I shall not soon forget a minister whom I met some years ago at a State Convention of the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavour at New Britain, Conn. I was speaking upon the subject of personal work and as I drew the address to a close, I said that in order to do effective personal work, we must be baptized with the Holy Spirit, and in a very few sentences explained what I meant by that. At the close of the address, this minister came to me on the platform and said, “I have not this blessing you have been speaking about, but I want it. Will you pray for me?” I said, “Why not pray right now?” He said, “I will.” We put two chairs side by side and turned our backs upon the crowd as they passed out of the Armoury. He prayed and I prayed that he might be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Then we separated. Some weeks after, one who had witnessed the scene came to me at a convention in Washington and told me how this minister had gone back to his church a transformed man, that now his congregations filled the church, that it was largely composed of young men, and that there were conversions at every service. Some years after, this minister was called to another field of service. His most spiritually-minded friends advised him not to go, as all the ruling elements in the church to which he had been called were against aggressive evangelistic work, but for some reason or other, he felt it was the call of God and accepted it. In six months, there were sixty-nine conversions, and thirty-eight of them were business men of the town.
After attending in Montreal some years ago an Inter-provincial Convention of the Young Men’s Christian Association of the Provinces of Canada, I received a letter from a young man. He wrote, “I was present at your last meeting in Montreal. I heard you speak upon the Baptism with the Holy Spirit. I went to my rooms and sought that baptism for myself and received it. I am chairman of the Lookout Committee of the Christian Endeavour Society of our church. I called together the other members of the committee. I found that two of them had been at the meeting and had already been baptized with the Holy Spirit. Then we prayed for the other members of the committee and they were baptized with the Holy Spirit. Now we are going out into the church and the young people of the church are being brought to Christ right along.”
A lady and gentleman once came to me at a convention and told me how, though they had never seen me before, they had read the report of an address on the Baptism with the Holy Spirit delivered in Boston at a Christian Workers’ Convention and that they had sought this baptism and had received it. The man then told me the blessing that had come into his service as superintendent of the Sunday-school. When he had finished, his wife broke in and said, “Yes, and the best part of it is, I have been able to get into the hearts of my own children, which I was never able to do before.” Here were three distinctly different lines of service, but there was power in each case. The results of that power may not, however, be manifest at once in conversions. Stephen was filled with the Holy Spirit, but as he witnessed in the power of the Holy Spirit for his risen Lord, he saw no conversions at the time. All he saw was the gnashing of the teeth, the angry looks and the merciless rocks, and so it may be with us. But there was a conversion, even in that case, though it was a long time before it was seen, and that conversion, the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, was worth more than hundreds of ordinary conversions.