Christians seem just to think of something that happened two thousand years ago. But everything that happened two thousand years ago is meant to happen again in my life.
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Jesus is called in the Bible our trailblazer, the one who went ahead first and showed us the way where to go. So there is a very real sense in which I follow him in the way, and the first name for Christianity was the way.
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Receiving the Holy Spirit is not the same thing as believing. Many Christians have got those two confused, and perhaps the commonest confusion is that the moment you believe in Jesus, that moment you receive the Spirit, whether anything happens or not. That is not borne out in the Scripture.
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If nothing happened, the apostles said they haven't received, and they did something about it. Because there isn't a single case in the New Testament of anyone receiving the Spirit and not knowing it. And there is not a case of anyone receiving the Spirit without everyone present on the occasion knowing it. It was a definite experience.
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From the day of Pentecost onwards in all their preaching, they told people to receive the gift of the Spirit, the person whom Jesus has sent to take his place on earth. Jesus is not on earth in the flesh now. He's seated at the right hand of the Father in the heavens. He has taken his authority. Another person has replaced him on earth. He has sent another comforter, another strengthener like himself, and he, the Holy Spirit, is the person now to receive.
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That's the acid test of whether you are accepted by God, not whether you've repented, not whether you've believed, not whether you've been baptized, but whether you have received the Holy Spirit. Hereby know we that we belong to God and are his children because he has given us of his Spirit. That's the very basis of assurance in the New Testament.
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You cannot know if a person has been justified or received by God or accepted by him until he gives his Spirit. That is the seal of God on the whole transaction.
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When you receive the Spirit, that's the first down payment that God is going to give you. It's your first little bit of heaven.
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When you receive the Holy Spirit you've got one foot in heaven. You'll be doing a lot of singing in heaven, and sure enough when you're filled with the Spirit you find yourself making melody in your heart. In heaven there'll be a lot of love and fellowship, and sure enough when you get filled with the Spirit there's a lot of love and fellowship. It turns a church into a little foretaste of heaven.
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Renewal is God restoring you to your original condition. Just think of that. Here's a shock to you. You won't believe this, but one day you'll see me perfect. Now those who know me well here are looking down at their boots now and they pull the other one. I can see it on their faces. But God hasn't finished with me yet.
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All these words. Now listen, that could hardly happen to anyone without them knowing it, could it? Can you imagine somebody getting a downpour, being plunged into something, having it fall upon them, and not knowing anything had happened? It's almost inconceivable.
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How do you know when a jug is full, when it overflows. You only know when a person is full, when they overflow. Whatever you're full of, said Jesus, will come out of your mouth. Because the heart, when it's full of something, that's where it comes out.
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When you cry out, Abba, the Spirit is bearing witness with your spirit that you are the child of God. It's a crying out. It's not something inward, it's outward. It's something overflowing from the mouth. It's something coming out.
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Spontaneous spiritual speech is known in the Scripture as prophesying. Whether it takes the form of a new language or your own language, that spontaneous spiritual speech that overflows from your mouth is the proof in the New Testament that the gift of the Spirit is now yours.
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