RECEIVING the Spirit, Time of
THE TIME OF RECEIVING THE SPIRIT
Virgil Warren, PhD
The time of receiving the Spirit naturally belongs with discussing commitment to Christ. The gift of the Spirit as an “indwelling presence” occurs at the time of personal identification with Christ, commitment to him and his values and purposes That understanding is natural if receiving the Spirit means entering a personal relationship with him. Reconciliation follows forgiveness, which removes the guilt of sin that caused the separation. If we identify with Christ (formally in baptism) and God forgives sin on the basis of that identity, then receiving the Spirit correlates with that commitment. Salvation means salvation from alienation; so in regard to the Spirit it means “receiving the gift of the Spirit,” as we say. Not only does that make sense in the nature of things, but Acts 2:38-41 presents baptism as identification with Christ, and therefore with forgiveness of sins, receiving the Spirit, and entering the body of Christ. By the nature of those items, they belong together rather than strung out over time. They are all aspects of one up-front event. We can say they have a logical sequence, but we have no reason to say they have a chronological seqence.
We need to take care then about thinking of a subjective “experience” of receiving the Spirit as what it means to receive the Spirit. If “eceiving the Spirit” is a term for a subjective, perceivable, discernible experience, the inference would be that we do not have the Spirit if we do not “feel,” or “sense,” the Spirit—we don’t have the Spiritif we don’t feel like we do.. Such an idea changes having the Spirit from having an objective relationship into “sensing” a subjective relationship. That shift of meaning leads to the notion of “praying through” and relates to “baptism of the Spirit” evidenced by speaking in languages. The thought pattern connects our having the Spirit with perceiving that we have the Spirit. So, “receiving the Spirit” would not be something we can have without “experiencing” it; the “gift” is the experiencing of it. By contrast, our understanding makes receiving the Spirit an objective fact known by promise, not a subjective awareness known by perception. It is a personal presence and therefore real; but since God is not perceivable in his own person, it is an unperceived real presence. The fact of his presence should lead to a sense of his presence, but that sense is “imagined,” not “perceived”; it is believed by promise, not known by feeling.
The fact that we “feel like” we have the Spirit earlier or do not “feel like” we have the Spirit until later does not mean that we had the Spirit earlier or did not have the Spirit till later. Neither does it mean that receiving the Spirit is separable from initial commitment Christ nor that we have the Spirit because we feel we do. Interpersonalism shows how the objective fact and the subjective feeling relate. No personal relationship in itself is perceivable—as if we are getting “vibes” from the other person’s body; it is known to exist by the statement of the other person. Physical persons can tell from perceivable actions how other people view them even aside from verbal expression; but our inability to perceive God with the senses means that we do not know his relationship to us that way. So, the expression “gift of the Spirit” labels more than the sense of relationship with the Other. The only way we can perceive God is by his manifesting himself to us, but it is not obvious from the experience itself nor from scripture that the normal sense of relationship we have with him is a response to a manifestation of the supernatural. Even if we were to experience an inner “something” that would not seem adequately explained as response to promise, it would not mean that such an experience is the norm for conversion or that it should be identified with what the New Testament means by “receiving the Spirit.” We simply affirm that at conversion all Christians receive an objective personal relationship with the Spirit and that periodically the relationship becomes subjectively impressed upon us in conjunction with the experiences of Christian living. As part of the normal Christian experience, however, when those impressions come, they represent our response to promise, not our perception of supernatural manifestation.
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