Assured
The Spirit is an attending Spirit. He wants to be with us in a real way. Do you know the Spirit’s presence? Or are you not sure? Or are you faking it perhaps?
Faking the Spirit’s Presence
When I was lecturing in music production, we used online attendance lists or roll calls. The web-based teaching system allowed you to enrol the students into your class, and then for each class you could open the attendance list, and on our college computers, and click if you were absent or present. And the students used to try get around this! They would try get their friends to log in and sign in for them while they bunked class, because if you missed a certain number of classes you couldn’t graduate. Attendance was a part of the mark.
I think some people try to fake the Holy Spirit’s attendance! They try to pretend the Spirit is with them, when He isn’t!
I was speaking to a man the other day who spoke about the Pentecostal church he attends. And he said there are moments in the services where everyone is told to start speaking in tongues. And he said “people fake it! People start talking gibberish to try and prove that they have the Spirit and fit in.”
I have another friend who spoke about going forward in a church service to be prayed for to receive the Spirit, where everybody in the church was falling down, being ‘slain in the Spirit’. And he said as they prayed for him they pushed him and pushed him and pushed him until eventually, he faked it. He just said ‘enough!’ and lay down so that they would stop pushing him.
How strange that we would feel the need to fake the attendance of the Spirit around people we should be able to trust.
Not External Signs, But Internal Assurance
I don’t believe that the baptism of the Spirit results in the same external signs for everybody. Some speak in tongues… some don’t. Some fall over… some don’t. Some people laugh, some cry… Some get excited, some get calm…
If we stress that one of these external signs is the clear sign of the Spirit’s ‘attendance’, then people are gonna fake it.
Jesus simply said that the Spirit would be with them forever. That the Spirit would live within them and make his home within them. He would be ‘in attendance’ in our hearts, forever.
The great promise is not some external sign. The great promise is an internal reality of God’s literal dwelling with you. That’s worth far more than some external experience!
May the Spirit minister to you today – not by some external sign, but by the internal assurance that He is in you.
