The Third Baptism

The book of Acts presents a lot of stories of the intervention of the power of the Holy Spirit - KABOOM - right in the midst of a meeting or a talk or even a stoning.  The result; lives are changed, the gifts of the Spirit are manifested, people are encouraged, healed or delivered from evil spirits.  I can personally witness to this power in my life and in the lives of those I know.  He is after all the same Holy Spirit as He was two thousand years ago.

But the problem for me and for us, as it was even from the early days of the church, is that man wants to create a box to put the Holy Spirit into.  The Spirit shakes things up.  He messes things up.  Maybe He even will blow things up.  We might say yea, go for it, but in practice we want to be in control.  So we have our wise traditions and our sacraments, dolling out the Spirit in small doses or in theory while patting ourselves on the back for presenting the full gospel.

You might be surprised that St. Paul did not teach the 1st century Corinthian church to stifle the demonstration of the Holy Spirit.  He was not designing a template which all future churches should use to fit the Holy Spirit into.  Instead he advised them to order their meetings with love and maturity.  Since that requires that leadership actually have spiritual gifts such as discernment and because it always takes work to help the immature grow and to keep the enemy who wants to disturb things at bay the fall back position is to regulate.   We can train anyone to regulate.  The result has been for the most part that the Power and the Presence fade away.

Thus it is difficult to talk about the move of God as a baptism without us picturing something like a ritual happening in a church or a church directed setting.  Here I want you to think about baptism in the sense of us being immersed or entering into a new type of relationship with with God.

In the 19th chapter of Acts there is a story that talks about three different types of baptisms.  The Holy Spirit is present and active in each.  The first is a baptism of repentance and should lead to the second.  The second is surrender to the presence and lordship of Jesus and should produce the third.  The third is a release of the power of the Holy Spirit in one's life and should be the normal result of the first and second.  If we get stuck on the idea of three separate ceremonies or two distinct sacraments we will completely miss how the Holy Spirit was moving.

Let's go back to the 18th chapter of Acts to start our story.  The apostle Paul arrives in Corinth and hooks up with Aquila and Priscilla.  They are tent makers just like Paul and because he needs to work and preach at the same time he stays with them.  During this period he teaches them about Jesus and the working of the Holy Spirit.  Later on he brings them with him on a missionary trip that eventually arrives in Ephesus.  Paul moves on but Aquila and Priscilla stay and start a church that meets at their house.

Eventually a Jewish man by the name of Apollos comes to town - "an eloquent man . . . he was mighty in the Scriptures.  This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord;  and being fervent in spirit, he was speaking and teaching accurately the things concerning Jesus, being acquainted only with the baptism of John;"   He begins to speak out boldly in the synagogue, Priscilla and Aquila hear him, take him aside and "explain to him the way of God more accurately."

What was "the baptism of John"?  We remember from the gospels that at the very beginning of His ministry Jesus went into the waters of the Jordan to be baptized by his cousin John whose ministry preceded that of Jesus and which ultimately looked forward to Him.  The Jewish people went into the waters to repent for their sins and their sinfulness.  This was something quite new because their culture and traditions required that a Jewish person go to the temple in Jerusalem to present gifts and to offer sacrifices to repent for sins.

The problem is that religious traditions like this almost always end up circumventing the heart and become in a person's mind a payment that we make to God to try and settle a debt.  The holiness of the Father demands something totally different than us making restitution.  As the words of the old song go;  "I owed a debt I could not pay.  He paid a debt He did not owe."  The purpose of presenting a sacrifice at the temple was designed by God not as a payment but rather to demonstrate the results of sin.  Yes, God required a blood sacrifice but when Old Testament Scripture says many times that God takes no delight in the blood of goats and lambs it is because the blood of innocent lives was shed instead of ours to show us how horrible sin and rebellion is.  A religious act by itself does not change anything.  It is the desire of the heart that goes with it that the Holy Spirit works with.

True repentance is needed to approach the Father.  To prepare the nation for the ministry of Jesus the Holy Spirit moved even from before his birth in the life and ministry of John who becomes recognized by the Jewish people as a prophet of God.  It is the Holy Spirit who changes the focus of the people from the mostly corrupt religious center in Jerusalem to the prophet John in the wilderness.  Going to the wilderness brings them back to the place where God first gave the Jewish people the tabernacle and the presence of God in the Holy of Holies.  In this setting, apart from religious traditions, the people are now free to approach God to repent with an open heart.

Apollos understood the need for repentance to approach the Father and the witness of Scripture that pointed to Jesus as redeemer, One who by the shedding of His blood on the cross could reconcile man with the Father.  But he apparently did not yet understand that there was something much more available to man than the Old Testament idea of repentance and forgiveness.  Now the very spirit of man could be reborn.  Jesus could enter into our hearts and change who we are in Him and our spirits could be a temple where the Holy Spirit could reside.  Now the Holy Spirit, sent by Jesus at Pentecost and available to all believers, could move through our soul to minister to our needs and to the needs of the community around us.

We get then to Acts chapter 19.  Apollos has left Ephesus to preach and Paul eventually makes it back there, finding some disciples.  

He said to them, "did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?"  And they said to him, "No, we have not even heard whether there is a Holy Spirit."  And he said;  "Into what then were you baptized?"  And they said, "Into John's baptism."  Paul said, "John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in Him who was coming after him, that is Jesus."

These were people who were baptized by Apollos into a baptism of repentance but must have been called "disciples" because they believed that Jesus was God who had died and rose from the dead for them.  Paul however does not notice any obvious signs that the outflow of the Holy Spirit is evident in their lives and his experience has been that the normal course of events is to see the outflow of the Spirit in a believer's life, including the manifestation of spiritual gifts.

Paul then baptized these disciples in the name of Jesus  And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they began speaking in tongues and prophesying."   Tongues and prophesying is what Paul expected and that is what he got.

It is not the water.  It is not the oil.  It is not the laying on of hands or the slap on the cheek.  It is not Apollos.  It is not Paul.  It is not the words that are said or the day they are spoken.  These are all good things and important because they represent eternal truth and must be taken seriously.

The Holy Spirit shows us the need for repentance and draws us to Jesus.  He brings the Spirit of Christ into our hearts to change us and make us a new creation.  He then resides in our hearts, working through our souls to reveal the Father's will to us.  Our baptism into Jesus should then result in an outflow of the Holy Spirit into all areas of our soul.  Spiritual gifts should be the result of our relationship with Jesus.  Because this is not the case in much of the Church today some even deny that the gifts of the Holy Spirit are needed now.  Isn't tradition wonderful?

The third baptism, the release of the working of the Holy Spirit in our souls, should be the result of our baptism into Jesus.  It happened for me when I first believed, alone in the living room of my apartment, allowing me to praise God right then in an unknown tongue.  It can happen to you now without any ceremony.  Get alone, ask Him for a release of the Holy Spirit in your life, sing to Him in the shower in English, surrender your tongue to the language He gives you.  Take time to listen to His direction in your heart.  

We become new creations in Jesus but the Father has even more for you.  He wants you to surrender your worries and your needs, your desires and your plans, your memories and your talents, your tongue and your control to the move of the Holy Spirit in your life.  Is this scary?  Yes.  Is God good and does He know your personality and does He have a plan for your life that is better and greater than your fears?  YES!  YES!  YES!