1.The Spirit Is a Person

The first thing to settle about the Holy Spirit is that He is a Person. This is easy to lose. We speak of the Spirit as an influence, a power, an atmosphere — an "it" to be used — and in doing so we quietly turn a Person into a thing. But Scripture will not allow it. The Spirit does what only a person can do: He teaches and brings to remembrance; He speaks, and forbids, and sends out workers; He searches the deep things of God; He wills, distributing gifts to each one as He chooses. And He can be treated as only a person can be treated: He can be grieved, He can be lied to, He can be resisted and even blasphemed. The Lord Jesus called Him "another Helper" — another of the same kind as Himself, not another force but another Friend and Helper to take His place among the disciples. Why does this matter so much? Because our whole relationship to Him depends upon it. We do not use the Spirit as we would use electricity or steam; we yield to Him, we obey Him, we grieve Him or please Him, we walk with Him as with a Person. And the great question is never how much of the Spirit we have, as though He came in measurable amounts, but how much of us the Spirit has.

2.The Spirit Is God

The second truth is that this Person is fully God — the third Person of the one true God, together with the Father and the Son. Scripture gives Him the names of God, the attributes of God, and the works of God. When Ananias lied about his gift, Peter told him he had lied "not to men but to God" — and the One he had lied to was the Holy Spirit. He is eternal, present everywhere, and He shares in the works that God alone can do: He moved over the waters at creation, He gives life, He inspired the Scriptures, He raised the Lord Jesus from the dead. When Christ gave the church its baptismal command, He joined the Spirit with the Father and the Son under a single divine name. The Spirit is therefore not a lesser or created being, not merely God's power reaching us from a distance, but God Himself, present and personal, to be worshiped and obeyed as God. To think rightly of the Spirit is to bow before Him, not to reach for Him as for a tool.

3.The Spirit and the Lord Jesus Christ

The Spirit and the Son work in the closest possible harmony, and this stands at the heart of everything. The Spirit was upon Christ at every point of His earthly life: at His conception, at His baptism when the Spirit descended upon Him, throughout a ministry carried out in the power of the Spirit, and even in His offering of Himself to God. And the risen, exalted Christ, in turn, poured out the Spirit upon His church. But the most important thing is what Jesus Himself said the Spirit came to do. The Spirit does not advertise Himself or draw attention to His own gifts; He comes to point to the Son. "He will glorify Me," Jesus said, "for He will take of what is Mine and declare it to you." "He will testify of Me." This gives us the surest test of any work that claims to be the Spirit's, then or now: does it exalt Jesus Christ and lead people to Him? Where the Spirit is truly at work, Christ is magnified. And the Spirit never leads against the written Word He Himself inspired; the Spirit and the Scriptures always agree, for they are of one God.

4.The Spirit's Work in the Believer

We come now to what the Spirit does in those who trust Christ. His work begins before conversion, for He convicts the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment, awakening the careless conscience. It is by the Spirit that a person is born again; no one enters the kingdom of God who is not born of the Spirit. And every true believer, without exception, has the Spirit — "if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His." This indwelling belongs to all who are Christ's, from the moment of faith, and not to an advanced few. Having come to dwell in the believer as in a temple, the Spirit does a many-sided work. He bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, giving assurance. He sanctifies us, producing His fruit — love, joy, peace, patience, and the rest — the quiet growth of Christ's own character within us. He teaches and guides us into truth. He helps us in our weakness and intercedes for us when we do not know how to pray. And He seals us for the day of redemption, the guarantee of an inheritance kept for us. The whole Christian life, from the new birth to the final glory, is lived in the power of the indwelling Spirit.

By that same Spirit we are given access to the Father, and made to know ourselves His children. He is the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, "Abba, Father," and He is the down payment, the guarantee of our inheritance until we take full possession of it. So the Spirit is not only the One who begins the Christian life but the One who carries it and secures it, all the way home. Torrey loved to press this comfort upon anxious believers: the Christian is not left to struggle on alone, at the mercy of his own weakness, but is indwelt, taught, guided, and kept by a divine Person who will not fail him. What He begins, He will surely complete; and the assurance of our salvation rests not on the strength of our feelings but on the faithful presence of the Spirit whom God has given us. This does not make us passive; it makes us confident. Knowing that the Spirit dwells in us, we set ourselves to walk with Him — grieving Him in nothing, obeying Him in all things, and drawing daily on the life He supplies.

5.Power for Service

Torrey laid a particular stress on one further work of the Spirit: His power for service. Beyond regenerating and indwelling the believer, the Spirit comes upon His servants to fit them for witness and work — the enduement of power that turned fearful disciples into bold witnesses at Pentecost. Torrey urged every believer to seek this fullness of the Spirit, without which, he held, our labor for God is weak and our witness barren. Whether this power-for-service is best described as a distinct "baptism in the Spirit" following conversion, or as repeated fillings of the one Spirit already given, is a question Christians have answered differently, and one this seminary weighs carefully in its own unit. But the practical point stands, however it is framed: we are not meant to serve God in our own strength. The same Spirit who raised Christ and filled the first church is given to empower our witness still. And so we are commanded to be filled with the Spirit — an ongoing command, not a once-for-all event — to walk in the Spirit, and to keep in step with Him, that His power might rest upon all we do.

6.The Gifts, and the Fitting Response

The Spirit who indwells and empowers His people also equips them, distributing gifts — abilities for the building up of the body of Christ — to each one as He wills. Which gifts there are, and whether all of them continue today, are questions taken up elsewhere in this course; here it is enough to see that the gifts are His to give, bestowed freely and sovereignly, for the common good and the glory of God, and never earned as a badge of superior holiness. And this points us to a distinction worth keeping: the gifts of the Spirit are not the same as the fruit of the Spirit. A believer may have striking gifts and little fruit, or humble gifts and abundant fruit — and it is the fruit, not the gift, that reveals a life truly filled with the Spirit. The right response to all of this is not to grasp after experiences or manifestations, but to yield: to surrender more of ourselves to the Person who is God, to seek His fullness for holiness first and for service too, and to let Him do what He always does — turn our eyes to the Son.

7.Knowing the Spirit Better

How, then, shall we come to know this Spirit better, and to live in His fullness? Torrey's counsel was simple and searching. First, we must recognize the Spirit for who He is — a divine Person, dwelling within us — and treat Him accordingly, in reverence and dependence rather than neglect. Second, we must yield fully to His control, holding nothing back, for the Spirit fills the surrendered heart. Third, we must ask; the Father gives the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him, and the promise still stands. Fourth, we must feed on the Word the Spirit inspired, for He works through the Scriptures and never apart from them; a Christian who neglects the Bible cannot expect the Spirit's power. And fifth, we must obey, walking in the light we already have, for the Spirit is given to those who obey God. There is no secret technique here, no formula to master — only a Person to be honored, trusted, asked, fed upon in His Word, and obeyed. Those who so walk with Him find, as the first disciples found, that He is faithful: He gives assurance, forms the character of Christ, guides the perplexed, strengthens the weak, and pours out power for the work He gives us to do.

1.The Promise and the Waiting

Before He ascended, the Lord Jesus told His disciples to wait. They were not to rush out and begin the work, however eager they were; they were to tarry in Jerusalem until they were clothed with power from on high. "You shall receive power," He said, "when the Holy Spirit has come upon you." And so, for some ten days, about a hundred and twenty of them waited together, and they filled the waiting with prayer. Maclaren notes the fitness of this: the church's very first act was not activity but dependence, not organizing but praying. The power they needed could not be manufactured; it could only be received. There is a lesson here that the church has often forgotten — that the work of God is done in the strength of God, and that the strength of God is given to those who wait upon Him. The disciples did not know the day or the hour; they knew only the promise, and they held to it in prayer until it came. Every genuine work of God since has begun in that same posture: empty hands lifted up, waiting to be filled. We are not more capable than they were, nor less dependent; and if the church today would see God work, she must still begin where they began — on her knees, empty and expectant, waiting for the promise of the Father to be poured out afresh.

2.The Day: Wind and Fire

When the day of Pentecost had fully come, and they were all together in one place, it came. Suddenly there was a sound from heaven like a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. The two signs are full of meaning. Wind, throughout Scripture, is a figure of the Spirit of God — unseen, sovereign, life-giving; indeed the same word serves for wind, for breath, and for Spirit. And fire is the ancient sign of God's holy presence, as at the burning bush and upon Sinai. Together they announced, to any who had eyes to see, that God had come down to dwell among His people in a new and nearer way — no longer in a tabernacle of cloth or a temple of stone, but in a people, in living men and women. The timing was fitting too: Pentecost was a harvest feast, fifty days after the Passover at which the Lord had died and risen; and now, at the next great feast, He sent His Spirit to begin the great harvest of souls.

3.Known Languages, Not Confusion

The first effect of the Spirit's coming was speech — but speech of a particular kind. The believers "began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance." And these tongues were not unintelligible sounds; they were real, identifiable human languages. Jerusalem was full of devout pilgrims from every nation, and when the sound drew them together, each one heard the believers speaking in his own native language. Luke even lists the nations — Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and a dozen more — and records the crowd's astonishment: "we hear them speaking in our own tongues the wonderful works of God." The whole marvel was precisely that these Galileans, who had never learned these languages, were plainly understood. Here is a beautiful reversal. At Babel, long before, God had scattered proud humanity by confusing its one language into many. At Pentecost He begins to gather the nations back to Himself — not by erasing their languages, but by speaking His good news in all of them. The gospel is for every tongue under heaven, and on the church's first day that truth was written across the sky. Whether the tongues Paul later describes in Corinth are of the same kind or another is a separate question, taken up elsewhere in this course; here we simply let Acts say what it plainly says.

4.Peter's Sermon: Christ Proclaimed

When some in the crowd mocked, saying the believers were drunk, Peter stood up with the eleven to explain. This, he said, was no drunkenness, but the fulfillment of what the prophet Joel had foretold — the last-days outpouring of God's Spirit upon all flesh. But Maclaren draws our attention to where Peter goes from there. He does not linger over the wind, the fire, or the tongues; he does not make the wonders themselves the message. He preaches Christ. He tells them of Jesus of Nazareth, attested by God with mighty works, delivered up according to God's set purpose and crucified by wicked hands — and then raised from the dead, for death could not hold Him, and now exalted to the right hand of God, from where He has poured out this very Spirit they see and hear. Peter drives the whole matter to a single point: "God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ." The Spirit had come, and His first work through the church was to lift up the crucified and risen Savior before the eyes of the crowd. Pentecost was not, in the end, about the phenomena; it was about the Son whom the Spirit had come to glorify.

5.The Response: Three Thousand Souls

The effect of the sermon was not applause but conviction. The word cut the hearers to the heart, and they cried out, "Men and brethren, what shall we do?" Peter's answer is the gospel's own answer: "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." Turn from your sin, trust the crucified and risen Lord, be baptized in His name, and receive forgiveness and the Spirit — here, in the first Christian sermon, is the message the church has carried ever since. And the response was astonishing: "those who gladly received his word were baptized; and that day about three thousand souls were added to them." In a single day the little company of believers had become a great multitude. This is the shape of the Spirit's work: He came, and the result was bold witness to Christ and the salvation of the lost. The mark of His presence was not spectacle for its own sake, but a gospel preached and sinners brought home to God. That is still the truest evidence that the Spirit is among us.

6.The Church That Was Born

Luke leaves us a lovely portrait of the newborn church's earliest life together. "They continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers." They shared what they had with any who were in need; they worshiped together with glad and sincere hearts; they enjoyed the goodwill of the people around them — "and the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved." Here is the Spirit-filled church in miniature, and a pattern for every age. Notice the four marks Maclaren points to: a people devoted to the teaching of God's Word, to real fellowship with one another, to worship and the Lord's Table, and to prayer — and among them, open-handed love and a steady stream of new converts. This is what the Spirit produces when He is truly at work: not merely excitement, but a devoted, worshiping, loving, growing people. The wind and fire of that first morning settled down into the ordinary, faithful, glad life of a church — and that ordinary life was itself the continuing miracle of Pentecost. We should not despise it. A quiet church full of the Word, of prayer, and of love is a greater wonder than any noise.

7.What Pentecost Means for Us

What did that day accomplish, and what does it mean for us who read of it so long after? First, the church was born — the new-covenant people of God, indwelt by the Spirit, in whom the ancient promises were fulfilled that God would put His Spirit within His people and write His law on their hearts. Second, the worldwide mission of the gospel began; the gathering of the nations to hear God's works in their own tongues, and the three thousand saved that first day, were the firstfruits of a harvest that would reach, as Jesus had said, to the ends of the earth. And third, the age of the Spirit was opened — the age in which the whole church still lives. The same Spirit who came that morning indwells every believer in Christ today; the same gospel that Peter preached is still the power of God for salvation; and the same mission still presses outward to the nations. Pentecost is not merely a past marvel to admire, but the doorway into the age we inhabit. When we gather, pray, preach, and are filled for service, we are living out what began on that day.

8.Christ at the Center

Through it all, Pentecost points beyond itself to Christ. The Spirit was not given until Jesus was glorified; He came because the Son had finished His work and been exalted to the Father's right hand. And the Spirit's first act through the newborn church was to preach that same Son and to gather people to Him. This gives us the enduring measure of any work that claims to be the Spirit's, then or now: does it exalt Jesus Christ and lead people to Him? Pentecost did. The wind, the fire, and the tongues all served that one end — the proclamation of a crucified and risen Savior, and the turning of sinners to God. Where the Spirit is truly at work, Christ is magnified and His people multiplied. That is what we saw on the day the church was born; and it is what we may still ask God to do among us — not chiefly a repetition of the signs, but the same Spirit lifting up the same Savior, and the same salvation flowing out to the lost.

1.The Hunger Before the Fire

Bartleman's account makes one thing plain: the fire fell where hunger had long prepared the ground. For months before anything visible happened, believers in Los Angeles were pleading with God for revival. Word of the great awakening in Wales, only a year or two before, had stirred many hearts, and a longing spread that God would do the same in America. Bartleman himself carried a heavy burden of prayer through that season; he wrote and distributed tracts, visited churches, and called any who would listen to seek the Lord with their whole hearts. He believed, and often said, that revival is born in travailing prayer before it is ever seen in public. There was nothing showy in this preparation — only ordinary people, in small rooms, crying out to God over a long stretch of time. And that, Bartleman insisted, was the true seedbed of all that followed. Whatever else may be said of Azusa Street, it did not begin with a program or a personality; it began with hunger, and with a prayer that would not let God go. This is worth pausing on, for it is the pattern of nearly every genuine awakening the church has known.

2.Humble Beginnings

When the outpouring came, it came first in a private home. Small prayer meetings had been gathering, and in April of 1906, at a house on Bonnie Brae Street, the sense of God's presence became so strong that the meetings overflowed the little house; people gathered on the porch and out in the street. Soon a larger place was needed, and the company found an old, plain building at 312 Azusa Street — a former church that had since been used as a stable and a warehouse, with bare rafters, sawdust on the floor, and rough planks laid across nail kegs for seats. It was about as humble a place as could be imagined, and Bartleman saw the fittingness of it. God had not chosen a grand cathedral or a famous pulpit, but a bare room in an unremarkable part of the city. The leader of the meetings was William Seymour, a humble, soft-spoken preacher, a son of former slaves, blind in one eye, who would often sit behind a stack of wooden crates with his head bowed in prayer. There was no advertising, no eloquence, no display. And yet, Bartleman records, people felt they had walked straight into the presence of God.

3.What the Meetings Were Like

The meetings themselves were unlike ordinary church services. There was no fixed program, no announced order, often no sermon in the usual sense. People came and waited on God — singing, praying, weeping, confessing sin, sometimes for hours together. Bartleman describes a pervading sense of awe, as though the room were filled with something holy and weighty that hushed the proud and broke the hard. Seymour led with a remarkably light hand, unwilling to organize or control what he believed to be the work of the Spirit; he would encourage the seekers, pray, and wait. Many spoke of being deeply convicted of sin, of being reconciled to God and to one another, of a joy and a love they had never known before. And there were the phenomena for which Azusa became famous: people speaking in tongues, others prophesying, others overcome under a sense of God's power. Bartleman, a careful and sometimes critical observer, was moved by the reality of God he sensed among them, even as he watched with a discerning eye. Whatever one concludes about the particular manifestations, the hunger for God and the seriousness about sin and holiness in those early meetings are beyond dispute.

4.The Color Line Washed Away

One feature of Azusa Street struck observers then and still strikes us now. In an America deeply and legally divided by race, the Azusa meetings brought together people of every color and every class as equals before God. Black and white, rich and poor, immigrant and native-born, educated and unlettered — they knelt at the same altar, prayed together, and embraced one another as brothers and sisters. Bartleman captured it in a line that has echoed ever since: "The color line was washed away in the blood." For 1906 this was extraordinary, even scandalous to some. Under the leadership of a black preacher, in a poor part of the city, a fellowship formed that quietly defied the divisions of its age. It did not last unbroken; the pressures of the surrounding society reasserted themselves in time, and the movement later divided along some of the very lines it had briefly transcended. But for a season, something of the reconciling power of the gospel was visibly displayed for all to see, and it remains one of the most moving features of the whole story — a reminder of what the Spirit can do when He is given room.

5.The News Spreads

Word of what was happening at Azusa Street traveled fast — carried by letters, by visitors, and by the little papers the mission printed and mailed out across the country and beyond. Curious and hungry believers came from across Los Angeles, then from across the nation, and before long from across the world. Many who came were skeptical; some went away unconvinced; but many others were caught up in the same hunger and carried the fire home with them. Missionaries and preachers who visited Azusa took what they had experienced back to their own cities and nations, and new centers of the movement sprang up in Europe, in Latin America, in Africa, and in Asia within a remarkably short time. Bartleman himself traveled and wrote, helping to spread the news. From this one humble mission, in the space of only a few years, a movement went out that would in time touch the whole earth and number, a century later, in the hundreds of millions. Whatever we make of it, the historical fact is plain: a great deal of what became worldwide Pentecostalism can be traced back, along many streams, to that plain building on Azusa Street.

6.Earnestness and Excess

Bartleman's account is valuable precisely because it is honest, and it does not hide the shadows. Alongside the genuine hunger for God, he saw confusion, immaturity, and the flesh creeping in. Where there was little order and much emotion, error and fanaticism found room to grow; some sought experiences for their own sake, some fell into strange excesses, and some claimed for the Spirit what plainly did not come from Him. Bartleman warned of these dangers again and again. He grieved when the pure seeking after God was mingled with self-display, or when what he called "wildfire" — uncontrolled, fleshly excitement — was mistaken for the true fire of the Spirit. He knew that a real work of God can be spoiled by human pride and folly, and he called for humility, for testing, and for keeping the eyes fixed on Christ rather than on manifestations. This candor is a gift to us. It reminds us that a single movement may contain both the genuine and the false, and that our task is neither to embrace everything nor to reject everything, but to test all things by Scripture and hold fast what is good. Bartleman’s own life shows how hard, and how necessary, that balance is: he neither fled the revival because of its excesses nor closed his eyes to them because of its blessings, but stayed near, prayed, warned, and gave thanks. That is very much the posture this course commends toward the whole movement that Azusa began — near enough to learn from what was real, honest enough to name what was not.

7.Keeping Christ at the Center

For all the phenomena that made Azusa famous, Bartleman himself was clear about what mattered most: not tongues, not signs, but Christ. He believed the whole point of any true outpouring of the Spirit was to exalt the Savior and to make people holy, and he feared any drift toward making the gifts, rather than the Giver, the center of attention. This is exactly the concern that the whole of Scripture presses upon us. The Spirit was given to glorify the Son; where He is truly at work, Christ is lifted up and sinners are drawn to Him. Bartleman longed for a revival that would humble the proud, save the lost, reconcile the divided, and send holy witnesses out into the world — and he judged the meetings by that standard, rejoicing where he saw it and grieving where he did not. It is a good standard for us as well, whenever we consider any claimed move of God: does it make much of Jesus Christ, and does it make people more like Him? Where it does, we may thank God; where it does not, no amount of excitement can make up the lack.

8.What We May Learn

What, then, may we take from this story? First, that God draws near to the humble and the hungry; the fire fell not on the grand and the self-sufficient, but on ordinary people who sought Him in prayer, in a bare room with sawdust on the floor. Second, that a real work of God and human excess can stand side by side, so that we must neither despise the genuine because of the false nor excuse the false because of the genuine, but weigh all things by the Word. Third, that the gospel has power to break down the walls that divide people, as it did, for a season, at Azusa Street. And fourth, that in all of it Christ must be kept at the center; the surest mark of the Spirit's presence is not the extraordinary, but the exalting of the Savior and the making of holy men and women. We approach the whole movement that flowed from those days, and the brethren in it, not as enemies to be refuted but as family to be understood — honest about what was mixed, thankful for what was real, and always looking to Christ.

1.The Need to Test the Spirits

Edwards begins where Scripture begins — with the sober fact that not everything which claims to be from God is from God. "Beloved, do not believe every spirit," John writes, "but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world." There are counterfeits, and there is deception, and a wise Christian is neither gullible nor cynical, but discerning. Yet Edwards is equally concerned with the opposite error. In a time of real revival, some were so alarmed by the excesses that accompanied it that they were ready to condemn the whole work as delusion. Edwards saw the danger on both sides: to embrace everything uncritically, calling every stir of feeling the Spirit of God; and to reject everything suspiciously, quenching a true work because of the human weakness mixed with it. The task, then, is discernment — to distinguish the genuine from the false, the wheat from the chaff, by a right standard. And the right standard, Edwards insists, is not our own impressions or preferences or fears, but the Word of God, and especially the sure marks that the apostle John lays down in his fourth chapter.

2.What Does Not Prove It Either Way

Edwards's first great service is to clear away the false tests — the things people seize upon, on both sides, that in fact prove nothing either way. That a work is carried on in an unusual manner does not prove it is not of God, for God is not bound to work only as He has worked before. That it produces strong effects on people's bodies — tears, trembling, crying out, loss of strength — proves nothing, for such effects may attend deep conviction or deep joy, and may also be merely natural or worked up; they settle nothing by themselves. That it causes a great stir, or much talk, or commotion in a community, proves nothing. That it stirs powerful emotions, or fills the imagination with vivid impressions, proves nothing; feelings and mental pictures are not the test. And — this is important — even that some who are caught up in it fall into errors, or into delusion, or into scandalous sin, does not prove that the whole work is not of God, for the devil will always try to spoil a true revival by mixing in his counterfeits, and human weakness will always mar what is good. None of these things, Edwards says, is a mark either way. We must look deeper, and we must look where Scripture tells us to look.

3.The First Sure Mark: Esteem for Christ

Having cleared away the false tests, Edwards turns to the sure ones — and he takes them straight from the fourth chapter of First John. The first is this: a work that raises people's esteem for Jesus, confirming that He is the Son of God and the Savior of men, is the work of the Spirit of God. "By this you know the Spirit of God," John writes; "every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God." The Holy Spirit was given to glorify Christ, and so wherever He is truly at work, Christ is exalted — men and women are drawn to love Him, to trust Him, to honor Him as divine and to rest upon Him as Savior. A deceiving spirit will never do this; the enemy has no interest in magnifying the Son of God. So this is the first thing to look for in any claimed work of the Spirit: does it lift up Jesus Christ? Does it make Him more precious, more trusted, more adored? Where it does, we have strong evidence of God's hand; where the attention is drawn away from Christ to something else — to experiences, to a leader, to signs for their own sake — we have reason for grave concern.

4.The Second Mark: War on Sin and Satan

The second sure mark is that a true work of the Spirit operates against the interests of Satan's kingdom, which is a kingdom of sin. When a movement leads people to turn from sin, to forsake worldly lusts and vanities, to grow serious about holiness and righteousness, it bears the fingerprints of the Spirit of God — for Satan would never lend his power to the pulling down of his own kingdom. Edwards is pointed here: a spirit that makes people less attached to the world and its pleasures, more careful of sin, more earnest about eternity, is not the spirit of the world or of the devil. This is a searching test, and a very practical one. Excitement is cheap, and can be produced by many causes; but a real hatred of sin, a real turning from it, a real pursuit of a holy life — these are the marks of a work that comes from God. So we ask of any claimed move of the Spirit: are people becoming more holy, or merely more excited? Is sin being put to death, or are feelings only being stirred up? The Spirit of God is the Spirit of holiness, and He always wars against sin.

5.The Third and Fourth Marks: Scripture and Truth

The third sure mark is that a true work of the Spirit leads people to a greater regard for the Holy Scriptures, establishing them more in their truth and divinity. The Spirit inspired the Scriptures, and He never leads against them; where He works, He gives His people a deeper love for the Word, a greater confidence in it, a greater hunger to read and to obey it. A spirit that leads people away from the Bible, or above it, or against it — that treats new impressions and private revelations as if they outranked the written Word — is not the Spirit of God. And the fourth mark is closely joined to it: the Spirit of God is a Spirit of truth, and a false spirit is a spirit of error. A true work leads people into truth, giving them a right understanding of their own condition, of God, and of the way of salvation. So we test any claimed work by asking: does it drive people to the Scriptures, or away from them? Does it deepen their grasp of the truth, or fill them with error and confusion? The Spirit and the Word are always in perfect agreement, for they are of one God.

6.The Fifth Mark: Love to God and Man

The last and greatest of the sure marks is love. If a spirit operates as a spirit of love to God and man, Edwards says, it is surely the Spirit of God. This is the crowning evidence, for "love is of God," and "God is love," and the Spirit's own fruit is love before all else. A true work of the Spirit kindles a deeper love for God — a delight in Him, a longing after Him — and a deeper love for others, drawing believers together in humility, kindness, and forgiveness, softening hard hearts and healing broken relationships. Edwards is careful here, for the devil can counterfeit a kind of natural affection or mere party spirit; the love that marks the Spirit's work is the love that Scripture describes — humble, self-giving, patient, forgiving, reaching even to enemies. Where a movement produces this kind of love, we have the surest sign of all that God is in it. Where instead it produces pride, division, contempt, and bitterness, whatever else may be said of it, the Spirit of the God who is love is not its author. Love is the great test, because love is the very character of God Himself.

7.Applying the Marks

With these marks in hand, Edwards gives us a tool of great value for our own day, and for the movement this course studies. When we meet a claimed work of the Spirit — a revival, an unusual manifestation, a whole movement — we are not to judge it by its outward strangeness, nor by the emotions it stirs, nor by the errors of some who are caught up in it, for none of these settles the question. Nor are we to accept it simply because it is exciting or popular. We are to apply the sure marks: Does it exalt Jesus Christ? Does it lead people away from sin and the world toward holiness? Does it deepen their love for the Scriptures and their grasp of the truth? And does it produce real love to God and to one another? Where these marks are present, we may thank God and not be afraid, even if there is human weakness mixed in; where they are absent, no amount of wonder or fervor can make the work genuine. This is the balance the church has so often missed — neither quenching the Spirit nor being deceived, but testing all things, and holding fast what is good.

8.A Word of Caution and Comfort

Edwards adds a caution that we do well to hear. In a true work of God there will almost always be some mixture of human infirmity, imprudence, and even sin, because the work is carried on in weak and sinful people; and we must not stumble at this, nor let the enemy use the failings of some to make us reject the whole. At the same time, we must not defend or excuse what is wrong simply because it appears alongside what is right; error and excess should be gently corrected, not celebrated. The comfort is that God is patient with His people, and able to carry on His work through them despite their weakness, refining it as He goes. So we come to the whole subject — and to the movement this course studies — with both discernment and charity: quick to honor whatever truly exalts Christ, turns people from sin, magnifies the Word, and produces love; honest about whatever does not; and always, in all our testing, keeping our own eyes fixed on the Savior whom the Spirit was given to glorify.

1.The Question, Carefully Stated

First we must be clear about what is, and is not, in dispute. No one on either side doubts that the Holy Spirit is God, that He is fully at work in the church today, or that He still gives many gifts — teaching, service, mercy, leadership, and the rest. The question is narrower: it concerns the miraculous, revelatory sign-gifts that appear in the New Testament — speaking in tongues, prophecy, the working of miracles, and gifts of healing. Did these continue past the apostolic age, to be sought and exercised in every generation? Or were they given for a particular time and purpose, and then withdrawn? This is the point at issue. And before we hear the two cases, one more thing must be said, for it prevents endless confusion: the question of whether a gift is real is different from the question of whether it is required. A person may hold that the gift of tongues is entirely genuine and still deny that every believer must speak in tongues; the two convictions belong to two different questions. We keep them apart throughout, and you will find that much of the apparent conflict grows smaller when we do.

2.The Case That the Gifts Have Ceased

Warfield makes the case for cessation with great care, and it runs like this. The miraculous gifts, he argues, were not given for their own sake, nor as the normal equipment of every Christian in every age, but as credentials — a divine authentication of the apostles and of the new revelation they were bringing. Miracles clustered around the founding of the church and the giving of Scripture, as they had clustered around Moses and the prophets and around Christ Himself; they were the seal of God upon His messengers. Once the foundation was laid — once the apostles had finished their work and the New Testament was complete — the credentials had served their purpose, and they were withdrawn. Warfield points to the actual course of church history, arguing that the sign-gifts visibly declined and disappeared as the apostolic age passed, and he is cautious about the many later claims to miracles, testing them and finding much that will not stand. On this view, we honor the gifts as real in their time, but we do not expect them as abiding offices now; the Spirit works today chiefly through the completed Word He inspired, and through the ordinary graces He still supplies in abundance.

3.The Case That the Gifts Continue

Gordon makes the opposite case, and it too deserves a fair hearing. Scripture, he observes, nowhere plainly states that the miraculous gifts would cease before the return of Christ; the passages that promise the Spirit and His gifts to the church seem to hold for the whole age, not merely for one generation. The gifts are given, Paul says, for the building up of the body of Christ until it reaches maturity — a work not yet finished. If the Spirit is given to the whole church throughout the age, Gordon reasons, why should we assume that some of His gifts were quietly retired? He points to accounts of healing and unusual works of the Spirit scattered through the centuries, and to the plain expectation of the New Testament that the Spirit's power would attend the church's mission to the end. On this view, we should be open to the Spirit's gifts today, seeking them humbly and testing them by Scripture, neither demanding them nor forbidding them, but expecting that the God who worked then may work still. Gordon writes not as a fanatic but as a sober pastor, longing for the church to know the Spirit's fullness and power.

4.The Text at the Center: 1 Corinthians 13

Much of the debate gathers around one passage, and it is worth setting it plainly before us. Paul writes that love never fails, "but whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away." The whole question turns on what "that which is perfect" means. Those who hold that the gifts have ceased often understand "the perfect" as the completed Scripture, or as the maturing of the church — something that arrived, they argue, when the foundational age closed, so that the partial gifts of prophecy and tongues then passed away. Those who hold that the gifts continue understand "the perfect" as the return of Christ and the face-to-face knowledge of the age to come — for Paul goes on at once to say, "now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face." On that reading, the gifts continue until Christ comes. The course sets both readings before you and presses neither; here, as elsewhere, thoughtful believers differ, and the honest reader will feel the weight on both sides.

5.How Much the Two Sides Share

It is easy, in the heat of disagreement, to miss how much the two sides hold in common — and the common ground is large. Both Warfield and Gordon confess that the Holy Spirit is God and is mightily at work in the church today. Both prize the Scriptures as the inspired and final Word, and refuse to set any experience above them. Both insist that whatever claims to be from the Spirit must be tested, and both reject fanaticism, disorder, and the parading of the flesh as though it were the power of God. Both long above all for Christ to be exalted and for sinners to be saved. Neither is a fanatic; neither is a scoffer. Their disagreement, real as it is, lies within a shared love for God, His Word, and His Son — and that is worth remembering. It means the question of the gifts, while important, is not a question that need turn brothers into enemies. Two men who agree on so much, and differ on this, can still kneel together at the same cross and serve the same Lord. That kneeling together, more than any settled verdict on the gifts, is itself a mark of the Spirit of love who binds them in one body — and it is a mark the watching world can see.

6.Two Questions, Kept Apart

Here the distinction we noted at the start does much of its work. A great deal of the heat around this subject comes from running together two questions that are really separate. The first is whether a gift is real — whether the Spirit still gives it. The second is whether a particular gift or experience is required of every believer. These are not the same. Even a convinced continuationist need not hold that every Christian must speak in tongues, or that anyone who has not is a lesser believer; Paul himself asks, "Do all speak with tongues?" — plainly expecting the answer no. And a convinced cessationist need not deny that God still heals in answer to prayer, or works wonderfully in His providence; he denies only that the sign-gifts continue as abiding offices in the church. When the two questions are separated, much of the apparent conflict grows smaller, and both sides can be heard more fairly. Whatever you conclude about whether the gifts continue, do not let anyone burden your conscience by making a particular experience the measure of a true or a full Christian; Scripture nowhere does so.

7.Weighing It by Scripture

How, then, should you come to your own settled conviction? Not by temperament, nor by the tradition you happened to inherit, nor by the excesses or the coldness of others, but by patient attention to the Scriptures. Read what the New Testament actually says about the gifts, their purpose, and their duration. Weigh the cessationist's argument that they were credentials of the founding age, and ask whether Scripture says so plainly or leaves it to inference. Weigh the continuationist's argument that the gifts are promised to the whole age, and ask the same. Consider First Corinthians 13 and what "the perfect" most naturally means in its own setting. And bring to it a humble and teachable spirit, remembering that men more learned and more godly than ourselves have read these same texts and reached different conclusions. This is not a matter on which Scripture shouts; it is one on which it may be heard to speak more softly, and on which we must listen with care. Come, then, as the Bereans came — receiving the word readily, and searching the Scriptures to see whether these things are so.

8.Holding It with Charity, Christ at the Center

Whatever you conclude, hold it with charity, and keep Christ at the center. This is one of those questions on which faithful, Bible-loving Christians have long differed and will likely differ until the Lord returns; it is not one on which we should break fellowship, or treat those who disagree as enemies of the truth. If you come to believe the gifts have ceased, do not despise brothers who earnestly seek them; if you come to believe they continue, do not look down on brothers who do not. In either case, remember that the gifts were never the point. The Spirit was given to glorify Christ, and the surest evidence of His presence is not any gift, but a Savior exalted and a people made holy and loving. So weigh the question honestly, hold your conclusion humbly, extend charity freely, and keep your eyes, in all of it, on the Lord Jesus — who is greater than every gift, and whom the Spirit delights to make known.