Tuesday, July 12, 2022

Some Odd Manifestations of the Holy Spirit, Or . . .?

An odd little topic here. John MacArthur preached in a sermon I heard recently at You Tube, about the various thingsx that are attributed to the Holy Spirit in the charismatic churches. He listedn falling over backwards, laughing uncontrollable, shaking and quaking, the hiccups, jumping up and down and other things. I hadn't heard about the hiccups as an effect of the Holy Spirit, but all thhe rest is familiar to me from my time in the charismatic movement.

Some of it I'm sure he's right about, that that these things are not the work of the Holy Spirit. The laughter I know isn't. Watchman Nee wrote about that in his book Soul Power and made it quite clear that it comes from the flesh or from something in the soul left over from the powers God originally gavbe to Adam and Eve, but it doesn't come from the Holy Spirit.

Falling over backwards has always seemed to me to be unlikely but I'm not completely sure of that one. However, shaking and quaking have always seemed to me to be genuine manifestations of the Holy Spirit and I've experienced them many times. When you spend a lot of time with the Lord in prayer you may get the shakes and the quakes and I think that's a good sign that it's from God. The Quakers and the Shakers wer eaptly names for that particular experience. As I've spent a lot of time seeking the Lord in the last few months I've had that experience a few times after prolonged periods of prayer. Surely it is something that happens to us as a result of the Holy Spirit's working in us.
As for the hiccups, that one is very strange but I've also had bouts of the hiccups in this same period of intense seeking of the Lord, though I hadn't had hiccups for many yhears. I didn't connect it with my spiritual practices though until MacArthur mentioned it. Now I don't know. An odd one, that's for sure.