Dr. David Chotka
Acts 19:1-7
While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples 2 and asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”
They answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”
3 So Paul asked, “Then what baptism did you receive?”
“John’s baptism,” they replied.
4 Paul said, “John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.” 5 On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. 6 When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. 7 There were about twelve men in all.
Getting Started with God
It has been a long, long journey to unpack how the process of getting started with God is supposed to unfold. In fact, I have had many long conversations with others about this matter.
Sometimes the conversations were gentle inquiry, rooted in a genuine desire to know how best to grow in the gospel. Sometimes the conversation was more of an argument than anything else.
Then, one day, someone pointed out that Acts 19:1-7 contained helpful parameters in a compact text, delineating exactly how we should go about getting started with God.
That was a “sea-change” transformation, a defining moment in my life.
I remember the moment vividly.
I had been discipled by people from every branch of the Lord’s church. The Intervarsity group that helped me first grow in Christ included Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, Mennonites, Plymouth Brethren, Anglicans, Lutherans, Dutch Reform, and Roman Catholics. I first heard about the power of the gospel through an English Methodist, was discipled by a Salvation army officer, attended a Bible study with a Brethren elder, and belonged to a mainline congregation. (At this point, I had not met anyone from the C&MA).
All of them were well-meaning believers, dedicated to walking with God. All of them loved the Bible and did their best to love the people around them. All of them had different views of baptism, the salvation process, and the Spirit’s infilling. But they had in common a fervent love for God, fearless dedication to the Bible, and the clear conviction that repentance meant turning your back on any sin, or sin pattern.
The fellow who made Acts 19 clear to me was a lecturer at a seminary summer school course—someone who had journeyed through many different streams of the Lord’s church, just as I had (he had been a Methodist, then a Baptist, then an independent). He reflected on the text and said something very straightforward:
“There are four marks of conversion/initiation, not only here, but in each complete account of conversion in Acts. Each mark is a distinct event in its own right. Everyone needs to complete all four of these, just to get started. In fact, there are six places in the Acts that contain the same four marks.”
According to him, conversion involves the following four things:
- Repentance
- Belief in Jesus for the forgiveness of sins
- Being baptized in water to begin your walk
- Receiving the Holy Spirit in a separate distinct experience.
Now, the crowd listening to the speaker was as diverse as the throng that helped me get started. There were people who believed that infant baptism was foundational to their faith. Others believed that when you trusted Christ for salvation, you received the Spirit in that moment—that getting saved and receiving the Spirit were identical. There were still others in the room that held that the Spirit’s infilling always included speaking in tongues, while others sitting next to them believed that speaking in tongues was utterly unnecessary (and nothing more than made-up blathering).
All of us tuned in with great interest.
It was the question of the apostle Paul that captured our attention.
“Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” asked the apostle of these followers of John the Baptist.
Then the lecturer asked us to process whether Paul was speaking of one experience or two.
Silence filled the room as the class of 300 or so processed that question.
Suddenly I realized that the apostle was implying that “believing in Jesus” and “receiving the Holy Spirit” were separate, distinct events. The two things, (believing in Jesus, and receiving the Spirit) could happen at exactly the same moment, or they could happen at different times. Regardless, they were not the same event. This was Paul’s teaching. This meant it was Pauline theology, and apostolic doctrine.
After Paul asked that question, the hearers indicated that they didn’t have one clue about the existence of a Holy Spirit.
It is no wonder they didn’t. The words “holy” and “Spirit” show up together only twice in the entire Hebrew cannon (Psalm 51:10; Isaiah 63:10-11).
These twelve disciples of John had been immersed in water to turn away from sin, based upon the Baptizer’s clear teaching to do so. They understood baptism, immersing themselves in, and passing through water, as an act of repentance. They named their sins on one side of the stream and exited clean on the other side.
Paul didn’t wait to get them into the water. He didn’t wait until they were mature. He actually told them to get in the water immediately as their first act of obedience to the Lord.
Baptism was their first obedience, rather than an outcome of their learning or a reward for their maturity. Baptism was for the novice, the beginner, who barely understood the gospel. They obeyed Jesus’ command to being baptized into His salvation.
Then Paul took them a step further. They had repented, they had believed in Jesus, they were baptized, but they were not yet filled with the Holy Spirit. \So they underwent another action. They needed to be infilled and overflowing. And this was not a result of them being mature. It was required for them just to get started.
Paul gave each of them personal attention, to get their start with God established. He placed his hands on each of the twelve in turn, waiting for them to experience an infilling that was visible, tangible, felt and real.
I have a pet peeve about the phrase “Holy Spirit.” We say it quickly, and don’t ponder its clear meaning. A better rendering would be “the Spirit who brings holiness.”
The point is simple: We need to be immersed and overflowing with the deepest inner being of Jesus’ himself—his very own Spirit who infills us to energize us and produce a God-honoring life from the inside out.
These twelve all had some sort of dynamic encounter. In their cases, there were two distinct marks on them: they “spoke in tongues” and they “prophesied.” In other words, receiving the Spirit had evidence.
My own view is that receiving the Spirit includes many different kinds of evidence. An infilling of deep and abiding joy is one of those evidences. So is effusive praise. So is an immersion in tangible love, and/or tears of repentance. I could make the case that bold preaching in the face of opposition is also evidence of the Spirit’s infilling. Yet let’s not avoid the obvious: There was tangible evidence that convinced Paul these twelve were infilled by “the Spirit who brings holiness.”
They uttered words and phrases that were not their own, imparted by the power of the Spirit who brings holiness. Some of those words were in an unknown tongue. Some of those words had to do with declaring the goodness of God in their own ordinary language.
After the lecture, I examined all the fully narrated conversion accounts in Acts.
- The disciples at Pentecost (Acts 2)
- The Samaritan believers and Simon the sorcerer (Acts 8:1-24)
- The Ethiopian Eunuch (Acts 8:25-40: his infilling was joy)
- Saul of Tarsus’ conversion (Acts 9)
- The Household of Cornelius (Acts 10-11)
- The Ephesian disciples of John Baptizer (Acts 19:1-7)
All six events had the same four markers. This was a repeated pattern of conversion/initiation that was practiced and endorsed by the church. What affect might his have on our own understanding of conversion?
Questions for Reflection:
- Did you “receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” What was your beginning with God like?
- Do you baptize new believers immediately, or do you require training for them before bringing them to baptism?
- What evidence do you embrace as marks that the Spirit has infilled a new believer? Should we expect this each time someone comes to faith in Christ?
- What is the most important take-away from this devotion for you today?
Author Bio
Dr. David Chotka is the founder and director of SpiritEquip Ministries (www.spiritequip.com). He has served as the chair of Alliance Pray! Team (APT)—the national prayer equipping team of the Alliance Church in Canada—for more than twenty years. He is an author, conference speaker, director of a renewal society, a writer, and a prayer mobilizer.
David has served his Lord as a church planter, a solo pastor, an associate, and as a lead pastor of multi-staff churches in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Ontario. He has led seminars and conferences nationally and internationally, particularly to train people in various spiritual disciplines, including such topics as “How to Hear God’s Voice,” “Living out the Lord’s Prayer,” and “Healing Prayer.”
David lives in southwest Ontario, Canada, with his wife Elizabeth. Together they have two adult children. For fun, he plays the piano and allows his fourteen-pound dog to take him for a walk from time to time.
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Luke and Acts taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®
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