I was there in the street of my parents’ town telling the street preacher about my experience of the Holy Spirit thirty years previously. I told of the speaker in a service who gave a message in tongues by the power of the Holy Spirit. I told how the message turned into English words in my head as the power of the Holy Spirit gave me the interpretation. I told the preacher in the street how the words went “Consider the trees.” As I spoke, we were stood in the street under a tree, and the end of a branch of the tree was drooping down right there in front of my eyes. I told him how, as the interpretation came a vision came with it. Amazing to me was how the vision accompanying the words was exactly the same as this branch in front of me. It had a few leaves and some buds between some of them. I held the branch and showed the man the branch and told him of the vision and the words which went, “Consider the trees. They put forth buds and leaves.” I got a bit muddled with how I recalled the words but got there in the end (I’m getting old). “They do so by the power of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” I told him how the word ‘power’ came to me as combined with the word ‘authority’. The authority of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ by which the trees put forth buds and leaves, just like that tree branch there I was holding in my hand as I spoke, with its buds and leaves growing, helping me relate what the Holy Spirit gave in tongues and interpretation. I told him how this was certainly the Holy Spirit because it was to the glory of Jesus that it told things from him, making them known to us, exalting Jesus Christ’s name. This is a kind of fellowship. There is the preacher hearing for the first time afresh this message from the Holy Spirit. There am I telling it with the tree branch helping me, feeling again that power the Holy Spirit brings with illuminating truth about things of Nature and of Jesus and of the power given by the Creator to Jesus in the name given Jesus by God. It is a commonality of experience of the divine by the Holy Spirit’s gifts. We need the reality of such fellowship. We need to foster it with confession of our sins to each other, as I and this street preacher had been doing: Me in my testimony about my conversion I had just been confessing to him, and he in his confession in a tract he had given me about his own conversion. In this mutual confessing, we find common ground and commonality of our cause, which is to be saved to the uttermost from our sins by the power of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ: That same power by which that tree branch was putting forth buds and leaves.
