Will the experience of fire be a dynamic experience or will it be a process? For several years we have seen this experience of fire as an unfolding process. But in the last outpouring of the Spirit it will also be a dynamic experience.
Most believers who receive the Holy Spirit speak with tongues and receive a great blessing. Because of certain manifestations, they know that something definite has happened to them.
As they walk on with the Lord, they experience more, including the laying on of hands and prophesying. These are definite experiences in the believer’s life. The experience of sanctification is real, but it is also a process which continues to work even after the initial experience. That is true also of salvation. Accepting Christ is a definite experience in which the Holy Spirit witnesses that you are born of God. But salvation is also a process that continues to unfold.
We need to know directly from God, with repeated confirmation through His Word, what it will mean for us to experience His fire. If it is an experience, we need to know how to enter into it. If it is a process, we need to know how to come into that.
Some experiences are expandable. Perhaps you were baptized in water when you were too young to understand all that was involved in it. How were you to know all that it meant as to identification in the death, burial, and resurrection of the Lord? If you had understood it perfectly and completely, you would have moved immediately into resurrection life. As all the experiences are restored, they will be expanded to the full scope of what God intended for you in them. The time will come when people will accept Christ, and it will be like a nation being born in a day. They will be projected immediately into a level which you reached only through a long process. There will be times when people who are baptized in water in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ will immediately enter into resurrection life. When hands are laid on them to receive the Holy Spirit, they will be baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire immediately.
We are in the process of restoration and some of our experiences need to be amplified and expanded. Some Christians need to go before the Lord, not to repent and to be saved all over again, but to believe for the Lord to fortify that salvation experience and make it strong and alive to them. If anything is lacking in our appropriation, we must reach out with an increase of understanding and take it. No one needs to be saved all over again or to be baptized in water again. For instance, when a person is seeing others baptized, the significance of baptism will have an impact on him and he can expand his own experience to embrace a greater revelation.
If you have received the Holy Spirit, do you question whether or not you have been baptized with the Holy Spirit and fire as it happened in the book of Acts? What can you do about it? Should you tarry and wait and have hands laid on you again as if you had never before received? God forbid! Do not make an unbeliever of yourself by such action. Believe that whatever was limited in its restoration will be expanded to what God is restoring today. Every time God gives a new step of restoration, determine to collect the extra expansion He has brought to it. This is how you should approach it. But do not make an unbeliever of yourself simply because you recognize that you have not had the experience as fully as you should have.
Most of the experiences we receive are expanding. People are being filled with the Spirit more gloriously than in former years. The people who receive the Holy Spirit now may not have as dynamic an experience, with all the manifestations, but they have learned to receive by faith and appropriate something that keeps growing and expanding in their lives. This is far greater than any bombastic experience.
It would be fine to see cloven tongues of fire resting upon each believer; but if that were all that happened, we might decide to make another Azusa Street of our churches so that we could boast, and that would not accomplish God’s purpose. It would be much better for us to realize that we have received the Holy Spirit; and God is restoring an integral part of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, so that we shall also be baptized with fire. That fire is going to penetrate and burn out every bit of dross. Wherever our receiving of the Holy Spirit and walking in the Spirit has been limited and restricted, it will be completed as the Lord completes the experience within us and causes it to expand and grow. Although we are aware that we have not received all that the believers received on the day of Pentecost, we do believe it is all intended for us today—right now.
Keep the Pentecost of fire. Believe that the Lord will expand your experience to take in everything that happened in the early Church with all of its dynamic results. Believe it will happen to you too—now! Reach in and embrace it. Whatever is lacking in any experience that God gave you, believe and lay hold of it now. Elements of impartation have increased during the years, not because of better techniques, but because the restoration is moving on and on. It is a process. Do not ever sell yourself short when you compare yourself with the disciples in the book of Acts. They without us are not made perfect. They wait for us. Let us lay aside every weight and press on in (Hebrews 12:1). We are the anchormen in this relay. The Lord has committed the Word to us and we must enter in for their sakes. They ran, but they did not attain to it. We are running, and we are going to break the tape at the finish line and win! We are to break into the Kingdom as we lay aside every weight and the sin that so easily besets us. God is moving, and fantastic things will happen to you. Never forget, however, to be thankful in your heart for the men who taught you to walk with God. Be grateful for the men who several years ago stood on street corners and in rented store buildings, who prayed night and day, sought the Lord, and lived a life of sacrifice. There is no more worthiness in you than there was in them. Although there was very little revelation in those early days, many men gave their lives for the few truths they did have. At that time the world was filled with much spiritual pride. As the Lord began to pour out His Spirit, many outstanding men of God listened, but the reproach was too great and they backed away. In all this land, God had no place to move except among the lame, the halt, and the blind—men without education, men without anything by this world’s standards. Some of them could not even speak English. Although those men knew very little, they moved in God and things happened.
Be glad for what God is turning loose in the earth. He will not stop until His people are a glorious Church without spot or wrinkle or any such thing (Ephesians 5:27). He will not stop until His little remnant takes the gospel of the Kingdom to the ends of the earth. He will not be mindful of your limitations; He will burn up the chaff with the fire.
Since the beginning, this restored walk in the Spirit has been founded on the grace of God; but no one yet knows what the grace of God really is. You have no idea what He is going to do in your life, nor how total the effect will be when he looses you from the chaff. When He thoroughly threshes you, do more than refrain from murmuring; submit yourself to Him. Submit to His dealings. Let Him chasten you. Let Him thresh the wheat until all the chaff is gone.
What do you have to do to be righteous? Hunger and thirst for it. Come back to basics—ask of the Lord rain (Zechariah 10:1). As Job said, “They opened their mouth wide as for the latter rain” (Job 29:23). Open up to what God wants to do for you, to what He has already provided for you. Even though you do not know what form it will take, yet you do know that the process already has been taking place.
A coming event looms up, and you can see it as it casts its shadow down to where you are living. God holds the experience of the future up where we cannot see it clearly because we are almost blinded by His light. We do not understand what He is going to do completely, but it casts a shadow from the future right into our hearts. It becomes very real because we know that God has been meeting us and breaking up the fallow ground. We know that from time to time we have been receiving an earnest of this inheritance.
Today’s younger believers were born after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that took place several years ago. They never knew what it was to see the power of God mowing people down as with a sickle until not one was left standing.
In the book With Signs Following you can read of the fire that appeared in some of those early visitations of the Holy Spirit. I think some of the people during those visitations reached into a complete experience. By the grace of God, we will reach into it also.
We can feel rich in the wisdom and endowment of the Lord. Then He brings a Word to us, and we feel very poor. That does not minimize what He has done, but we look forward to what the Lord will give. Our hearts hunger for it. Will it happen by God speaking and making us so poor in our spirits that we begin to yearn and hunger after Him? Is that the key to the Kingdom? Perhaps we still do not understand the Beatitudes. There may be deep things that we are to experience so tremendously that they will seem to be unbelievable. Oh how we will hunger after God as He brings us into glorious experiences.
This is God’s day of Pentecost, the Pentecost of fire! We are being led by a pillar of fire. In writing to the Corinthians about Israel, Paul related that they were all baptized in the cloud and in the sea (I Corinthians 10:1–2). They were completely submerged. It was difficult for the Israelites to live under that pillar of fire. If they murmured, they died. Today, we are coming to God, the consuming fire. We either let God deal with us or we are finished. If we let God deal with us and bring the fire, we are victorious.
At this time God is bringing to the Body of Christ a flow of revelation concerning Isaiah 61. The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted; He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to captives, and freedom to prisoners; to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord…. Isaiah 61:1–2. After Jesus read this portion of the Scripture in Nazareth, as recorded in Luke 4, He rolled up the scroll and handed it to the ruler of the synagogue, saying, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears. Luke 4:21b.
We are living in the day when not only the above portion of Isaiah 61 is applicable, but the next portion also: …and the day of vengeance of our God (Christ could not read that phrase because the day of vengeance had not come, but it is here now); to comfort all who mourn, to grant those who mourn in Zion, giving them a garland instead of ashes…. The day of vengeance is coming and the fire of the Lord is going to reduce us to ashes. That is what this revelation is all about. While there is judgment upon the world, there is judgment upon the believer also. This visitation of God is judging the old .
The Lord will give His people the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the mantle of praise instead of a spirit of fainting. So they will be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified. When this work of fire has done its work, Then they will rebuild the ancient ruins, they will raise up the former devastations, and they will repair the ruined cities, the desolations of many generations. Instead of your shame, you will have a double portion…. Isaiah 61:2–4, 7. Let the Lord consume you so that you can have an overcomer’s crown instead of ashes.
In a measure, a few have been experiencing the fire. It has cast its shadows from the future into their lives. From the time you began walking with God, the fire of the Lord has dealt with you. Many things have been utterly consumed. Your attitudes, ideas, life, and circumstances have all been completely changed; yet you stand with an awareness that they will change even more.
God is meeting you. Seek the face of the Lord and believe to see your walk shift gears to a new level, a new plane. It is a time of fulfillment. The day of Pentecost has fully come. God has declared and proclaimed a new level for His people, and you can walk in it. He has been leading you step by step. The Lord has told you what He has given and what is available. Appropriate it! Do not groan and tarry, but mourn in your heart. Hunger and thirst; appropriate and take. Jesus said, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. John 7:37b.
There is still too much of the flesh hanging on. Jude 23 speaks of fearing and hating even the garments spotted by the flesh. There is a stench of death upon the old flesh. We must come out of it completely.
As we walk on with God we must go through crises. We tend to become too self-satisfied, and our liberty leads to a sense of human adequacy. That cannot continue. If we go on in that way, we will miss this step of fire completely. We must approach this step without any self-righteousness or any sense of worthiness.
No one can say that this experience is not for him, for the promise of the Holy Spirit applies to all. On the day of Pentecost, Peter proclaimed: “For the promise is for you and your children, and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God shall call to Himself.” And with many other words he solemnly testified and kept on exhorting them, saying, “Be saved from this perverse generation!” Acts 2:39–40.
Loose yourself! Do not be a partaker of the fire of judgment in the earth! Judge yourself and participate in the fire of the Lord for your deliverance. Embrace the promise in the name of the Lord, knowing that as the chaff and the hindrances are burned out, many will be made ready to go to the ends of the earth with this gospel of the Kingdom. They will do the exploits and the greater works, not because they have an ambition to do them, but because the Lord has reduced them on the human level to be those vessels He can truly use.
A meeting with the Lord in these days must not be shallow. Do not be satisfied until you have completely appropriated that total visitation from the Lord. Do not only receive the Holy Spirit, but be filled with the Spirit of the Lord; for this is the time and this is your heritage.
Isaiah 4:4–6 will become increasingly real to the Church of Jesus Christ in the days before us. When the Lord has washed away the filth of the daughters of Zion, and purged the bloodshed of Jerusalem from her midst, by the spirit of judgment and the spirit of burning, then the Lord will create over the whole area of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day, even smoke, and the brightness of a flaming fire by night; for over all the glory will be a canopy (bridle chamber). And there will be a shelter to give shade from the heat by day, and refuge and protection from the storm and the rain.
Isaiah prophesied long after the wanderings in the wilderness; therefore, this prophecy speaks of the end time, when God’s people will experience a traveling through a wilderness. It will be necessary for a little season before the establishment of the Kingdom. During that time the Spirit of burning will come to purge and to cleanse them. They will not perish in their wilderness because of unbelief as Israel did, but they will move in and possess their heritage. The Lord will wash away the filth of the daughters of Zion and purge His people by the Spirit of burning. Even as it was of old—a cloud by day and the brightness of the flaming fire by night over all the camp—so in these days the glory will be a canopy over the remnant.
The Spirit of burning is already upon us. What a day of Pentecost is upon us! Let us embrace the experience that is coming and rejoice in it as though it were already here.