I prayed the sinners prayer with them. "Woo! Now the Mass can go on!" I thought. It didn’t. Again they stared at me saying, "Now What?" I prayed, "Jesus, now what do You want me to do?" He brought Romans 10:9-10 to my mind,

"That if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved; for with the heart man believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation."

Then He said to me, "Give them an opportunity to share with everyone else they just received me." So I spoke up and said to them,

A few minutes went by and a girl about five people down from me stood up and said the following:

I thought to myself, "Oh! Please! don’t say that!" I could just see the egos of the Priests and Nuns getting stepped all over.

Then another person stood up and another. Pretty soon everyone in the whole room was standing up. People were looking around in amazement saying, "What is this? I have never felt the Lord’s presence like this before!" I thought to myself, "Ya, what is this? I have never experienced the Lord’s power like this before!" It was Charles Finney’s experience all over again, only now it was mine. The Baptism of the Holy Spirit was for real!

I couldn’t seem to do anything wrong that night. I felt my prayers would have raised the dead if I had had the opportunity. A man walked up to me and told me that he had received Jesus Christ two years earlier, but came up to me and said, "Jesus is the only way to God isn’t He? You can’t go through the saints or anyone else, only Jesus alone?" I told him yes that this was true. The Holy Spirit had quickened him to this fact.

When I got up the next morning the anointing was gone. I knew it was time to leave. I said my good byes and left.

Jesus wanted me to learn to wait on Him through worship and praise and in Spirit and truth to get the answers to those needs that I had in relation to Jesus, myself, and others; whether it was in relation to someone else’s need of salvation, healing, counseling needs, or my own personal needs or Evangelism. I now understood.

Does this mean that everyone who gets Baptized in the Holy Spirit will follow this pattern? To be honest with you I do not know, but it does seem to fit the pattern of Scripture. When Jesus was Baptized in water by John the Baptist, Matthew tells us,

"And after being baptized, Jesus went up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and He saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, coming upon Him; and behold, a voice out of the heavens, saying, ‘This is My Son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased’" (Matt 3:16-17).

First, there was evidence of submission to the Father’s will on Jesus’ part. He was water baptized by John according to the will of the Father for all His people. John said to Jesus, ". . . I have need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me?" (Matt 3:14). Jesus responded back to John, "‘Permit it at this time; for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then he permitted Him" (Matt 3:15).

When Jesus through physical action, water baptism, demonstrated total surrender to the Father’s will and purpose, the next thing that happened was that He was Baptized in the Holy Spirit.

Then what happened? In the first verse of Matthew Chapter four we read, "Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil." (Matt 4:1). Jesus first experience of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit was not a great show of emotion and power, but rather by the Holy Spirit instead He was thrown into a wilderness, a personal valley, to be tested and broken of His own self-initiative.

Jesus was God and would have never succumb to these temptations any way, but Jesus was our example. The writer of Hebrews states,

If there was to be any fruit or life in Jesus’ ministry, it had to rise out of the motivation and control of the Holy Spirit through his human spirit; otherwise it would only have been flesh.

Satan’s first temptation to Jesus in the wilderness was to try and get Jesus to do something out of His own initiative in the area of physical provision. Jesus answered and responded back to the Devil with a quote from the Old Testament, ". . . Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God." (Matt 4:4). Notice it says, ". . . Man shall not. . ." Their is total identification of Jesus’ humanity to man. Though Jesus was God, he was also a man, and God’s plan for man was for Him to be totally dependent on God for everything; not just in how and what to say in ministry, but in the basic provisions of life itself. Jesus states to Satan that man’s life is not in bread, but in the individual dictates of God to man through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The Apostle John records Jesus saying in John 6:27,

"Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man shall give to you, for on Him God the Father has set His seal."

In the second temptation, Satan tried to use Scripture to get Jesus to act out of His own initiative to establish His ministry and identify who He was to mankind. Jesus called it tempting God and then quoted another Old Testament passage of Scripture, "You shall not tempt the Lord your God." (Matt 4:7).

What Satan did not understand was that the Word of God is not his or man’s sword to swing at will, but Paul says it is the sword of the Holy Spirit. We read in the Epistle of Ephesians, "And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God." (Eph 6:17). We are to hide the Word of God in our hearts, but Jesus does not want us quoting Scripture in ministry unless we are led of the Holy Spirit to do so. This is because only Jesus knows what Scriptures apply in any one given situation. Jesus did not quote these passages of Scripture at Satan out of His own initiative but by the initiative of the Holy Spirit. Jesus tells us in the Gospel of John, "He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory; but He who is seeking the glory of the one who sent Him, He is true, and there is no unrighteousness in Him." (John 7:18).

Finally, Satan knew that Jesus had come not only to redeem man but to regain rulership over the kingdom of the earth by way of the cross. Satan offered Jesus a short cut, though, to by pass the way of suffering.²¹

What do we mean by suffering? We mean the discipline of Jesus in our lives through the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, to break down our self-initiative, and wait for Jesus’ counsel as to when we should move out in ministry and as to what we should preach in ministry. This is the way of meekness. Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." (Matt 5:5). Jesus knew the only way He was going to inherit the earth was through submission to the Father through the Holy Spirit’s dictates to His life as a man. Not only has Jesus regained rulership over the earth through the cross as a man, but He promises that those who submit to the rulership of the Holy Spirit over their lives will inherit the earth with Him.