Goodwin, Lloyd-Jones, & Piper Discuss The Baptism of The Holy Spirit….at the Woodshop

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.)

Such a Measure of Faith

As Thomas Goodwin, the great Puritan divine, lay dying with a fever, his son recounts the way he died. I relay this testimony because this is the way a man of God dies. The only way we know the metal or valor of a man’s faith and his devotion to Christ, is in the way he meets his death. This is a common thread that seems to run pretty consistently through all the Puritans. Another reason I love to read them. They simply had an all-consuming passion for Christ.

“In all the violence of [his fever], he discoursed with that strength of faith and assurance of Christ’s love, with that holy admiration of free grace, with that joy in believing, and such thanksgivings and praises, as he extremely moved and affected all that heard him…. He rejoiced in the thoughts that he was dying, and going to have a full and uninterrupted communion with God. ‘I am going,’ said he, ‘to the three Persons, with whom I have had communion: they have taken me; I did not take them…. I could not have imagined I should ever have had such a measure of faith in this hour…. Christ cannot love me better than he doth; I think I cannot love Christ better than I do; I am swallowed up in God….’ With this assurance of faith, and fullness of joy, his soul left this world” (Works, 2:lxxiv-lxxv)

(Quote taken from Meet The Puritans, page 273)

Goodwin’s own words, “I could not have imagined I should ever have had such a measure of faith in this hour.” This encourages me to not be concerned about death. For when it comes, I will be just as sustained by Christ as ever I have always been. Praise God that he keeps us!