Baptism in the Holy Spirit (4 of 7)

Immersion into the person, and power and presence of the Holy Spirit, so it lives around you, and is on you, and flows freely from within you. The entrance into a supernatural living. Introduction

Foundational Principles, Hebrews 6:1. These are the principles that you can build a great life walking with God. This is the fourth in the series, we're doing the teaching on baptisms.

"Now leaving the discussion of the elementary principles or doctrines of Christ, let us go on to perfection or maturity, not laying again the foundation of: Repentance from Dead Works; and Faith Towards God; of the Doctrine of Baptisms; of Laying on of Hands; of Resurrection of the Dead; and of Eternal Judgement. And this we will do if God permits".

God wants us to go forward, to grow; not to remain static, but to grow. To grow forward requires two things: 1) that you have spiritual foundations strongly established in your life. The foundations of a building are unseen, but the whole building depends on the strength of the foundations. It would be unwise to build something on weak or incomplete foundations. 2) it requires that God permits us to go on.

So God requires: 1) that we embrace, and open our life, to the foundations being set in place; 2) that we walk with him.

So we've been sharing with you some of these teachings. The one we're on now is: Doctrine of Baptisms. The word doctrine means: 'the teaching' or 'instruction'. There are some experiences we can have, and there's a teaching related to them. The teaching and the experience form the foundation.

Main Message

In the Western culture people tend to think of teaching just as information; we don't relate it to life. From a biblical point of view, teaching and life went together. In other words: what you knew was what you were living out. So you notice it talks about the doctrine, or teaching, of baptisms (plural); there are more than one baptism referred to in the Bible, last week we saw a reference to four of them.

You are Baptised into Christ; so when we receive Jesus Christ as our saviour, the Holy Spirit comes into our life. We are born again. We become joined, and become one, or we become ‘in’ Jesus Christ. Not only that, we are put by that same spirit into a body of people. We become part of a church, a body of people called the body of Christ, God's family universal. We outwork our conviction of that belief, by committing to a local church, and being involved in it.

The next baptism we saw was a Baptism in Water. The teaching or the instruction behind that is that, when we came to Christ, we identified with Him, and received Him as our representative; then our old life, literally its power of sin, was broken.

The Bible says very clearly, the power of sin was broken when we came to Christ. You don't need to live in sin any more - and so our old nature died, and we have become in Jesus Christ a totally new person.So if someone dies, the natural thing to do is to bury them; so baptism in water is literally a public acknowledgement of an inward reality: my old life, living for myself, living independently has finished - it's out of sight. That old nature, that old life, lived under the power of sin, living as everyone else lived, has now ended; a new life has begun.

Water baptism is your testimony to the world, and to the spiritual powers, that old person died. There's a new person risen up, born again! He's a child of the living God! It's a great change - but that's not all! Now God wants to immerse us into a different life, and so we come to the Baptism in the Holy Ghost...

Baptism in the Holy Ghost - the word ‘baptise’ is to ‘dip into’ or ‘immerse you into something’; so baptism in the Holy Ghost is immersion into the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. The presence and power of the spirit of God lives around you, and is on you, and flows freely from within you. It is literally the entrance into a supernatural living.