Being Filled With God's Spirit – Léonce B. Crump Jr.
When God first called me to Himself and subsequently filled me with His Spirit it was all very experiential, passionate, and life-giving; but I lacked knowledge. Being wired the way I am I began to seek knowledge and came to grasp many of the beautiful truth's of our faith. I delved into the writing of men like Augustine, Calvin, Luther, Edwards etc., and my mind was filled with wonderful truth of the power of the gospel. But as my mind grew my heart seemed to shrink. Not in a manner that displayed a lack of love or appreciation for Christ and His gospel, but in the ability to joyfully experience the gift of grace I'd been given and the knowledge of the same.
There is generally a great divide between the intellect and the Spirit in Christianity. There are those who delve deep into doctrine, desiring to understand every nuance of the text and those great truth's that we believe, but they have lost the capacity to feel the unquenchable joy associated with understanding the revelation of Truth. On the other side of the coin are those who are completely experiential. They seek to feel God's Spirit and move comfortably within the ambiguity of being "led by the Spirit," but they often lack knowledge, order, or control and act out of ignorance, forgetting that though our faith should be experiential it is also deeply intellectual.