Clean Enough for the Spirit?

What this page is asking

The testimony is told on television, and it is told to encourage. As the author of this site heard it, it runs like this. A well-known evangelist prayed without ceasing for seven years to receive an anointing of the Holy Spirit. Nothing happened. He asked God why, and he says he was shown the reason: a restaurant had once undercharged him by a tiny amount, and he had not reported it. He wrote to the restaurant and paid the money back. Other instances of the same kind then came to mind, and he put those right as well. Only then, he says, did he receive the full anointing of the Holy Spirit.

The story has a good man in it and a good deed. That is what makes it worth examining. The author’s own framing: “I am not talking about making restitution. That is Christian. But this kind of transaction? Does Scripture or the historic Church teach that God withholds a fuller possession of the Holy Spirit until a Christian identifies and rectifies even forgotten sins?” If the answer is yes, then every Christian who prays for more of the Spirit and feels nothing has a task: go back through your life until you find what you missed. If the answer is no, the story teaches something the church has spent sixteen centuries refusing to teach.

Two positions, labelled, and used consistently throughout

Both positions take sin seriously and both believe the Holy Spirit is holy. The page states each as a thoughtful person who holds it would state it.

Notice what the two share. Both affirm that God is holy, that sin does real harm to a Christian’s life, that wrongs should be put right, and that a Christian should want more of the Spirit’s work. They disagree about one thing: whether God holds his Spirit back until the cleaning is finished, or gives his Spirit so that the cleaning can be done.

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. First, reverse it: ask for the strongest case, from Scripture and from the Holiness and Pentecostal writers themselves, that unconfessed sin does hold back the Spirit’s fullness. Second, narrow it: ask only what Acts 5:32 means by “them that obey him,” in its context and in the Greek. Third, make it a test: describe, with no names, a testimony you have heard in which a blessing arrived after some last thing was put right, and ask which of the two positions it assumed.

Write a detailed, source-first, interactive article, in British
English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote Scripture
from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other quotation:
give the work, the edition or translation, the section, and the page
where possible. Where an attribution or date is disputed, say so at
the point of use. Verify every quotation against a reliable published
source; where a quotation cannot be verified, cut it. Do not invent
quotes.

  TITLE. Clean Enough for the Spirit?

  AREA OF INTEREST. Moral perfection.

  THE TESTIMONY. A modern television evangelist claims that he
  prayed ceaselessly for seven years to receive an anointing of the
  Holy Spirit. He was not successful. He wondered why, and he claims
  he was shown that he had not reported an instance where a
  restaurant had undercharged him by a tiny amount. He wrote a
  letter to that restaurant and corrected this by paying back the
  amount. Similar instances came back to him and he fixed those as
  well. Only then did he receive the full anointing of the Holy
  Spirit (which I take to mean speaking in tongues, as he is of the
  Pentecostal/charismatic persuasion).

  THE QUESTION. Contrast this with the historic church and its
  teachings. Does one have to become sinless to progress in the
  Christian life and receive the Spirit of God? I am not talking
  about making restitution. That is Christian. But this kind of
  transaction? Does Scripture or the historic Church teach that God
  withholds a fuller possession of the Holy Spirit until a Christian
  identifies and rectifies even forgotten sins? How can this be
  reconciled with historic Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican
  accounts of grace and sanctification?

  THE POINTS TO TEST.
   1. The Holy Spirit is gift, not payment for moral completion. In
      Acts 2:38 and Galatians 3:2-5 the Spirit is associated with
      repentance, faith, baptism and hearing the gospel, not with
      successfully completing an exhaustive moral audit first.
   2. Sanctification presupposes that Christians remain sinners.
      Paul describes an ongoing struggle with sin (Romans 7:15-25);
      1 John 1:8 says, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive
      ourselves." Historic Christianity expects repentance
      throughout the Christian life, not sinlessness as the gateway
      to spiritual advancement.
   3. The story risks reversing the direction of grace. Historically
      God gives the Spirit to regenerate and sanctify the sinner;
      the Spirit then produces repentance, obedience and good works.
      In this account, sufficient purification appears to become the
      condition that finally persuades God to grant the Spirit.
   4. Restitution is Christian; making it the price of "anointing"
      is another matter. Zacchaeus makes restitution after
      encountering Christ (Luke 19:1-10). Scripture does not
      establish a rule that forgotten debts block a second or fuller
      reception of the Spirit.
   5. How could anyone know the purification process was complete?
      If an unnoticed restaurant undercharge can prevent the
      Spirit's "full anointing", what about every forgotten harsh
      word, unpaid obligation, selfish act or unknown injury?
      Psalm 19:12 asks, "Who can understand his errors?"
   6. Historic Christianity ordinarily points outward to God's
      promises, not inward to finding the hidden blockage.
      Lutheranism emphasises Word and Sacrament as objective means
      through which God gives grace; Anglicanism grounds Christian
      life in baptism, Scripture, prayer, Eucharist, repentance and
      faith. Neither requires solving a concealed spiritual puzzle
      before God will grant grace.
   7. It can turn conscience into an endless archaeological
      excavation. Examination of conscience is ancient and healthy,
      but it leads to confession and absolution, not to the
      assumption that every spiritual difficulty proves some
      forgotten sin remains undiscovered. The latter produces
      scrupulosity rather than assurance.
   8. Tongues are especially problematic as proof that the process
      finally worked. "Do all speak with tongues?" (1 Corinthians
      12:30) expects the answer no.
   9. The apostles themselves were plainly not morally perfected
      after receiving the Spirit. Peter receives the Spirit at
      Pentecost yet is later rebuked by Paul at Antioch (Galatians
      2:11-14).
  10. The deeper contrast is two models of Christian progress.
      Historic: grace, then faith and baptism, then lifelong
      repentance and sanctification, then good works. The
      testimony: moral purification, then spiritual breakthrough,
      then extraordinary experience, then assurance that God has
      finally bestowed the Spirit.

TWO LABELLED POSITIONS, used consistently:
  G - the Gift: the Spirit is given to sinners on God's promise,
      and he does the cleansing. HELD.
  A - the Audit: a fuller reception of the Spirit is withheld until
      the believer has found and rectified his sins, including
      forgotten ones. State it as a sincere holder would.
      UNDER TEST.

COUNTER-CASE. No separate section. Answer objections inside the
argument where they arise, at full strength - including Acts 5:32
("to them that obey him"), Psalm 66:18, Isaiah 59:2, Matthew
5:23-24, Achan, and "without holiness no man shall see the Lord".

FOUR PARTS THE ARGUMENT OWES ITS READERS.
  a. Where the idea came from: Finney's sin-lists and restitution
     (1835), the Holiness "conditions", Torrey's seven steps, Azusa
     Street - and Wesley, whose perfection excluded unknown faults.
  b. What the historic churches do say blocks grace, at full
     weight: Cyril of Jerusalem on Simon Magus, Trent on mortal
     sin, the Orthodox tradition of purification.
  c. Scrupulosity: Luther in the monastery and Staupitz; Ignatius
     of Loyola's notes on scruples.
  d. A reader's diagnostic for someone told that a hidden sin is
     blocking the Spirit.

NAMING. The evangelist is not named and is not quoted; the
testimony is retold. No living person named anywhere. Deceased
figures quoted only from dated published works. Organisations quoted
only from their own published documents, verbatim. Every modern
example is composed for illustration and labelled as composed.

EXCLUDED. Whether the gifts of the Spirit continue; whether there is
a baptism in the Spirit after conversion (grant both for argument).
Adjudication between Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran and Anglican
accounts of justification.

INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz. A sort of the claims inside the
testimony. A quiz on what precedes the gift of the Spirit in six New
Testament passages. A sort of texts by whether the sin in view is
known or unknown. A sort of prayers and sayings by the direction
they run. Eight composed cases judged by the historic churches' own
rules. An audit calculator. An objection drill the reader answers in
his own words first. A guess-the-source quiz on real, dated
quotations. A reader's diagnostic.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional
and readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating the
question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, repeating the
key points in prominent boxes for readers who skim, and giving the
reader something to do in every major section. Also produce a plain-
English quick version of about fifteen minutes with three short
exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked. Where a quotation could not be verified against a published source, it was cut. Three things qualified the brief. The question “does one have to become sinless?” was narrowed. The testimony does not claim sinlessness in so many words, so the page tests the narrower claim the author also states: that God withholds a fuller gift of the Spirit until even forgotten sins are identified and rectified. Point 6 was widened from the Lutheran and Anglican churches to all four named in the question, each quoted from its own documents. And one finding was not in the brief: the position paper of the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination, rejects the idea that the gift depends on a person’s worthiness. The testimony goes further than the mainstream of its own tradition, and the page says so.

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has a determinate answer, and you can check every one yourself in Part XV. Answer them before reading and lock them in. They come back in Part XIV with the sources beside them.

What follows

The story, taken apart

A testimony is persuasive because it arrives whole. A man prayed, searched, paid, and received, and the hearer takes the four together. But the story contains several separate claims, and they are not equally strong. Some of them every Christian tradition would sign. One of them is new.

Start with what is sound. A restaurant charged too little, the customer noticed, and he said nothing. Years later he wrote and paid. That is restitution, and Scripture requires it. The Law told the man who had “deceived his neighbour” to “restore it in the principal, and … add the fifth part more thereto” (Leviticus 6:2, 5). Paul told the Romans to “owe no man any thing, but to love one another” (Romans 13:8). Jesus said that “he that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much” (Luke 16:10), so the smallness of the sum is no argument against paying it. If the story ended with the letter to the restaurant, there would be nothing to examine.

It is also sound that a Christian should want more of the Spirit’s work in his life. “Be filled with the Spirit,” Paul writes (Ephesians 5:18), to people who already have him. And it is sound that sin does a Christian harm. “Grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30).

The new claim is the link between the two halves of the story. It says why the seven years were empty, and what ended them. God was holding back, and the cause was an unpaid trifle. When the trifle and a few others like it were paid, the gift was released. That is a statement about how God gives his Spirit, and it can be tested.

Sort the claims yourself. Each of the eight statements below is contained in the testimony or follows directly from it. For each, decide whether the historic churches would agree with it, or whether it belongs to the part this page is testing.

0 of 8 sorted

What the Spirit is given on

The New Testament describes the giving of the Spirit many times, and it is specific about what the gift is attached to. On the day of Pentecost a crowd that included people who had called for the crucifixion asked Peter what they should do:

Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call.

Acts 2:38–39. Peter’s answer on the day of Pentecost. Three thousand were baptized the same day (2:41).

Peter calls it a gift and a promise. Repentance is there, and it should not be explained away. But three thousand people repented and were baptized between a morning sermon and nightfall. Whatever their repentance was, it was not a seven-year inventory of their dealings with shopkeepers.

Paul makes the point into an argument. The Galatians were being told that faith in Christ was a beginning, and that the full blessing required something more from them. He asks one question:

This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish? having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh? … He therefore that ministereth to you the Spirit, and worketh miracles among you, doeth he it by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?

Galatians 3:2–3, 5. The question expects the answer every Galatian knew: by hearing. A few verses on he says that “we … receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (3:14).

Notice the phrase “made perfect.” Paul’s opponents were not offering the Galatians a way to become Christians. They were offering a way to be completed. Paul’s reply is that the Spirit who began the work came by hearing, and the same Spirit, still being supplied, comes the same way. John Chrysostom, preaching on this verse in Antioch in the late fourth century, drew out what the Galatians had received:

You have received, he says, the Holy Spirit, you have done many mighty works, you have effected miracles in raising the dead, in cleansing lepers, in prophesying, in speaking with tongues — did the Law confer this great power upon you? Was it not rather Faith, seeing that, before, you could do no such things?

John Chrysostom, Commentary on Galatians, on 3:2 (Antioch, c. 390s). Trans. Gross Alexander, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13 (1889), as revised for New Advent.

The clearest single case is the house of Cornelius. Peter has been sent to a Roman officer’s household and is partway through explaining who Jesus is:

While Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word. And they of the circumcision which believed were astonished, as many as came with Peter, because that on the Gentiles also was poured out the gift of the Holy Ghost. For they heard them speak with tongues, and magnify God.

Acts 10:44–46. Peter’s last sentence before the interruption was that “whosoever believeth in him shall receive remission of sins” (10:43).

Nobody in that room had been asked to do anything yet. Chrysostom noticed it: God “does not suffer the speech to be finished” (Homilies on Acts, Homily 24, c. 400; NPNF I.11). The Spirit fell on Gentiles who heard, with tongues, before baptism, and before a single old account could have been settled. It is true that Cornelius was “a devout man” who gave alms and prayed (10:2). But Peter, reporting the event in Jerusalem, does not say that God saw a clean record. He says God gave them “the like gift as he did unto us, who believed on the Lord Jesus Christ” (11:17), and later that God was “purifying their hearts by faith” (15:9). The purifying was God’s act, and faith was how it came.

Jesus’ own teaching on asking for the Spirit is in the same key, and it contains a phrase that is easy to pass over:

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?

Luke 11:13. Jesus has just asked whether a father would give his son a stone for bread or a serpent for a fish.

“Being evil.” The people who are told to ask are described, in the same breath, as evil. The picture is a child asking a father for food. It is hard to fit into it a father who says nothing for seven years because the child once kept the wrong change.

Six passages follow. For each, choose what the text itself ties the gift of the Spirit to.

“To them that obey him”

Position A has texts of its own, and they deserve to be read at full strength. Four are used most often.

Acts 5:32: “whom God hath given to them that obey him”

This is the verse most often quoted for the Audit, and R. A. Torrey built a whole step on it (Part X). Here it is in its place:

Then Peter and the other apostles answered and said, We ought to obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree. Him hath God exalted with his right hand to be a Prince and a Saviour, for to give repentance to Israel, and forgiveness of sins. And we are his witnesses of these things; and so is also the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey him.

Acts 5:29–32. Peter before the council that had forbidden the apostles to preach. The Greek verb for “obey” is the same in verse 29 and verse 32 (peitharchein).

The obedience in view is named three verses earlier. The council had ordered the apostles to stop preaching Christ, and Peter says they must obey God instead of men. “Them that obey him” are the people who, against the council’s order, believe and proclaim the risen Jesus. Peter is contrasting two groups in the room. He is not listing a condition that some believers meet and others do not. Notice also that the verb is in the past: God hath given. And the man speaking had denied Christ three times a few weeks before he received the Spirit at Pentecost. If the gift waited on a clean record, Peter would not have been standing there. In the same speech he says what God gives: “repentance … and forgiveness of sins.” Even the repentance is given.

Psalm 66:18 and Isaiah 59:2: sin that stops prayer

“If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.” “Your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.” These are real warnings, and the historic churches have always preached them. But look at what kind of sin each describes. The psalmist’s verb is “regard”: to look on with approval, to keep. And his next line is “But verily God hath heard me” (66:19). Isaiah goes on at once to say what the iniquities were: “your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies” (59:3). Neither text is about a fault a man has forgotten. Both are about sin he knows and is keeping.

Matthew 5:23–24: leave your gift at the altar

Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.

Matthew 5:23–24. From the Sermon on the Mount.

This is the nearest thing in the Gospels to the evangelist’s letter, and it supports what he did. If you remember, go. But the instruction turns on one word: “rememberest.” Jesus tells the worshipper what to do when a wrong comes to mind. He does not tell him to stay away from the altar until he is sure nothing has slipped his memory. The worshipper in the saying is already at the altar with his gift.

Achan: one hidden thing that stopped a whole army

Joshua 7 is the strongest Old Testament picture for the Audit. Israel was defeated at Ai because one man had hidden plunder under his tent, and nothing went right until it was found. But Achan’s own confession shows what kind of case it was: “I saw among the spoils a goodly Babylonish garment, and two hundred shekels of silver … then I coveted them, and took them; and, behold, they are hid in the earth in the midst of my tent” (7:21). He knew exactly what he had done and where it was buried. And he did not find it by searching his memory. God identified him, tribe by tribe and household by household (7:14–18).

What Scripture does with the faults a person cannot see

The Bible knows that there are such faults, and it has a settled way of dealing with them. The Law provided a sacrifice: “though he wist it not, yet is he guilty … and the priest shall make an atonement for him concerning his ignorance wherein he erred and wist it not, and it shall be forgiven him” (Leviticus 5:17–18). The psalmist prays about them:

Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults.

Psalm 19:12. “Secret” here means hidden from the man himself, as the question before it shows.

He asks who can know his own errors, expects the answer “no one,” and hands them to God. Paul does the same with his own conscience: “For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord” (1 Corinthians 4:4). In older English, “I know nothing by myself” means “I am not aware of anything against myself.” A clear conscience, Paul says, proves nothing either way. And when the psalmist does want his heart searched, he does not propose to do it himself: “Search me, O God, and know my heart … and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23–24).

Sort nine texts below. For each, decide which kind of sin it has in view. Then see what the text says happens.

0 of 9 sorted

Restitution is Christian

It would be a poor answer to the Audit to suggest that paying the restaurant did not matter. It mattered. A reader who comes away from this page thinking that grace makes old debts disappear has misread it. The restaurant was owed the money, and writing to return it was the right thing to do, whatever was going on in the man’s prayers.

The Gospel’s own restitution story is Zacchaeus, the chief tax collector of Jericho. It is worth reading for its order.

And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him, and said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for to day I must abide at thy house. And he made haste, and came down, and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all murmured, saying, That he was gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner. And Zacchaeus stood, and said unto the Lord; Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold. And Jesus said unto him, This day is salvation come to this house, forsomuch as he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.

Luke 19:5–10.

Jesus invites himself before Zacchaeus has said a word. The crowd’s complaint is that he has gone to be the guest of “a man that is a sinner,” which is true. The promise of restitution comes afterwards, from a man standing in his own house with Jesus already under his roof. And when Jesus says that salvation has come, Zacchaeus has not yet repaid anyone. He has said what he will do. The last sentence gives the reason for the whole episode, and it is about who went looking for whom: “the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.”

The same order runs through the rest of the New Testament. “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth” (Ephesians 4:28) is written to people Paul describes, two verses later, as “sealed” by the Spirit (4:30). At Ephesus, “many that believed came, and confessed, and shewed their deeds,” and burned their books of magic (Acts 19:18–19). They believed, and then they came. The Augsburg Confession puts the order in a sentence: after contrition and faith, “then good works are bound to follow, which are the fruits of repentance” (Article XII, 1530).

Christians remain sinners

The Audit assumes that the list is finite. There is a last item, and a serious believer can reach it. The historic churches have never believed that, and they have said so in their most formal documents.

The New Testament says it first. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8), written by an apostle and in the first person plural. “For in many things we offend all” (James 3:2). Paul, late in his ministry: “Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after” (Philippians 3:12). And at more length:

For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. … O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Romans 7:18–19, 24–25. The next chapter is the New Testament’s fullest account of life in the Spirit, addressed to the same people.

In 418 a council of more than two hundred African bishops met at Carthage to answer the teaching of Pelagius, who held that a Christian could, by effort, live without sin. Two of its canons deal with believers who thought themselves past needing forgiveness:

It has seemed good that whoever should say that when in the Lord’s prayer, the saints say, forgive us our trespasses, they say this not for themselves, because they have no need of this petition, but for the rest who are sinners of the people … let him be anathema. For holy and just was the Apostle James, when he said, For in many things we offend all.

Council of Carthage, 1 May 418, as preserved in the African Code of 419, canon 115 (Greek numbering 116). Trans. Henry Percival, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14 (1900), as revised for New Advent. Canon 114 condemns anyone who holds that 1 John 1:8 is said “out of humility” and “not because it is really so.”

Augustine, who was at the council, had preached the same to the newly baptized some years earlier, probably in 407. He told them that “a man, so long as he bears the flesh, cannot but have some at any rate light sins,” and then gave them their comfort: “if you have confessed yourself a sinner, the truth is in you” (Homilies on the First Epistle of John, Homily 1.6; trans. H. Browne, NPNF I.7, as revised for New Advent).

The four traditions the question names all took this over, and each put it in a binding text.

Trent: trans. J. Waterworth (London, 1848). Augsburg Confession and Large Catechism: Triglot Concordia (1921), bracketed glosses omitted. Articles: Book of Common Prayer (1662). Orthodox prayer: text as published by the Orthodox Church in America.

The first of Luther’s Ninety-five Theses makes the same point from the other side: “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He said Poenitentiam agite, willed that the whole life of believers should be repentance” (1517). Repentance was to be the whole of the Christian life. It was never a stage to be completed before the Christian life could move on.

The apostles after Pentecost

If the Spirit were given only to the morally completed, the people who received him at Pentecost should be the proof. Peter received him then. Some years later at Antioch he withdrew from eating with Gentile Christians for fear of what visitors from Jerusalem would think, and Paul “withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed” (Galatians 2:11). Paul calls it “dissimulation,” which is acting a part, and says Barnabas was carried away with it (2:13). This was a public failure by the leading apostle, on a matter touching the Gospel itself, long after the Spirit had come on him.

Corinth: the most gifted church and the least orderly

The church at Corinth is the hardest case for the Audit, because Paul’s two descriptions of it stand side by side in one letter. He opens by thanking God that “ye come behind in no gift” (1 Corinthians 1:7). They spoke in tongues so freely that he had to regulate it (chapter 14). He tells them they are “the temple of God” and that “the Spirit of God dwelleth in you” (3:16).

In the same letter he says this: “I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal” (3:1). There was sexual sin among them “as is not so much as named among the Gentiles” (5:1). They were taking each other to court, and worse: “Nay, ye do wrong, and defraud, and that your brethren” (6:8). At the Lord’s Supper “one is hungry, and another is drunken” (11:21).

Paul does not conclude that their sins were unimportant. He spends sixteen chapters correcting them. But he corrects them as people who have the Spirit, and he argues from that fact: “know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you?” (6:19). The gift comes first in his reasoning, and the cleaning up is what he demands because of it.

Which way grace runs

The deepest difference between the two positions is one of direction. Both have the same pieces on the table: the Spirit, repentance, a cleaner life. They put them in opposite order.

The question of direction was fought out in the Western church in the fifth and sixth centuries, and it was settled. After Pelagius, a milder view survived in southern Gaul: grace is needed, but the first move is ours. We turn, we will, we make ourselves ready, and then God responds. In 529 a council at Orange, under Caesarius of Arles, rejected it. Its fourth canon could have been written about the testimony:

If anyone maintains that God awaits our will to be cleansed from sin, but does not confess that even our will to be cleansed comes to us through the infusion and working of the Holy Spirit, he resists the Holy Spirit himself who says through Solomon, “The will is prepared by the Lord” (Prov. 8:35, LXX), and the salutary word of the Apostle, “For God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Phil. 2:13).

Second Council of Orange, 529, canon 4. English text as given in the Internet Medieval Sourcebook (Fordham University). Canon 6 adds a condemnation of anyone who “makes the assistance of grace depend on the humility or obedience of man and does not agree that it is a gift of grace itself that we are obedient and humble.”

“God awaits our will to be cleansed.” That is the Audit in seven words, and Orange calls it resisting the Holy Spirit. The council’s reasoning is that the desire to be clean, and the humility and obedience that go with it, are already things the Spirit has given. A man cannot produce them first and present them as his qualification.

This bears directly on the testimony. The evangelist says he was shown the restaurant bill. On any Christian account, the one who shows a man his sin is the Holy Spirit: “when he is come, he will reprove the world of sin” (John 16:8). If the Spirit was convicting him of a forgotten undercharge, then the Spirit was already present and at work in him, doing what the Spirit does. The story’s own turning point is evidence against its conclusion.

Each of the four traditions states the direction in its own terms.

For through the Word and Sacraments, as through instruments, the Holy Ghost is given, who works faith; where and when it pleases God, in them that hear the Gospel … They condemn the Anabaptists and others who think that the Holy Ghost comes to men without the external Word, through their own preparations and works.

Augsburg Confession, Article V (1530). Triglot Concordia (1921). The Lutheran statement: the Spirit comes through means God has appointed, and not through “their own preparations and works.”

And in Christians this repentance continues until death, because, through the entire life it contends with sin remaining in the flesh … and that, not by his own powers, but by the gift of the Holy Ghost that follows the remission of sins. This gift daily cleanses and sweeps out the remaining sins, and works so as to render man truly pure and holy.

Martin Luther, Smalcald Articles, Part III, Article III, §40 (1537). Triglot Concordia (1921), bracketed glosses omitted. The Spirit is a gift that follows forgiveness, and the sweeping out is his daily work.

The condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith, and calling upon God … Works done before the grace of Christ, and the Inspiration of his Spirit, are not pleasant to God, forasmuch as they spring not of faith in Jesus Christ, neither do they make men meet to receive grace.

Thirty-nine Articles, Articles X and XIII (1571). “Meet” means fit. The Anglican statement: nothing a person does beforehand makes him fit to receive grace.

… we are therefore said to be justified freely, because that none of those things which precede justification — whether faith or works — merit the grace itself of justification. For, if it be a grace, it is not now by works, otherwise, as the same Apostle says, grace is no more grace.

Council of Trent, Session VI, chapter VIII (13 January 1547). Trans. J. Waterworth (1848). The Catholic statement. Chapter V says the beginning of justification comes “from the prevenient grace of God … without any merits existing on their parts.”

Thomas Aquinas, three centuries before Trent, asked whether a man can prepare himself for grace without grace, and answered that he cannot: for a man to prepare himself, “we must presuppose a gratuitous gift of God, Who moves the soul inwardly or inspires the good wish” (Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 109, a. 6, c. 1270; trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province). And Luther, at Heidelberg in 1518, put the whole matter in a sentence: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it” (Heidelberg Disputation, thesis 28).

The prayers say it most plainly

Doctrine is one test of what a church believes. Its prayers are another, and on this question they are clearer than the textbooks. When the historic churches ask for the Holy Spirit, they do not report that the cleaning is done. They ask him to do it.

Collect: Book of Common Prayer (1662). “O Heavenly King”: text as published by the Orthodox Church in America. Veni Sancte Spiritus: the Latin of the Roman Missal; the English is a literal rendering by this page. Small Catechism: Triglot Concordia (1921).

The Collect for Purity is addressed to a God “from whom no secrets are hid,” and the conclusion it draws is a request for the Spirit, with no promise to search harder. The Orthodox prayer says “come” and “cleanse” in one breath. The Latin hymn asks the Spirit to wash what is soiled. The Old Testament promise they all rest on has the same order: “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean … A new heart also will I give you … And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:25–27). God speaks in the first person all the way through, and the walking in his statutes comes last.

Ten sayings follow. Some are real and dated; three are composed by this page and labelled. For each, decide which way it runs.

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What the historic churches say blocks grace

Position A could fairly reply that Part VI proves too much. The historic churches have never taught that sin makes no difference to a person’s life with God. They have taught the opposite, and a page that hid this would deserve to be distrusted. Here is their teaching in their own words.

The early church. Cyril of Jerusalem, preparing candidates for baptism around the year 350, warned them that the rite would do them no good if they came to it without repentance:

Even Simon Magus once came to the Laver: he was baptized, but was not enlightened; and though he dipped his body in water, he enlightened not his heart with the Spirit … But if you persist in an evil purpose, the speaker is blameless, but you must not look for the grace: for the water will receive, but the Spirit will not accept you.

Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis 2 and 4 (c. 350). Trans. E. H. Gifford, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7 (1894), as revised for New Advent.

The Catholic Church. A Catholic who comes to confirmation, the sacrament in which, the Catechism says, there is “the full outpouring of the Holy Spirit as once granted to the apostles on the day of Pentecost” (§1302), is told to prepare:

To receive Confirmation one must be in a state of grace. One should receive the sacrament of Penance in order to be cleansed for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1310 (1992; English text as published by the Holy See).

The Lutheran church. Luther himself, in the same article that calls the Spirit a gift who sweeps out remaining sins, insists that open and deliberate sin drives him out: “when holy men … happen to fall into manifest sins, as David into adultery, murder, and blasphemy, that then faith and the Holy Ghost has departed from them” (Smalcald Articles III.III, §43). The Augsburg Confession condemns those “who deny that those once justified can lose the Holy Ghost” (Art. XII).

The Anglican church. “After we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin, and by the grace of God we may arise again, and amend our lives” (Article XVI).

The Orthodox Church. Orthodoxy has the richest tradition of all on the purification of the heart, and it speaks of the whole Christian life as the “acquisition of the Holy Spirit.” The Orthodox Church in America’s catechetical series says that a person chrismated is one “in whom the Holy Spirit lives and acts — as long as we want him and cooperate with his powerful and holy inspiration” (The Orthodox Faith, vol. II, “Chrismation”).

So the historic churches do say that sin can stand in the way of the Spirit. “Cleansed for the gift of the Holy Spirit” is a phrase from a Catholic catechism, and a Pentecostal preacher could use it. The question is whether they mean what the Audit means. They do not, and the differences are four.

The Orthodox tradition makes the last point with particular force. Seraphim of Sarov, the nineteenth-century Russian saint whose phrase “acquisition of the Holy Spirit” is quoted more than any other, is cited by the same catechetical series as saying this:

In spite of our sinfulness, in spite of the darkness surrounding our souls, the Grace of the Holy Spirit, conferred by baptism in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, still shines in our hearts with the inextinguishable light of Christ … and when the sinner turns to the way of repentance the light smooths away every trace of the sins committed.

Seraphim of Sarov (1754–1833), Conversation with Motovilov, as quoted in The Orthodox Faith, vol. IV, “The Holy Spirit” (Orthodox Church in America). The conversation was first published in 1903 from Motovilov’s notes.

The grace given in baptism “still shines,” in spite of sinfulness. Repentance does not earn the light. It is the sinner turning toward a light that never went out, and the light that does the smoothing away.

Now apply this to the restaurant. On the historic churches’ own rules, was the undercharge the kind of thing that blocks grace? It was small. By the time of the seven years it was forgotten. It was not being persisted in. And the man was baptized, praying, and by his own account seeking God earnestly. Put the case to each tradition in turn. A Catholic confessor would ordinarily treat it as a light matter, of the kind Trent says does not exclude a person from grace. A Lutheran pastor would say that such things are forgiven every time a penitent hears the absolution. An Orthodox priest would point to the prayer for sins “of knowledge and of ignorance,” and an Anglican to the Litany’s “negligences, and ignorances.” On the documents quoted on this page, none of the four would say God was waiting. All four would say: now that you remember it, pay it, and be glad.

Eight composed cases follow. None describes a real person. Judge each by the historic churches’ rules as set out above: is this a real obstacle, or not?

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“Who can understand his errors?”

Suppose the Audit were true. A believer who takes it seriously now has a practical problem: how will he know when he is done?

The evangelist’s list, as the story is told, was short. One restaurant, then a few similar cases. But the principle has no stopping point. If an unreported undercharge can hold back the Spirit, so can every harsh word never apologised for, every exaggeration, every unkind thought, every duty left undone, every injury caused without knowing. The sixteenth-century reformers had lived inside exactly this problem, in the confessional, and it is the reason the Augsburg Confession says what it does:

But of Confession they teach that an enumeration of sins is not necessary, and that consciences be not burdened with anxiety to enumerate all sins, for it is impossible to recount all sins, as the Psalm testifies: Who can understand his errors? Also Jeremiah: The heart is deceitful; who can know it? But if no sins were forgiven, except those that are recounted, consciences could never find peace; for very many sins they neither see nor can remember.

Augsburg Confession, Article XXV (1530). Triglot Concordia (1921), verse references omitted. Article XI says the same more briefly: “an enumeration of all sins is not necessary. For it is impossible according to the Psalm: Who can understand his errors?”

“Very many sins they neither see nor can remember.” Luther described the older practice from memory in 1537. A penitent was absolved of forgotten sins “on the condition that, if they would occur to him, he must still confess them. In this way he could never know whether he had made a sufficiently pure confession, or when confessing would ever have an end” (Smalcald Articles III.III, §19; bracketed glosses omitted).

What is striking is that the Council of Trent, answering the Lutherans twenty-one years after Augsburg, agrees with them on the point that matters here. Trent insists that a Catholic must confess every mortal sin he is conscious of. But about the rest it is explicit:

… it is certain, that in the Church nothing else is required of penitents, but that, after each has examined himself diligently, and searched all the folds and recesses of his conscience, he confess those sins by which he shall remember that he has mortally offended his Lord and God: whilst the other sins, which do not occur to him after diligent thought, are understood to be included as a whole in that same confession; for which sins we confidently say with the prophet; From my secret sins cleanse me, O Lord.

Council of Trent, Session XIV, chapter V (25 November 1551). Trans. J. Waterworth (1848). The council is quoting Psalm 19:12, the same verse the Augsburg Confession had used.

Both sides of the Reformation’s bitterest argument reach for the same psalm and draw the same conclusion from it. What a person cannot find after honest examination is forgiven with the rest. The Orthodox and Anglican churches say it in prayer. The Orthodox prayer before Communion asks forgiveness for “my transgressions both voluntary and involuntary, of word and of deed, of knowledge and of ignorance.” An Orthodox evening prayer addressed to the Holy Spirit himself asks him to forgive “all the things which I have sinned as a man, both voluntary and involuntary, in knowledge and in ignorance.” The Litany of the Book of Common Prayer asks God “to forgive us all our sins, negligences, and ignorances; and to endue us with the grace of thy Holy Spirit.” In that last petition the forgiveness of unknown sins and the gift of the Spirit are asked for in one sentence, in that order, with no search in between.

The same objection has been raised from inside the Pentecostal movement. The Assemblies of God is the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. Its American General Presbytery put it this way in an official paper:

Baptism in the Spirit Is a Gift. By definition, a gift is not earned. If it were on the basis of a person’s merit, the unanswerable question would be, “What should be the extent of the person’s worthiness?” Or, “How ‘perfect’ must one be before qualifying for the experience?” It is possible for a sincere seeker to be so preoccupied with a sense of personal unworthiness that the Spirit cannot flow freely through that person.

Assemblies of God (USA), “Baptism in the Holy Spirit,” position paper adopted by the General Presbytery, 9–11 August 2010. The same paper says: “The Spirit Already Indwells All Believers.”

“The unanswerable question.” That is the brief’s fifth point, in the words of the tradition the testimony comes from.

Run the audit yourself

The following is an illustration and makes no claim to measure anything. It simply takes the Audit at its word. Put in your own figures.

There is a second problem, and it concerns the logic of the claim. Ask what could count against the Audit. If the seeker receives, the search was complete. If he does not, there is something he has missed. No outcome can show the teaching to be wrong, and when it fails, the fault always lies with the seeker. Dossier 42 examined a claim of this shape, and Dossier 16 found the same structure in the reasoning of Job’s friends, who were sure there was a hidden sin because there was suffering.

The church has met this before

Examining one’s conscience is ancient and healthy. All four traditions practise it. A Christian looks at his day or his week, names what he finds, confesses it and hears that he is forgiven. The examination has an end: it leads to absolution.

The church has also long known a condition in which the examination never ends. The sufferer is sure there is more, goes back over old ground, confesses the same things again, and takes any dryness in prayer as proof that something is still hidden. The pastoral tradition calls it scrupulosity, and it has always treated it as an affliction to be relieved. It has never recommended it as a route to holiness.

Luther in the monastery

The best-documented case is a young Augustinian friar at Erfurt, in the years after 1505. His biographer Roland Bainton describes what he did:

He confessed frequently, often daily, and for as long as six hours on a single occasion. Every sin in order to be absolved was to be confessed. Therefore the soul must be searched and the memory ransacked and the motives probed. … Luther would repeat a confession and, to be sure of including everything, would review his entire life until the confessor grew weary …

Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York and Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1950), ch. 2, p. 54. Bainton adds: “The great difficulty which he encountered was to be sure that everything had been recalled.”

That last sentence describes the Audit exactly. Luther’s superior and confessor, Johann von Staupitz, did not tell him to dig deeper. Bainton renders his reply from Luther’s later recollections: “Look here, if you expect Christ to forgive you, come in with something to forgive — parricide, blasphemy, adultery — instead of all these peccadilloes.” Staupitz judged, in Bainton’s words, that the leftovers Luther kept bringing were “only the scruples of a sick soul.” Luther’s own verdict on those years is well known: “if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I” (Bainton, p. 45). Two decades later he looked back on the old discipline of listing sins as a “heavy burden and torture … so that no one was ever able to confess perfectly enough” (A Brief Admonition to Confession, 1529).

Ignatius of Loyola

The Catholic side has its own witness, and he is not a critic of confession but one of its greatest promoters. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, suffered severely from scruples after his conversion and later wrote a set of notes on them for those who give his Spiritual Exercises. He attributes the over-fine conscience to the enemy of the soul:

The enemy looks much if a soul is gross or delicate, and if it is delicate, he tries to make it more delicate in the extreme, to disturb and embarrass it more. For instance, if he sees that a soul does not consent to either mortal sin or venial or any appearance of deliberate sin, then the enemy, when he cannot make it fall into a thing that appears sin, aims at making it make out sin where there is not sin, as in a word or very small thought.

Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises (approved 1548), the notes headed “to perceive and understand scruples and persuasions of our enemy,” fourth note. Trans. Elder Mullan, S.J. (New York, 1914).

His fifth note gives the remedy: if the enemy “tries to draw it out to extreme fineness, let the soul try to establish itself in the mean, in order to quiet itself in everything.” Ignatius is careful. He allows that a tender conscience can for a time do a soul good. But a conscience that is pushed to find sin “in a word or very small thought,” and cannot rest, is in his judgement being worked on by the wrong spirit.

An objection should be heard here. Is this not simply a way of making people comfortable with their sins? Below is the objection in the form a sincere holder of Position A would put it. Write your own answer before reading the page’s.

Where the idea came from

The Audit is not ancient, and it did not begin with television. It can be traced, step by step, through about a hundred and fifty years of English-speaking revivalism. The men who built it were serious, and they were reacting against something real: a churchgoing Christianity in which nobody paid his debts or changed his life. That should be said plainly before the documents are read.

John Wesley, 1759–1777: perfection, with a boundary

The story starts with John Wesley’s teaching that a Christian may, in this life, be made “perfect in love.” Later Holiness preachers took the idea much further than he did, and it is worth seeing where he drew his own line. In the tract he reprinted in A Plain Account of Christian Perfection he wrote:

Not only sin, properly so called, (that is, a voluntary transgression of a known law,) but sin, improperly so called, (that is, an involuntary transgression of a divine law, known or unknown,) needs the atoning blood. I believe there is no such perfection in this life as excludes these involuntary transgressions which I apprehend to be naturally consequent on the ignorance and mistakes inseparable from mortality. Therefore sinless perfection is a phrase I never use, lest I should seem to contradict myself.

John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766; final revision 1777), §19, reprinting Thoughts on Christian Perfection (1759). Wesley’s numbering (1.)–(3.) omitted. He adds that “the best of men still need Christ in his priestly office, to atone for their omissions, their short-comings … their mistakes in judgment and practice.”

Wesley’s perfection concerned “a voluntary transgression of a known law.” Unknown and involuntary faults he put in a separate class, said nobody in this life is free of them, and assigned them to Christ’s atonement. On Wesley’s own definitions, a forgotten undercharge could not have stood between a believer and the fullest blessing he taught. The Audit goes beyond the most famous perfectionist in Protestant history.

Charles Finney, 1835: the list

The method came from the American evangelist Charles Finney. In the winter of 1834–35 he gave a course of lectures in New York on how to produce a revival. The third tells Christians how to “break up the fallow ground” of their hearts:

You must take them up one by one. It will be a good thing to take a pen and paper, as you go over them, and write them down as they occur to you. Go over them as carefully as a merchant goes over his books; and as often as a sin comes before your memory, add it to the list. General confessions of sin will never do. Your sins were committed one by one; and as far as you can come at them, they ought to be reviewed and repented of one by one.

Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (New York, 1835), Lecture III, “How to Promote a Revival,” on Hosea 10:12. Quoted from the revised edition of 1868.

He supplies headings to write under, among them ingratitude, neglect of the Bible, lying and cheating, and then turns to restitution. If the injured person is far away, “sit down and write him a letter, and confess the injury, pay the postage, and put it into the mail immediately.” And: “If you have defrauded any body, send the money, the full amount and the interest.” When the list is finished, go over it a second time, and “then go over it a third time, and you will recollect other things connected with these.”

Here is the evangelist’s story more than a century before television: the pen, the list, the letter, the money sent, and further cases coming to mind once the first is dealt with. Here too is the explanation for spiritual dryness, already quoted in Part IX: “little things” have been covered up. Finney’s phrase “General confessions of sin will never do” should be set beside the Augsburg Confession’s “an enumeration of all sins is not necessary.” The two sentences contradict each other, and they were written three hundred years apart.

R. A. Torrey, 1910: the specific sin

By the end of the century the Holiness and “higher life” movements had turned Finney’s method for revival into a set of conditions for a second experience, the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Reuben Torrey, Moody’s associate in Chicago, gave it its most systematic form in seven steps. The second is the renunciation of sin:

People often say to me, or write to me, “I have been praying for the baptism with the Holy Spirit for a year (five years, ten years, one man said twenty years). Why do I not receive?” In many such cases, I feel led to reply, “It is sin, and if I could look down into your heart this moment as God looks into your heart, I could put my finger on the specific sin.” It may be what you are pleased to call a small sin, but there are no small sins. … A controversy with God about the smallest thing is sufficient to shut one out of the blessing.

R. A. Torrey, The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1910), ch. XX, “The Baptism with the Holy Spirit.” Torrey’s fourth step rests on Acts 5:32.

The years of unanswered prayer, the single specific sin and the smallness of the thing are all in place by 1910. Torrey illustrates with a story he credits to Finney, of a woman who prayed night after night until she pulled the pins from her hair and threw them across the room, “and instantly the Holy Ghost fell upon her.”

Fairness requires two observations. Torrey did not teach that tongues were the evidence of this baptism. And even he speaks of sin the seeker knows about: “If we cling to one single known sin, it will shut us out of the blessing.” He tells the seeker to ask God to search him, and adds: “If after sincerely waiting on God, nothing is brought to light, then we may proceed to take the other steps.” Torrey had a stopping point. A doctrine in which the forgotten sin keeps blocking until it is found has taken his stopping point away.

Azusa Street, 1906: clean first, then the baptism

Early Pentecostalism inherited the Holiness scheme and added a third stage. The first issue of the Azusa Street mission’s newspaper sets it out: repentance (including “Restitution”, with Luke 19:8 cited), then justification, then sanctification as a second work, then the baptism with the Holy Ghost:

You know, that they could not receive the Spirit if they were not clean. … The Baptism with the Holy Ghost is a gift of power upon the sanctified life; so when we get it we have the same evidence as the Disciples received on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:3,4), in speaking in new tongues.

The Apostolic Faith (Los Angeles: The Apostolic Faith Movement, 312 Azusa Street), vol. 1, no. 1, September 1906, p. 2.

In those two sentences the whole shape of the testimony is present: cleanness as the condition, the baptism as what follows, and tongues as the evidence.

The correction from inside

Pentecostals themselves soon divided over this. From about 1910 a large part of the movement, following the Chicago preacher William Durham, rejected sanctification as a separate second stage that had to be completed before the baptism. The Assemblies of God, formed in 1914, came out of that side of the argument. Its 2010 paper, quoted in Part VIII, is the mature form of that correction: “By definition, a gift is not earned,” and the seeker who is “preoccupied with a sense of personal unworthiness” is hindered by the preoccupation, not helped.

Guess the source

Nine real, dated quotations used on this page. For each, guess where it comes from. All are checkable in Part XV.

Tongues as the receipt

The testimony ends with a result: the full anointing came. The author of this site takes that to mean speaking in tongues, since the evangelist belongs to the Pentecostal and charismatic world, where tongues are widely taught as the sign of the Spirit’s baptism. That is an inference, and the argument of this part depends on it only loosely. Whatever the experience was, the story uses it as a receipt. It shows that the account was finally settled.

This page does not ask whether tongues continue. It grants that they do. It asks whether the New Testament lets them serve as proof that a person has become clean enough. Three things in Paul’s letter to Corinth stand in the way.

First, not everyone has the gift. Paul ends his list of gifts with a string of questions: “Are all apostles? are all prophets? are all teachers? are all workers of miracles? Have all the gifts of healing? do all speak with tongues? do all interpret?” (1 Corinthians 12:29–30). The Greek form of each question expects the answer no. If tongues were the mark of the fully cleansed, Paul would be saying that some believers are never to be fully cleansed, whatever they do.

Second, tongues can be present without love. “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” (13:1). Paul can imagine the gift in a person who lacks the one thing that matters most. It cannot then be a certificate of moral condition.

Third, the church that had the gift most was the one Paul called carnal. Part V set the two descriptions side by side. Tongues abounded at Corinth while members were defrauding one another. The gift did not wait for the debts to be paid.

Jesus adds a warning that reaches further still: “Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you” (Matthew 7:22–23). Remarkable gifts, even real ones, are not a reading of a person’s standing with God. Dossier 28 examines that passage. Dossier 13 traces how the early Pentecostal understanding of tongues changed between 1906 and 1916.

The historic churches’ signs of the Spirit are of a different kind. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5:22–23). “No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 12:3). By that last test, every Christian who confesses Christ already has what the seven years were spent asking for.

What the story does to its hearers

A testimony told from a platform is also a piece of teaching. It tells the people listening what to do next. It is worth asking what this one tells them.

She has been taught three things, and none of them is in the New Testament. She has been taught that her dryness has a cause, and that the cause is in her. She has been taught that the cause is findable, if she looks hard enough. And she has been taught that God is waiting, with his gift held back, until she finds it.

The historic churches would send her somewhere else. They would send her out of herself, to things that are true whether or not she feels them. The Lutheran reformers called these the means of grace: the Gospel preached, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, absolution. Luther’s catechism has the Christian say that the Holy Ghost “has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me.” In every clause the Spirit is the one who acts, and “me” is the one acted on. The Anglican bishop, laying his hand on each person confirmed, prays that he may “daily increase in thy Holy Spirit, more and more.” The increase is asked for as a gift and expected daily. An Orthodox Christian is told that the grace of baptism “still shines.” A Catholic is told to make an honest confession and that what she cannot remember is included.

The Catholic Catechism, which no one accuses of being soft on sin, adds a caution about treating inner experience as the measure: “Since it belongs to the supernatural order, grace escapes our experience and cannot be known except by faith. We cannot therefore rely on our feelings or our works to conclude that we are justified and saved” (§2005). Thomas Aquinas had said the same of God’s presence in the soul: “His presence in us and His absence cannot be known with certainty” by inspecting ourselves (Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 112, a. 5). Dryness in prayer is not a readout of hidden guilt. Dossier 09 and Dossier 23 take up the same question from other directions.

What the story says about the one who tells it

There is one more effect, and it needs to be stated with care, because this page makes no judgement about the evangelist’s motives. A testimony of this shape carries a second message underneath the first. The stated message is: I was hindered by sin. The unstated one is: after seven years of searching, the worst thing I could find was a restaurant bill.

Jesus told a story about two men praying. One of them listed what he was not: “God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers.” The other “would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other” (Luke 18:11, 13–14). The tax collector does not itemise his sins. He asks for mercy on the whole of himself, and he goes home justified. A story about the tiny size of one’s last remaining sin stands closer to the first prayer than to the second, whatever the teller intends. Dossier 35 looks at how confessions of unworthiness can work as advertisements.

Repentance, or an audit?

The two can look alike from outside. Both involve looking at one’s life, naming what is wrong and putting things right. Here is how to tell them apart.

For anyone who has been told a hidden sin is blocking the Spirit

Eight statements. Answer about yourself, honestly. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere, and nothing here is pastoral advice.

Your answers, revisited

Here are the ten questions you answered before reading, with what the sources say. If you skipped them, go back to the quiz, lock in your answers, and return.

Check it yourself

Eighteen items. Nearly everything here is free, online and short. If you read only three, read the first three. If you do only one thing, do the last.

1. 1. Acts 2:37–41; 8:14–17; 10:34–48; 11:15–18; 15:7–9; 19:1–7; Galatians 3:1–14; Luke 11:9–13. Read this first. Twenty minutes. Every passage where the Spirit is given, and what he is given on.
2. 2. Luke 19:1–10; Leviticus 6:1–7; Matthew 5:23–24; Ephesians 4:25–32. Read this first. Ten minutes. Restitution, and where it stands in the order.
3. 3. Psalm 19:12–14; Psalm 66:16–20; Psalm 139:23–24; Isaiah 59:1–8; Leviticus 5:17–19; 1 Corinthians 4:1–5; Acts 5:27–32; Joshua 7. Read this first. Twenty minutes. The texts on known and unknown sin, and the verse most quoted for the Audit, in its setting.
4. 4. 1 Corinthians 1:4–9; 3:1–4, 16; 5:1; 6:1–8, 19; 11:20–22; 12:27–13:3; Galatians 2:11–14; Romans 7:14–8:11; 1 John 1:5–2:2. Twenty minutes. The Corinthians, Peter at Antioch, and the sin that remains in believers.
5. 5. Council of Carthage (418), canons 114–115 in the African Code (Greek 115–116). Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14, trans. H. Percival (1900); free at New Advent. Five minutes.
6. 6. Second Council of Orange (529), canons 3–8 and the conclusion. Free at the Internet Medieval Sourcebook (Fordham University). Ten minutes. “If anyone maintains that God awaits our will to be cleansed from sin …”
7. 7. Augsburg Confession (1530), Articles V, XI, XII and XXV; Smalcald Articles (1537), Part III, Article III; Small Catechism (1529), the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. Triglot Concordia, trans. F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau (St Louis, 1921); free at bookofconcord.org and Project Gutenberg. Thirty minutes.
8. 8. Council of Trent, Session VI (1547), chapters V, VIII, IX and XI and canon XXIII; Session XIV (1551), chapter V. Trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848); free at the Hanover Historical Texts Project. Twenty minutes.
9. 9. The Thirty-nine Articles, X, XII, XIII, XV and XVI; the Collect for Purity, the Litany and the Order of Confirmation. Book of Common Prayer (1662); free at churchofengland.org. Fifteen minutes.
10. 10. “O Heavenly King”; the prayers before Holy Communion; the evening prayer to the Holy Spirit. Texts as published by the Orthodox Church in America (oca.org). Also The Orthodox Faith, vol. II, “Chrismation,” and vol. IV, “The Holy Spirit.” Fifteen minutes.
11. 11. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§1302–1310, 1458, 1863, 2005, 2010. Free at vatican.va. Ten minutes. Read §1310 and §1863 together.
12. 12. Cyril of Jerusalem, Procatechesis (c. 350), NPNF II.7; Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts 24 and Commentary on Galatians on 3:2, NPNF I.11 and I.13; Augustine, Homilies on 1 John 1.6, NPNF I.7. All free at New Advent. Thirty minutes.
13. 13. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 109, a. 6 and q. 112, a. 5. Free at New Advent. Fifteen minutes. Whether a man can prepare himself for grace, and whether he can know he has it.
14. 14. Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (1950), ch. 2. Twenty minutes. Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, the notes on scruples, trans. Elder Mullan (1914); free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Five minutes.
15. 15. John Wesley, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, §19. Free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Fifteen minutes.
16. 16. Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), Lecture III. Free at gospeltruth.net. Thirty minutes. R. A. Torrey, The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit (1910), ch. XX. Free at Project Gutenberg. Thirty minutes. Read these at full length; they make the case for Position A better than any summary.
17. 17. The Apostolic Faith, vol. 1, no. 1 (Los Angeles, September 1906), p. 2. Transcriptions are free online. Assemblies of God (USA), “Baptism in the Holy Spirit” (2010), free at ag.org. Twenty minutes. Read the two together.
18. 18. The last testimony you heard in which a blessing came after some final thing was put right, written down with no names. Do this one. Write what was said to have been in the way, and what was said to have happened when it was removed. Then read Galatians 3:2 and Psalm 19:12 beside it, and ask which way the story ran.

Every individual named on this page is deceased, or biblical, and is quoted from a dated, published source. Organisations are quoted only from their own published documents. The evangelist whose testimony prompted the page is not named and is not quoted. Every modern example, sermon line and case is composed by this page for illustration and does not describe any real person or event.