Sweet surrender. But that wasn't the best part of the retreat...
Sunday Morning we heard a teaching on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I was determined not to bring any past religious experiences into the mix. For people who are filled with the Spirit and have received the gift of speaking in tongues, you will appreciate this next statement. If you go to a charismatic expression of the church, you are told to "stir yourself up in the Spirit by speaking in tongues". When we hear it like that, we tend that whether for personal edification or for speaking a tongue that is to be interpreted by men, "tongues" is a work of the Spirit. But when we are asked to speak in tongues, how many of us actually depend on the Holy Spirit to pray through us. Not me. I just start off speaking the "tongue" that I've always spoken. Sometimes I feel the Holy Spirit's impression but most of the time I'm on autopilot. Not good because I think that would fall under the category of "vain babblings" I'm pretty sure...because it's not doing anything in the heavenlies. Anyway...so I made sure that I wasn't going to do any vain babblings this time around. Either I was gonna get a fresh infilling of the Holy Spirit for real or I wasn't going to be speaking in tongues that day.
The Lord totally blew me away! Even before hands were laid on me, I felt the Holy Spirit inside of me stirring things up. It felt like something inside of me just moving. Not physically, but spiritually. And it just came up and I began to speak in other tongues. It was so real! The power of God completely took over. Now I have a new standard for speaking in tongues. It's either the Holy Ghost or nothing. It's His tongues of fire or nothing because I won't be offering up any strange fire.
To sum it all up, God exceeded my expectations this past weekend. It was really life changing! And I know that this was just the beginning of a supernatural walk with him...life on another level. Tonight, we are supposed to be linking up with people who have been in training and ready to engage us in some intense discipleship. I'm ready for it. This is what I've been teaching, this is what I've anticipating, this is it...finally.
Pray that I hear and obey the Spirit of God as I continue on this journey to becoming more like Him!
That is so real my brotha! I asked the Lord to show me the same thing some years back because I didn't want to "fake it to make it", or just do it to be excepted. When I left it all up to the Lord, He showed me how real this gift really was. I was just talking to a young disciple earlier this week about the difference between water baptism and being baptized in the Holy Spirit and Fire. I believe God wants His people to open up even more so in these end times so that He may continually fill us with His Spirit.
ReplyDeleteThat is awesome Jarrell. I too believe we ought to be careful with this gift as Paul warns us. For many years a church I attended misused this and therefore the perception was lost and it was abused.
ReplyDeleteMany don't realize that a translator should be present if it is spoken aloud because it is direct communication between us an the father.
I really like your blog. You have a fan. Iron sharpening Iron.
Thank You