A very rich, honest, and impressive telling of Jim’s
Christian life through 1990 continues to bless me—and hopefully others—every
time I listen to it. Just recently I
went to the his high school class website (https://prep66.weebly.com/test.html)
on my phone and listened to his words, his voice telling a story that would be
even more impressive with details from the other side--mine. I was the first to venture into the new territory
of the Holy Spirit, not because of any special holiness or desire for it; to
the contrary, I was just a young woman, afraid and open to new possibilities after
several months of an unidentified illness had kept me absent from my teaching
job for more than two months.
I had a genuine faith in God; I believed in Jesus as His
son, but I had not been introduced to a more experiential connection to this
God, His words, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit-- Until one
day, when I made a call to another English teacher, who now was home taking
care of her new baby. She encouraged me to read my Bible with the expectation of Jesus
actually touching me with words that “spoke” to my needy heart. This teacher even encouraged me to underline these
words in the scriptures that encouraged me and gave me hope in God’s promises
to answer prayer and actually provide help in our distresses.
My doctor finally determined I had been made ill by a
parasitic illness, paratyphoid, which I might have picked up from a sick cat
Jim and I had found in a parking lot and brought home, briefly. Carefully (I thought), I had cleaned up the diarrhea
from the night the cat spent with us, but apparently not carefully enough. Finally, after this diagnosis, I started feeling better by taking an antibiotic,
but I had lost almost 20 pounds and had been severely shaken. Never before had I been so sick or left a
doctor’s office so many times with an incorrect diagnosis.
Despite my deep need for a new hope and faith that I
would fully recover, I wasn’t “buying” into all I saw and heard when I attended
my first charismatic prayer meeting. It
was orderly, but I needed to do some investigating on this baptism in the Holy Spirit
and the gifts that then became available to believers by the quickening of this
Spirit. Besides studying the scriptures,
I read a book called, They Speak in Other
Tongues by John Sherill, a reporter on a skeptical exploration of these
Holy Spirit folk. However, he came to
see these believers as real followers of Jesus having real experiences in the things of the Spirit Jesus and Paul spoke of.
I prayed about all this and after a few weeks, I sought the baptism in
the Holy Spirit for myself, believing it to be the scriptural direction to
receive power, a new dimension of power, for Jesus’s followers. This indwelling Spirit would continue the ministry
Jesus talks about in Mark 16 and John 14, etc.
As Jim described in his testimony, he was very resistant to
any of this new aspect of faith I had found.
He didn’t like the praise music, some of it written by Jesuit priests. But God helped me trust Him to work in Jim’s
heart and life just as He had in mine. This,
however, did not come quickly or easily.
In fact, the only strain that ever existed between us in our marriage
was over these issues of faith. Curious,
but I was determined to share this new life in the Spirit with my husband, a
Godly man but not one looking for anything new at this point.
More stories, more works of God as we came to share a
Spirit-filled faith life will be written about in days to come. For now, let me just give God thanks and
praise for His providential ordering of our steps and faithfulness to reveal
Himself to those who truly seek Him. Let
me just pause for now and suggest several scriptures to examine in any effort
to consider what is true about the Holy Spirit and how believers can experience
this comforter, the one Jesus Himself will pour out on those who ask Him.
In
Mathew 3, John the Baptist describes Jesus as the one who will baptize with His
Spirit. John and his followers baptized for the forgiveness of sin, not Jesus.
In
Luke 24:49, Jesus instructed his followers to stay in the city until they are “clothed
with power from on high.”
Acts
1:4,5; 2:1-41 give Jesus’s final words before ascending and describe that first
Pentecost.
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