When He had said this, He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit…” John 20:22
And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit… Acts 2:4
Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, spoke to them… Acts 4:8

At a recent wedding I was talking to a young woman who expressed serious spiritual confusion based on what she found herself experiencing vs. the theology (or lack of it) that she had grown up in church with. In a nutshell, she was experiencing a move of the Holy Spirit in her life, but her church experience had never prepared her for God acting this way.

That’s ok. God specializes in breaking out of the boxes we have Him in. But how is it that so many people like this young women…people who grew up in local churches with youth programs, sound teaching, etc… meet the work of the Holy Spirit and have no idea?

That question is answered by the ‘When?’ question. How has what has been learned over time affect what we currently think (positively and negatively)? How does failure to learn affect us when we face spiritual realities we’ve never considered?

Last week we saw that the Holy Spirit exists along with God the Father and God the Son eternally. The Spirit shows up on many occasions in the Old Testament, sometimes indwelling a select person for life, other times just for a task or event.

In the New Testament, we find Jesus promising the Holy Spirit’s indwelling for all believers. The results were instantaneous in many cases, but even after the initial indwelling, we read that the Holy Spirit came upon people multiple times after the initial encounter. The record of the day is clear that this continued for quite a while after the “early church”. (Some people—known as cessationists—date the collecting of the New Testament books as the reason for the Spirit’s experiential absence in later records.)

Note that the record dies out, but that doesn’t mean that the Spirit stopped revealing Himself. In fact, the record was pretty much controlled by one block of church authority in Western Europe for many centuries, so what we know from that quarter doesn’t mean that the Spirit wasn’t working in the open in other areas (like the Eastern Church, the African Church, Celtics … etc.) where there is less record.

This brings us to the reformation: Many good things happened in the reformation, but one glaring omission was the wholesale assumption that the Spirit was no longer at work—the prominence of the Bible over church leaders authority was championed, the prominence of the Holy Spirit was not.

…Until the mid to late 1800’s when expressions of the Spirit broke out in many places in the west (and importantly—places where records were kept and distributed—so we know about these)…

This has continued up to this day as the prominence of the Holy Spirit’s work has gained popularity; few western churches have been completely untouched by it and many have been completely transformed.

This leaves many whose churches have not prepared them for the Holy Spirit working in their lives, at a loss for what’s happening to them when some kind of Holy Spirit work manifests itself. Conversely, many find new life in their relationship with the Holy Spirit.

And that leads to #3— Spiritual theology asks “So what?” How does this work out in our every-day lives? We’ll talk about this next time.