A.J. Gordon was Baptized in the Holy Spirit

A.J. Gordon was Founder of Gordon College and Gordon-Conwell Seminary

One summer at a Northfield conference, Dr. Gordon with Dwight L. Moody spoke to a group of college students at a consecration service. In a letter to Mrs. Gordon he wrote: “The questions which they asked about the work of the Holy Spirit are the hardest I have to answer. Questions of experience are so much more difficult than questions of doctrine. For while ‘the testimony of the Lord is sure’ the testimony of consciousness is variable, like the impression on the sea beach, which the next wave may change. So after Mr. Moody had given his experience of the baptism of the Spirit because the students called for it, I confessed to much shrinking and reluctance when they made the same demand of me. The boys would have all that could be known, both of doctrine and experience. A hungrier crowd one rarely finds; may the Lord give us more and more to tell…”

“There came a one day a still voice of admonition, saying, There stander one among you whom ye know not. And perhaps I answered, “Who is he, Lord, that I might know him?’ I had known the Holy Ghost as a heavenly influence to be invoked, but somehow I had not grasped the truth that he is a Person of the Godhead who came down to earth at a definite time and who has been in the church ever since, just as really as Jesus was here during the thirty and three years of his earthly life…”

With lightening heart came the climax: “…how many true Christians toil. on, bearing burdens and assuming responsibilities far too great for their natural strength, utterly forgetful that the mighty Burden-bearer of the world is with them to do for them and through them that which they have undertaken to accomplish alone! Happy also for these if some weary day the blessed Paraclete, the invisible Christ, shall say to them, Have I been so long time with you and yet hast thou not known me? So it happened to the writer. The strong Son of God revealed himself as being evermore in his church, and I knew him, not through a sudden burst of revelation, not through some thrilling experience of instantaneous sanctification, but by a quiet, sure, and steady discovery, increasing unto more and more. Jesus in the Spirit stood with me in a kind of spiritual epiphany and just as definitely and irrevocably as I once took Christ crucified as my sincerer I now took the Holy Spirit for my burden-bearer.”

“So on the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit, as the comforter, Advocate, Helper, and Teacher and Guide, was given to the church. The disciples who before had been regenerated by the Spirit, as is commonly held, now received the Holy Ghost to qualify and empower them for service. It was another and higher experience than that which they had hitherto known. It is the difference between the Holy Spirit for renewal and the Holy Spirit for ministry. Even Jesus, begotten by the Holy Ghost and therefore called ‘the son of God,’ did not enter upon his public service till he had been ‘anointed,’ or ‘sealed,’ with that same Spirit through whom he had been begotten. So of his immediate apostles; so of Paul, who had been converted on the way to Damascus. So of the others mentioned in the Acts, as the Samaritan Christians and the Ephesian disciples (10:1-8). And not a few thoughtful students of Scripture maintain that the same order still holds good; that there is such a thing as receiving the Holy Ghost in order to qualify for service. It is not denied that many may have this blessing in immediate connection with their conversion, from which it need not necessarily be separated. Only let it be marked that as the giving of the Spirit by the Father is plainly spoken of, so distinctly is the receiving of the Spirit on the part of the disciples constantly named in Scripture…

“God forbid,” said Gordon, “that we should lay claim to any higher attainment than the humblest. We are simply trying to answer, as best we may from Scripture, the question asked above about the baptism of the Holy Ghost. On the whole, and after prolonged study of the Scripture, we cannot resist this conviction: As Christ, the second person of the Godhead, came to earth to make atonement for sin and to give eternal life, and as sinners must receive him by faith in order to have forgiveness and sonship, so the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Godhead, came to the earth to communicate the ‘power from on high;’ and we must as believers in like manner receive humbly faith in order to be qualified for service. Both gifts have been bestowed, but it is not what we have but what we know that we have by a conscious appropriating faith, which determines our spiritual wealth. Why then should we be satisfied with the ‘forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace’ (Ephesians 1:7), when the Lord would grant us also ‘according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man’? (Ephesians 3:16).”

“It costs much,” said Dr. Gordon in one of these convention addresses, “to obtain this power. It costs self-surrender and humiliation and the yielding up of our most precious things to God. It costs the perseverance of long waiting and the faith of strong trust. But when we are really in that power, we shall find this difference: that, whereas before it was hard for us to do the easiest things, now it is easy for us to do the hardest.”

~ Excerpts from They Found the Secret