'Thomas Goodwin, a seventeenth-century Puritan pastor, wrote that one day he saw a father and son walking down the street. Suddenly the father swept the son up into his arms and hugged him and kissed him and told the boy he loved him - and then after a minute he put the boy back down. Was the little boy more a son in the father's arms than he was down on the street? Objectively, and legally, there was no difference, but subjectively and experientially, there was all the difference in the world. In his father's arms, the boy was experiencing his sonship.
When the Holy Spirit comes down on you in fullness, you can sense your Father's arms beneath you. It is an assurance of who you are. The Spirit enables you to say to yourself: "If someone as all-powerful as that loves me like this, delights in me, has gone to infinite lengths to save me, says that he will never let me go, and is going to glorify me and make me perfect and take everything bad out of my life - if all of that is true - why am I worried about anything?"'
Timothy Keller, Prayer, p.172.
