28/04/2024
There's another sense in which the baptism of the Holy Spirit is spoken, which is in 1 Corinthians 12:12-13, where Paul says, "I don't want you to be ignorant of spiritual gifts and how these things work. There are lots of different gifts, lots of different workings, but it's all by the same Spirit." He goes through these different things, and he says one has faith by the same Spirit, another, tongues, the same Spirit, another, healing, and the same Spirit. And his point is not to pick the gifts apart and say, "Which one do you have?" His point is all of these are the work of one in the same Spirit.
He goes through all of that to say "Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ" (1 Corinthians 12:12). He's making this analogy that you have a lot of differences. The Holy Spirit has made you different in very important ways: one has this gift, another has that gift. But then he says you actually have some things about you that are the same.
In 1 Corinthians 12:12 he says, "Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ." He looks at the human body and says you've got lots of different parts, but there's a unity despite those differences. He says the body of Christ is just like that. He says in verse 13, if you want to know how we can be sure that the body of Christ is like this, that there is a unity despite all these differences we might observe in spiritual gifts, he says in verse 13, "For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body. Jews or Greeks, slave or free, and all were made to drink of the one Spirit."