This lack of personal development is just sheer laziness on the part of many, and as a result, the church is happy just paying someone else to look after their Christianity. We need to address the fundamental issues facing Christendom with Scripture and Scripture alone.
The spiritual gifts of prophecy, speaking in tongues and healing seemed to have disappeared from the mainstream of the church’s life by the middle of the third century. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian all testify to the continuing experience of… Read More ›
The baptism in the Holy Spirit is regarded as an experience that usually occurs after conversion. Pentecostals believe at conversion a Christian receives the Holy Spirit. However only at the subsequent baptism in the Holy Spirit does the Christian receive the fullness of the Spirit and the full empowerment for Christian service. Most Pentecostals believe that Spirit-baptism is always accompanied with the gift of speaking in tongues as evidence for the baptism. Thus one can be a genuine Christian yet not be baptised in the Holy Spirit.
Our self-love keeps us from surrendering to the guidance of the will of God, and eliminates the sense of gratitude we should have toward God for all the blessings God lavishes upon us. By calling upon us to deny ourselves, bear our cross and hope for eternal life, even as we thank God for the blessings of this life, we are to abandon once for all the image of ourselves we have created through our blind self-love, in order to be conformed to the image of selfless and self-giving love that is revealed in Jesus Christ.
The Holy Spirit will take us in hand, time and again, over our breaches of the law of unselfish love; if we respond He will write part of that law in our hearts. We, in fact, are ourselves changed, from one degree of glory to another, but always in the direction of liberty –‘where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’ (2 Corinthians 3:17).
