What sort of sin can stop receiving the Baptism in the Holy Spirit?

The Holy Spirit receives or is fully received by repentant saints, i.e., by Christians who, through obedience, have removed all conscious sin from their lives.

Regarding Holy Spirit Baptism, obedience has two curves: one is active, the other is passive. In the first, the candidate is urged to act, and in the second, he is urged to cease from acting.

i. Active Obedience, (a) Separation from Sin. Obedience means first of all and actively the separation from sin. Whether understood negatively, as repentance, or positively, as obedience, under this condition the Pentecostals’ implicit doctrine of sin can be discovered.

Sin is understood as something which, with Christ’s help,53 the Christian can, indeed must, remove before his being able to receive the full gift of the Holy Spirit. Obedience has as its major task the removal of sin. For “you can receive the Holy Spirit, but not with sin in your heart” (Conn, Pillars, p. 96).

Sin, first of all, is anything in a man’s life—large or small—which may displease God. We may illustrate this conviction first from the writings of the one from whom Pentecostalism appears to have acquired its specific understanding of the conditions for the baptism in the Holy Spirit—R. A. Torrey. 

In his series of conditions, after discussing the first step requisite for the spiritual baptism (viz., that we accept Jesus Christ as our Savior and Lord), Torrey describes the second step.

The second step in the path that leads into the blessing of being baptized with the Holy Spirit is renunciation of sin.… A controversy with God about the smallest thing is sufficient to shut one out of the blessing. Mr. Finney [n.b.] tells of a woman who was greatly exercised about the baptism with the Holy Spirit. Every night after the meetings, she would go to her rooms and pray way into the night.… One night as she prayed, some little matter of head adornment, a matter that would probably not trouble many Christians today, but a matter of controversy between her and God, came up (as it had often come up before) as she knelt in prayer. She put her hand to her head and took the pins out of her hair and threw them across the room and said, “There go!” and instantly the Holy Ghost fell upon her. It was not so much the matter of head adornment as the matter of controversy with God that had kept her out of the blessing.54

Yet not simply one’s adornment or outward behavior in the world, but one’s inward attitude is of major importance in the Pentecostal understanding of sin and of the conditions which will remove it. An absence, for example, of the inner attitude of humility is prejudicial to the Spirit’s reception. 

Conn asks (Pillars, p. 192), “Have you obeyed God in humility?… Humbleness is an absolute ‘must’ for … candidates for the baptism of the Holy Ghost.” 

Thus, the omission of right attitudes and the commission of wrong deeds can hinder the coming of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. John Sherrill learned this from his new Pentecostal experience. 

“the fiercest enemies of the Spirit within are not those active sins but the passive ones: the sins of omission, indifference, inertia. I hadn’t been familiar with the Holy Spirit for long before I knew that we are not made automatons by His presence. He will stay with us as long as we actively will it, work at it, yearn for His company.”55

But however sin is understood, and it can be given wide or narrow interpretations depending upon the interpreter, it is something which must be removed or subdued if one is to receive the Pentecostal experience. 

For, in the frequent Pentecostal declaration, “the Holy Spirit and sin cannot abide in the same heart” (Conn, Pillars, p. 96).

The only conclusion possible to draw from this spiritual law might seem to be that the Holy Spirit can abide only in a heart without sin—i.e., in sinlessness. Extreme as this may at first appear, Pentecostals believe that they can and must urge this condition if two facts are understood: 

• That it is possible to speak of a “heart without sin” if by sin is understood not so much actual sin as known sin; and 
• That it must be said that the Christian’s heart can be free of known sin if one realizes that the Holy Spirit, by definition, cannot possibly have commerce with the unholy.56

The Pentecostal conviction is that when Christians remove all known sin, the Holy Spirit can dwell in their hearts even though there may still be unconscious or unknown (and hence, apparently, unculpable) sin. 

In any case, as far as the candidate knows he must be without sin, for it is impossible for the Pentecostal to contemplate sin and the Holy Spirit coinhabiting the Christian’s heart.

This conviction offers an additional explanation for the doctrine of the subsequence of the Holy Spirit: at conversion it is a sinner who is understood to receive the salvation provided in Christ. But in the majority Pentecostal view, as the converted sinner increases in sanctification he progressively qualifies for the special gift of the Spirit. 

The Christian is understood as quite another kind of person by the time he is ready to receive the subsequent spiritual baptism. “As sinners we accept Christ,” Pearlman summarizes, “as saints we accept the Holy Spirit.”57

It does not need to be stressed that this doctrine posits a special view of sin. 

When it can be averred by Pentecostal leaders that (with Sweden’s Pethrus, p. 51) “the only thing that can hinder you in receiving the full blessing of God is sin,” it must be wondered how this blessing could ever be obtained. 

But Pethrus continues immediately by explaining the means to this benediction: “If we live a yielded, pure and holy life, in close fellowship with Him, the experimental side of this mighty baptism must come” (ibid.). The possibility of living a yielded, pure, and holy life in close fellowship with God, even prior to the full coming of the Spirit, is implicit in the Pentecostal conditions. 

An entirely comprehensible answer awaits how it is possible for the Christian to live this kind of life before he enjoys the full gift of the Spirit. 

Riggs is the only Pentecostal author we have found to have specifically raised the question. He asked (pp. 102–03), “How can His children … be obedient, when they have not received the Holy Spirit?” Riggs’ answer to this important question is not as clear as we might wish, but we reproduce it as he immediately offers it:

 “[Christ] had commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem until they had been filled with power from on high. Luke 24:49. This command was to be passed on to their converts, the new disciples. His command then comes also to us” (ibid.).

Riggs’ answer thus seems to be that contemporary Christians can fulfill the conditions of obedience even though they have not yet fully received the Holy Spirit, because it was possible for the first disciples to be sufficiently obedient before they received the fullness of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

But one might even raise the prior question: How is it possible to be Christians at all without having first received the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:9)? To this particular question Skibstedt addressed himself (p. 16):

God’s Word as well as experience teach us very clearly that it is possible to become a believer and to be baptized and to experience great joy in salvation—i.e., to be a recipient of the work of the good Holy Spirit—and nevertheless not yet to have received the gift of the Holy Spirit according to the New Testament understanding.

Skibstedt seems to argue that it is possible to be a Christian and even experience the work of the Spirit, and yet not actually receive the gift of the Spirit because Scripture and experience teach us that this kind of twilight existence is, in fact, an observable datum in Scripture and in many modern lives.

Or it can be argued even more frequently in Pentecostalism, as we have already had to see, that every Christian has received the gift of the Holy Spirit, but that not every Christian has been filled with the Spirit, or received the full gift of the Spirit, or the gift of the Holy Spirit in his fulness. We are reminded again that it was Torrey’s opinion, appropriated by Pentecostalism, that “every true believer has the Holy Spirit, but not every believer has the baptism with the Holy Spirit.”

The obstacle keeping Christians from this full experience is simply sin.

The first step to removing this obstacle and to receiving this full experience is simply obedience, which sets itself to the task of removing all the sin that is known in one’s life. Christ, we may say, paraphrasing Pearlman, receives repentant sinners; the Holy Spirit receives or is fully received by repentant saints, i.e., by Christians who, through obedience, have removed all conscious sin from their lives.

Bruner, F. D. (1997). A Theology of the Holy Spirit: The Pentecostal Experience and the New Testament Witness (p. 97). Wipf and Stock Publishers.

53 It would not be fair to imply that Pentecostals teach that cleansing from sin is accomplished apart from Christ. Pentecostals all place great stress upon the blood of Christ and its cleansing power. Cf. Gee, Gift, pp. 55–57; Barratt, Rain, p. 222. Pentecostals also place great stress on the conditions of obedience and faith to be fulfilled by the believer in order to appropriate Christ’s blood, help, and power.

54 The Person and Work of the Holy Spirit: As Revealed in the Scriptures and in Personal Experience (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1910), p. 218. See Torrey’s remarks: “The Baptism with the Holy Spirit causes one to be occupied with God and Christ and spiritual things. The man who is filled with the Holy Ghost will not be singing sentimental ballads, nor comic ditties, nor operatic airs while the power of the Holy Ghost is upon him. If the Holy Ghost should come upon one while listening to the most innocent of the world’s songs he would not enjoy it. He would long to hear something about Christ.” What the Bible Teaches, p. 276. Fr. Kilian McDonnell observes that Pentecostals, “like Roman Catholics, and in contrast to the Lutheran, and orthodox Reformed, … are psychologically predisposed to think of sin in terms of an act, hardly ever in terms of a state.” “The Ecumenical Significance of the Pentecostal Movement,” Worship, 40 (Dec. 1966), 619. For a perceptive Pentecostal view of the several doctrines of sin in the churches see William W. Menzies, “The Spirit of Holiness: A Comparative Study,” Paraclete, 2 (Summer 1968), 10–16.

55 They Speak with Other Tongues, pp. 128–29.

56 On known sin, cf. Pethrus, Wind2, p. 42; Barratt. Rain, p. 206. The Pentecostal doctrine of sin is perhaps best understood in the light of the Wesleyan evangelicalism from which it came and on which it draws for its underlying suppositions. Cf. Wesley in the Documents, below, p. 329 and see, for example, Lawson’s Deeper Experiences and the following representative conviction: “It is only Christians who regard faults, mistakes, temptations, lack of knowledge, and so on, as sin, who believe that the Christian cannot live without sin,” p. xi.

57 Pearlman, Doctrines, p. 318. The pre-Pentecostal evangelical A. J. Gordon expressed this idea in a similar way, earlier, in arguing for the same distinction: “It is as sinners that we accept Christ for our justification, but it is as sons that we accept the Spirit for our sanctification.” The Ministry of the Spirit (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Publishing House, 1949 [1894]), pp. 68–69.

Bruner, F. D. (1997). A Theology of the Holy Spirit: The Pentecostal Experience and the New Testament Witness (pp. 93–97). Wipf and Stock Publishers.