My first experience of the Holy Spirit was not long after I was baptised in my teens. My believer church friend and I were playing chess. I never experienced the Holy Spirit before. We were playing chess and discussing Einstein and Creation and the speed of light, like most wannabe intellectual teens about to start more heavy duty academic courses. (My friend later married a daughter of a world-top scientist and became a respected radiographer. I didn’t do anything like that but, well, I hoped.) We did that chess thing where to decide who plays white and gets to go first, one of you juggles a black and a white pawn behind your back then holds them out in closed fists, one pawn in each hand. The other then chooses a hand and you play the colour you chose. My friend did the hand juggling while I got to choose a fist held out. Our minds were full of quantum theory and Einstein. Suddenly a kind of voice said inside my head “Choose the fist that looks the whitest”. One hand looked a bit whiter than the other in my perception. So I chose it. The pawn was the white pawn. For some reason we did it again but I said nothing about the voice. Another hand looked whitest. I chose white again. We did it thirty two times. Each time I chose white. We got scared and stopped. It is a lesson to me in how God can bypass the uncertainties of quantum physics and create the outcome He wants, whatever it is He wants it to be. The Holy Spirit searches the deep things of God the Father and makes them known to us.
Years later I was at university in London and my friend was at a different university in London. We went to the same church but it was so big we only realised that when we met up a year or so ago. When at that church a great preacher was leading it. Dr R T Kendall. He would preach an hour or more and it was never enough for me. I shut my eyes and soaked it in. Pure scripture exposition, a verse or less at a time, going through a single book over many, many weeks. Three services each Sunday. One Sunday I burnt my finger so badly on the toaster at breakfast that I got a blister over a centimetre (third of an inch) wide. It was agony. I went to church and he preached on the verse “If you have faith and do not doubt you can say to this mountain move and it will move”. I could not concentrate even with my eyes shut. The pain was excruciating. Then suddenly as he read the verse an inner certainty arose inside me that this blister was a mountain God wanted moved so I could listen. In my mind I shouted at that pain “Go!” Immediately it disappeared and I struggled against doubts trying to rise up in my mind (memories of how folk would say it is all in my head and the pain will come back) and I was able to resist because of the certainty that had welled up inside me. Half an hour he preached and my eyes were shut and no pain came back. When he finished I opened my eyes, and yes the blister had disappeared and never came back. I went to meet RT afterwards and told him about it. He said “that is what we can expect when we faithfully preach the word”. Years later I wrote and reminded him. He still had that belief.
Just a few years ago I was debating with online social media associates and sometimes I would go and lie on my bed, letting it sink in what we debated and meditating a bit to get consolation and reflect. One time as I did so I reflected on things that went badly for aggressive unbelieving attackers or even for respected friends at work or in my general life who actually started to become a serious, even life endangering threat to me. They would end up suddenly in a bad way and be removed from harms way. A couple even died. It suddenly struck me how it had been happening in the background. In my childhood I got persecuted at school for believing in Jesus but I had had dreams in which Jesus stood there and fended the attackers off and these so greatly encouraged me. Now looking back it seemed an angel had been physically fending off attacks and keeping me safe. It suddenly dawned on me it might be an angel doing it. Then the verse popped into my head “the Angel of the Lord encamps around them that fear Him”. I could not remember where it was, a psalm I thought. Suddenly a voice spoke inside my head as clear as a bell “DANIEL 3”. I knew it was the Holy Spirit (or an angel, I later thought). I just got up and looked up Daniel 3 in a Bible I never used but which I had in the next room. Nothing about an angel or the like but I kept reading, then at the very end of the chapter it had “Angel” capitalised and a margin reference. I looked up the reference and it was that very verse “the Angel of the Lord encamps around them that fear Him”. The chapter in Daniel was about lives of believers being spared from certain death by what looked like an Angel of the Lord and even their persecutor had to admit this proved God is real.
In my childhood I must have read about God appearing in a dream to Solomon because over and over I prayed Him to appear to me like that. I so wanted to see Jesus too but I read He told Thomas “blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” so I didn’t want to forfeit such a blessing. I heard from Pentecostal grandparents about the gifts of the Holy Spirit and they took my sister to church and she came back telling me about speaking in tongues. Never did anything like that happen in churches I attended. I was distraught that I was ever missing out. I prayed more so in my late teens at university and a believer got visions and I never did, and another told me I was missing out. I then did get a vision in our university Christian student meetings of glory of God and this believer saw my face all lit up and was delighted for me. But it did not assure me I had received the Holy Spirit. I had nobody to assure me. In my twenties and early thirties it got too much so I started earnestly praying for all this and especially to be certain I had received the Holy Spirit. One day I really prayed so earnestly and suddenly a vision happened like seeing a TV program in front of my eyes of a bucket of builder’s sand tipped out before me and words like subtitles across that ‘screen’: BUILD THE TEMPLE. I love it. Never had it happened to me before. But still I wasn’t sure. So I beseeched God, if it is the Holy Spirit doing this please confirm it threefold. I was taken by a friend to a Saturday church miles away and in it anybody was allowed to stand and speak if God gave them something. Three girls from ‘Sunday School’ stood at the front and sang the song they had written: it went “Build build build the temple. Build build build the temple“! A man stood and played a redemption hymnal hymn on a guitar and sang it then spoke about David being told by God that his Son Solomon could build the Temple and the man spoke about a David being awestruck at the privilege. Then an elderly man spoke about building the temple too. I had my threefold confirmation.
After that command BUILD THE TEMPLE I tried to do the only method of building the temple of believers I knew about: preaching. I became a lay preacher with the Methodists and also tried to find churches where anyone was allowed to preach and I really wanted to prophesy but did not know what that entailed. I got conviction that I did not know enough to preach well. I remembered a verse where Paul criticised wannabe teachers of the law, saying they did not know what they were talking about. I told God it was me too who did not know really anything much about God nor even have full assurance He existed, since most days since childhood I woke up in the morning and before getting up I had to persuade myself God exists. It was not good enough for a preacher. If God wanted me preaching I beseeched Him to give me knowledge of Himself, Father and Son and Holy Spirit (that was my Trinitarian church thinking). Knowing how Jesus said such privilege of seeing God and Himself and having the Holy Spirit first and was only really promised for those who obeyed Jesus, I went on a personal audit to check that every command of Jesus I could understand well enough, I was indeed obeying. Then I asked God to show me Father and Son and Holy Spirit. One night a little later in a dream the Father did come and stand in my dream in front of me. He was like an imposing male elderly great figure standing very upright dressed in a long gown and He said sternly “I am God” and the vision showed me the thing God wanted me to do the next day at work and what the cue would be. It happened as was told me and resulted in someone’s day being saved (a gifted poet getting married that coming week). Months later in a ferocious storm that is in Wikipedia, there was a voice again but this time different like a voice nobody could refuse. “PUT DOWN YOUR UMBRELLA” and as I put it down the torrential rain stopped dead so not a drop hit me. “It is the Lord!” I exclaimed to myself. As usual I went home and that night asked for proof. A dressing gown I never used at all was on a nail in the wall. By morning let it come off that nail if indeed it was Jesus who had spoken to me and stopped the storm. In the middle of the night I suddenly felt someone reaching so deep into my mind it was to a part of my consciousness I never knew existed, turning a key of my will like total master and compelling me to wake up. I jumped out of bed and in the dark reached for the dressing gown and as I took it down I remembered the sign request and was stunned that Jesus had done that. Months later again I was taken by my lay preaching supervisor to a different church where he assured me I would witness real speaking in tongues. A weight kept me inwardly in a kind of straight jacket. A hand was upon me of the Holy Spirit. In the service a man spoke a message in tongues at a microphone and the interpretation was given me as I heard each sentence. “Consider the trees, they bring forth buds and leaves. They do so by the power of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” It said more too, about planets I think. The speaker himself then said those very words. Months later I got my first (only so far) prophetic word. Israel has sinned, the eagle over the house of Israel is the sign. And the church I said it to, they had one of the first police helicopters fly over them and their locals were in the news about it. Mass surveillance started from that time onwards to this day.
It is not always pleasant what the Holy Spirit can do. I stayed with a friend and went with him to a church in another town where mostly the pastor had worked among the mentally disabled and there were maybe fifty who attended and they were all full of the Holy Spirit somehow unhindered by their disabilities. The meeting started with singing and there was no gradual warming up of the energy of the spirit of the singing. Then went instantly into joyous powerful praise to God and never got tired or deflated. Red hot Spirit-filled praise to God in their joy in Jesus. I was suddenly overcome with utter conviction. I felt nothing but conviction of my own sinfulness. There was no consolation except I could only try to utter with my proud-hearted mouth “Lord Jesus!”. That is the Holy Spirit too.
