Some Personal History on This Subject

When I was first exposed to the concept of being baptized in the Holy Spirit, it was at the height of the Charismatic Renewal/Jesus Movement of the 1970s.

I committed my life to Christ’s lordship in November of 1973 while I was a GI assigned to the 3rd Armored Division in Gelnhausen, about 30 minutes northeast of Frankfurt, then-West Germany. After conversion, I was discipled by two disparate Christian ministries who operated outreaches to military personnel.

There were several people who ministered to me at my home base: John Little (who led me to Jesus), Gene Billingsley, and Chaplain & Mrs. Hedrick, and a missionary to the Soviet Bloc named Chester Gretz in Gelnhausen. As it turned out, John, the Hedricks, and Rev. Gretz were all charismatic, though I didn’t find this out until much later. My friend Gene married the Hedrick’s daughter Kathy and they have been married for almost 40 years now. But I digress…

While I was at my home base, I was also discipled by The Navigators who had a ministry covering Frankfurt’s Rhein-Main AFB and neighboring Army installations. The Navs were not a charismatic organization and remain so to this day. The primary person who discipled me from this organization was an Air Force NCO in Frankfurt named Jim Albert, though John and Gene were also associate with that group. So I have personally witnessed people who did not speak in tongues — and indeed didn’t even accept it as scriptural — who walked in the love of Christ and lived lives of victory by the grace of God.

When our unit went out to “the field” to shoot for qualification with our tanks at a place called Graffenwöhr (known to all soldiers in Germany as “Graf”), I hung out at a Christian coffee house there operated by Youth With A Mission (YWAM). These folks were definitely charismatic and I acquired from them quite a number of teaching cassettes by the leaders of the then-in-progress Charismatic Renewal as well as hearing some incredible teaching from video tapes of classes taught at YWAM’s School of Evangelism at Lausanne, Switzerland. At the time I was hearing all this teaching, however, I had not been baptized in the Holy Spirit.

It was an interesting upbringing spiritually, to say the least, and I thank God for it!
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The spiritual gift of the baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues is an amazing blessing for those who have received it. Unfortunately, it is also the source of an equally amazing amount of dissension within the Body of Christ between those who do and those who don’t. It is appalling how hostile both sides can get towards one another while debating it. Both sides are guilty of not only not walking in love towards their brothers and sisters in Christ on the opposite side, but also of some extremely poor biblical scholarship, some of it so bad that it doesn’t remotely qualify as scholarship at all.

While I personally have experienced this gift for over 30 years, I have to admit that the attitudes of many of my brothers and sisters who I share that experience with cause me to be more than a little ashamed to be associated with them because of their oftentimes ungodly and/or squirrelly behavior. But there is more than enough blame to spread around — both sides are generally so contentious that Satan just smiles and nods approvingly, knowing that the lot of them are busy arguing and condemning one another, rather than exhibiting the love that Jesus said the world would know us by. And millions continue on to their eternal destruction because the Church is too busy arguing over this doctrine instead of doing its job.

So what does the Bible really say on the matter and what use is this gift to those who have received it? If it’s the source of such contention, why should we bother with it? And if we have it, how should it be used?
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