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COMPILED by Dr. Paul KING: Deeper Life Encounters
• John Wesley’s encounter with the Holy Spirit at Aldersgate, holy heat: “I felt my heart strangely
warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken
away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
• French scientist/philosopher Blaise Pascal, an eloquent speaker and writer, was reduced to writing a
few brief, repetitive words when he experienced this holy heat in what has been described as “Pascal’s
Night of Fire” on November 23, 1654: “Fire, fire,… Security, security, feeling, joy, peace,… forgetfulness
of the world and all except God…. Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.” This encounter launched Pascal into a new
realm of the Spirit, inspiring him to write his famous Pensees, insightful philosophical essays on the
nature of God.
• Lutheran Pastor L.H. Ziemer: “Oh, glorious rapture of the soul! I arose, shouted, & sang, & laughed in the Spirit until I cried for very joy as the flood-tide of God’s grace rolled in over my soul again & again
with purifying and cleansing power…. The Lord Jesus Christ was baptizing me with the Holy Spirit
according to His Word & power.” This was such an outside-the-box experience for his Lutheran
colleagues that he had to leave his denomination & found a sympathetic home in the C&MA.
• A.B. Simpson: deeper, fuller baptism in the Spirit. Diary 1907: A distinct sense of warmth—at times a
penetrating fire—filled my whole body. God showed me plainly that it was the Holy Spirit. It continued
for more than 6 hrs. I got alone w/God & on my face opened all my being to Him to fill. At the same
time there was a deep sense of much more to come & that my heart could not be satisfied without all
the fullness of His power.
• Madame Guyon: encounter with the fire of the Holy Spirit as an “unction” or “sanctified heart” that
brought “victory over the self-life.” She testified that it “burned in me like a fire which was going to
devour all that what left of self. . . . I was so suddenly altered . . . no longer those troubling faults or
reluctances. They disappeared, consumed like chaff in a great fire.” As a result, she experienced “such
harmony with the will of God. . . inward purity. . . such a oneness with God.”
• Quaker theologian Robert Barclay: “the purifying action of the Holy Spirit on the soul, and the
cauterizing of our unrighteous nature by the fire of His judgment. . . “reaching the heart & melting it so
that a change of heart is brought about as well as an increase of understanding.”
• Jonathan Edwards shared of his deeper encounter w/God after his conversion: “The Person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent w/an excellency great enough to swallow up all thoughts & conceptions, which continued, as near as I can judge, about an hour; such as to keep me a greater part of the time in a flood of tears, & weeping aloud. I felt an ardency of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied & annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone; to love Him with a holy & pure love; to trust in Him; to live upon Him; to serve Him & to be perfectly sanctified & made pure, with a divine & heavenly purity.”
• Welsh Baptist Christmas Evans received “the promise of the Holy Ghost,” he “felt shackles loosening, old hardness softening, mountains of frost melting” and his mind was relieved from bondage.
• John Bunyan overwhelmed w/God’s grace & power, “My chains fell off, I was loosed from my
afflictions.”
• Oswald Chambers received his baptism in the Spirit, he testified that he had “an altered disposition. . . . the last aching abyss of the human heart is filled to overflowing with the love of God. The power and
tyranny of sin is gone and the radiant, unspeakable emancipation of the indwelling Christ has come.”
• Andrew Murray: “What is the baptism of fire?… I know no fire like the fire of God, the fire of
everlasting love that consumed the sacrifice on Calvary. . . . Brother, sister, ask God to baptize you with
the Spirit of love. . . . Love is a fire that will burn through every difficulty.”
• A.B. Simpson: “Like a flame that consumes the dross and leaves the molten metal pure and unalloyed, so the Holy Spirit separates us from our old sinful and self-life, and burns into us the nature and the life of Christ.”
• A.W. Tozer: “I am looking for the fellowship of the burning heart. I claim the Methodist and the Baptist as mine and I claim everybody that loves Jesus Christ as mine; but I am looking for the fellowship of the burning heart. Men and women of all generations and everywhere that love the Savior until ‘adoration’ has become the new word and they do not have to be entertained or amused. This Christ was everything. He was their all in all… I am looking for men and women who are lost in worship, those who love God until he is the sweetheart of the soul.”
