When the Holy Spirit comes upon you, you will receive power.

Power.

That's what the disciples were waiting for, and that's what they experienced.

Everybody upon whom the Holy Spirit comes in his fullness receives God.

That's a promise. Have you ever wondered what it means to receive the Holy Spirit? And how do you know if you have? I'm Dan Kroover.

In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper turns to Acts 8, verses 14 to 17 to consider

why the Samaritans did not receive the Spirit when they first believed. This message was originally delivered at Bethlehem Baptist Church on May 19, 1991.

This text raises the question now as to whether or not the Pentecostal understanding of the baptism of the Holy Spirit has a good basis here.

Let me explain what I mean by the Pentecostal understanding of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

For the last hundred years or so, the mainline Pentecostal teaching has been that after the initial work of the Holy Spirit by which we are grafted into the body of Christ through faith, there is a later experience, a crisis experience, perhaps, by which we, by faith, receive the Holy Spirit in new fullness and power characterized

by speaking in tongues.

There are a lot of non-Pentecostals who would agree that the baptism with the Holy Spirit

is a second decisive receiving of the power of the Holy Spirit after conversion, but don't

necessarily equate it with speaking in tongues. For example, A.J. Gordon, founder of Gordon

Seminary, Ruben Torrey, Dwight El Moody, Charles Finney, and many others who taught that the

baptism of the Holy Spirit was, in fact, a second event by which we consciously received the blessings of the Holy Spirit not yet appropriated in conversion and yet not aligned with speaking in tongues.

Now, this passage here in Acts 8 gives apparent support to a two-stage

kind of reception of the Holy Spirit and is appealed to as a kind of classic text for

Pentecostal teaching of various kinds. Let me try to show why that is and then assess it a little bit with you.

The Samaritans in this text had already been converted, so it is said, and that's the first

experience. Before the apostles come down and lay hands on them that they might receive the

Holy Spirit, and then the apostles come, and they receive the Spirit, and that's the

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