Being Filled With The Holy Spirit - For Spirit-Filled Praise Unto Him

About thirty five years ago, I was in a John Wimber meeting in Minneapolis.

At the end of the meeting John told the congregation that the Lord wants to fill some of us with his Holy Spirit.

So I stood there with my hands high in the air and I was actively praising God.

I had my hands raised and I was offering up the fruit of my lips which is praise and thanks unto Him.

When I thought about what might happen I thought maybe I would break out in tongues, but I held onto no fixed formula since it was HE who would be the one who would orchestrate what would happen, and I had no idea if I would be one of the chosen ones to receive this filling of the Holy Spirit. After all, John, under the intuition and guidance of the Holy Spirit, said that SOME of us would be filled with the Holy Spirit.

All of a sudden, as I was in the midst of worship and praise, I was filled with a tremendous joy and a huge smile came across my face spontaneously. By the way, The Book of Hebrews 1:9 speaks of the anointing with the oil of Joy. This is a sign that it was the Holy Spirit who did something special in me that day.

Then SPONTANEOUSLY I started breathing in and I started breathing out, and I breathed in and breathed out, and in and out, and I checked myself analytically to come to a conclusion if I was the one who was doing this breathing in and breathing out or not, and I came to a quick assurance in my mind that it was happening spontaneously and I was not the one who was doing it. As I was breathing in, I could feel the Breath of God ( The Holy Spirit ) going inside of me. This Breath of God entering me, in a sense, was the second sign of being filled with the Holy Spirit, also called the Ruach Ha Kodesh, which is Holy Spirit in the Hebrew language. In John 20:22 Jesus "breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit."

I tried to speak in tongues during this experience because in the Book of Acts people spoke in other tongues when the fire of God came upon them, but I realized I was the one who was doing the speaking and it was not a part of the experience, so I stopped speaking in tongues under my own power, and I just let God orchestrate the infilling of the Holy Spirit experience in his own sovereign way as He had done from the very beginning to the very end of this wonderful encounter with HIM.

When I compared the account of Pentecost and the Asuza Street revival I saw that tongues happened spontaneously and no one was trying to prime the Holy Spirit language pump by saying Pepsi Cola backwards or anything like that. The tongues happened spontaneously in the Book of Acts and they happened spontaneously in the Azusa Street Revival also (1906 - 1909).

The Lord chose to fill me this time without the spontaneous manifestation of speaking in tongues. I, instead, had the sign of receiving the BREATH of GOD, and GOD'S POWER and HIS JOY. These are signs of being filled with God's presence. Didn't Jesus say to his disciples that they would receive power after the Holy Ghost comes upon them?  Joy is also called a fruit of the Holy Spirit and is also given by the anointing of the Holy Spirit. Jesus breathed on his disciples and they received the Holy Spirit as I already stated in a paragraph above.  I got all of these SIGNS spontaneously that day.

Now, getting back to my experience at the John Wimber meeting..... Only a few moments after I started breathing in and out and in and out, tremendous power started to spontaneously course through my whole body. It felt like 100 volts of electricity was surging through my arms and legs. It seemed that my whole body had this strong current of God's electrical power coursing through it.

The more I praised the Lord with my arms raised, as this experience was unfolding, the stronger the power got. I REPEAT: THE MORE I ACTIVELY PRAISED THE LORD THE STRONGER THE POWER GOT. I felt my knees start to buckle and I thought that even if I fall down in a heap because of the power it would be worth it all because it was God in me and I was in HIM. In the Book of Acts 1:8a Jesus said: But you will receive POWER when the Holy Spirit comes on you.....  WOW, did I ever receive power when the Holy Spirit came upon me and went into me that special day in my life.

But then after some minutes of this glorious encounter with the MOST HIGH, the power started to subside and it lessened until the last remnant of power was left on my hands and that subsided also.

So, even though I did not receive the sign of speaking in tongues that day, I did receive three other signs that this encounter was WITH the Holy Spirit: One was JOY, another was the BREATH of GOD going into me, and the other sign was GOD'S POWER coursing through my whole body. All three signs can be enlightened with Scripture as I have done in the text above.

What a glorious encounter with God!!!