“Now suppose one of you fathers is asked by his son for a fish; he will not give him a snake instead of a fish, will he? Or if he is asked for an egg, he will not give him a scorpion, will he? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” (Luke 11:11-13)
First, in the actual passages where the baptism in the Holy Spirit is described, there is no direct mention of emotion. Never once is any form of emotion depicted either as the evidence, or as the direct consequence, of having received the Holy Spirit.
Any person who equates receiving the Holy Spirit with an emotional experience has no scriptural basis for his doctrine. This usually surprises the average religious person who does not base his opinions directly on the New Testament.
In fact, sometimes believers seeking the Holy Spirit receive a clear, scriptural experience of speaking with other tongues and yet afterward are unconvinced and dissatisfied with their experience simply because there was no intense emotion, as they had wrongly been led to expect.
We may illustrate this by the example of a little boy who asks his parents for a spaniel puppy as a birthday present. When the present arrives, it is a beautiful golden cocker spaniel puppy, exhibiting all the marks of a pedigree spaniel of its class.
Nevertheless, to the parents’ dismay, the little boy is obviously far from satisfied with the gift. When his parents ask why, they discover that all the little fellow’s friends have been telling him for weeks that all spaniels are black, and therefore he has formed in advance a strong expectation that his puppy will be black.
No matter how beautiful the golden puppy may be, it now cannot satisfy him, simply because it fails to live up to his expectation of being black. Yet his opinion that all spaniels are black has no basis in fact but has been formed merely by listening to the opinions of friends his own age who know no more about spaniels than he does.
So it is sometimes with Christians who ask their heavenly Father for the gift of the Holy Spirit. In answer to their prayer they receive an experience of speaking with other tongues, which is in perfect accord with the examples and teaching of the New Testament.
Yet they are not satisfied with this scriptural answer to their prayers simply because it was not marked by any intense emotional experience. They fail to realise that their anticipation of some intense emotion was based on the ill-considered opinions of misguided fellow Christians, not on the clear teaching of the New Testament.
Father, teach me to live on the basis of Your Word and not on the basis of human opinions or my own thoughts. Thank You for the richness of Your Holy Spirit and everything You want to give me through him. Amen.
