Friendship With the Holy Spirit: The Path to Deeper, Exciting and Closer Walk with the Holy Spirit

FRIENDSHIP WITH THE HOLY SPIRIT

Chike Anthony Samuelson

Trilogy Christian Publishers

A Wholly Owned Subsidiary of Trinity Broadcasting Network

2442 Michelle Drive

Tustin, CA 92780

Copyright © 2022 by Chike Anthony Samuelson

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) taken from The Holy Bible, King James Version. Cambridge Edition: 1769.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information, address Trilogy Christian Publishing

Rights Department, 2442 Michelle Drive, Tustin, Ca 92780.

First Trilogy Christian Publishing hardcover edition May 2018

Trilogy Christian Publishing/ TBN and colophon are trademarks of Trinity Broadcasting Network.

Cover design by: Chinedu Ezenwamelaku (Nerd Grafix) +234-806-033-0112; [email protected]

Author’s contact: +234-803-762-2747; +234-802-888-7000; [email protected]

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Trilogy Christian Publishing.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-68556-070-6

ISBN 978-1-68556-071-3 (ebook)

Dedication

To the glory of God and the flourishing of individual believers and His church, this book is dedicated to all my children in the Lord, who are yielded to the Holy Spirit and flying high in Him and with Him.

It is also dedicated to all who desire a close relationship and friendship with the Holy Spirit.

May their Friendship with the Holy Spirit grow and grow and grow.

May they remain in effective friendship and partnership with the Holy Spirit!

Amen!

Acknowledgments

To God be praise, honor, and glory! He is highly appreciated for the burden, passion, and inspiration for doing this book.

I am gratefully indebted to the content editorial team that worked on this book, headed by Professor Jasper Onuekwusi. Others in the team were the Venerable Barrister (Dr.) Festus Opara, Sir Chinwuba Amachi, Arc. Sweeny Onyegbosi, Engr. Clinton Emekoma (late), and Mr. Pius Ejiogu. All of them are at home with the Holy Spirit.

May I particularly appreciate Prof. Jasper Onuekwusi, who also did the foreword to this book?

I cannot forget my nephew, Mr. Chinedu Ezenwamelaku (Nerd Grafix), who designed the front cover of this book. Thanks to him.

The other team to appreciate is my technical team editors comprising of Engr. Chinonso J. Samuelson, and Mr. Tochukwu Godson. Both are writers in their own rights, as well as my sons. Thank God for their diligence. I must also acknowledge the great publishing work done by Trilogy Christian Publishing, a subsidiary of Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN).

I remain ever grateful to my family, especially to my wife, Chika, for all her love, prayers, encouragement, and support. None of these people shall lose their rewards. Amen!

Foreword

b

Friendship with the Holy Spirit is a comprehensive and Holy Spirit-inspired exposition and manual of how a sincere believer in Jesus Christ can court, obtain, retain and enjoy a dynamic relationship with Him and with the Holy Spirit here on earth. There is plenty in this book that will sustain such believers in a credible hope of greater fellowship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit as he or she marches towards eternity.

Presented in twelve chapters and about 300 pages, the book is an invaluable production from this servant of God, Venerable Chike A. Samuelson, erstwhile Clerical Synod Secretary of the Anglican Diocese of Owerri, Nigeria, and pioneer director of Trinity Theological College, Umuahia (Owerri Study Centre), in Imo, State of Nigeria. In this effort, He is determined to draw all men to a realistic and lasting relationship with the Holy Spirit.

The book contains a personal and largely original encounter of the author who sincerely sought, cultivated, and is continually appropriating an ever-evolving insight into the person and being of the Holy Spirit in his Christian race. It is a manual that introduces to the Christian a serious search and recreates in the relaxed Christian a serious enthusiasm for upward rise to greater Christian maturity and a more intensive search for the benefits of friendship with the Holy Spirit of God. The great credit of this book is that it is a roadmap that demystifies and clarifies the controversies that surround the subject of the Holy Spirit as often raised by some scholars, theologians, priests, and sometimes ordinary Christians.

The first chapter of the book, From Idolatry into Friendship with the Holy Spirit, is an interesting and significant beginning that provides sustained credibility to the later contents. It assures the sincere believer of the truth and specific nature of the experience of receiving the Holy Spirit for purification of character and for service in the life of the author.

The Spirit and Spirituality is the second chapter that clarifies issues often misconstrued by believers and theologians in the study of spirits, the Holy Spirit of God, and Spirituality. Through identifications and explanations of characteristics in the third, fourth and fifth chapters, the author defines the Holy Spirit and how He could be known as a friend and partner. The sixth chapter discusses favorable and unfavorable environments for the growth or otherwise of partnership and friendship with the Holy Spirit.

Chapters seven, eight, and nine constitute an in-depth treatise on Christian Spiritual Disciplines (CSD). Obviously, they are the most engaging parts of the book. They itemize, clarify and analyze comprehensively elements and texts that unreservedly qualify the Christian generally and especially the one in friendship and partnership with the Holy Spirit. Chapter ten, Closet Fellowship with God-Alone with God, emphasizes purposeful seclusion, silence, and meditation as prime attitudes for good realization of a robust vitality in friendship with the Holy Spirit as manifested in effective and fulfilling communication with Him. While chapter eleven, Walking in the Spirit, explains further the essence of this manual. The last chapter, Friendship with the Holy Spirit, is an invaluable recapitulation and summary of the contents of the book. Indeed, this last chapter provides for the reader a parting opportunity to skim and retain the core contents of the book.

While the content of this work is comprehensive, exploratory, and thought-provoking, its organization is attractive and engaging. The age-long pedagogical construct of going from the simple to the complex fully applies. In reading this book, a serious reader is on a pleasant and gradual journey into the depth of the subject. He is often relieved from the tedium of meditation on the subject by relevant illustrations and anecdotes, sufficiently authenticated and spiced with quotations from the Bible and other sources. These apart, the language of expression is simple, vivid, and specific for the averagely literate person in the English language. This is useful especially as the audience of the book is expected to be large, cutting across classes of readers.

Another aspect of the author’s style that is appealing is his elaborate use of bullets in the listing of facts and skillful cross-referencing to earlier chapters and pages. These strategies assist the reader to easily capture and retain very essential aspects of content.

It was Francis Bacon who, in his Essay on Studies, wrote that some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested. I have thoroughly read Friendship with the Holy Spirit. I am convinced that it belongs to Bacon’s third category of books. It is a friendly, inviting, and invaluable book to be read not just by all Christians but by all humanity who care and are in quest of peace, love, divine guidance and are desirous to give an acceptable and ultimate account of their existence here on earth. I recommend it without reservations to all.

Prof. Jasper Ahaoma Onuekwusi

Imo State University, Owerri, Nigeria

Preface

b

Introducing: Friendship with the Holy Spirit

The burden to write this book has been for many years. Now you have a twelve-chapter book in your hands.

The purpose and thrust of this book are simply to identify the Holy Spirit and make it easier for people to embrace and seek Him.

As Christians, the Holy Spirit is there for us, to assist us, facilitate our lives, not just in our relationship with God, but also in our everyday endeavors, in the public squares, market-places, and corporate squares of this life. God is not distant when the Holy Spirit is there. We are the ones who should make room for Him in our lives.

This book, running across twelve chapters, is organized to flow from the preceding chapters to the very next through to the end. Nonetheless, each chapter makes a complete reading in itself. This book shows that the Holy Spirit is not a preserve of any special group of people. The Holy Spirit is for every believer, irrespective of age, class, status, or race, young or old. On the subject matter, this book is laden with basic Bible truths, pragmatic, feasible, and tested principles and practices meant to bring home to every reader the reality of the Holy Spirit. This is with the intended outcome that you come into true and pragmatic friendship with the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the Promise of the Father given to facilitate your life and mine as believers, all our endeavors in everyday situations: our personal lives, our walk with God, our vocations, businesses, and professions. He is given that all believers may profit withal.

The core emphasis is that you, as a believer, can relate with the Holy Spirit. You can get into a close friendship with the Holy Spirit, as well as grow your relationship with Him. You will, among others, discover in this book how true and real the believers’ relationship with the Holy Spirit could be, practical, refreshing, transforming, empowering, and enlightening. It is a person-to-person relationship, you and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit makes God real in the heart and lives of believers.

This book has indeed been inspired and written to be the path to a deeper, exciting, and closer walk with God.

Read it. Relish it, and be blessed!

Chike Anthony Samuelson (JP)

September 2021

Chapter One

b

From Idolatry into Friendship with the Holy Spirit

True story! Yes, true story!

It was a mighty, rushing wind! Right all around me, here and there, people were falling, screaming in other tongues, and praising and praying in loud and serene voices. Some were sobbing in tearful groans, while others were just ecstatic! What a scene! It was the Holy Spirit at work. This marked the beginning of knowing and relating with the Holy Spirit firsthand.

It was in an Easter season in the year of Our Lord, 1973, in a student retreat that year. About a year before then, as a student of the famous mission school, Dennis Memorial Grammar School, in the commercial city of Onitsha, Nigeria, I had yielded my life to the Lord Jesus as Saviour, Lord, and King. I had become a committed member of the Scripture Union Fellowship group at school. Alas, that was just the beginning of an exciting walk with the Lord and the Holy Spirit.

An Unforgettable Student Easter Retreat

On that unforgettable day in 1973, at an Easter student retreat, we were in a session of prayer and praise one morning. It was between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. The atmosphere gradually became very spiritually charged, and suddenly this mighty rushing wind came from nowhere and filled the community hall where we were meeting. It was so real!

Before you knew it, people were falling all over all around the hall under the power of God. I do vividly remember that one Evangelist, Edozie Mba, was ministering. That was indeed an experience that has remained with me ever since. But could you believe it? I personally insisted that I will not fall. Could you guess why?  

Too Much for a Good Anglican Boy

I was too much of a good Anglican boy. That was not the practice and tradition of my church. I had been taught that Jesus is a gentle, organized, and orderly person. He does not do rowdy things. Bible days are different from ours. Things during worship time must be serene and solemn. In contrast, what I saw that day was both noisy and very disorderly in my view.

 As a result, something snapped within me to the effect that a five-year period of backsliding ensued. Alas! It was ignorance, ignorance of the ways of the Holy Spirit. This period of backsliding ended for me on the 25th of May, 1978, at the Biological Gardens of the University of Ife, Ile-Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University). Then I was in my penultimate year of undergraduate studies. I shall return to this story in due course.

Today as I write, it has been over four decades of exciting walk and friendship with the Holy Spirit. Our God is worthy of all my praise, considering the fact that I am coming from an ancestry of idolatry. And now, I am talking about friendship with the Holy Spirit. Who like me His praise should sing!

An Ancestry of Idolatry

It is clear to me that in the realm of the Spirit, my story remotely started changing through my father, late Pa Samuel Onyejieke Ezenwamelaku. By the mercy of God, he came to the saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus about the 21st of September 1970. He had come from a background of idolatry. His father, Pa Ezembaji Ezenwamelaku, worshipped idols. He was a rich and renowned yam farmer. He had the longest and biggest yam ban in the community, for which he was honored and celebrated. He was an Ozo titled man. He was also a tall and huge warrior, but he was an idol worshipper.

My papa was the favorite of his father. So when in the mid-1930s, my father decided to join the church; it was vehemently opposed by his father. It was so serious that he had to escape from home at a point to enable him to continue with the church. He had joined the Anglican Church in his late teens. His father lamented that he had forsaken the rich heritage that was his lot in material wealth and his people’s traditions to embrace a strange religion and the white man’s God. For my grandfather, it was a huge loss, filled with pain and regrets. His mates actually commiserated with him.

Faithful to the Church

My papa was a faithful churchman from day one. No guile! No guises! Strict and straight! So we were raised in the church, attended church schools from kindergarten through primary and secondary schools. We were like Cornelius the Centurion (Acts 10). We did not miss attending church. We were encouraged to attend Sunday school every Sunday evening, by 4 p.m., where children were taught and told Bible stories. We were schooled in Catechism and the ways and practices of the church. I started in the children’s choir at the age of seven. At seven, I could read the Bible, both in English and in my native language (Igbo). With all these, we turned out good Anglican boys, morally self-righteous and respectful. All the same, as we grew up, we may not have been perfect, but we were not as bad as other boys in the neighborhood.  

We respected God and the church. We did our best to keep the Ten Commandments, but we were aliens to the Gospel of Grace. Giving your life to Jesus was going too far. It was becoming a fanatic. It was becoming a loafing Bible-carrier and allowing your studies to suffer, and so, jeopardizing your future. Judging by the values our society and parents held, a good future is guaranteed by getting a good education and getting good employment after that. A good future was guaranteed for those who were not bright enough to continue with schooling by learning a good trade and becoming rich and well-to-do merchants and businessmen. There was no way of getting close to Jesus. Receiving Him as Lord and Savior did not even come a close second in guaranteeing a successful future. So many parents did everything to either prevent and/or oppose their children who embrace Jesus as Lord. Who wants fanaticism? 

The Religious Context in Which We Grew Up

With respect to my country of origin, Nigeria, it is reported that the first advent of Christianity was in the 16th century by the Portuguese. However, that did not quite stick. Eventually, evangelical Christianity reached Nigeria through the CMS in 1842 at Badagry and later Abeokuta in Western Nigeria. Subsequently, this reached my part of the country on the 27th of July, in 1857, through the 3rd expedition of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), under the leadership of Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a freed converted Yoruba slave. He did tremendous work and is credited with bringing evangelical Christianity to the Niger Delta, Igbo-Land, up the Niger River, up to Lokoja, and its environs and beyond.

With time, three kinds of local churches had emerged from Crowther’s work and produced their own types of influence.  

The CMS founded churches: 

These are local churches planted either directly by early CMS missionaries or those they discipled. They were full of zeal and were very vibrant and evangelical. Through their work, many in the hinterland experienced genuine conversion. In the power of God, they confronted many satanic strongholds, including evil forests and shrines. They confronted the idols and gods of the land and prevailed. Consequently, many natives who were worshipping idols dumped their idols and yielded their lives to the Lord Jesus. These were CMS kind of churches. Anglican-styled churches were a later development. Many still believe that these two are not quite the same.

Colonial style churches:

These were local churches set up by and for the British people: Colonial civil servants and expatriates. These were churches set up just as it was back home for them in England. They worshipped in the English language. They were set up in towns and centers where there were enough expatriates. These eventually became elite churches. Soon the emerging class of educated indigenes joined these churches. So somehow, they became the kind of churches to emulate. People copied them variously. Through the educated indigenous men that became members of these churches, they spread their style, standards, and influence to many towns and communities in the hinterland.

Local churches founded through community interests and competition:

With time, it became evident that Christianity and the church brought development through schools, health care, education, craft, skills, etc. 

Education brought progress and changed the status of those who had embraced the church.

As communities saw these things, they wanted such benefits. So, they, on their own, reached out to church authorities, paid whatever they were asked to pay, and provided so as to meet the minimal requirements. After that, they were given church agents to come and start local churches together with schools in such communities. With time, rivalries grew. These produced the kind of converts and Christians of their kind. Soon, nominalism became the order of the day. Nonetheless, there were still genuine converts to Christianity. However, that this kind of mix-ups would produce a mixed-multitude kind of situation was inevitable. I am sure that as time went by, the evangelical CMS Christianity that was brought to us got encumbered and compromised with many things. It is evident that this led to a nominal and purely liturgical church, full of forms and virtually spiritually powerless with time, a sprawling church today, needing renewal and revival.

Nominal and Pseudo-Christianity in the Context of Igbo Philosophy and Socio-Religious Culture

The complicated Christian reality I have been describing was happening in Igbo culture and socio-religious practices. The religious reality in which we grew up is that of one God, many deities. This God is so mighty and distant that He can only be reached through deities (smaller intermediary gods). The Igbos (Ndi-Igbo) have their worldview and traditions in which the transcendent is very strong.  

The Igbo society has always been an achievement-oriented one. Therefore, it is not difficult to see that one of the chief deities is Ikenga, the god of fertility and industry. There are other deities like:

Ala (Land goddess)

Urashi

Ogwugwu

Idenmili

Ajoku (Yam God)

Amadi- Oha

Agwu (Spirit responsible for violence and restiveness)

Igwe-Ka-Ala

Ibinu-Ukpabi (Long Juju of Arochukwu)

Etc.

And so, while Christianity made its advances in Igbo land, idolatry lost many members, but its hold on society did not quite abate deeply in my view. This was helped by the fact that vibrant evangelical Christianity founded by Crowther and pushed by men like Simon Jonas, John Taylor, and their contemporaries was having its fire tempered by growing nominalism by those who claim to have become Christians. Church racial policies from England did not also help matters. This reversal in vibrant evangelical spirituality was also not helped by the fact that the speed with which church planting and church growth were taking place did not keep pace with adequate ministerial and spiritual formation for those coming into church work as pastors and teachers. Soon forms had to take the upper hand with sufficient discipleship lagging behind and almost virtually disappearing in many places.

Keep in mind that Satan, the devil, will like reverses like this to remain. Part of his business is to attack and stunt people’s faith as Christians. Satan is also the master behind the unleashing of idols of different kinds on earth. There are also spirits (demon spirits) facilitating these idols. While each of these idols has their peculiar interests, all are directed at stealing, killing, and destroying humankind. It is about Satan’s interests of deceiving, destroying, and dispossessing people everywhere.

These demon spirits, by their mandates, counter-position themselves against the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit. Therefore, if one is under the sway of these spirits, the door of his or her life is locked against the Holy Spirit. Only the Lord Jesus can unlock such doors for those who yield to Him. The interplay of these religious, traditional, and cultural sceneries unleashed very powerful forces and impacts on people. One of the things that result is people with religious faith and commitment, which are neither here nor there. They are half-Christian and half-heathen if there are any such things in reality. The truth remains that those who are neither hot nor cold are none of His. The Lord pledges that He will spew them out of His mouth (Revelations 3:5–16).

Pseudo-Christianity and Mongrel Religiosity

When anybody claims to be a Christian, and it does not reflect in his or her thoughts, words, and deeds, something spiritually fundamental has gone wrong. Did not the Lord Jesus say, By their fruits, you shall know them (Matthew 7:16 and 20)?

Situations of pseudo-faith and mongrel religiosity are not new. Was this not what happened to the Samaritans? After the reign of King Solomon, son of David, his son Rehoboam reigned in his place. King Rehoboam, lacking in diplomatic suavity expected of a normal king, gave in to peer pressure and so disagreed with Jeroboam, the son of