THE TABERNACLE’S STATEMENT OF BELIEF

1)The Born Again experience, also known as the New Birth is actually the gateway to begin a brand new life in relationship with God our Father – 2nd Corinthians 5:17.

2)In the natural when a woman is about to give birth she usually goes through three trimesters of three months each until the gestation period is over and she brings forth that new born baby. Well spiritually speaking similarly the New Birth of the believer has three major components; - Acts 2:38

  1. Repentance – When a person experiences genuine repentance it does not just mean that they are sorry for having been found out about sinning against God, but morethat it means they make a decision to turn away from a particular sinful way of living and begin to walk a path that is more pleasing to God.
  1. Baptism – This word in the New Testament comes from the original Greek word ‘baptizo’ which means; to plunge under, to dip under, and to immerse under. This does not mean to have water sprinkled on your head, like some Christian denominations do to babies and call it a baptism. But rather one must be fully immersed under water before it can be regarded as a genuine baptism. Also when a person is baptized that person should ideally be baptised in the name of Jesus. In other words when the person who is performing that baptism baptizes the individual they should state that the baptism is being done in the name of Jesus because it is only Jesus who can remove sins, Acts 2:38.
  1. The infilling of the Holy Spirit is also known as the ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’ or being ‘born of the Spirit’. The Holy Spirit living inside of us is also an important part of being born again, Romans 8:9, NIV. The question is oftenasked: "How can we know if a person has been filled with the Holy Spirit?" To answer this we must of course check the Word of God. In John 3:8 Jesus told us what a person being born of the Spirit would be like; He went on to tell us that it would be like the ‘wind’, you would not see it or where it came from but you would know it was there because it would make a ‘sound’. So the next question we must ask is "what ‘sound’ does the Holy Spirit make when infilling a person?" Once again to answer that question we must go to the Word of God.

Read all of these different instances of people being filled with the Spirit; Acts 2:1-4, Acts 10:44-48, Acts 19:1-7. In some of these cases there are different sounds happening but the one sound we see evident in all three of these cases is the speaking in other tongues as the sound of the Spirit, having filled a person on the inside. Some people in response to this may say that they have felt or heard the Holy Spirit telling them to help someone or to do certain things but yet they have never spoken in tongues. Well of course the Holy Spirit will speak to whoever He wants to speak to but He only infills and lives inside of those who seriously seek him and invite him to live inside of them. However, when He fills them they make a sound and that sound will be the speaking in other tongues.