In John 16:7, Jesus said that it was expedient for us that He should go away because, unless He left, the Holy Spirit could not come. What is this advantage that Jesus spoke of concerning having the Holy Spirit in our lives?
The book of Romans is actually the closest thing to a systematic theology that we have in the New Testament. Because Paul wrote it to a church that he had never visited and to a congregation of folks whom he did not know, he was not able to address very specific issues. Instead, he gave them a thorough explanation of the gospel in general. The progression of the book is that chapters one through five set the theological stage for salvation, chapter six gives the salvation experience, chapter seven describes post-salvation existence lived in human power, chapter eight gives his victorious answer through the Spirit, and chapters nine through sixteen give practical application of Christian life. Paul’s emphasis in chapter seven is on the word “I” – his personal effort to achieve godly goals. The conclusion is that it is impossible to do so. He ends chapter seven in defeat, but moves into chapter eight with great victory. The key to this dramatic shift is that in chapter eight he moved into the realm of walking in the Spirit. Paul speaks of the Spirit only four times in the first seven chapters of Romans, but twenty times in chapter eight alone. Since the original Greek texts contain no capital letters, the translators have made their own evaluations as to when to use “Spirit” (as Holy Spirit) and when to write “spirit” (as in human spirit); therefore, it is sometimes difficult to clearly distinguish whether Paul actually meant the Holy Spirit or the human spirit in some of the verses. However, I like to think of how a tuning fork will automatically begin to vibrate in resonance when another tuning fork of the same pitch is sounded. If our human spirit is on the same “wavelength” with the Holy Spirit, they will both be “singing the same song” so it doesn’t really matter if the text is actually talking about the divine or the human spirit – they are both functioning alike.
If we determine to walk according to our spirit man which is enlightened by the Holy Spirit as opposed to our soulical man (the “I” in chapter seven) which is controlled by the physical world around us and our own mental evaluation of things, we will move into the same victory which Paul described in chapter eight verse six. Being directed by the Holy Spirit through our human spirit will bring us to a place of victory over the sinful nature that is inherent in our mortal existence. (Romans 8:1, Galatians 5:16) However, we must remember that it is our choice to live this way. Living and walking in the Spirit is a lifestyle, not just an experience. We do not automatically fall into all these blessings simply because we accept Jesus into our lives. We must make a determinate decision to follow the guidance of the Spirit. (Proverbs 3:5-7, Galatians 5:16- 25, Romans 8:14)
We have a job to do, but we can’t do it without the Holy Spirit. Although education, organization, and human talents are all beneficial, they cannot do the job. Like a carpenter without a hammer or a plumber without a wrench, we Christians will never complete the Great Commission which Jesus left with us if we do not have the Holy Spirit with us. (Matthew 28:19, Mark 16:15, Luke 24:47-48, Acts 1:8) In the same way we use an extension cord to operate a power tool some distance from the wall outlet, we must learn to rely upon the Holy Spirit to extend the power of God from heaven into our present situation.
I remember a little gray-haired man I once met in Madras, India. He had come there for an evangelism conference where he first learned about the baptism in the Holy Spirit. This little man had spent many years trying to witness in his little Hindu village, but had not yet won his first convert. After having moved into a new dimension of spiritual authority when he was filled with the Spirit at the conference, he returned to his home with a renewed confidence and faith. Upon his arrival, he met an old woman who had been gored by a water buffalo. Even though she was twisted and crippled from the attack, the evangelist asked if he could pray for her in the name of Jesus. She agreed, and he laid his hands on her and spoke with a boldness unlike anything he had ever experienced before – and he experienced results which he had never experienced before: her twisted body instantly straightened up! That day, he learned why Jesus had said that believers should treat the power of the Holy Spirit like the old American Express credit card commercial admonishes us, “Don’t leave home without it!” (Luke 24:49)
I have found that living in the dimension of the Holy Spirit is an absolute “must” for a victorious Christian life. Time after time, it has been the Holy Ghost factor that has given me the winning edge. Once I was invited by a well- known evangelist to serve as his youth director. For a kid just out of college, this was a real honor and an open door for a great ministry. But something inside – the Holy Spirit – said, “Wait two weeks ” So I asked for two weeks to pray before I made the decision. During those two weeks, the man was caught in adultery with a lady in Canada. Like dominos, other cases of adultery began to pop up all across the country. How wonderful it was that I was able to save my reputation by not becoming part of such an organization!
In other cases, the Holy Spirit has spoken through other individuals via the gifts of the word of knowledge or the word of wisdom to help me know how to direct my life. While working one summer in Yosemite National Park, I was approached for a full-time position. It was an absolute dream come true – living and ministering full-time in one of nature’s wonderlands. It was toward the end of the summer, and I had to make a decision quickly as to whether I should accept the offer or return for my last semester of seminary. It was then that I met a minister who was vacationing in the park. Because of his unusual ministry of looking at individuals and giving them Bible verses that are God’s directions or encouragements for them at the moment, some of the local believers coerced him to minister to them in a home fellowship. As we entered the park ranger’s living room, I wound up seated next to the minister. He turned to me and said, “Young man, you have a decision to make within the next ten days. Don’t you?” I replied in the affirmative and he responded that God would speak to me through Isaiah 30:20. Then he went on with the meeting. Flipping my Bible open, I found the indicated verse and read, Thine eyes shall see thy teachers. Instantly I knew that I was not able to complete my studies by correspondence as I had considered because I had to be in class to see the teachers.
On another occasion, I was visiting a church in Wrightsville Beach, NC. As I walked in the door, I was welcomed by one of the ushers who grabbed me in a “Pentecostal bear hug” of a greeting. Since he was a very tall and rotund man, when he pulled me to himself, he actually picked me up off the floor. There I hang – suspended between heaven and earth – when suddenly the anointing of the Holy Spirit fell upon this man. He began to dance and spin in the Holy Spirit. As I was being whirled about in midair by this total stranger, he began to tell me my life story. He proclaimed that I was to go around the world to teach the gospel. My ears really perked up at that because I had never been out of the country except short excursions into Canada and Mexico! Since that time, I have literally traveled the globe to hold national teaching sessions to help establish the local believers in their Christian faith.
Probably the most dramatic experience of the supernatural guidance through the Holy Spirit came on another of North Carolina’s Atlantic coast beaches. I had organized a retreat for Christian student groups from several North Carolina campuses. The retreat weekend was planned as a teaching conference, yet a number of the participants wanted to use the time to do beach evangelism. Tension began to rise as the students began to split into two camps – those who wanted to evangelize and those who wanted to be taught. Sensing the turmoil in the air, I picked the top leaders of each group – three from each side. Leading them to an attic room in the ocean-side house we had rented for the weekend, I said, “We’re going to the Upper Room until the Holy Ghost falls like He did on Pentecost.” After a short season of prayer, one young man began to prophesy. After a few sentences, he abruptly stopped in mid-sentence. Across the room another young man picked up the message, finished the sentence, and added several more lines. But he, too, stopped in mid-sentence. Again, the message was picked up without missing a word and completed by another of the participants in our prayer group. He also stopped in mid-sentence. Again and again this happened until everyone in the room had taken part in the prophetic word. One prophecy, spoken by seven of us – bouncing back and forth between leaders of two opposing sides of the argument – confirmed that the original plan for a training conference was God’s plan for our weekend. The group was brought into harmony and given excellent direction through the Holy Spirit’s gifts. To confirm the word, a rainstorm blew in that evening and drenched the coastline for our entire stay. No beach ministry could have occurred after all!
We may often think that the gifts of the Spirit are for supernatural use in church services and are possibly restricted to the clergy only. However, God is interested in every area of our lives and is eager to be involved in any and every aspect. I believe that He wants us to learn to use the gifts of the Spirit in our daily lives as well as in our ministries. The passage in which the Apostle Paul instructs the Ephesian church about being filled with the Spirit leads directly into the section of his letter in which he teaches on the family. (Ephesians 5:9-10)
The Lord has used the word of knowledge many times to guide or protect me in my personal life.
One such experience was after I had taken my wife on her first missionary trip. It had been a real struggle for her. Instead of being with our little two-year old toddler on Mother’s Day, I was dragging her through the orphan-laden streets of Calcutta, India. The next week was her birthday, but on that day she was not to have a cake with candles and a nice party. Instead, she would be stuck in the sand on a jungle road surrounded by wild boars and other Sri Lankan beasts. It seemed only fair that I reward her with at least one nicety from her first missionary trip. When I learned that one of my friends in Sri Lanka had become involved in the trade of gemstones that are so splendid in that country, I decided to arrange for her to have a nice sapphire necklace and ring as appreciation gifts for her endurance on the trip. They were beautiful, and she was more than pleased – until they turned up missing when we arrived home! I took the suitcase apart; I unfolded every item of clothing we had packed; I looked under every piece of furniture we had touched since returning home; I went through the trash can and kitchen garbage piece by piece; I even looked through the baby’s diaper pail, opening each disposable one by one! But still no necklace and ring! Where in the world could they be? For sure, I had “left no stone unturned.” Finally, the jet lag began to take its toll, and I stretched out on the sofa and succumbed to its forces. I had actually slept for only about five minutes when my mind was overtaken by a dream. In it I saw the exact location of the missing jewelry. I leapt from the couch and began to look for my wife. Alas, she had left for the store; so, I began my nervous wait. Finally, she returned, and I met her at the door. She had barely made it across the threshold when I grabbed her purse and began to empty it. Almost too shocked to ask what was going on, she stood dumbfounded as I began to pull the lining out of the handbag. In the dream, I had seen the items inside the lining of the purse – and as I pursued my quest, I found them in the exact spot as in the dream! Apparently she had dropped them in the side pocket of her purse for safekeeping during the airplane trip. A tiny hole had allowed them to fall into the inner folds of the purse. No one had seen it – except God, and He willingly shared His secret with His beloved children through the gift of a word of knowledge.
On another occasion, the angel of death was cheated of the prize of taking my life in an automobile accident because my mother was directed by a supernatural word of knowledge. She rescued me from the snare of the trap just as the spring was tripped and the jaws were ready to devour me. The miracle of it is that she was hundreds of miles away. Driving from Washington, DC, to Delaware during rush hour one Friday afternoon, I found myself in bumper-to-bumper traffic racing along at nearly sixty miles per hour. As the flow of traffic moved from the open terrain to the vicinity of Baltimore, we suddenly encountered the congestion of major city traffic trying to merge into the freeway as they too joined the urban exodus for the summer weekend. Suddenly, the snarl of traffic brought us to a total standstill. Within seconds, our break-neck pace was brought to an idle. That is, except for the car behind me, whose driver seemed to be oblivious to the traffic jam. Still charging forward at an excessive speed, the car plowed into my little burgundy Mustang. My car was slammed into the car ahead of me that was, in turn, smashed into the one in front of it. Sustaining the full impact of this four-car collision, my sporty little car was instantly transformed into a giant metal accordion. It became a truly “compact car.” I had to climb out the window to escape my prison of twisted metal and shattered glass. But through it all, I came out with only one minor injury – a cut under my chin that required five small stitches. But how was it that my mother figures into this rescue? In South Carolina, she suddenly was impressed to pray for me at the exact time of the accident!
I could go on and on, reciting stories such as the one of how the Lord woke me up early one morning and told me that that day was the day that a close family member was to come to Him. I convinced my wife to make a visit that day; and she did, indeed, lead her to the Lord – just days before she was admitted to the hospital with the disease which eventually took her life! Or the one about how I returned the favor on my mother’s supernatural intercession for my life by praying for my son at the exact moment he was in what could have been a fatal automobile accident – I was not in church or even being “spiritual,” rather I was half a world away, snorkeling in a lagoon on an island in the South Pacific.
The word of wisdom is similar to the word of knowledge, but it involves supernatural foreknowledge concerning the future. My favorite story about this gift happened in the life of one of my students who also raised cattle on his farm in Colorado. One year, an extended drought had plagued the state to the extent that no cattle ranchers were buying cows to raise, knowing that the added expense of feeding and watering them rather than allowing them to graze on the open range would eat up any profit they might hope to make and actually take them into the “red” for the year. When my student was praying about how to best position himself in the questionable cattle market, the Lord brought a Bible verse concerning rain to his mind. The verse even mentioned a certain month in which rains would come. Accepting that insight as a direction from God, he stocked his farm with cattle and expected the drought to break in time for them to have sufficient food and water to fatten up in time for market. At exactly the time mentioned in the verse he had trusted in, the rains came! Because so many other farmers had limited their stock that year, he got top dollar for his cattle and made a great profit while most of his neighbors barely broke even!
Discerning of spirits is another area in which the Lord may speak to us in our everyday lives. I was cleaning a large attic room of a house that we had just purchased. The building was empty, and I was all alone as I swept away years of dust. Suddenly, I felt an evil presence as I worked my way across the middle of the hardwood floor. Clutching the broom a little tighter, I looked around to locate the source of this unwelcome invader. My attention was drawn upward to the light fixture directly above my head. I noticed immediately that there was a sort of secret cubbyhole above the light where a horizontal platform for mounting the fixture had been suspended from the slanted ceiling. After locating a chair, I climbed up to investigate that mysterious secret compartment. Inside, I found the most horrible cache of pornographic literature imaginable. After removing the literature, the demonic presence left the room. I can only imagine how tormented a family could have been had someone without a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit purchased that house and moved their children into that attic bedroom. Thank God that He gives the gifts of the Holy Spirit to us to use in our daily lives as well as in our church ministry.
When it comes to the gifts of power, it is difficult to carefully discern the dividing line between the various manifestations. In the gift of faith God works on our behalf as a result of a supernatural ability to trust Him which He has placed inside of us. The working of miracles is when God supernaturally works through us to bring exponentially greater results when we exert our own human effort. Many times it is difficult to determine unquestionably when our actions are the “step of faith” it takes to prove that we really believe in God’s promises and when those actions are the exertion of our human abilities which “prime the pump” for God’s miraculous intervention. When healings come, it is difficult to unequivocally distinguish if they are the result of faith, miracles, or the gifts of healing. The only thing that really matters is that we are convinced that God does want to work supernaturally in our personal lives. Let me share a few examples of how God’s supernatural intervention has come into our family’s finances when we dared to believe God’s promises and take action to demonstrate our trust in Him.
As newlyweds, my wife and I often struggled through on a shoe-string budget. At one point, we were down to only five dollars in our checking account and no cash in our wallets. We sat in our living room one evening calculating how we would make it through to the next payday. It was the time of the month for the newspaper boy to come and collect his five-dollar charge, and we knew that he would probably be arriving soon to ask for that last bit out of our checking account. When the doorbell rang, my wife whispered, “Don’t answer it; it’s probably the paperboy.” I responded, “No, if we owe him, and we have it, I’m going to pay him.” To our surprise and relief, it was not the paperboy coming to drain our account; instead, it was a neighbor with tears in his eyes proclaiming, “Here! God spoke to me to bring you this!” As he handed us a thirty-dollar check, we all rejoiced because no one had any way of knowing about our personal need except that it had been revealed supernaturally. The other amazing part of the story is that he had originally argued with the Lord about bringing us the money – assuming that we had no financial lack. Finally, he had conceded to make the visit with one condition – that if no one answered the door, he would know that it was not the Holy Spirit directing him to give us the blessing. Once we graduated from the “shoe-string” budget to what you might consider a “boot-lace” budget, the only thing that changed was the size of the miracles God continued to do in our lives.
Concerning the inspirational gifts of prophecy, speaking in tongues, and interpretation of tongues, it is always necessary to have godly words that fulfill the threefold functions of edification, exhortation, and comfort. (I Corinthians 14:3) I remember a conversation I had with Peggy before we were married. I had made a commitment of my love for her and devotion to her, but she had difficulty accepting it because previous boyfriends had made similar statements without heartfelt sincerity. Her response was, “Words are cheap,” to which I immediately replied, “Not my words.” It was a simple reply, but I believe that it was quickened by the Holy Spirit because it brought comfort to her, it strengthened or edified our relationship, and it encouraged or exhorted us to make the next step in our relationship – officially announcing our engagement.
It had been a long, exhausting night of counseling with a young couple who were bitterly enraged at each other. To hear her talk, it seemed that he was the worst husband to have ever walked the planet. Of course, hearing his side of the story would make you think that she was some sort of a she-devil and the very source of all their problems if not the root of evil altogether! What made it worse was that they were missionaries – God’s very mouthpieces in a pagan land! After several hours of listening to their enflamed accusations toward each other as all our futile attempts to counsel them fell on deaf ears, I suddenly turned to the husband and asked, “How much have you been praying in tongues lately?” He confessed that he had neglected his supernatural prayer language altogether for several months. I then turned to the wife and asked the same question. She also confessed to allowing the gift to lie dormant. We then laid hands on the couple and began to pray over them until they each broke forth in fluent heavenly languages. Before long, they were hugging and kissing as rivers of repentant tears poured from their eyes and rivers of Holy Ghost living water poured out of their innermost beings! Their lives, marriage, and ministry were renewed that night simply because they began to use the supernatural key to victory – their prayer languages.
At our house, we make a purposeful determination to pray in tongues on a daily basis because we believe the biblical promises that praying in the Spirit is the key to seeing that all things work together for our good (Romans 8:26-28) and that speaking in tongues strengthens us personally (I Corinthians 14:4) while building us up on our faith (Jude 20).
