I believe there really is a Holy Spirit.
My earliest experiences of the Holy Spirit were probably when, in my early twenties, I was about to go to a difficult part of the world as part of a gospel mission team. I was nervous on hearing of the likelihood of quite serious food poisoning and some nasty wildlife and malaria. My grandparents had spent much of their life visiting jungle areas as Pentecostal missionaries and had tremendous faith, so I went to see them, telling how I felt. They laid hands on me and prayed in spirit, as was their gift to do. I went home feeling I was walking on air and invulnerable. For the month I was on the mission trip I was in the spirit the whole time did miracles and gave prophecies and experienced the Holy Spirit in other real ways. Around twenty five others on the trip witnessed this.
In my mid twenties I was sent by a friend of my grandparents on an inner city evangelism weekend. I was feeling quite low about myself. I was realising how I just could not be honest in my words. I habitually lied to try to make people think highly of me. I actually felt myself to be accursed and it was as if the Holy Spirit was convicting me of this. I did not feel the right person to be doing any evangelism, but I went along. We all stayed together nearby, a large group learning to do inner city evangelism. Some of us were accompanying a street evangelist to help with engaging the audience in the city centre. The street evangelist painted words on a whiteboard: CHRIST DIED FOR YOU. Although I was supposed to be there to support the preaching, the message cut right into my inner being. It gave me wonderful hope that God could and would fix me. I told the preacher. He took me into a church nearby. Many were about to have communion. We sat in a front pew. A large cathedral-like church. He prayed for me then asked me to pray. When I prayed candidly my voice suddenly had incredible power welling up in it. People must had been aware. As soon as I started getting proid and dishonest, as was my habit, the power went. I kept going back to honesty to bring back the power. Among the evangelists we met and prayed and sang hymns. Again when I was honest that power rose up amazingly in my voice. I committed to only being honest. That was forty years ago. I have kept that resolve and seen power at work that can only be from heaven. It teaches me to be honest like heaven requires.
Years prior to all of this, a fellow student at university had challenged me had I ever received the Holy Spirit. Oddly I was still challenged about gifts of the Holy Spirit because I had never spoken in tongues in meetings, and not even at the time my grandparents laid hands on me. It somehow did not come to me that the prophecies on the mission trip were my baptism in the Holy Spirit. I had a stereotypical idea of what such baptism would mean, and I had not recognised mine was not a match to the stereotype. I spent a few years bothered about why I had not received what others had received. I prayed and prayed. One day I prayed very earnestly and as I prayed, a vision suddenly came to me crystal clear in my inner sight. The vision, as the words of it were coming, was of a builders bucket full of builders sand and it was tipped out in front of me, as the words came “BUILD THE TEMPLE”. I was raised on Bible stories including the call of Gideon who asked for a sign it was truly from God. He asked for a sign twice. I actually asked for threefold confirmation, just to be really sure. I went to church a little later, and three messages were given there. Some Sunday school girls, three of them, had written a song. It went “Build build build the Temple. Build build build the Temple. Build build build the Temple”. Then a man with a guitar sang about building the temple. Finally, an elder gave a sermon on how King David sat in awe when God told him Solomon would build the Temple, saying “Who am I and who is my family that Thou has given this honour to us. We are now the most honoured of all families.”
As a result of this vision I started trying to find churches where I could take part in spiritual aspects of the services, but the church I mostly attended only gave opportunity to become an official lay preacher, which required a period working with a supervisor. I submitted to this process. At this church there were some who I told about my interest in charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit and of wanting to attend a church with these gifts present. Unbeknown to me, they told my supervisor about my interest. One day said one day he would take to such a church where I would definitely see the speaking in tongues. On the way I felt a tight grip of being in the spirit. In the service a leader spoke in tongues at the microphone. It was a real angelic message of awesome words. The words turned into English in my head. I realised it was a gift of interpretation being given me. “Consider the trees. They put forth buds and leaves,“ (a vision of it appeared in my mind) “They do so by the power/authority of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ”. Then it continued further about planets orbiting stars by this power. I was thinking maybe I should stand and speak it but I did not know how the congregation would accept me, a stranger there. Within seconds the speaker spoke those very same words. I told him later and he could not remember any of it happening. The supervisor who took me there told me this happened a lot in some of the churches in the area.
Years later, I was one day pondering how notable it had been that on many occasions the people who tried things which might ruin me, perhaps not even knowing that could be the outcome of the actions, were suddenly brought down by calamity, leaving me safe from harm. It was striking how it had been happening so much over the years. I had a Bible verse in mind which I thought must explain it, but it was all a bit new to me to be noticing such things and I longed for a bit of certainty of understanding as to whether the verse did apply. The verse said “The Angel of the LORD encompasses those who fear Him”. I did not know where in the Bible it came from. Probably a Psalm, I thought. I lay on my bed thinking about this. Suddenly in my head came words so clear they could have come from near me, but no, they were put into my head by something invisible. “Daniel 3.” I just knew it must be the Holy Spirit, although this had only ever once before happened to me, many years before. I realised it must be a Bible reference. In my living room, on a cabinet, I had a Bible. Someone gave it me years before as a study Bible with cross-references. I had rarely used it. I had other Bibles but this is the one I kept out, on top of my cabinet. I went to it and looked up Daniel chapter three. I started looking through the long chapter about men thrown into a fiery furnace for refusing to bow to an image of a Babylonian emperor. I saw nothing until the end of the chapter where there was the word “Angel” and beside it a cross reference. I knew what would come next. I checked the reference. Yes, it was a cross reference to that Psalm which said, “The Angel of the LORD encompasses those who fear Him”. The words which were in my head. It was showing me that the Angel in Daniel 3 was like what had been protecting me, surrounding me because I feared the LORD. How remarkable, extraordinary, that there was this Spirit reading my very innermost thoughts, which I had not spoken out loud, then answering my unspoken question. And had known what was in the margin of my study Bible and that I would look at this particular Bible. It stunned me. What stunned me most, in a delightful way, was how this Spirit, I assumed the divine, heavenly Holy Spirit, had used this brilliant way to prove to me this was not my imagination playing tricks on me. This was real. Impossible that it was not real. And that this Spirit had power to know my thoughts and speak right into them in crystal clear English words, and with just two words tell me so much. What wisdom. The Spirit, as the scripture says, of the fear of the LORD.
Besides all of these more outwardly evident events, there is the more subconscious work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit opens my heart to scriptures, corrects my opinions if they are way out of line with truth, leads me into truth by highlighting things and making my heart aware of how they piece together and how to make sense of these things. If I get my doctrines badly wrong, I will soon be corrected. If I keep teaching a doctrine, without it being corrected, and later on I am still teaching it, that doctrine has weight. So I kept a web blog online of all my teachings, so anyone can look back over more than a decade and see where things are constant.
Most importantly, the Holy Spirit is manifested in open ways in church and assembly meetings, and also in more subtle ways in the combined subconscious workings in the minds and spirits of those in the meeting. It can happen over time. The whole church can find themselves on a spiritual journey in this way. It is a journey into all truth. Meetings where the Spirit brings Christ into the church, these mark the church as sealed in Jesus Christ, belonging to him.
This should not detract from the individuality too of both the Father and the Son. The Father is the one who says “Be still and know that I am God”. He also acknowledges Jesus, alive forever from the dead, as truly His Son, while Jesus in turn acknowledges the Father as the one true God who sent him. I have experienced all of this too. Besides the Holy Spirit, both the Father, and the Son, each give experience of themselves when we walk in adherence to their teachings.
