Receiving the Holy Spirit is language that God uses to indicate that moment when God applies His Salvation to our life by performing the miracle of giving us our Resurrected Soul. It is the moment that we become Born Again.
The acts that you mention are WORKS that we do and can never initiate nor cause nor maintain our salvation in anyway whatsoever.
When God has "saved" us we will find in our life an ernest ongoing desire to be obedient to the Law of God, that is the Bible. Our obedience to God's commandments and our repentance from sin will be the RESULT of our Salvation. They are never the CAUSE.
Our Salvation is totally a gift of God's grace. God must do 100% of the work in saving us. We never want to be trusting in anything we do or have done for our salvation.
That to me, Onewatchman, is a difficult question to answer, simply because the Holy Spirit will come into a person's life to take up residence, when that repentance of sin is real, without other motives or hypocrisy. By this I mean, a sinner might be suddenly overwhelmed by the volume & intensity of his sin before God's Holiness (as was in my case back in 1979), where I fell to my knees in tears when my sin, once enjoyable & boundless, suddenly became a horror in my heart. I could do nothing else but cry out for mercy to a merciful God. And how did I know that I was baptized in the Spirit? Not with other tongues, nor any other outward manifestation, but with an overwhelming peace in my heart & the assurance that my cry was heard & I was now forgiven. To me, that could only happen when the Holy Spirit filled me - turning my weeping over my wretchedness before God into laughter for being made clean & acceptable, because of God's mighty Work. And God's Spirit has been with me & in me all this time, in my long march Heaven-ward.
Mine is just a quick example for you, of a conviction of sin & reception of the Holy Spirit at the point of repentance. But of course, not all who repent or confess or even baptized in water, are necessarily saved. Why? Because we do not know that person's state, his reason for turning to Christ, or him just being on a journey with God, so that what may be repentance now, may some time later be a true repentance leading to salvation & the Gift of the Holy Spirit. So it is possible that a person may repent for his sins often (i.e. feeling sorry for doing wrong & then going back to the old ways; but not having the conviction of sin that causes a complete turn-around & brokenness before God). I think of Acts 3:19: "Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord...". True repentance brings true conversion brings true refreshing now & till Jesus returns.
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[Comment Removed]
Receiving the Holy Spirit is language that God uses to indicate that moment when God applies His Salvation to our life by performing the miracle of giving us our Resurrected Soul. It is the moment that we become Born Again.
The acts that you mention are WORKS that we do and can never initiate nor cause nor maintain our salvation in anyway whatsoever.
When God has "saved" us we will find in our life an ernest ongoing desire to be obedient to the Law of God, that is the Bible. Our obedience to God's commandments and our repentance from sin will be the RESULT of our Salvation. They are never the CAUSE.
Our Salvation is totally a gift of God's grace. God must do 100% of the work in saving us. We never want to be trusting in anything we do or have done for our salvation.
[Comment Removed]
Mine is just a quick example for you, of a conviction of sin & reception of the Holy Spirit at the point of repentance. But of course, not all who repent or confess or even baptized in water, are necessarily saved. Why? Because we do not know that person's state, his reason for turning to Christ, or him just being on a journey with God, so that what may be repentance now, may some time later be a true repentance leading to salvation & the Gift of the Holy Spirit. So it is possible that a person may repent for his sins often (i.e. feeling sorry for doing wrong & then going back to the old ways; but not having the conviction of sin that causes a complete turn-around & brokenness before God). I think of Acts 3:19: "Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord...". True repentance brings true conversion brings true refreshing now & till Jesus returns.
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