Baptism of the Holy Spirit

I quote Johnson who addresses the Baptism of the Holy Spirit:

“When people receive salvation, the Holy Spirit comes to live in them. The Holy Spirit seals the work of salvation in an individual’s heart [mind, will and emotion, the soul] (Eph. 1:13).

“However, after salvation, every believer is invited to additionally ask for the Holy Spirit to fill them with power, boldness, and courage to be a witness in the earth.

“The baptism of the Holy Spirit was prophesied by John the Baptist. It is what Jesus tells His disciples to wait for in Jerusalem, prior to the rise of the New Testament Church. It was what the early church sought after in terms of supernatural impartation and it available to us today.”

Stan Lennard
Who is the Holy Spirit?

Russell Johnson is the pastor of PursuitNW in Washington state, located in Snohomish, WA, the thriving church my family attends. I will cite several comments taken from his booklet, In Pursuit of the Spirit: Baptism of the Holy Spirit, Pursuit Press, 2021. He has personal knowledge of and experience with the Holy Spirit. Let us see what he shares.

“The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. He’s not a force. He’s not a mystical aura. He’s not a vibration. He’s not a frequency. The Holy Spirit is a person.

“Because He is a person, the Holy Spirit can be honored, dishonored, grieved (Isa. 63:10), celebrated, quenched (1 Thess. 5:19), resisted (Acts 7:51), and blasphemed (Matt. 12:31). New Testament believers have a responsibility to steward their relationship with the Holy Spirit by earnestly desiring His gifts (1 Cor. 14:1), praying in the Spirit (Eph. 6:18), singing in the Spirit (1 Cor. 14:15), walking in the Spirit (Gal. 5:16), and being renewed in the spirit of their mind (Eph. 4:23).

“Being filled with the Holy Spirit is not a one-time activity. Instead, Scripture speaks to being continually filled on a daily basis (Eph. 5:18). The Holy Spirit is a person. He is honored when we recognize His importance in our life. He is honored when He is welcomed in our daily interactions. Just like any other person, the role and influence of the Holy Spirit grows as you tend to the development of this important relationship.”

The indwelling of the human spirit by the Holy Spirit has been renewed in repentant believers by the boundless love and grace of God through the sin sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ, who lives and sent the Holy Spirit as Counselor and Helper as He promised upon His resurrection. Believers are blessed to have the Holy Spirit guide their minds, their souls, in a dualist interaction in our time in anticipation of the everlasting communion with Jesus Christ to come.

Stan Lennard
Jesus, fully man, fully God

I quote Burke:

“When we think about Jesus only as a meek, mild-mannered religious figure, stain-glassed into obscurity and mostly out of touch with our real lives today, we have been deceived. Jesus revealed the almighty, all-knowing, ever-present, infinite Creator of the universe in a form we could relate to because God wants relationship.

“But Jesus is not only fully man; he is fully God in all his majestic brilliance today. That’s what NDE’rs [near death experiencers] see: the majesty of god in the form of a man. And those who already know him, recognize him. Like Jesus said, ‘I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep, and they know me. . . . They will listen to my voice’ (John 10:14,16).”

In my books and blogs I have identified the present reality of communion between the Holy Spirit and the human spirit and soul. As he promised, the resurrected Jesus Christ sent the Holy Spirit to indwell repentant believers to restore the personal communion that was lost at the Fall of Adam. It is an everlasting communion.

Stan Lennard
Mind governs matter

In my writings I have endeavored to make a compelling case for dualist interaction between the immaterial mind, including the Mind of God, and the components of the material brain. I am including a very interesting post from Burke’s book that speaks to the increasing recognition of mind-matter interaction.

“Science used to think of matter as solid, but we now know the tiny atoms that make up matter are more like invisible waves [I have presented numerous posts that address wave forms and how they may interact with our neural synaptic networks], more mind-like than particle-like. In fact, atoms are 99.999 percent empty space. Cambridge and Princeton physicist James Jeans wrote, ‘the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we ought rather hail it as the governor of the realm of matter.’”

In my books and blogs I have pointed out that information comes only from a mind. The Mind of God is the ultimate Source of ALL information that has been instantiated into and sustains His creations with specification, that is with meaning and purpose and structure. Such information is transmitted within codes, linguistic codes in the case of neural spike trains of action potentials which are learned over a lifetime, interpreted by the human mind and archived in memory. So the comments of James Jeans are relevant to this reality, that the Mind of God governs the realm of matter, and the human mind/soul governs the transmission of specified information through the brain’s neural synaptic networks to express movement, ideas, will and the interpretation of sensory input. No, the universe is not thought per se, but thought of a Mind has been actualized within its very structure, meaning and purpose.

Stan Lennard
Perfect unity of love

I quote Burke:

“With perfect communication and perfect love comes perfect unity. The very thing Jesus prayed that we would learn to experience more and more on earth will happen fully in Heaven’s Family: ‘I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one - I in them and you in me - so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ (John 17:20-23). In Heaven, Jesus’ prayer is tangibly felt by all.”

Stan Lennard
Love, the point of Heaven

I quote Burke:
”Those who get a glimpse of Heaven agree on one thing more than anything - love is the point of it all. In the presence of God, they experience a love that words cannot explain, and the people of Heaven seem to be filled with a light that is love. So if love and relationship is the goal of life on earth, why would we think God wants to tear that apart or take relationship from us in Heaven. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Stan Lennard
New spiritual bodies to come

“Some things people can’t express or are not allowed to tell, but other things God wants us to know. He wants Heaven to fire up our imaginations, and I believe that’s why he’s giving us more and more evidence and insight into the life to come - so we will live for it. . . . this new spiritual body is a promise from God conveyed in the Scriptures. Paul may be reflecting on his own near-death experience when he explains, ‘For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies. While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life . . . . And we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord. So whether we are here in this body or away from this body, our goal is to please him.’” (2 Corinthians 5: 1-4, 8-9)

Stan Lennard
Near death experiences, beyond three dimensions

I cite John Burke: “One person summed it up well by recounting his thoughts during the experience in relation to what he had been taught in geometry. He had always accepted the existence of only three dimensions, but now he knew his teachers were mistaken - there are more. He concluded that this was the reason retelling his experiences was so difficult, because, ‘I have to describe it to you in words that are three-dimensional. That’s as close as I can get to it, but it’s not really adequate.’ So every individual near-death story is actually an interpretation of an experience that’s beyond our finite, earthly language.”

Stan Lennard
Near death experiences

In the next several posts I am including excerpts from a most interesting book by John Burke. It is a New York Times bestseller entitled Imagine Heaven: Near Death Experiences, God’s Promises, and the Exhilarating Future that Awaits You. I quote Burke:

“Heaven and near-death experiences (NDE) - when people clinically died, were resuscitated, and claimed to have gotten a peek into the afterlife - have been a hot topic of late. . . . Over the past thirty-five years, I’ve read or heard close to 1,000 near-death stories (there are millions out there). I started seeing amazing commonalities across stories - intriguing, detailed descriptions by doctors, professors, commercial airline pilots, children, people from around the globe. Each gave a slightly different angle to what started to look like a very similar picture. . . . You will get a thorough understanding of the picture of Heaven from the Bible . . . . If nothing else, [Burke’s book] will open your eyes to the millions of accounts out there that have convinced skeptical doctors, atheistic college professors, and many others . . . that Heaven is for real.

“Could people make up stories or fabricate detail to sell more books? Yes. For this reason, I’ve tried to choose stories from people with little or no profit motive: orthopedic surgeons, commercial airline pilots, professors, neurosurgeons - people who probably don’t need the money but have credibility to lose by making up wild tales. I’ve also included children; people from predominately Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist countries; and people who did not write books. Amazingly, they all add color to a similar, grand picture of the afterlife.”

Finally, I include these excerpts with my comments to present an increasingly compelling case for dualist interaction between the immaterial spirit and soul (mind, will and emotion) of human beings and the material neural synaptic networks of the brain. It is an interaction that also includes communion with the immaterial Mind of God, His Holy Spirit. I am also endeavoring to make the case for the eternal existence of the immaterial human spirit and soul. It is my belief that God gives mankind progressive revelation as Man is able to receive and at least partially comprehend it. Are NDE “clues” to what is to come, identified so strongly by Scripture? If so, we have hope increased for the life to come, blessed by our being in the presence of the living Jesus Christ, God with us, for eternity!

Stan Lennard
Human throne for God and the Self

I conclude posting excerpts from Jabay’s books, this one speaking to the throne that every human being has:

“In the center of every human heart is a throne. It is always occupied. Not a person in all the world is without both throne and someone occupying that throne at all times.

“The aspirants to the throne are only two: God and the self - or, as we will call it, the prideful, self-centered ego. If God is enthroned by a human spirit, then that man is under the regime of the kingdom of God. Man, because he is human spirit with that godlike freedom of choice, can choose who will sit on that throne. If God is enthroned, the prideful ego is dethroned and the human spirit is correctly positioned under God and with people. But when the ego is self-enthroned, God is ignored while man, who is now mispositioned in his world, plays god. It is this mispositioning of man which brings him now to live without God and against his fellow men. The tragic result of egoistic self-enthronement is correctly termed godlessness.

I have endeavored to show in compelling manner that by the boundless love and grace of God through the sin sacrifice of His living Son, Jesus Christ, we can have personal communion restored with the Holy Spirit, a dualist interaction that leads believers to sanctification and everlasting entry into the Kingdom of God.

Stan Lennard