Simply Spirit-Filled Read online

  Questions for Reflection or Discussion

  1.Do you think you have leaned more toward being a Spirit-experience junkie or toward being a skeptic of experiences of the Spirit?

  2.What are some ways you have experienced the Holy Spirit?

  3.What is the most intense experience of the Spirit you have had?

  4.Do you equally value the ways the Spirit blows like a strong wind and like a calm breeze?

  5.What does it mean to be open to having authentic experiences of the Spirit?

  CHAPTER 2

  SHAKE AND BAKE

  Slain in the Spirit and Other Manifestations

  The steel concave walls made the sanctuary, or tabernacle, as we called it, look more like a steel barn than a church. About a dozen campers remained in the evening worship service, praying and singing the slow worship choruses as the band played their guitars and keyboard onstage. Below the stage, I lay flat on my back on the cold concrete floor. I opened my eyes and saw the green plastic underside of a chair. Later my roommate would tell me that when I fell back my head smacked the chair and then cracked on the floor. Yet I had no sense of this or any pain as I lay there, and there would be no negative after-effects.

  My experience that night was what many people call being “slain in the Spirit.” Some people also refer to this as “falling under the power” of God or “resting in the Spirit.” The idea is that, while people are worshipping, the Holy Spirit might “slay” them by making them fall over as if dead. Of course, if you have ever been in a church service where you have seen this happen, you will know as well as I do that many people who fall over are not knocked over by the Holy Spirit; they are pushed over by a preacher.

  Slain in the Spirit

  But no one pushed me over when I fell under that chair at church camp. On previous occasions I had been prayed for and had people catch me when I fell over. But this time was different. I wanted to know if the experience of being slain in the Spirit was legitimate. Perhaps I was a bit naive; I was still in my teens. If I had resolved to test the experience of being slain in the Spirit later in life, I’m sure I would have gone about it differently. But that night, as I stood there worshipping with my hands raised, I began to feel myself sway like a tree that was being cut down. This is what usually happened before I was slain in the Spirit. I suspect this was more my own doing than that of the Holy Spirit. After all, I eagerly desired to have “more of God,” as the preachers put it, and this especially included feeling or sensing God more—what some people describe as mystical experiences of God. But as I swayed, I knew that this time there was no hand behind my back to catch me. The time had come for the test.

  So I let myself fall. Did I mention that the floor was concrete? The camp had apparently stopped believing in having sawdust on the floor at the altar, as some earlier generations did. Still, I didn’t feel my head hitting the floor or the chair. I have heard stories of other people falling down while worshipping and without experiencing pain as well.

  Shaking and Baking

  Being slain in the Spirit is only one of the controversial so-called manifestations of the Spirit. Another one would be shaking. I myself have shaken to some extent. Usually it was just one arm or one leg at a time. I have also seen some people shake quite violently, so much that you might wonder if they were demon possessed or having a seizure.

  I jokingly describe the trembling as the shake and the lying there “under the power” as the bake. I myself have experienced both. During the numerous times I have lain on the floor “baking,” I have remained conscious of myself and those worshipping around me. Sometimes I have also prayed, sometimes I have prayed in tongues, and sometimes I have sung, but I think the majority of the time I just lay there relaxing and soaking in the presence of God. And while I have absolutely no doubt that I encountered God in those moments, I do want to question whether the shaking and falling were actually from God.

  Are the Experiences Caused by the Spirit?

  I really did meet with God the night I fell and cracked my head on the concrete floor, but maybe it was not the Holy Spirit who made me fall down. Maybe I fell down because I wanted to. But what about the fact that I didn’t end up with a concussion or bump on my head after it hit the floor? Perhaps that was God being gracious to me in my naiveté. God knew my faith was sincere, even though I was possibly putting God to the test. Instead of healing me after the fact, maybe the Lord was gracious enough to keep me from injuring myself in the first place. This is certainly possible. But even if God miraculously saved me from injury, my falling does not require us to conclude that the Holy Spirit knocked me over.

  And what about those experiences when I shook? My shaking does not require any supernatural explanation either. I had seen other people do it. I probably came to the conclusion that that was what a person was to expect when they experienced the Holy Spirit during a church service. So, again, I ask the question: what are we to make of all this trembling and falling?

  The Loopy and Weird Test

  One could immediately reject experiences of falling or shaking as just plain weird. I hear some people dismiss certain teachings or experiences simply because they sound loopy. The problem with this approach, however, is that we usually make such conclusions only when it concerns an experience we are not used to; yet, others may be very used to it. Nevertheless, many people have made similar conclusions regarding speaking in tongues. In fact, numerous times throughout Christian history, church leaders have accused people who spoke in tongues of being demon possessed. If the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement had not grown to the extent it has today, speaking in tongues would still seem weird—it remains so for some people—and many people would continue to dismiss the experience of speaking in tongues as a result. So I do not think it is wise to dismiss trembling or falling under the power of the Spirit just because it seems strange.

  A First Look at Scripture

  Unlike my own testing of God in my youth, a better way for us to test the idea of trembling or being slain in the Spirit is to consider the Scripture. This might seem like a dead end, perhaps a dead end that settles the question. After all, the phrases “slain in the Spirit” and “falling under the power” never occur in the Scripture. By contrast, references to “speaking in tongues” do appear a number of times. In spite of the missing phrases, however, some people do claim to find examples of people being slain in the Spirit in the Bible.

  When I went looking, I found that one of the most common verses people refer to in support of being slain in the Spirit comes from the night Jesus was arrested. Some soldiers and officials approached Jesus to arrest him. When they said they were looking for Jesus, Jesus affirmed, “I am he,” and then the soldiers “drew back and fell to the ground” (John 18:6). It should be obvious from the context of this verse that it does not provide biblical support for the experience of being slain in the Spirit. These were soldiers who came to arrest Jesus. And their experience of falling had no immediate positive effect on them, because it seems they weren’t converted, and they did indeed arrest Jesus. This passage might seem helpful for supporting the idea of being slain in the Spirit if we only focus on the fact that people “fell to the ground.” But once we realize these people were not at all seeking the presence of God and that they were not even Christians, it is clear that this verse provides weak support for being slain in the Spirit.

  We must say the same thing regarding the soldiers who guarded Jesus’ tomb. They encountered the angel of the Lord and “were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men” (Matthew 28:4). This story has next to no resemblance to contemporary stories of people shaking or being slain in the Spirit in the context of a worship service, except for the fact that in both instances people shook and fell to the ground.

  Falling Before the Lord

  Nevertheless, many other scriptures speak of people falling before the Lord. On the one hand, in some cases a person chooses to fall over as a reverent response in worship to God, r
ather than being knocked over by God. For example, “Joshua fell on his face to the earth” before the Lord. We know that Joshua fell by his own initiative, for this verse also clarifies that Joshua “bowed low” (Joshua 5:14 NASB; Numbers 22:31).

  On the other hand, a number of biblical texts do not make it clear if the person falls before the Lord intentionally or not. For example, in Genesis 17:3 we are only told that “Abram fell on his face, and God talked with him” (NASB). Similarly, in Judges 13:20 we read, “As the flame blazed up from the altar toward heaven, the angel of the LORD ascended in the flame. Seeing this, Manoah and his wife fell with their faces to the ground.” While these verses allow for the possibility that these people fell involuntarily and were, therefore, slain in the Spirit, nothing explicit in the context of these verses leads me to think this is what happened. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that the biblical authors had no intention of teaching about the experience of being slain in the Spirit, if it is in the Bible at all.

  Furthermore, most texts in Scripture that describe people as falling before God are describing experiences quite different from the ones many Christians today call being slain in the Spirit. For example, in many of the verses I mentioned above, the individual who falls before the Lord falls forward. By contrast, most who claim to have been slain in the Spirit fall backward. In some biblical texts where people fall forward before God, it is clear that they do not continue to lay there basking in the presence of God, as people who are slain in the Spirit today generally do. In fact, sometimes those who fall down before God are immediately told to “arise.” This is what happened at the transfiguration of Jesus. Peter, James, and John hiked up a mountain with Jesus. Jesus was then “transfigured before them; and His face shone like the sun, and His garments became as white as light” (Matthew 17:2 NASB). As a result, Peter, James, and John “fell face down to the ground and were terrified” (v. 6 NASB). Jesus responded to their falling by saying, “Get up, and do not be afraid” (v. 7 NASB). So Peter, James, and John didn’t keep lying there.

  This is quite different from how many people describe their experiences of having been slain in the Spirit. Furthermore, the typical setting where people claim to be slain in the Spirit clearly does not occur in Scripture. Nowhere in the Bible can you find a preacher giving an altar call and lining up people with catchers ready to catch those for whom the preacher prays. Also, no one is ever touched or prayed for when they fall in the Scripture.

  A New Experience?

  Since my first searching of the Scripture suggested that being slain in the Spirit and shaking was not a biblical idea, I eventually came to the conclusion that being slain in the Spirit was a new event in Christianity. By new, I mean an idea people made up in the last few decades and that had no basis in the Scripture. As a result, I began to associate being slain in the Spirit with the excesses of some revivalistic worship that make many people balk. As I studied church history, however, it became apparent that I was mistaken to only associate being slain in the Spirit with contemporary Charismatic movements or fringe groups.

  Experiences of people falling under the power of God were common in the early days of the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement. The Azusa Street Revival was one of the most important events at the beginning of this movement. The revival took place in Los Angeles, California, from 1906 to 1909. There it was common for people to fall under the power of God during worship meetings. In the first edition of The Apostolic Faith newspaper, published from the Azusa Street Revival, one attendee testified, “So many are seeking, and some are slain under the power of God. . . . In the meetings, it is noticeable that while some in the rear are opposing and arguing, others are at the altar falling down under the power of God and feasting on the good things of God.”1 The first edition of The Pentecostal Testimony, a small newspaper published by the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, contained a similar report from Alberta: “In our Sunday morning meetings the power has been falling like rain. . . . Under the power of the Holy Ghost some fall prostrate, others dance, some sing, march around the Hall, shout the praises of Jesus, etc.”2

  Early Evangelicalism

  It would be easy for people to make another mistake and conclude that being slain in the Spirit has only happened in the last hundred years during the contemporary Pentecostal-Charismatic movement. In fact, I have found a long history of such experiences. Let me take you further back in history to early evangelicalism. Historians agree that the evangelical movement began in the 1700s during the revival movements associated with people like Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley.

  Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) was a Calvinist who lived in New England. Calvinism is a major branch of Protestantism that follows the theological tradition and Christian practice of John Calvin and other Reformation theologians. While many remember Edwards for his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” he was also one of America’s greatest theologians and a key leader in the Great Awakening revival (1720–1740s). Regarding this time, Edwards wrote, “It was a very frequent thing to see a house full of outcries, faintings, convulsions, and such like, both with distress, and also with admiration and joy.”3 Edwards believed that at least some of these fainting experiences and convulsions resulted from authentic encounters with God.

  John Wesley (1703–1791) hailed from across the Atlantic Ocean in England. Although he is best known as the founder of the Methodist movement, which eventually led to Methodist denominations, he lived and died as an Anglican—the word used to describe the people, institutions, and churches, as well as the liturgical traditions and theological concepts developed by the Church of England. Like Edwards, Wesley was a theologian, though not a Calvinist, and a revivalist.

  Wesley recounted numerous incidents when people fell or shook at meetings where he was preaching, especially “sinners” who were converted after such experiences. Wesley described people falling as one of the “outward signs that so often accompanied the inward work of God.”4 He reported that some of his critics claimed people fell on the ground only from “natural effects” in the sense that they “fainted away only because of the heat and closeness of the rooms.”5 Other critics suggested that when people fell it was all fake because the falling only happened in private meetings.

  In response to such claims, Wesley wrote in his journal that on May 21, 1739, God “began to make bare his arm, not in a close room, neither in private, but in the open air, and before more than two thousand witnesses. One, and another, and another was struck to the earth; exceedingly trembling at the presence of His power.”6

  As evangelicalism moved into the next century, people occasionally experienced the same signs of the work of the Spirit that previous evangelicals had experienced. Falling and trembling were common experiences during the Second Great Awakening (1800–1840s). At this time, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and others started holding camp meetings. Concerning a camp meeting held in Georgia in the early 1800s, one person reported,

  They swooned away and lay for hours in the straw prepared for those “smitten of the Lord,” or they started suddenly to flee away and fell prostrate as if shot down by a sniper, or they took suddenly to jerking with apparently every muscle in their body until it seemed they would be torn to pieces or converted into marble, or they shouted and talked in unknown tongues.7

  The testimonies of Edwards, Wesley, and other early evangelicals made it clear to me that contemporary experiences of trembling in the presence of God or being slain in the Spirit are not new to the evangelical movement. While they were not always common, they did not begin with the dawn of the contemporary Pentecostal-Charismatic movement.

  Reassessing Scripture

  The fact that experiences of being slain in the Spirit and trembling are not new in Christian history and the fact that key leaders in early evangelicalism sometimes accepted them as authentic experiences of God does not prove that such experiences are legitimate. Nevertheless, these historical observations caused me to pause and reass
ess these experiences in light of Scripture. In the Bible, I found that although people who encountered God usually had control of themselves, people sometimes lost control or had involuntary responses to God’s presence. For example, after Paul met Jesus on the road to Damascus, God continued to keep his attention by making him blind for three days (Acts 9:9). This was certainly not something Paul voluntarily made happen to himself. Trances also happened involuntarily. Peter “fell into a trance” and then had a vision from God (Acts 10:10). Likewise, the apostle Paul “fell into a trance” one day while praying in the temple (Acts 22:17).

  And They Trembled

  I also found some testimonies in the Bible of people trembling before the Lord. For example, one psalmist wrote, “My flesh trembles in fear of you” (Psalm 119:120). Beyond this, when the presence of the Lord descended on Mount Sinai, “the whole mountain trembled violently” (Exodus 19:18). If God’s presence can make a mountain tremble, it makes good sense for us to think that a person might respond to God’s presence with trembling.

  Humans are more than just minds and thoughts, so it is natural that God would not only renew our minds (Romans 12:2), but that some intense encounters would also affect our emotions and our bodies.8 I am not suggesting that God shakes people to make them tremble or fall, although God could. Instead, it might be that people shake or tremble as a reaction to the presence of God, just as some people weep in God’s presence. Similarly, it might be helpful to think of being slain in the Spirit as a human reaction to the presence of God working in or around a person. In other words, sometimes God’s presence or work in a person could be so overwhelming that a person might tremble or fall—not because God is slaying them and making them fall, not because God is pushing them over, but because they just can’t stand in the presence of God any longer.