The following is excerpted from Andrew Murray's devotional The Secret of Inspiration. There is some deep spiritual truth here that is beginning to dawn on me. In particular the thought that the baptism of fire scripture speaks about is first a foremost about bringing us into true, experiential union with the crucified and risen Savior. Pentecost power is proceeded by the cross and resurrection, in both natural history and spiritual history.
OUR DEATH AND LIFE IN CHRIST
WHY could not the apostles, who had been eyewitnesses to the whole process of Christ, testify with their human apprehension to the truth of such things until they were baptized with fire and born again of the Spirit? It is because these things—the mysteries of Christ's process as knowable by man—are nothing else in themselves but those very things which are done by this heavenly fire and Spirit of God in our souls.
Therefore every man, however able in all kinds of human literature, must be an entire stranger to all the mysteries of gospel redemption until they are verified, fulfilled, and witnessed to by that which is found and enjoyed of the whole process of Christ in his soul. As the work of the Spirit consists in altering that which is the most radical in the soul, bringing forth a new spiritual death and a new spiritual life, it must be true that no one can know or believe the mysteries of Christ's redeeming power but only and solely by an in-ward and experiential finding and feeling the operation of them; in that new death and new life, both of which must be effected in the soul of man or Christ is not known as its salvation.
Boehme prefixed as a motto to most of his epistles the words of Scripture: that our salvation is in the life of Jesus Christ in us. This truth of truths, fully possessed and firmly adhered to, turns the whole faith of man to a Christ that can in no wise be a Saviour to him unless essentially born in the inmost spirit of his soul by the immediate inspiration and working power of the Holy Spirit within him. To such a man, the words of Christ and His apostles fall like a fire into him. And what is it they kindle there? A holy flame of love, to be always with, always attending to, that Christ and His Holy Spirit within him. This alone can make him to be and do all that which the words of Christ and His apostles have taught. For there is no possibility of being like-minded with Christ in anything that He taught, or having the truth of one Christian virtue, but by the nature and Spirit of Christ essentially living in us.
We need ever to remember that the great work of the Holy Spirit is to reveal Christ in us. Not to the mind as a matter of knowledge but in the heart and life, communicating to us the very death and life of our Lord. It is thus that Christ is formed in us, has His abode in us, and works in us and through us all that is well-pleasing to the Father Take time to yield yourself to this blessed truth; in it lies the true secret of the Christian life.