I once asked a man to describe "being slain in the spirit" for me. He went out every night to these meetings seeking that experience. He fell backward and passed out, sometimes for hours, just laying in the floor. Well any fool can achieve a blackout.
He reported nothing else-- just blacked out. He knew nothing about the bible or any doctrine--- he just dismissed it all as legalism.
***Giving up control? of our minds and bodies? That’s *spiritualism*. God seeks those to worship Him in spirit and in truth. that means with all faculties intact.***
I agree. Have you ever read Frasier’s THE GOLDEN BOUGH?
There is a section in there about the feast of Atis and how people lost control of themselves with the music chants, drums,blood, then would mutilate themselves while “in the spirit” you might say. When they regained their senses ,IT WAS TOO LATE! Because of the body parts they cut off they now were forever a priest of Atis. ;-D
Years ago I saw a photo of worshipers of the hindu monkey god speaking in “tongues” dancing” in the spirit” and I have no desire to allow ten devils worse than the first to find an open door to my body.
I’ve longed to be “slain in The Spirit” for most of my life.
Never has happened. Has happened all around me.
Those I most respect assert that they were fully aware of what was going on around them, they were not blacked out. They were ‘merely’ in a hightened focus on God and God was evidently sheltering them in a sort of spiritual bubble that mostly blocked out distractions rather wholesale.
Many were healed in such experiences. Many had emotional or other relationship stuff healed. Certainly many had their relationships with God advanced greatly during such a period.
I did have, as a teen one time . . . standing in front of the front pew at my teen AoG church during an altar service . . . The Lord’s Presence was rather thick at that time. I was desperately seeking God as I often did in those years. Suddenly my legs from my knees down, just quit functioning. So I simply sat down/fell into the pew. Some have asserted to me that being ‘slain in The Spirit’ is similar.
Again—what’s the fruit.
The authentic always has good fruit. And that’s what I’ve observed in the services I’ve been in.
I don’t know why such an experience has not befallen me. Maybe I think to much. Maybe I’d become too focused on such experiences rather than The Giver. I don’t know. I just know there’s a real, authentic of Holy Spirit such experience that millions do experience. And Praise God He blesses them in that way as it has a wonderful impact on their lives.
There was another time in my teens when there was a particularly anointed and powerful altar service . . . and I prayed long and fervently in tongues. I remember feeling woozy as I left the church and my step-father sort of begrudgingly helped me down the long flight of front steps.
I think he was a bit skeptical and maybe embarrassed being traditionally a Presbyterian Dane. My mother’s mother and the Pastor and his wife were tickled and blessed to see me that heavily touched by The Lord’s Presence. They knew I longed for such and rarely experienced such. By the time we made the 2-3 miles home, I was no longer woozy.
There was a reason Peter said they were not drunk in Acts 2. It was an authentic, kosher, Holy Spirit influence that left them obviously acting in ways that others construed as junk.
Such happens today.
Does counterfeit stuff happen? Certainly.
Do people play act for attention? Certainly.
I doubt there’s much I or anyone else can say to most folks looking at such EXPERIENCES
from the OUTSIDE.
The Sherill’s classic: THEY SPEAK WITH OTHER TONGUES
and Charles and Francis Hunter’s
CLASSIC: TWO SIDES OF A COIN discusses probably the best I’ve read . . . both sides and their transition from one side to the other after Holy Spirit ‘apprehended’ them.
WHY SHOULD *I* SPEAK IN TONGUES?
might also be enlightening.
Personally, I have known a few who claimed to be totally zonked out in terms of what was going on around them while they were in that state.
Yet, they evidenced spiritual blessing and growth from it.
One interpretation was that God needed to do some spiritual surgery that He saw fit to do best with them “under anesthetic.”