The New Testament scriptures have some passages that give impressions of the experience of being a Christian which is strikingly different to what seems to be more typical today. Maybe that is stating the obvious. Yet many seem to ignore it. As a young person growing up in church life, I grew more and more aware that there was this disparity. The letters of Apostle Paul in the New Testament are markedly striking in their description of how his readers, Christian believers of that time, experienced the real Holy Spirit as part of their path to that life, and their experiences formed the very basis of their Christian way of living. It was normal to them to have a distinct religious experience, which was obvious to them as being marked, like a sealing of a letter, with the Holy Spirit, evidenced in a heavenly miraculous manner, such as, so the Book of Acts tells us, speaking in tongues and prophesying supernaturally. Based on this experience, which each of them received, they could be sure they were all being made into one body of believers, as the body of Christ. On that basis they needed to behave in a special way towards each other. In particular, they needed to speak the truth to each other, realising that lying to each other was entirely inappropriate now their shared experience of the Holy Spirit marking them, sealing them, had united them as one body together by the power of God who gave each of them this Holy Spirit. Now I grew up aware that this was not how Christianity seemed to work today. It perplexed me that nobody called this out like an ‘elephant in the room’, so to speak. Eventually I too experienced the Holy Spirit, though with the evidence of this in a form of interpreting tongues rather than speaking them. As such only I knew with certainty it had happened. Even the one giving the tongues message later seemed to doubt me when I told him about the interpretation given me. Yet I did not doubt him. Likewise I found others who shared experiences with the experiences I was receiving in more of a prophecy kind of gifting, and I did not doubt them being one in the same body of Christ as me, although they did not know I had been experiencing it too. In this way the others did not know me as being one with them, yet I knew them as being one with me, in this body of Christ. Of course it now dawns on me, many years later, that now I must obey the instructions in the New Testament that apply to this body of Christ, the circle of those sealed in this way.
