What is the baptism of the Holy Spirit?
Answered by New Wine
The Baptism in the Holy Spirit is a real, identifiable experience — distinct from and subsequent to salvation — in which the Spirit comes upon a believer with power for witness and supernatural ministry. It is not simply a synonym for the new birth. It is Jesus himself doing what John the Baptist said he would do: baptizing people in the Holy Spirit.
What the Word Actually Means
Derek Prince makes the linguistic case plainly: the Greek word baptizō means to dip, plunge, or immerse — there is no legitimate reading of it as anything less than a full immersion.
But this baptism runs opposite to water baptism.
In water baptism you go down into the water. In Spirit baptism, as Prince puts it, the Spirit comes down over you — an immersion from above, like standing beneath Niagara Falls. You don't get a little wet. You are drenched.
That is exactly the pattern Acts 2 records: the Spirit came like a rushing wind, filled the whole room, and then each individual was filled and began speaking with other tongues.
The Pattern in Acts Is Not Incidental
Scott Woodard traces the same threefold rhythm through Luke 24:49 and Acts 1:4-5 — sacrifice, salvation, and then a third distinct experience: being "clothed with power from on high." This is not redundant language. It's a third movement Jesus himself names.
And the book of Acts repeats this pattern deliberately, not accidentally:
- Acts 8:14-17 — Samaritans already believed, were already baptized in water, already healed and delivered — yet Peter and John were sent specifically because they had not yet received the Spirit.
- Acts 9 — Ananias is sent to Saul not merely to confirm his conversion but "that he might be filled with the Holy Spirit."
- Acts 19:1-6 — Paul finds disciples in Ephesus who believed and were baptized in water, and still asks the now-famous question: "Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?" The question only makes sense if the answer is not automatically yes.
Prince is right to note that the early church treated this as a normal third phase alongside repentance and baptism — not an optional extra for the spiritually elite.
A Word on the Person, Not Just the Power
It matters that Woodard insists on this before anything else: the Holy Spirit is not an "it," not a force, not a feeling at an altar. He is a person of the Godhead, and to be baptized in him is to enter intimate fellowship with him — empowerment is what flows out of that relationship, not the whole of it.
Some traditions — even within evangelicalism, as Michael Brown notes when laying out the range of views — collapse this into a single moment at conversion, treating subsequent empowering merely as "growing into" what was already fully given. That is a different theology than the one in view here. The Pentecostal-charismatic reading, which Brown himself affirms as his own position, holds that regeneration and Spirit baptism are two distinguishable works: one at the new birth, one subsequent, marked by power for ministry.
Why It Matters
This is not academic hairsplitting. Jesus told disciples who had already seen the resurrected Christ, already been commissioned, already had forty days of teaching — to wait. Information was not enough. They needed the Spirit to come upon them before they could be effective witnesses.
If the apostles needed a distinct, subsequent empowering before they could turn the world upside down, the same is true for us. Salvation makes you a child of God; the baptism in the Spirit clothes you with power to live and witness as one.
Sources
New Wine drew this answer from these teachings.
- Entrance Into God’s Kingdom — Derek Prince
- What is the baptism of the Holy Spirit (with Dr. Michael Brown) — Michael Brown
- Eight Valuable Truths by Zac Poonen — Zac Poonen
- Baptism of the Holy Spirit: Clearing Up Misconceptions | Scott Woodard — Scott Woodard
