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Did You Receive When You Believed?

Being a former Pentecostal (third-generation) but now longing for my present denomination (the Anglican Church of Australia) to experience the wind of the Spirit in new ways, this post reflects on the account of John the Baptist's disciples found by St Paul in Acts 19.1-7.

These Ephesian disciples prompt St Paul to ask, "Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?" And the question for us must be, 'What was it about the behaviour or demeanour of these disciples that led St Paul to ask that question?' I say that because I cannot imagine Anglican or Reformed or Baptist believers being asked this question by one of their leaders!

Surely today we would answer: 'Why do you ask such a strange question? Of course I have received the Holy Spirit otherwise I wouldn't be a Christian believer at all.' And Paul's own writings would seem to support that position for he does say in Romans 8.9 that any who do not have the Spirit of Christ do not belong to Christ. So, being a Christian and having the Spirit are concurrent.

However, we are still left with Paul's question to these Ephesian disciples.

We can only infer from that question that when people received the Holy Spirit, things happened. Those around saw something occur (and consequences followed). As John Piper (staunch Calvinist in the tradition of Jonathan Edwards) has said, the receiving of the Holy Spirit in the Acts is "experiential".

That leaves open the problem as to why many Christian believers today do not know of any experience of the Holy Spirit's having "fallen on them" (Acts 8.16).

We will address this issue in the next post.
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