The Dividing Line

How do we know when we have "crossed over" from death to life, in the words of St. Paul? 

In my mind, the dividing line is when the words of Scripture begin to take on life for us, when the Word of God is no longer like other words that we evaluate, judge, assess, and argue with, when it is no longer "someone else's truth," but our truth---the truth of our innermost being.

I remember when the Bible came alive in my own life---I was in the hospital facing major surgery, and my roommate, a young girl, prayed for me to receive the "baptism of the Holy Spirit."  I did not really know what this meant, but I wanted whatever it was she had, so I asked her to pray for me to receive it too.  As soon as I came out of surgery (without a general anesthetic--long story), I reached over and grabbed the Gideon Bible out of the bedside table, opened to the Acts of the Apostles, and began reading.  For the first time in my life, I was reading my story, not just "a" story.  As I read about the Apostles receiving the Holy Spirit, I said, "This is what just happened to me!"  And I kept reading:  from the Acts to the Letters of St. Paul, to Revelations, and then beginning with Genesis, I read the entire Bible back to Revelations.  Then I began studying what I had previously read. 

Now this was no "determination" on my part; I was reading the truth about my own life in those pages.  I couldn't stop reading.  Obviously, whatever had happened to me in the hospital did not come from within me, but from without.  I had received a gift through the hands and heart of a 22-year-old girl who had experienced the same gift in her own life.  I worried then that I would somehow lose the gift, that I would let it go through laziness or indifference after awhile.  So I asked my doctor, who had also prayed for me a few weeks previously in his office---I wanted to know how to sustain the gift.  He laughed and said, "You don't have the Holy Spirit; He has you---and He's not letting go!"  And then he told me about his own "baptism" 14 years before.  "It just keeps getting better and better," he said to me. 

That was in 1977, thirty-four years ago, and now I can testify myself to the truth of his words---it just keeps getting better and better.  The Holy Spirit continues to this day to open to me the Word of God as my truth, my life, my essence--a secret I could never have penetrated on my own.

"If you knew the Gift of God," Jesus told the sinner at the well, "and He it is that speaks with you, you would ask Him, and He would give you a spring of living water welling up to eternal life" (John 4:10).  If we are thirsty, we need to get to the Well of Living Water and ask for the overflow of the Spirit in our lives.  Then the Word of God becomes for us an ever- renewable and renewing resource instead of a historic document.