Water Baptism
As I studied the bible, I found that I couldn’t have enough of it. I discovered a book called a Concordance, in which you could look up any word in the Bible. The Concordance would tell you all the verses in the Bible that had the particular word you were searching for. From the Concordance, I discovered that whenever the word “believe” or “repentance” was mentioned, it was followed by the word baptism. See examples below:
Then Peter said to them, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Acts 2:38 NIV
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. Mark 16:16 NIV
In all these instances, I found that baptism followed (was after) believing/repentance, not the other way round.
I know that when I was baptised at 6 months of age, I had neither believed nor repented. So I realised I needed to get baptised. So I started searching for a Church that believed in “adult baptism” and got baptised.
Holy Spirit Baptism
One of the verses in the bible, that I mentioned earlier struck me. It was
Then Peter said to them, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Acts 2:38 NIV
As far as I could understood, this sentence had 3 parts
- Repent
- Water Baptism
- Holy Spirit
I knew I had done the first two but did not want to be denied heaven because I had not received the third, the Holy Spirit. So using the concordance, I started studying which verses in the Bible talked about receiving the Holy Spirit. I found that the book of “Acts” in the Bible had about 5 instances of people receiving the Holy Spirit. The common thing I noticed was that wherever it was recorded, this was marked by people speaking in “Unknown Tongues”. I started attending prayer meetings where people were being prayed for to receive the Holy Spirit. However I never received the gift of Tongues by any such prayers. One afternoon, after church I was very frustrated and praying asking God to give me the Holy Spirit. All of a sudden two words came to my mind. I dismissed these two words as words that either my mind had conjured up or that I had heard from other people. But knowing there was nothing to lose, I continued repeating those two words. Within a few minutes, to my surprise and amazement, these two words turned into full sentences that did not have the two words in them. It was then I realized that God had given me the Holy Spirit marked by my speaking in Tongues.