Acts 1:4-8 “And being assembled together with them, He commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the Promise of the Father, "which," He said, "you have heard from Me; (5) for John truly baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now." … (8) But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”
The second encounter that believers have with the Holy Spirit is what our Lord Jesus, in the above quoted passage of scripture, called the baptism of the Holy Spirit. As we have already mentioned, the word baptize means to be fully immersed into. And so obviously, even though the Lord’s disciples already had the Holy Spirit residing on the inside of them by this time, for they had been born again on the first night Jesus appeared to them and breathed on them to receive the Holy Spirit (John 20:22), they had not yet been fully immersed into or baptized with the Holy Spirit. So why does the Lord want His disciples to be baptized with the Holy Spirit? He answers that question for us in the same passage, when He tells us that we receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon us.
Michael E.B. Maher
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