What it Means to be Baptized with the Spirit

Here's Piper with a helpful perspective from John 1 on what it means to be baptized with the Holy Spirit - it's something we all need......

As I have tried to let John define for us what he means by baptism with the Spirit, it seems to me that the term is a broad, overarching one that includes the whole great saving, sanctifying, and empowering work of the Spirit in this age. I don’t think it is a technical term that refers to one part of the Christian life—say conversion, or speaking in tongues, or a bold act of witness. It is the continual, and sometimes extraordinary, outpouring of the Holy Spirit on God’s people. It immerses them not just in one or two, but in hundreds of his powerful influences.
In other words, if you are not born again, one way to describe your need is that you need to be baptized with the Spirit. That is, you need to be plunged into God’s Spirit with the effect that you will be born again and come to faith in Christ. If you are born again, but you are languishing in a season of weakness and fear and defeat, one way to describe what you need is to be baptized in the Spirit. That is, you need a fresh outpouring of his Christ-revealing, heart-awakening, sin-defeating, boldness-producing power. Every spiritual need that we have before and after conversion is supplied by Christ immersing us in greater and lesser degrees in the Holy Spirit.

Graham Kendrick on Worship

A good piece from the "father" of contemporary worship on what it is that we're doing when we sing in church.  It's about Him not us.  It's about what He's done not we plan to do.  It's about His faithfulness to us not about all we're going to do for Him.   

What is worship music for?

Music is a gift from God that we give back to him with thanksgiving and praise. In worship we seek to lovingly and accurately, richly and comprehensively describe God's nature, character and deeds.

In the same way that we are jealous over the reputation of someone we know and love, we should care about what we sing and what we expect others to sing about our creator.

Orthodoxy sounds like a dusty old word, but actually it means "right glory", in other words representing God as he actually is. 

What and who we believe God to be has eternal consequences both for his glory, and for the eternal destiny of every human being. Worship is a response, and will grow or shrink in direct proportion to our view of its object.

A Congregational worship song has the particular function of facilitating the corporate expression of praise, worship and thanksgiving from the hearts of the people, declaring the kind of God we worship, and what he has done for us.

I particularly like what Kendrick says about the role of the congregational worship song, that it's about facilitating our corporate expression, declaring the kind of God we worship. May we represent him rightly!