Holy Fire: A Balanced, Biblical Look at the Holy Spirit's Work in Our Lives

by R.T. Kendall

THE HOLY SPIRIT DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU. ARE YOU CHARISMATIC? He is bigger than your signs and wonders events. Are you Reformed? He will not be limited by your theology. The Lord Jesus said of the Holy Spirit, “He blows where he will.”

Having no fire is better than having wild fire. Having no fire is better than having strange fire. I also used to hear people say, “People will come out to see a fire,” as if crowds prove something. Crowds prove nothing.

Holy fire is what is needed. Holy fire is not the main thing; it is the only thing that matters.

Strange fire almost always shows up in any true revival or movement raised up by God. And yet I also know too much to allow the historic Pentecostal movement and the charismatic movement to be painted with one big brush—implying they are mostly characterized by strange fire—so that they can be so easily dismissed.

But more important than discerning the counterfeit is to be able to recognize the genuine presence of the Holy Spirit. It is far better to be able to discern the real than the counterfeit. And yet to the degree you are able to recognize and embrace what is real and true, to that degree will you be able to detect and reject what is spurious and false.

Satan will do everything he possibly can to lure you away from tasting the genuine power of the living God.

“The worst thing that can happen to a man is to succeed before he is ready.”

The phrase, “and so is also the Holy Ghost,” may seem to some as an incidental or a throwaway comment. But not to the Doctor.

First, Peter knew that the Holy Spirit could convict these Jews there on the spot—telling them they could be given repentance and forgiveness of sins. But there is more: God will give the Holy Spirit to those who obey Him!

Are all Christians baptized with the Holy Spirit? Objectively, yes. (See 1 Corinthians 12:13.) But do all Christians automatically experience the baptism with the Spirit as described by Luke in Acts?

Reformed people love his doctrine of election. They love his teaching of the sovereignty of God. They love his oratory and manner of exposition of the New Testament. But when it comes to the Doctor’s teaching of the immediate and direct witness of the Spirit, they all seem to go quiet.

baptism with the Holy Spirit is not an experience of sanctification, nor is it connected necessarily to speaking in tongues.

Such men are “so afraid of excesses,” he went on, so afraid of being labeled in a certain way that they claim the baptism of the Spirit to be “something unconscious, non-experiential, a happening that does not affect a man’s feelings. Such an argument is utterly unscriptural.

It was a conscious experience and something that follows saving faith.

As for those who have not experienced this—but eagerly want it—Dr. Lloyd-Jones had this to say (quoting Thomas Goodwin): “Sue him.” This word in the seventeenth century meant: Don’t give up. Hold God to His own Word. One should remind God of His own promise: Don’t give up “until you know you have the life of God in your soul,” Dr. Lloyd-Jones would say.