Be Filled with the Spirit

"And be not drunk with wine wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God." Eph. 5 vv. 18-21.

Be filled with the Spirit!

I think that this verse is at the heart of all such practical issues. Be filled with the Spirit! The way you should live, as far as the Lord is concerned, and as the Scriptures show us we should live, is possible because you are Spirit-filled. If you are a Christian, you are born again of the Spirit of God and you may go on to know that glorious baptism in the Holy Spirit which the Lord has freely poured out. Because of that mighty gift, it is wonderfully possible for you to live the life that the Bible requires of you. So all the practical issues we shall be looking at are possible to the Spirit-filled believer, and to the one who goes on, day by day, being filled with the Spirit. The moment we stop receiving that filling which He provides, the moment we stop relying on that enabling of His precious Spirit in our lives, then we start getting into difficulties. But in Him, we are more than conquerors.

Please remember, as we think on these things, that the Spirit is the Holy Spirit. He is a Person, a Divine Person, God the Holy Spirit. We are not discussing some impersonal force but God. Now the Bible tells us that we are partakers of the Divine nature and this is because God dwells in us. What we have read above is a command - "Be filled with the Spirit!" That, in itself, is a practical issue. A command is to be obeyed. We must be responsive to that, in faith, in obedience and in allowing the Lord to fill us with Himself and with what He wants us to have. It is allowing the Lord to make us what He wants us to be.

What we shall look at in this study is not so much how to be filled with the Holy Spirit, but how, being full of the Holy Spirit, you can allow Him to fill you. Now you may need to think about that idea. If we do allow the Holy Spirit to fill us, continually, we shall live right. If we get this right, the other twenty or so practical issues will present no problem. You will fail in the Christian life if you say, "I'm not like that, like the Bible says; I'm going to try to be like that." It seems to me that many Christians take that attitude. They look at what the Bible says concerning the believer and say, "I'm not like that. I'm going to try to be like it." If that is how you approach the Christian life, you will fail. You will never do it, because you will be relying on human effort. The life of faith, however, is a life of believing the Word of God. In faith, the Spirit-filled believer looks at the Word of God and declares, "I am like that. Therefore I will act like it." The devil, or your own fleshly mind, or your family will say, "You're not like that." That is why faith is essential, for by faith we look at things which are not seen. Our evidence is faith itself. We believe what the Word says about us above any other voice. It tells us we are children of the Living God, partakers of the Divine nature, more than conquerors, victorious, free from the dominion of sin, holy. You must believe it. If you are born of the Spirit, being filled with the Spirit, then that is what you are like. All kinds of voices of doubt, without and within, may be saying "impossible", but faith - not trying - will bring you to victory.

In some ways it is like learning to swim. You say, "I can't swim. It's impossible for a heavy body to do such a thing." But when you gain the confidence and move out in that confidence then you wonder how you ever thought it was impossible. Similarly, when you become a Christian and you begin to move in the life of faith, you cannot imagine what was so difficult about it before. Before it seemed so impossible. How can anyone live apart from sin and the lusts of the flesh? How can I live with a thought life that is pure and so on? It looks so difficult until you begin to move in the power of what you are. Then you prove that the Lord is true, because you are then living according to what His word says and not according to what your mind tells you. Your mind will tell you all sorts of different things about yourself based on what you used to be like. However, the Bible says that you are a new creation. That is what you must move in.

Jesus said, in John 15 v 5, "Without Me, you can do nothing." Now when we say that we are going to try to be what we should be, then we are doing it without Him and consequently fall flat on our face. But when we open our heart and life to the Holy Spirit and move out in faith, then we are moving with Him and He with us. Without Him we can do nothing, but with Him and in Him we are more than conquerors. So in Philippians 2 vv 12 and 13, it says, "For it is God that works in you both to will and to do His good pleasure." This is the secret: it is not us but God who works in us. Being filled with the Spirit is opening ourselves up to let God work in us, to let the Lord Jesus Christ be revealed in us, being responsive to His leading and guiding.