od keeps on doing this to me, and I’m enjoying every step of the journey.

 

I’m talking about how the Holy Spirit speaks to my life with such force and clarity that it can be overwhelming at times. The result is powerful periods of praise, worship, and adoration that gush from my heart.

 

I’m not describing some special prophetic message, but the simple morning-by-morning experience of opening sacred Scriptures and getting a word from God that galvanizes my life toward a fresh commitment to Him. This isn’t unique to me; many have this experience in their times with God. Indeed, it’s readily available to believers who “seek Him with all their heart.”

 

In my worship time with the Holy Spirit I typically read a selected book along with the Scriptures. Some mornings I don’t get to my collateral reading because the Bible itself engages my spirit with such intensity. Then there are those mornings when my extra reading dovetails so powerfully with the Word that the book gives me a special insight from God.

 

That was the case the other morning when two books collided to impact my life.

 

I had been reading Bob Sorge’s book Secrets of the Secret Place. Sorge zeros in on the ways and means by which believers can “ignite” their personal time with God. In that morning’s selection the author was describing how the Holy Spirit may consume our lives to such a degree that “every competing affection and false god is completely burned away until one raging, all-consuming passion fills my entire being . . . for the Man-Christ Jesus” (p. 39).

 

I was reminded of why I need to be daily filled with the Holy Spirit in my life. And I was reminded that many believers don’t crave the Holy Spirit in their lives at this level, living mundane Christian lives that resemble all the not-so-positive characteristics of Laodicea.

 

Marvin Moore’s volume The Crisis of the End Time also challenged me that morning. It’s a stirring account of events that will take place in this world as it moves toward a dramatic and climactic conclusion. There is not a movie version of this book, but there should be. In his chapter “So Where Are We Now?” Moore makes a very pivotal point arising out of the parable of the ten young women of Jesus’ parable, five foolish and five wise (Matt. 25:1-13), that I had clearly missed over the years.

 

I had always conjectured that the major reason for the Lord’s delay in returning is to give added time for more people to come to the Lord. But Moore got my attention when he reminded me that in the Scriptures, the oil represents the Holy Spirit. “The lesson of the parable is that the delay is not simply procrastination or indifference on God’s part. The delay has a distinct purpose: To give His people time to obtain the Holy Spirit” (p. 42).

 

Wow, that makes all the sense in the world. Because if God’s people don’t crave and receive the daily baptism of the Holy Spirit, their desire to win their world (friends, relatives, colleagues) to the Lord’s side will not happen. Believers cannot self-generate this passion for the lost; it has to be born in them by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. How did Bob Sorge put it? It has to be an all-consuming passion that fills our entire being.

 

Receiving the Holy Spirit is the ultimate baptism all of us need to experience. It is not a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. If we’re going to go all the way with God, asking for and receiving the Spirit has to be the driving passion of our hearts.

 

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