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Which Have Received the Holy Ghost as Well as We

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 24, 1915

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 92, No. 31.

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“Which Have Received the Holy Ghost as Well as We”

By William Ambrose Spicer

OVER a hundred Kafir believers, and a few Europeans, were standing up before the Lord at the Maranatha Mission, consecrating their lives anew to God, and to the bearing of the witness to all Kafirland.
God had blessed in the preaching service. Agrippa, one of our teachers in the Fish River outschools, had acted as translator. Even though I knew no Kafir, I could feel that he had the Spirit of the Lord with him in turning the word spoken, sentence by sentence, into the vernacular. Our hearts had been made tender. Then as we stood before God, Brother Moko, our oldest Kafir laborer, spread our needs before God in prayer, and asked him to accept this consecration to a life of victory over sin and to the finishing of the work in Kafirland and all the world.
As he began to pray, there swept over the entire congregation, like a wave, the spirit of contrition and supplication and surrender. There was the sound of suppressed sobbing, and of entreaty of soul among the little company. It was no outburst of mere emotion, but the tender and subduing work of God’s Spirit melting all our hearts. Brother Moko, for the moment, was unable to continue praying, and we all, Europeans and natives, knew that of a truth the Spirit of the living God was witnessing to the consecration of these believers.
There they were—a good proportion of them but a year or two or three out of raw heathenism. Like old-fashioned Seventh-day Adventists they were making the surrender of every sin, laying hold of the keeping power of Jesus, and dedicating their lives to service.
As the presence of the Holy Spirit filled the church and melted all hearts, I thought of those words of Peter as the Holy Spirit fell upon the Gentiles at Cæsarea, as he preached the remission of sins through Jesus. “Can any,” he said, “forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?”
The Holy Spirit is falling upon waiting souls in Kafirland to fit them for service, as well as on us. W. A. S.
Kafirland.