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  PRAISE FOR SIMPLY SPIRIT FILLED

  “Whether you’re curious about who the Holy Spirit is, just encountered Him for the first time, or are completely burned out on the subject, this book balances the more charismatic experiences of God with a thoughtful and thorough theology lesson, delivered from an honest and often humorous firsthand perspective. The Holy Spirit is the very manifestation of God in His people and this book will help the church encounter Him in a powerful new way.”

  —SAMUEL RODRIGUEZ, PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL HISPANIC CHRISTIAN LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE; TV HOST OF TBN’S THE LAMB’S AGENDA

  “Andrew Gabriel encourages readers to be discerning but also open to experiencing the Spirit. Gabriel writes with pastoral insight and personal experience while drawing on the depths of scholarship in a way that all Christians can benefit. I am pleased to recommend Simply Spirit-Filled to you.”

  —GEORGE O. WOOD, CHAIRMAN OF THE WORLD ASSEMBLIES OF GOD FELLOWSHIP

  “Andrew has a wonderful way of blending theology and application so that each reader will be more aware of the Holy Spirit in both the scriptures and daily living.”

  —SARAH BOWLING, COHOST OF THE TV SHOW TODAY WITH MARILYN AND SARAH

  “This marvelous book will help you make sense of how God by his Spirit works in our lives. Gabriel allows us to follow his life experience and walk with him as he touches base with the biblical text and helps us understand how the experiences of a Spirit encounter is what God has for us all. I’m so grateful for this book. It will bring clarity to confusion, and it will explain the legitimate life in the Spirit to those afraid of excess.”

  —BRIAN C. STILLER, GLOBAL AMBASSADOR, THE WORLD EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE

  “Andrew Gabriel presents a ‘skeptic/junkie’ dialectic concerning the presence and work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the twenty-first-century believer in a novel manner. He describes the synthesis of the polarities in terms of a refreshing spiritual maturity that engages the Spirit without abusing Him.”

  —JIM CANTELON, TV HOST OF JIM CANTELON TODAY

  “I appreciate Dr. Andrew Gabriel as a colleague who shares his insight and perspectives with wisdom, honesty, and a good sense of humor. In Simply Spirit-Filled Andrew brings wholeness, passion, and wisdom to a reader’s understanding of life in the Spirit. It is enhanced by being couched within the crucible of his own journey. There is a practicality and openness regarding the Spirit’s person and work that will contribute to both the experienced believer and to those who are seeking to understand life in the Spirit.”

  —DAVID WELLS, GENERAL SUPERINTENDENT OF THE PENTECOSTAL ASSEMBLIES OF CANADA

  “We have long needed a biblically rooted, pastorally sensitive, and theologically well-informed evaluation of ‘experiences of the Holy Spirit’ and Andrew Gabriel has provided precisely that. This book is clearly and concisely written and should prove immensely helpful to all believers, even those who remain unpersuaded by his arguments. I highly recommend it.”

  —SAM STORMS, LEAD PASTOR FOR PREACHING AND VISION AT BRIDGEWAY CHURCH, OKLAHOMA CITY, OK

  “In his new book Simply Spirit-Filled, Andrew Gabriel writes with focus and scriptural balance. This book will be an appreciated resource to the Pentecostal church.”

  —TIM HILL, GENERAL OVERSEER, CHURCH OF GOD, CLEVELAND, TN

  “Andrew Gabriel writes with depth and yet simplicity, here clearing away the brush that plagues the contemporary pentecostal-charismatic movement. All pentecostal and charismatic believers should read this book for a more informed yet relevantly and biblically vibrant Spirit-empowered life. All their friends who have been burned by high-voltage charismatic experience or hurt by pentecostal churches should read this book to see how the Holy Spirit can revitalize their spirits. All pastors across this movement in all its diversity should read this book so they can lead their congregations more effectively into the twenty-first century.”

  —AMOS YONG, DIRECTOR OF THE CENTER FOR MISSIOLOGICAL RESEARCH AND PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY AND MISSION, FULLER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

  © 2019 Andrew K. Gabriel

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  ISBN 978-0-7852-2362-7 (eBook)

  ISBN 978-0-7852-2361-0 (TP)

  Epub Edition December 2018 9780785223627

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018962472

  Printed in the United States of America

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  CONTENTS

  1. Confessions of a Recovering Spirit-Experience Junkie

  2. Shake and Bake

  3. Knock, Knock. Who’s There?

  4. Crazy Talk?

  5. Living Large

  6. Measuring Up?

  7. What Does It Mean to Be Spirit-Filled?

  Postscript: A Prayer

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  To Adelyn, Mylah, and Rayelle:

  May you seek to live each day filled with the Spirit.

  CHAPTER 1

  CONFESSIONS OF A RECOVERING SPIRIT-EXPERIENCE JUNKIE

  When I was eight, my family packed our boxes again and drove eighty miles to live near the Air Force Base in G
reenwood, a town with just enough farming and military families to support a small mall with a Walmart. We were always moving because of my father’s work, and so I grew up singing and praying in a number of different Baptist, Salvation Army, and primarily Pentecostal churches. Each church was unique in how they worshipped God, and each had distinct perspectives regarding what it meant to experience the Holy Spirit. The first time I remember having a real experience of the Holy Spirit was in Greenwood, in a modest Pentecostal church with brick and white siding and gravel in the parking lot. This is where the Spirit called me to put my faith in God.

  I may have experienced the Holy Spirit in a service at another church a couple of years earlier, when I was six or seven years old, but I question whether this was the case. I remember shuffling to the front of the sanctuary and up the stairs onto the stage where the pastor guided a number of nervous children to stand side by side in a line. He prayed for us, and we fell over. Of course, we knew we were supposed to fall because the pastor had asked our parents to stand behind us to catch us. I don’t recall much from this experience other than that I lay on the floor for a while and, the next day, when I played in my backyard with my neighbor, we stood one in front of the other on the grass and took turns catching each other as we fell backward. The fact that I remember anything about this experience, even though I was still quite young, makes me think I might have had an authentic encounter with God during the church service. At the same time, I wonder if I found myself on the floor solely as a result of charismatic manipulation.

  After living in Greenwood, my faith in God meant little to me until my teenage years. Then, becoming serious about my faith meant regularly praying and reading my Bible, but also that I wanted to have lots of experiences of God. I’ll describe some of these experiences in the coming chapters. Looking back, I’m not sure that all of them were legitimate. To some extent I just copied what other “Spirit-filled” people were doing. I watched people shake, so I shook. I heard people pray in tongues, and eventually I did as well. Following altar calls, during what we called the after service, that is, after the pastor preached and gave an invitation for people to gather at the front of the sanctuary and pray around the altar, I saw people laugh and dance, so I, too, laughed and danced. And I witnessed people stumble around as they claimed to be drunk in the Spirit, and sometimes I copied their stumbling.

  I did all this because I yearned to know God or, probably more, to experience God. And experiencing God was like getting a spiritual high—a feeling of elation and peace. Even though I would diligently sit in my pew during a church service and concentrate on the sermon, I would eagerly await the after service. When it finally came, I would race to the altar because that was the place I sensed the presence of God the strongest. Furthermore, every summer you could find me at church camp, where it seemed the exciting spiritual stuff happened and I could experience the Spirit even more! After all, at camp there were altar calls every night of the week. While I have no doubt that the Spirit was forming me in positive ways during my teenage years, you might say that I became a bit of a Spirit-experience junkie.

  The Junkie Turns Skeptic

  Somewhere during my four years of college, I lost a sense of enchantment regarding the Spirit. I learned to be more discerning, or, you might say, to think more critically. For the most part this was a good thing, and I’m grateful for my time at college. I certainly learned how to understand the Bible there, and I even had the privilege of studying for a year in Africa, where I worshipped amid the explosion of global Christianity, much of which is Pentecostal or Charismatic in nature. But gradually, by my senior year of college, I started to become skeptical regarding my past experiences of the Spirit. It wasn’t because of anything specific my professors taught me, but their encouragement to think about my faith did cause me to question the extent to which I was simply following the spiritual crowd.

  That growing skepticism was also in part an overreaction to the revivals taking place during those years in Florida and Toronto. Some of my friends who had traveled there told me some Christians there were barking like dogs as some sort of spiritual experience, while others lay on the floor groaning as though they were giving birth to a child. I balked at these behaviors, which just seemed weird to me, and I hesitated to engage in any spiritual experiences that were associated with those revivals. This included anything happening there that resembled my previous experiences, sometimes even something as simple as raising my hands in worship.

  After I graduated from college I got married, and we moved to a midsized city on the shore of one of the Great Lakes. There, in seminary, my skepticism reached its peak. As I continued to study, I questioned even more than just experiences of the Spirit. While I had caring and thoughtful pastors, for a while I had a hard time listening to their sermons because I could always find something to disagree with. And I wasn’t so quick to respond to altar calls.

  From Skepticism to Recovery

  It wasn’t as if all my studying caused me to lose my faith in God, though. In fact, it saved me. Reading theology was like reading devotional literature, and it deepened both my prayer life and my worship, helping me to recover from my skepticism. Over time I learned to relax more in church, to have a greater appreciation for the sermons I listened to, and to be less cynical about the experiences of the Spirit the people around me were claiming to have.

  During these years of study, Krista (my wife), our girls, and I attended a large, multi-staffed church where the presence of the Spirit was evident in many ways. While I don’t doubt that some things that happened at the church were more human-inspired than Spirit-inspired, both the pastors and the members of the congregation were outstanding examples of what it means to live a Spirit-filled life—they were passionate in their worship of God, they engaged in all the gifts of the Spirit on a regular basis, they prayed for and cared for one another, and they served communities around them and around the globe. During my time at that church, I slowly became more open to experiencing the Spirit in dramatic ways again. To some extent, my sense of enchantment regarding the Spirit returned, though now it coexisted with thoughtful discernment.

  After completing my PhD, I moved to serve in the Midwest. Churches here on the prairies are not as vibrant as many churches where I have worshipped in the past. Yet, even though people here clap less during worship and aren’t likely to shout “Amen!” when the preacher says something they like, I have still found the Spirit at work, though perhaps more quietly than I was used to. Thankfully, by now I have recovered from both my time as a Spirit-experience junkie and my time as a skeptic. As a result, I can appreciate that the Spirit works in and through believers in a variety of ways, some of which are less visible than others.

  My Heart

  I’ve met many people with stories similar to mine—people who were once open to having intense experiences of the Spirit, experiences that might affect their emotions and even their bodies, but who were turned off by some seemingly strange people they witnessed in a worship service or even some strange experiences they may have had themselves. Some have watched people try to manipulate others under the guise of the spiritual gifts. Others have seen people fake an experience of the Spirit. Some have been discouraged by seeing too many pastors or evangelists, who were supposedly anointed by the Spirit, betray others’ trust with terrible moral failures. Such experiences could make anyone want to stay away from anything that has to do with the Holy Spirit.

  I’ve met many other people who have never been open to experiencing the Holy Spirit in any perceptible manner. Usually they are from churches where the Spirit is never discussed, or, if the Spirit is mentioned, it is usually in a negative way. They are warned, “Be careful of people who talk too much about the Holy Spirit,” as though the Spirit were like poison or a hot stove. “Don’t get too close! Don’t touch!”

  The Holy Spirit is not hazardous. Jesus was anointed by the Spirit, and we all love Jesus (Acts 10:38). And if you are a Christian, you can
’t escape the Holy Spirit anyway, because the Spirit dwells within you, making you “a temple of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19 NASB). If it wasn’t for the Holy Spirit living in us, God might seem only far off in heaven or in the distant past doing miracles in Galilee. Thankfully, “this is how we know that [God] lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us” (1 John 3:24).

  The Holy Spirit is like the wind. In fact, the Hebrew and Greek words for Spirit (the languages the Bible was originally written in) both mean “wind.” And like the wind, the Spirit is mysterious. It is free and unpredictable and shapes its surroundings (John 3:8). Sometimes the wind gusts powerfully like a hurricane, whereas at other times it blows gently and we are not conscious of its stirring. Some Christians only look for the Spirit in the storm—in the spectacular and dramatic. By contrast, others assume the Spirit is only ever a calm breeze. We should not deny that the wind of the Spirit blows both powerfully and gently.

  My hope for the skeptic is that you will be open to experiencing the Holy Spirit, who is the touch of God, as more than just idly dwelling within you, and that you would sense the Spirit like “a spring of water welling up” within (John 4:14). My hope for the Spirit-experience junkie is that you will be discerning and realize that we experience the Spirit for more than just selfish reasons, like to enjoy a psychedelic buzz during worship. My hope for everyone is that you would “not quench the Spirit . . . but test everything; hold fast to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:19, 21 NRSV). Open, but not gullible. Discerning, but not cynical. Engaging, but not fanatical. My hope is that you would be simply Spirit-filled.

  Father, for those of us who have been skeptical or feared the Holy Spirit, please open our hearts to the authentic work of the Spirit. For those of us who have not followed your direction to test everything, help us be more discerning. Blow like the wind, Holy Spirit, in our lives.