just so, while the baptism with the Holy Spirit is potentially the
possession of every believer, each individual believer must appropriate it
for himself before it is experimentally his. We may go still further than
this and say that it is only by the baptism with the Holy Spirit that one
becomes in the fullest sense a member of the body of Christ, because it is
only by the baptism with the Spirit that he receives power to perform
those functions for which God has appointed him as a part of the body.

As we have already seen every true believer has the Holy Spirit (Rom.
viii. 9), but not every believer has the baptism with the Holy Spirit
(though every believer may have as we have just seen). It is one thing to
have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, perhaps dwelling within us way
back in some hidden sanctuary of our being, back of definite
consciousness, and something far different, something vastly more, to have
the Holy Spirit taking complete possession of the one whom He inhabits.
There are those who press the fact that every believer potentially has the
baptism with the Spirit, to such an extent that they clearly teach that
every believer has the baptism with the Spirit as an actual experience.
But unless the baptism with the Spirit to-day is something radically
different from what the baptism with the Spirit was in the early church,
indeed unless it is something not at all real, then either a very large
proportion of those whom we ordinarily consider believers are not
believers, or else one may be a believer and a regenerate man without
having been baptized with the Holy Spirit. Certainly, this was the case in
the early church. It was the case with the Apostles before Pentecost; it
was the case with the church in Ephesus; it was the case with the church
in Samaria. And there are thousands to-day who can testify to having
received Christ and been born again, and then afterwards, sometimes long
afterwards, having been baptized with the Holy Ghost as a definite
experience. This is a matter of great practical importance, for there are
many who are not enjoying the fullness of privilege that they might enjoy
because by pushing individual verses in the Scriptures beyond what they
will bear and against the plain teaching of the Scriptures as a whole,
they are trying to persuade themselves that they have already been
baptized with the Holy Spirit when they have not. And if they would only
admit to themselves that they had