We speak of the baptism of the Holy Spirit as an event that took place in the first century, at the very beginning of church history. That’s correct. Notwithstanding the practices of some charismatic groups, most Christians today do not expect groups of new believers to receive the Holy Spirit accompanied by tongues of fire and the expression of the prophetic word in foreign languages as in Acts 2. If we are honest, nothing that we see happening in those churches today corresponds authentically to the events we read about in Acts.
So then, we consign the baptism of the Holy Spirit to the past, where we believe it belongs. It was a historic manifestation of the power of God by which “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body”.
