The baptism of the Holy Spirit

In Acts 19, if you don't have your Bible, listen to me, it says, “It came to pass that while Apollo, one of the Apostles, was in Corinth, Paul after going through the upper regions, came to Ephesus, a city in Asia Minor, and finding to certain disciples, the Apostle Paul said 'did you receive the holy spirit when you believed?'

It's a question. Look at the question that the Apostle Paul asked these believers that he met in that city. He asked them, did you receive the holy spirit when you believed?

“.....and they said to him, 'we haven't even heard if there's a holy spirit.' -imagine- "....then Paul said to them 'in what then were you baptized?' They answered, 'in the baptism of John'. Then Paul said, 'John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who would come after him, that is, in Jesus, the Messiah, the Christ. When the disciples heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, and Paul laid his hands on them, and the holy spirit came upon them, and they spoke with tongues and prophesied. They were all about 12 men.”

What we have here, brethren, is like a little scene from the first century church. The early days of the spread of the Gospel and some church history must be understood in order to fully interpret this passage.

Why have I chosen this passage entirely out of what we had in mind this morning when I arrived here for the service at 9 am? Because what we have experienced in the second service... I was saying to the Lord, 'Father, before we start the second service, let us receive the same blessing that we received in the 9 o'clock service.' well, since the spirit is spent, there is no more left, so the brothers who come to the second service, well... but no, the Lord always has new things for us.

What I want is to put into context what we have experienced this afternoon and encourage you to continue to seek more and more in our lives each day. Periodically through the years I always make this call to the brothers and I feel from the Lord when it is time to stir the waters again, to drink again from the waters of the spirit, to renew ourselves as a church, to renew the Pentecostal feeling again of the church, the Pentecostal theology that we have embraced as a congregation.

And that's what we've done today. For Paul it was very important that every believer had a clear relationship with the holy spirit and with the gifts of the holy spirit.

Look, when the Apostle Paul was preaching it was just the very beginnings of the Christian faith and the Gospel had spread spontaneously in cities and in small villages and fields, the Gospel had arrived because Christians they had gone from Jerusalem and had been scattered to different parts and there was no Bible, what was there was the Old Testament. But the entire New Testament from the book of Matthew to Revelation had not yet been written. That came to be written decades after Christ ascended.

Then there was no written theology. There was no clear doctrine, but the Gospel was simply being spread by people who loved the Lord, who had received a little bit one day, had been touched by the Lord, and had gone to another country, or another village, or another town, and they shared what they knew, what they could.

So there were many people who had not been well educated and that seems to be what happened here. The Apostle Paul arrived in the city of Ephesus, he met 12 men who claimed to be Christians. Because look, it says "...finding certain disciples."

That word is applied in the Book of Acts to people who believed in Jesus Christ, people who had received Jesus as their Lord and savior. Paul meets these men who say they are Christians, but for some reason he realized that they were missing something, there was a lack in their lives.

So, he asked them, did you receive the holy spirit when you accepted Jesus, did you receive the holy spirit when you believed?

Now, one thing needs to be cleared up here, the Book of Acts and other New Testament texts speak of receiving the holy spirit in the sense of receiving the baptism of the holy spirit, receiving the infilling of the holy spirit, receive the saturation of the holy spirit. That Pentecostal experience that refers to when the holy spirit enters your life with power and does a work of strengthening, sealing you, endowing you with his gifts and doing something within you, in an extraordinary way, because the Bible teaches us that when a person receives Jesus as their Lord and savior, the holy spirit enters.

The Bible says here that the spirit of Christ enters the person. The Lord says “I am at the door, I knock; If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will go in to him and eat with him and he with me."

That is, there is a dimension of the holy spirit that is in every believer, but there is a second experience called the baptism of the holy spirit, the filling of the holy spirit that it is up to each of us to seek after we are accepted into the Kingdom of God.

And I share this with you because I know that many of our brothers here are new to the faith, others perhaps come from an evangelical tradition where the Holy Spirit is not talked about so much, others are searching. And I want our church to grow together, to grow knowing what we have to do as children of God and I want you to always be alert to the need to accompany your experience in Jesus Christ with an intimacy and an active, dynamic relationship with the Holy Spirit, with the gifts of the holy spirit.

I am going to talk more about it in the not too distant future, because I want to always.... months go by and a new generation of people comes, other believers come and you have to bless them with the same teaching. And these things we have to learn periodically.

So, it was very important for Paul to be sure that these disciples had also had the experience of the baptism of the holy spirit.

Look something, when he asks them 'did you receive the holy spirit when you believed? What do these disciples answer? We didn't even know there was such a thing as the holy spirit.

There was an ignorance in them because, of course, they had not been indoctrinated. Surely someone passed by, on the way, a Christian began to talk to them. He told them about Jesus, the Messiah who had been crucified, died for their sins, had risen. And they said 'okay, we got it'. And this person prayed for them and continued on his way, and these people already had something but they had not been indoctrinated, they had not been taught, they had not been ministered to.

And Paul finds them and asks them and they say 'we don't know anything about that.' Then Paul asks them 'well, and then in whose name were you baptized? How were they baptized?, because it seems that they had been baptized. They told him 'well, we received the baptism of John'.

What was John's baptism? The baptism that we are going to have today, water. John the Baptist baptized with water, and you remember if you read one of the books of the Gospels, that John once said 'I, he said, baptize with water', but he said 'but one comes who baptizes with fire and with the spirit holy'.

So there were like two baptisms, that's what John meant: a baptism that was the baptism of water and another baptism. What does the word 'baptism' mean? The word 'baptism' comes from the Greek 'baptizo' which means to immerse, that's why we baptize people, we immerse them in water. And also the baptism of the holy spirit is like an immersion, it is like taking your personality, your life, your nervous system, your emotions, your memories, everything and saturating it, lowering it and filling it in the holy spirit. That experience is needed by every Christian.

And in our Christian life there must be, from time to time, fresh infillings of the holy spirit. It is also seen in the Book of Acts that on several occasions says that the disciples were filled with the holy spirit, in moments of prayer, of intimacy with the Lord. The holy spirit came, touched them, they were refreshed, the gifts were manifested, there was intensity in the air and people received a new dose of the holy spirit.

And that, brothers, it is very important that we practice it in our Christian life, that we do not settle for the experience of yesterday or six weeks ago. I was telling the brothers this morning that we always have to measure our spiritual temperature.

We always have to have a thermometer around to see where we are, if we are at full or if we are at E, empty. Why what happened? Life with its struggles, its troubles, its shocks, its disappointments, its frights, its upsets, with the passing of the days, the weeks, our spirits go down. The same routine of coming to church every Sunday and singing the same choirs and listening to the preaching of the word. What's happening? As if one is getting used to it, one is losing the sense of the sacred, of the newness of the life of the spirit and it seems that we fall into a routine, right?

We come to church, we do the same things and it's like if you don't take care of yourself, you run the risk of the Gospel becoming something bureaucratic. One more routine: we come, we cross ourselves, we make some strange gestures there and we go home just as we arrived; unless we have a decision in our life to periodically come and seek a fresh visitation from the holy spirit.

As a pastor, I always try to ensure the spiritual temperature of the congregation. And in these last weeks, I told him 'Father, we need a visitation from you. We need a touch from you,' because the topics that we have been dealing with are also very practical topics, very good, very blessing, but the holy spirit has to be specifically glorified, it has to be raised before the people, it has to be invited. We must praise him, we must give him space and that is what we have done on this day.

We have invited the holy spirit to come, touch our life, refresh us, do works in us. I love to see new brothers and sisters in the faith who are hungry for the Lord and we have laid hands on you, we have declared things. And I believe that God has done a work of renewal in your lives, my brothers. And above all we are impacting them with this idea that the Christian life is a life that has to be led in intimacy with the spirit of God.

Because the Christian life is not just actions and words and rituals. The Christian life depends on the energy, on the dynamite of the holy spirit in us. It's like a car, a car has seats, it has a guide, it has an engine, it has a transmission, it has a body, wheels, but there is something very important that makes that car move and it is the gasoline that you constantly pour into it. . Yes or no? Without gasoline, that car will not go anywhere, it needs that liquid that can be converted into an explosion and energy that moves the machine.

It is likewise with the Christian. There is doctrine, there is faith, there is a body, there are emotions, there are decisions that we have made, but energy is needed, the gasoline that moves all that apparatus of faith that is the holy spirit. That is why the Lord Jesus Christ told the disciples 'do not leave Jerusalem until you have received the baptism of the holy spirit'.

Why did he tell them that? Because when they left Jerusalem where the Gospel had begun, they were going to go to different parts of the world, different countries, they were going to find resistance, they were going to find tests and first they needed the powerful gasoline of the holy spirit to be able to preach the Gospel and resist the enemy attacks on their lives.

So, Christian, Christian, I encourage you in the name of the Lord to always remember that you need, not only to have received Christ as your Lord and savior, you need not only to come to church, but you also need a fresh anointing of the holy spirit day after day in your life. Amen.

That's why Paul told them 'well, okay, you received the baptism of John, very good, you received Jesus, but there is something else. I am going to pray for you. The Bible says that he laid hands on them and they received the holy spirit and prophesied and spoke in tongues.

When you receive the holy spirit something happens in your life. There is an external manifestation, it can be crying, it can be laughter, it can be joy, it can be raising your hands, it can be dancing, it can be falling, it can be saying 'Glory to God, Hallelujah!', it can be prophesying, it can be speak in tongues. There are demonstrations that take place. Because? Because the holy spirit enters your life, the holy spirit is energy and connects with the energy of your nervous system, of your spirit, and there is a reaction that externalizes what is happening in different ways, as we have seen.

And as a church, we shouldn't be surprised by any of these things because this is part of God's work in our lives. And we left here strengthened. It is not believed, when a church allows the holy spirit to jump and move, the blessings not only happen at the same moment, but that renews the life of the church.

I assure you that the vibrations of this will continue for many days in this congregation because it is what happens when..... It is like that story that there was a lake, a pond where it says that Periodically an angel would come and stir up the waters and when the first one to jump in was healed. Do you remember that story?

And so it is in the life of a church. Many times the pool of water from the holy spirit is like this, placid, calm, without moving and we have to come and stir the water so that the energy of the holy spirit jumps again, moves again. Those placid waters that have been established within us by force of routine and daily living in the Christian life have to be stirred again, the spiritual temperature has to be raised again.

Brethren, let us never settle for being a programmatic church. Amen. We do not want to be a program-only church. We want to be a church that from time to time the bow falls off because it makes a little mess and we jump and pray and bless and rejoice in the Lord and beat the waters of the spirit again. Praise God for that.

Say 'Glory to God' and praise the Lord. Glory to the Lord. Amen. Amen. Amen.

Young people, children, adults, new believers, people of time in the faith, we are a people who love the holy spirit, we are a people who love the gifts of the holy spirit, we are a people.... we love the movement of the spirit in our life.

It is not with a sword, it is not with an army, it is not with money, it is not with a program, it is not with a physical plant, it is not with effective administration, it is with the power of the holy spirit that the construction site. And God wants an anointed church. God wants a full church. God wants an energetic church. God wants a church that is not afraid to latch on to the live wire of the holy spirit and get a fresh dose. It is what we have done on this day.

Glory to the name of the Lord. We bless the name of Jesus. Stand up. We are going to give glory to the Lord and with that we are going to close this time and we are going to wait a few moments until we prepare ourselves well, while our brothers, who are going to raise the platform. If you are out there, can you help us on this?

Roberto, ok, come over here, we're ready..... but give glory to the Lord. Let's go to one last prayer to close this time.

Father, we adore you, we bless you, we thank you. We want more of you Lord, thank you for what you have done this afternoon and we invite you to continue Lord, continue working in our lives as a church. Complete the works you have started, Father. We give you all the glory and all the honor and we invite you to take possession of our meetings as many times as you want, Father, and to you we will always give the glory and honor.

Blessed be your name. Give the Lord a big round of applause.