May He grant you out of the riches of His glory, to be strengthened and spiritually energized with power through His Spirit in your inner self, [indwelling your innermost being and personality], so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through your faith. And may you, having been [deeply] rooted and [securely] grounded in love, be fully capable of comprehending with all the saints (God’s people) the width and length and height and depth of His love [fully experiencing that amazing, endless love]; and [that you may come] to know [practically, through personal experience] the love of Christ which far surpasses [mere] knowledge [without experience], that you may be filled up [throughout your being] to all the fullness of God [so that you may have the richest experience of God’s presence in your lives, completely filled and flooded with God Himself]. Ephesians 3:16-19
Okay you’ve come to know that Jesus Christ is who He says He is, and you’ve taken the step of asking for Jesus to baptize you with the Holy Spirit, what’s next? The Holy Spirit with all of His endowment, gifts, and instruction and strengthening is not a substitute for experience. When one first begins to ‘walk’ in The Way most of the spiritual knowledge you really know is intellectual with small, and usually short but powerful experiences. And we begin asking the Holy Spirit to do things for us He just will not do, because of our inexperience in relationship with Him. The Holy Spirit must lead us into .. life experiences, to the ‘working out’ of our new faith in Him. So many of our prayers will be answered through experiences. You may be asking the Lord to do something in your life and He leads you through an experience and in that experience your answer is delivered. And many times we don’t even recognize the answer till we review with Him what is going on in our lives in conversational prayer. Steadfast faithfulness works through our life’s experiences. If you have no experiences then all you have is a mental concept which may or not be true on how you view that concept in your mind. Experience brings a ‘knowing’ that just intellectual knowledge can’t give. You may have all of the concepts of fighting down in your mind, but until you are actually in one…
Is experiential knowledge greater than just being delivered from tribulation or hard times? Tribulation and hard times in our life forces us into experiences where our spiritual knowledge is tried and ‘worked out’. We often ask the Lord for this and that, and we don’t see any evidence of Him answering those prayers. Why hasn’t God stopped so many of the terrible things going on in our lives and around the world? Experience is often a big part of the answer. Experience is important then as it shows us the quality of our faith and our service to Him. When you face real life difficulties and issues of real consequence you seek more than just information you want experience that is tested by your faith. Think of David facing Goliath. David was tested with a lion and a bear and had experiences of God’s faithfulness in those scary times. Thus our life experiences through those difficult times show the quality of our service and faithfulness to Him. Experiences allow us to be useful to Him in greater and greater ways.
Does experience supersede the authority of scripture? No. Scripture is cemented into reality through and in our life experiences. The Holy Spirit should be explaining, instructing, teaching, and guiding you through the entire experience .. if you will let Him. But that will take a discipline in learning and discerning how to hear Him clearly. So many in the ‘preaching circles’ preach against experiences — but in the disciple of Christ experiences are HOW the scriptures and the Holy Spirit form us into becoming a ‘living’ epistle.
Would you rather just read about the person you … love, or would rather experience it?