Hi, I’m Josh, and I’m Confused About the Holy Spirit

Hi, I’m Josh, and I’m a recovering Baptist. I was blessed to be born and raised in a Baptist church, a heritage I thank God for. I was taught right from wrong early on, I knew the Bible stories, I even learned how to sing in four part harmony and I pretty much rocked youth choir. I was a church kid. I had a love/hate relationship with church growing up because they loved me but sometimes they weren’t too sure about the friends and new Christians I kept bringing to church with me.

One of the main aspects of my church upbringing that I’ve had to deprogram myself from (hence the label ‘recovering Baptist’) is what I was taught about the Holy Spirit. Growing up, we just didn’t talk much about the Holy Spirit. It was a bunch about God, with Jesus a close second, and then the Holy Spirit was a distant third. The way it was talked about, it kind of seemed like the Bible had replaced the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity. We didn’t really need the Holy Spirit, we had the Bible.

As I got older I heard rumors and whisperings of the Holy Spirit from my friends that went to different churches. Apparently He showed up at other places regularly, although He never decided to stop by our church. In my mind growing up, the Holy Spirit was something to be avoided. As for our charismatic and pentecostal cousins, well, we prayed for them. When I went off to college my curiosity got the better of me and I began to read books from authors like Watchman Nee that claimed Christians needed a second blessing or baptism of the Holy Spirit to be truly effective (or even truly saved). The claim of something more for Christians intrigued me because I had this gnawing sense that I wasn’t living out my fullest Christian potential, and I knew in my soul that it had something to do with the Holy Spirit. And yet I seemed to be given two extreme options, neither of which I was comfortable with.

My upbringing taught me to effectively ignore the person and work of the Holy Spirit. I didn’t need a person of the Godhead, I had a book. The other option seemed to be to seek an emotional experience in a worship service, as if the Holy Spirit’s only role was to give you spiritual goosebumps once the worship service got going good. Neither option seemed it fully lined up with what I read in the New Testament.

I once even went to an English-speaking charismatic church while I was missionary in Africa. I wanted to see how it differed from my experience in church growing up. I loved the contemporary music, I loved the energy, I didn’t love the two invitations that were given, one to accept Jesus and one for Christians who were ready to be baptized in the Holy Ghost, as if salvation and the full Christian experience came in two separate parts. At the end of the day, the majority of my life thus far has been characterized by confusion about the work and person of the Holy Spirit. And I don’t think I’m the only one.