ChosenRebel's Blog

I have been powerfully exercised this evening by the preaching of Martyn Lloyd-Jones mediated to me through the short bio on Lloyd-Jones life by John Piper. I think I will be meditating (and praying on) these quotations for months.

Those people who say that [baptism with the Holy Spirit] happens to everybody at regeneration seem to me not only to be denying the New Testament but to be definitely quenching the Spirit.²⁰

Baptism of the Holy Spirit Gives Exceptional Assurance and Joy

He believes that this view discourages us from seeking what the church so desperately needs today. “The greatest need at the present time,” he says, “is for Christian people who are assured of their salvation”—which is given in a special way through the baptism of the Holy Spirit.²¹ He distinguishes between the “customary assurance” of the child of God, and what he calls “unusual assurance”²² or “full assurance”²³ that comes with the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

“When Christians are baptized by the Holy Spirit, they have a sense of the power and presence of God that they have never known before—and this is the greatest possible form of assurance.²⁴

The baptism of the Spirit is a new, fresh manifestation of God to the soul. “You have an overwhelming knowledge given to you of God’s love to you in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. . . . This is the greatest and most essential characteristic of the baptism with the Spirit.”²⁵ It is experiential. It is undeniable. There is an immediacy that goes beyond ordinary experience. It fills with overwhelming joy.²⁶ It turns advocates of Christ into witnesses of what they have seen and heard.²⁷

He illustrates the difference between steady-state, customary Christian experience and the experience of baptism with the Spirit by telling a story from Thomas Goodwin.

A man and his little child [are] walking down the road and they are walking hand in hand, and the child knows that he is the child of his father, and he knows that his father loves him, and he rejoices in that, and he is happy in it. There is no uncertainty about it all, but suddenly the father, moved by some impulse, takes hold of the child and picks him up, fondles him in his arms, kisses him, embraces him, showers his love upon him, and then he puts him down again and they go on walking together.

That is it! The child knew before that his father loved him, and he knew that he was his child. But oh! the loving embrace, this extra outpouring of love, this unusual manifestation of it—that is the kind of thing. The Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.”²⁸

Footnotes:

²¹ Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Joy Unspeakable: Power & Renewal in the Holy Spirit (Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1984), 39.

²² Ibid., 38.

²³ Ibid., 41.

²³ Ibid.,, 41.

²⁴ Ibid., 97.

²⁵ Ibid., 89–90.

²⁶ “I am certain that the world outside is not going to pay much attention to all the organized efforts of the Christian church. The one thing she will pay attention to is a body of people filled with the spirit of rejoicing. That is how Christianity conquered the ancient world.” Ibid., 102.

²⁷ Ibid., 90.

²⁸ Ibid., 95–96

“Oh God, please, send us revival. Our nation is doomed without it.”