From John Piper’s biographical sketch on Lloyd-Jones.
The baptism of the Spirit is a new fresh manifestation of God to the soul. You have an overwhelming knowledge given to you of God’s love to you in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ … This is the greatest and most essential characteristic of the baptism with the Spirit. It is experiential. It is undeniable. There is an immediacy that goes beyond ordinary experience. It fills with overwhelming joy. It turns advocates of Christ into witnesses of what they have seen and heard.
He illustrates the difference between steady-state, customary Christian experience and the experience of baptism with the Spirit by telling a story from Thomas Goodwin.
A man and his little child [are] walking down the road and they are walking hand in hand, and the child knows that he is the child of his father, and he knows that his father loves him, and he rejoices in that, and he is happy in it. There is no uncertainty about it all, but suddenly the father, moved by some impulse, takes hold of the child and picks him up, fondles him in his arms, kisses him, embraces him, showers his love upon him, and then he puts him down again and they go on walking together.
That is it! The child knew before that his father loved him, and he knew that he was his child. But oh! the loving embrace, this extra outpouring of love, this unusual manifestation of it—that is the kind of thing. The Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of God”.
When Jesus baptizes a person with the Holy Spirit, Lloyd-Jones says, the person is “carried not only from doubt to belief but to certainty, to awareness of the presence and the glory of God.”
(Listen or read this message in its entirety here.)
newspapers? Why do you do it? Why is it essential that you read right through these reports? What is your interest? It is not a legal interest, is it? or a social one? What is it? There is only one answer: you are enjoying it. You would not dream of doing these things yourself, but you are doing them by proxy. You are sinning in your heart and mind and in your imagination, and you are therefore guilty of adultery. That is what Christ says. How subtle this awful, terrible thing is! How often do men sin by reading novels and biographies. You read the reviews of a book and find that it contains something about a man’s misconduct or behavior, and you buy it. We pretend we have a general philosophical interest in life, and that we are sociologists reading out of pure interest. No, no; it is because we love the thing; we like it. It is sin in the heart; sin in the mind!
