My First Experience with the Holy Spirit
Before I was baptised in the Holy Spirit I had questions that only He could answer.
Maybe you have been asking the same questions.
- Every Sunday I would promise to do better, but why was it that every Monday morning I was the same old me?
I had no power to make it happen.
- Others hear from God, why doesn’t he speak to me?
I never heard anything.
- The bible’s first commandment is to love God with all your heart, mind and strength.
I couldn’t do that. How was I supposed to love a God I couldn’t see, and didn’t know?
When I was younger, I knew Jesus was the Son of God and I prayed to him.
But He didn’t communicate anything to me.
All my prayer was one sided and I just hoped He heard me.
I didn’t know the Holy Spirit was present with me just waiting to take my
hand and walk through this life with me.
But God knew my heart…………………
Then a woman I knew gave me a book “Nine O’clock in the morning”.
It was written in the 60’s, by an English Anglican Vicar, Dennis Bennett,
who church-swapped to USA and his entire new congregation were
Holy Spirit filled Christians but he wasn’t.
It is his journey in finding the Holy Spirit for himself.
I was hooked on the book couldn’t put it down.
The people in this book actually knew God.
They talked to Him and He talked to them.
Their prayers were answered when they prayed.
People were healed when they prayed.
They were full of joy and the power of God.
These people had power and that’s what I wanted to live the life of a Christian.
I realised, the Holy Spirit was the answer to my prayers.
So I went to her fellowship’s Sunday service.
There I invited Jesus into my heart and gave Him my life.
They told me about the Holy Spirit, the 3rd person of the Trinity
and taught me what scripture said about Him.
They laid hands on me, just like in the book of Acts, and prayed for me to
receive the Holy Spirit and I was filled to
overflowing with His power, the actual presence of God in me.
Isn’t that amazing that God wants to live in your heart?
Do you know what the first thing the Holy Spirit conveyed to me was?
GOD IS LOVE.
How many times had I said that, and sung that in Sunday School but
didn’t really have any understanding of what it meant?
Yet now I had a revelation of what God was like.
He is made of love.
He began to communicate with me, through His word and through my
prayer times with Him.
I had a hot-line to God.
I was communicating spirit to spirit.
There was no question now whether He heard me
He also communicates with me through preaching,
and conversations with other Christian believers,
and through circumstances
because I can hear in the Spirit now and not just with flesh ears.
I was able to read the bible too, for the first time, and understand what it
meant, in the King James Version too!!!
I know that wasn’t me because I had tried to read it before and couldn’t.
He began to work in my heart with a divine exchange.
I would repent and give Him the bad things like fear, guilt, anger, and brokenness.
He took them away and replaced them with faith, acceptance, peace and wholeness.
I began to understand that I was of such worth and value that He paid the
ultimate price for me, that horrible death on the cross.
I understood how much He loved me.
And I understood why He had to die on the cross.
The Gospel became very clear in my mind.
One of the Holy Spirit’s jobs is to give you assurance of your salvation and convince you of the love of Jesus.
When I woke in the mornings my first thought was Jesus.
I began to get to know Him and I began to love Him because I knew in
the depths of me that He loved me with an everlasting love that cannot be taken away from me.
His love is complete, constant, unconditional and everlasting.
The Holy Spirit leads me, strengthens me, encourages me and gives me courage,
He gives me hope, and love and He gives me faith to believe for the
impossible.
He is our source of true spiritual understanding.
He builds us up to live the Christian life.
Being baptised in the Holy Spirit is receiving what Jesus received enabling
us to do what Jesus did.