Keep in Step with the Spirit: Finding Fullness in our Walk With God

by J.I. Packer

Against the Pentecostal-charismatic thesis that the reception of the Spirit by the apostles at Pentecost after prayer, with glossolalia, as a second stage of their Christian experience, is presented in Acts as a revealed norm for all subsequent believers, it must therefore be said: (1) This is nowhere stated or implied in Acts itself. (2) It is consistent: If speaking in tongues is part of the universal pattern, why not hearing a roaring wind? (3) In the other recorded instances of the Spirit and tongues being bestowed together (Samaritans probably, 8:18; Cornelius’s group and the Ephesians definitely, 10:46; 19:6) these gifts came through apostles to folk not seeking, praying, or “tarrying” for them. (4) In all four cases the manifestation of the Spirit came to whole groups, not just to seeking individuals within those groups, to the exclusion of nonseekers. (5) Acts 4:8, 31; 6:3, 5; 7:55; 9:17; 11:24; 13:9, 52 speaks of persons being filled with, or full of, the Spirit, with no reference, explicit or implicit, to tongues. But if being Spirit-filled without glossolalia was the lot of some, then, it may be God’s path for some now. (6) From the way he tells the story, Luke seems to have understood his four cases of “Pentecostal” manifestations as God’s testimony to having accepted on equal footing in the new society four classes of folk whose coequality here might otherwise have been doubted—Jews, Samaritans, Gentiles, and disciples of John. Whether any more such manifestat...