Table of Contents

I Saw What I Saw

By Mark Rutland

I am an eyewitness to Pentecost. I saw the fire fall; I heard the wind blow. Nothing can dissuade me, confuse me, or convince me otherwise. I am no mere ideologue, ferociously paddling my fragile little theological canoe upstream against the prevailing current of modern dispensationalism. I saw what I saw.

"How old are you?" you may ask. I know my own age, and you have no need of the data. I make no claim of being 2,000 years old. In fact, that is the point. If the pyrotechnics of the Upper Room were a once-and-never-again historical fluke, Pentecostal theology–subject to the ravages of time–would stare forlornly at its own headwaters through the glass encasement of some ecclesiological Smithsonian. But we are not.

I saw what I saw, not in a rented upstairs banquet hall in first-century Jerusalem, but in a small, tidy living room in a colonia of Monterey, Mexico. I saw and heard Pentecost as an experience–not confined to antiquity–but alive in stunning fullness.

Having visited house to house all day with a group of about 30 Mexican seminaristas, I gathered them into a passionate, prayerful knot barely able to fit into the house of the only believer we could find. As those young people prayed, the Holy Spirit fell in stunning power. They began weeping and praying in tongues, some even collapsing on the floor in wracking, soul-wrenching sobs of intercessory grief. Someone produced the inevitable guitar and a worshipful chorus floated gently above the outburst.

After only a few minutes, the children who had followed us in naked curiosity filled the screenless windows. Shocked at the utterly inexplicable scene in the tiny parlor, they dashed away to fetch their parents. Soon the little yard, every window, and the cracked sidewalks out front were packed with the curious and the convicted. Eddie Rivera, Adrian Garcia, several of the girls, and I saw the ad hoc gathering and went out to answer their questions. Before the night was over, dozens had come to Christ. I saw what I saw there in Monterey; before that in my own life; and since, in thousands of Upper Rooms.

Those who would reduce Pentecost to the status of treasured relic deny its greatest reality and the apostolic priority. That reality is this: He who came in power in the Upper Room has not since left us to our own devices. He is still the Holy Ghost, and He still does what He did. The apostolic perspective was that every believer be filled personally, not in theory. That conviction, that holy priority, is at the epicenter of the Pentecostal earthquake that has shaken the church and the world for these last 100 years.

What Peter almost certainly could not have foreseen or even dared to imagine were the results that would be realized across the next two millennia. These results were of such global significance–by the last century of the second millennium, a Pentecostal expression of Christianity would be the religion’s historical dynamic. Nor did he ever dream those living, worshiping, and ministering under that same power–unbroken and undiluted by time–would be called Pentecostals. Did it ever occur to Peter, even years after the Upper Room, that the chamber experience was optional, or that the body of Christ would become a bicameral house vivisecting itself into non-Pentecostals and Pentecostals? Certainly not.

That the significance of the spiritual affluence in the Upper Room far transcended its immediate effect upon the recipients gathered there for the Jewish Feast of Weeks seems to have been clear even to them. Peter straightway identified the remarkable event along with its concomitant phenomena as being the effecting in time of that which Joel had forespoken. Peter’s economical phraseology, "This is that," frames the event prophetically.

A non-Pentecostal Christianity would have been no more imaginable to those first 120 than a nonelectrified city is to modern Americans. A defining Power and Light had descended upon them; and that believers in a millennium and continent far, far away might, for whatever reason, eschew such pneumatic inducement would have been utterly unimaginable to them.

AN HISTORICAL BRIEF

Amidst the bankrupt rubble of "religionized" Christianity at the end of the 19th century–encouraged at first, then fearfully laid aside by the Holiness movement–quivered the ragged, fibrillating heart of the very faith that had been breathed, not noted, into existence in Roman-occupied Jerusalem. Luther had not envisioned a Protestant church, but a biblical one. Likewise, John Wesley had not hoped to create Methodism in England, but renewal in its church. Even so, those touched by the flame ignited at Azusa Street and the virtually simultaneous bonfires elsewhere did not immediately envision a new Pentecostal church, but the church newly empowered and sanctified.

It is important for the several Pentecostal denominations to realize they themselves are not the harbingers of a new revelation, but merely the reminders of the primal blaze unextinguished by formalism, corruption, and the ecclesiastical pride that opted for form over power. We Pentecostals are not so much pioneers but stewards of the forgotten necessity without which the Church in every age becomes hardly more and frequently less than a glorified Kiwanis Club.

We dare not forget for even the blink of an eye that 20th-, and now 21st-century Pentecostals, are but the "wild branch" reminders that the power poured out in the Upper Room is not optional equipment, but utterly indispensable. The rambunctious, joyful, rollicking fact of us; the exponentially exploding, exuberant growth of us, is a prophetic sign to the wider church that there is power for ministry today. It is not so much what we believe or what we say about ourselves that the church and the world will regard, but the visual image of us. Peter and John were fresh from the Upper Room and in the midst of an antagonistic religious environment. They were about to work their first post-Ascension miracle. They did not say, "Listen to us"; they said, "Look on us."

HOW THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH VIEWED PENTECOST

Flabbergasted at the sudden deluge in the Upper Room, the empowered church–scattered across the world by the hand of God–operated out of a discernable paradigm of Pentecost. Some liberal writers have made much of the scarcity of apostolic writings on baptism in the Spirit as an experience. They have missed the point. How we talk and do not talk about what we do reveals much. For example, the fact a handbook on carpentry spends little time talking about hammers may not imply that they are unimportant, but rather obviously indispensable.

SPIRITUAL EMPOWERMENT ON APOSTOLIC PRIORITY

In Dr. C.I. Scofield’s dangerously misguided footnotes on Acts 2, he suggests that after Pentecost "no Christian need seek the Holy Spirit," because now the whole church is somehow automatically filled. Nonsense. Not centuries later, but even before Acts could be closed, it was clearly an apostolic priority that all believers should have a personal Pentecost. Witness Acts 8. Peter and John arrived at Samaria and immediately prayed for a city full of new converts to "receive the Holy Spirit." That is a wasted prayer if all new believers are filled by virtue of what happened in the Upper Room.

Even years later in Ephesus, Paul is still asking a question that must arise out of the same apostolic priority: "Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?" (Acts 19:2).* That is a superfluous question if Scofield was right. But he was not, and the question must be asked of all believers until the rapture of the Church.

An even more important view of how vital this was to the apostolic community is Acts 10. That the Romans at Cornelius’ house were truly born again had to be proven to Peter’s Jewish entourage. When they heard the Gentiles speaking in tongues, evidencing to them Spirit baptism, the Gentiles’ salvation could no longer be questioned. Why? Because Spirit baptism and salvation are the same? No, because Spirit baptism can only come, should come, must come, to believers.

The indispensable gift of God’s power and its physical evidence would never, in Peter’s view, have been given to unbelievers. That was the point to Peter’s group, at least. To us it means that Peter expected it for his converts, even as we must for ours. If baptism in the Holy Spirit was of such importance to the apostles, how can it be any less so to us?

THE APOSTOLIC CONCEPT OF PURPOSE

When Peter returned from Cornelius’ house to face the first Council at Jerusalem, one great question lay under the epidermal issue of baptizing Gentiles in water (though that was certainly issue enough for a good church fight). That hidden question was: If these Romans received the same Holy Spirit we did at Pentecost, did He do the same thing in them? Peter answered, "He [God] made no distinction between us and them, for he purified their hearts by faith" (Acts 15:9).

The promise of the Lord in Acts 1:8 was, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you." The power ministry–gifts, signs, wonders, and evangelistic anointing–all rained down at Pentecost. The apostles clearly viewed power in ministry as a Pentecostal work.

Just as clearly, however, they saw holiness of heart as equally a miraculous result of Spirit baptism. The Holy Ghost is at once the power element for ministry and sanctifying fire for the heart. Power and holiness, holiness and power–not one and then the other–were the twin blessings of Pentecost in the apostolic paradigm.

When inviting 21st-century converts to seek the great second blessing, we must tell them why: that, "Ye be endued with power from on high" (Luke 24:49, KJV), and, "Be holy, because I am holy" (1 Peter 1:16).

AN EXPERIENTIAL REALITY

The Church, its Kerygma, and its writings did not produce Pentecost; Pentecost produced the Church and all its doctrines. The doctrinal writings of the apostolic community did not bring down power from on high. Men full of the Holy Ghost and fire spent the rest of their lives trying to explain, articulate, and invite others into the power they had found. They were not mere Pentecostal apologists defending creedal positions out of a sense of duty to the prophet Joel. They were souls on fire whose doctrinal utterances on Spirit baptism had never had the pure punch packed into their lives and their ministries.

To the apostles, the issue was not who and how many agreed with them on their pneumatology, but upon whom and how many the Holy Ghost rained down like fire.

Doctrine is good. We are admonished to preach sound doctrine. But there are whole denominations sinking like pathetic dinosaurs in the La Brea tar pits whose doctrines on paper are right–dead right. Destined to become nothing but fossils of former revivals, they go gently into that good night with their doctrines, but are not radically altered.

It is their experience that is wanting.

Experiential, not doctrinal Pentecost, is more the apostolic model. In Acts 19 at Ephesus, Paul didn’t ask, "Do you believe there is a Holy Spirit (ruach)?" They could have answered that right enough. He asked, "Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?"

That is where we also must be renewed. Pentecostal preaching that only pounds the dunamis of doctrinal purity may well make us feel connected to the early 1900s. Pentecostal preaching that makes men hungry for holiness and power today will put us in touch with the first century.

Would that all Pentecostal churches were solid in their doctrine on tongues, for example. But if everyone agrees on initial evidence and no one ever speaks in tongues, what good is there in it? A believed-in Pentecost is good, but it was a received Pentecost that turned the world upside down.

WELCOMING AN UNWELCOME POWER

By the late 19th century, a thoroughly Americanized church had in many ways been too invaded by the culture’s individualistic self-sufficiency to accept its contemporary need for the power of Pentecost. The liberal denominations sanitized their theology of the miraculous for one reason and the fundamentalists for another, but the result was the same.

The promise of Christ that "you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you," was hardly appetizing to either camp. A burgeoning Holiness movement under leaders like A.B. Simpson, at first reclaimed elements of "power ministry," especially healing. These groups were later to draw back from other gifts, however, most particularly tongues. This vacuum created an atmosphere ideally conducive to a freshly awakened interest in supernatural ministry. Azusa Street was the spark that lit the dry tinder.

We modern Pentecostals, while being cautious to remain biblically sound and theologically balanced, dare not be reticent about the gifts–any of the gifts. Even as we cherish tongues both as gift and evidence, we ought also to anoint the sick, despise not prophesying, and remember that authentic deliverance in a demonic world must not be ignored. Pentecostal churches where the gifts are absent are not mature, but rather, deficient. Even worse, they play into the hands of charlatans and manipulators and hyper-spiritual nitwits.

The 20th-century Pentecostal movement that welcomed the power of Pentecost so long denied by both liberals and evangelicals must welcome again the grace of miracles in perhaps the most morally bankrupt and spiritually confused generation since the Dark Ages.

TESTIMONIES ON FIRE

When Peter spoke of the Gentiles he baptized at Cornelius’ house, he did not tell what they believed, but what had happened to them. Our testimony of the full blessing of the full gospel must shine in our eyes, blaze in our hearts, and be ready on our tongues.

Within a solidly constructed house of sound doctrine must burn the fire of a witnessable Pentecostal experience. We must recapture how to tell what happened to us. For this, after all, is what the world really wants to know.

MY WORD

In 1975, as a depleted, demonized Methodist pastor with a proper academic pedigree and the weight of generations of Wesleyan tradition deeply implanted in me, I found myself hopelessly mired in guilt and suicidal depression. At a pastors conference organized by several charismatic Methodist ministers I saw–not just heard–but saw power in ministry for which I had no supporting intellectual framework.

An unspeakable longing within me for holiness and power was suddenly munificently met by a work of grace I had discounted, denounced, and denied. Everything I had preached against for several years was suddenly gloriously mine. My doctrines were eventually–indeed, quickly changed; but first my heart was. I saw what I saw.

For example, the issue of initial evidence for me was not settled by persuasion, but by experience. The first person I ever heard speak in tongues was myself.

My soul on fire, my depression scattered like midnight by the dawn of a righteous sun, I began to search for explanations, insights, and yes–thank God–doctrines.

The freedom, holiness, happiness, and power I have known and seen since that day a quarter century ago remain undiminished and unalloyed by time and so-called maturity. The full blessing of Pentecost, which fell on me like fire from heaven, compels me yet to ask with the apostles, "I know what you believe. I know what your tradition, background, culture, and doctrine say. My question remains unchanged by these. It is this: ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?’ "

There are third-generation Pente-costals in the pews of Assemblies of God churches who fully understand our Pentecostal distinctives but stand apart from them experientially. Dare we be content for them to say only that they know what their Movement teaches? Surely not. We must pray and preach for them to say, "I saw what I saw!"

Mark Rutland, Ph.D., is president of Southeastern College of the Assemblies of God, Lakeland, Florida.

*Scripture references are from the New International Version unless otherwise noted.