When John the Baptist, filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb, came as the forerunner of the Messiah, preaching and baptizing unto repentance he promised that the One who came after him would “baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire”. Today I want to try to tackle the question, “what does it mean to be baptized in the Holy Spirit?” It’s one of those questions in which our answer often has a lot to do with our background and with our experience but as Martyn Lloyd-Jones so powerfully stated in his teaching on the baptism of the Holy Spirit “if we start with ourselves and what we like and our experience we will already go wrong. No, we have got to start, all of us, with the New Testament and it’s teaching.” So what does the New Testament teach us about the baptism of the Holy Spirit? John promised that Jesus would baptize us with the Holy Spirit, Jesus promised His disciples, in our text this morning “you shall be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now”. About 10 days after Jesus made this promise, on the Day of Pentecost, Acts 2 tells us that the first 120 believers of Jesus were all “filled with the Holy Spirit”. Peter preached that day, as recorded in Acts 2:33 that what they were experiencing and what the crowds were witnessing was “the promise of the Father” being poured out on them by Jesus, he is making it abundantly clear that this is the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Going forward in the book of Acts we see the Holy Spirit being poured out upon groups and individuals in different ways, at different times and by different methods but what we see in each and every account is what we have talked about so much over the last few months: glory to Jesus, redemption to men and unity in the church. My contention is that the book of Acts uses a lack of clarity to make it abundantly clear that there is no method, formula or even time-table to the baptism of the Holy Spirit but there is a reality that God desires to pour out His Spirit on all flesh and when a person is baptized in the Holy Spirit they are transformed, empowered and over-joyed. I believe that for us to understand what the baptism of the Holy Spirit truly is we have to understand the word baptism, we have to understand the person of the Holy Spirit, we have to understand the character of Jesus and we have to understand God’s planned purpose for the church. This morning I am praying that we will see that being baptized in the Holy Spirit is not when we receive gifts from God but rather it is when we become God’s gift to the world. We are empowered and we become witnesses when we are immersed in the One who does nothing but glorify Jesus in us, to us and through us.