Joy unspeakable
If you’re a Christian and you can read, you should read D. Martyn Lloyd Jones’ Joy Unspeakable. It presents his teaching on the baptism of the Holy Spirit, combining thrillingly the evidence of the Bible and the experiences of God’s people. Reading this, despite the archaic versions of the Bible he used, was such an exciting experience: it bears the marks of a man who has allowed God to shape his thinking rather than finding Scriptures that fit his preference. The result is wonderful hope for all who wish to know God better – you can! Reading this book will increase your thirst for God and educate you in how to seek Him.
I made many, many notes as I read through, here are some of the highlights.
On this baptism being a separate, experiential event to conversion…
You can be regenerate [i.e. a Christian] without being baptised with the Holy Spirit… The baptism with the Holy Spirit is always something clear and unmistakable, something which can be recognised by the person to whom it happens and by others who look on at this person.
On being certain that you’re saved…
It is a terrible thing, not only a wrong thing, to confuse saving faith with full assurance of faith… What the Holy Spirit does is make real to us the things which we have believed by faith, the things of which we have had but a kind of indirect certainty only. The Holy Spirit makes these things immediately real.
On how it is impossible to prescribe what baptism in the Spirit should be like…
All these variations [of how the Spirit comes to people in Acts] establish the lordship of our Lord Jesus Christ in this entire matter. It is He who is the giver, it is He who is the baptiser. He does so in His own way and in His own time, and we must never lose sight of this all-important principle.
But on what we should expect…
There is not always the noise but there is always the sense of glory, the sense of awe, of the majesty of God; a sense of power, an assurance of salvation. It always leads to greater joy, and always gives boldness to witness.
On why being filled with Spirit is more important than good training and good planning…
[Jesus tells the disciples, surely the best-trained men ever, to stay in Jerusalem until the Spirit fell on them, Acts 1:4] when you look at it like that, you see how utterly ridiculous it has been for the last hundred years for us to put all our emphasis upon academic teaching and learning, as if that is the thing that is most essential to make a preacher… Are you trusting the organising power of the church? Or are you trusting in the power of God to pour out His Spirit upon us again, to revive us, to baptise us anew and afresh with His most blessed Holy Spirit?
On waiting patiently to be filled…
We are a people who always desire some short cuts, some easy method, some kind of ‘package’ blessing. And that is one of the great differences between the Christian literature of this present century and of the Christian church up to about the middle of the last century. People would seek a blessing for years before they received it. But there was purpose in it all; God was dealing with them and leading them along a given path. You will never know the heights of the Christian life without effort.
On the superlative joy of being filled with the Spirit…
The only thing beyond the experience of the baptism with the Spirit is heaven itself.