“Be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18).
This is the great gift of Christ Jesus to His people; our blood-bought patrimony and inheritance; costly to Him but free to us. It was the reason that Christ apprehended Paul on the road to Damascus; that he might be filled with the Holy Spirit (Acts 9:17); and Christ’s purpose was fulfilled, for we see Paul, “filled with the Holy Spirit”, confronting Elymas (Acts 13:9); that this filling with the Holy Spirit is for all, was shown at Antioch, where “the disciples were continually filled with joy and the Holy Spirit” (Acts 13:52).
The filling of the Spirit is an absolutely fundamental and vital requirement for those chosen by Christ; without it we cannot be pure, we cannot be cleansed, we cannot be holy and we cannot inherit the salvation to which we have been called. The whole of the scriptures set forth clearly the standards God sets for His chosen people; those called to be fellow heirs of Christ Jesus in the Kingdom of God; these can only be accomplished by the effective working of the Holy Spirit.
Since the work of the Holy Spirit in a believer is so essential to salvation, our implacable enemy devotes much of his energy and all of his guile to seeing that this work is short-circuited and re-routed. And he has had some success in these sad days; the Spirit is coveted for power, not purity; for profit, not prophecy; for our comfort, not His glory.
But the Holy Spirit is just like Jesus; He too will bring grace and truth, purity and holiness; His desire is to make the choice of God’s people as fellow heirs of the kingdom of God a reality; to bring us to the same place, in this life, of the One after Whom we are called. What that means for all of us is that we can no longer be in command of the good ship “ME”.
This is the good news; that there is One who Himself will take responsibility for guiding us on the divine course; but the Holy Spirit is not a mutineer; He will not take command unlawfully, but will await the summons to the bridge where He may assume command lawfully and with the agreement of the former captain. And there’s the rub; we, of Adam’s flesh find that this is bad news, not good news; we resist fiercely and cling to our carnal command even though we can see that we are heading for the rocks. And sadly, the Holy Scriptures have been so carnally deconstructed by men that we now believe that we can have the Holy Spirit as a passenger, while we remain in command and that we will somehow arrive safely at our heavenly destination.
But this is a lie; it is arrived at not by exegesis – extraction of the truth from the scriptures – but by what we might call “eisegesis” – reading into the scriptures something that is not there. This is endemic in modern Christianity. The Holy Spirit has today been assigned a role as a follower of men, rather than a leader; as one who brings comfort, rather than discipline and instruction; who brings peace with this world, rather than peace with God; who leaves us as we are, rather than seek to change us. Such a view is of a spirit, all right, but it is not the Holy Spirit and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth when self-commanders arrive at their eternal destination and find themselves before the Great White Throne.
The truth is, we have as much of the Spirit as we want and as we allow; but we are not His until the Holy Spirit is in complete command.
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