Understanding The Concept Of Filled With The Holy Spirit

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Hello, my name is Paul, and I am the voiceover for a ministry provided to you by Jim Pugh at God is Government called Your Daily Bread, taken from Christ's teaching of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6, verse 11. This is a daily devotion ministry focused not only on uplifting Scripture, but Scripture that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ. We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly, advance your knowledge base of the Holy Scriptures. Let's look again at Ephesians chapter 5 and verses 18 to 21. And be not drunk with wine in which 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. Now as I say, we have spent seven lessons, or this is our seventh lesson, on this tremendous text. You might think that such a brief text could be covered in less time than, say, five or six hours or whatever that total time would be. But the fact is that we haven't even come close to exhausting the rich content that's here. I find, and I'm sure you do too, that the Word of God is kind of like a limitless well. The harder you pump, the richer and clearer and fuller the flow becomes. The more I study the Bible, the more inexhaustible it becomes. The deeper I dig, the wider the expanse of treasure that appears before my eyes. It's inexhaustible. It's one of the incredible experiences of the ministry to dig deeper and deeper and to find that the deeper you go, the bigger the subject becomes. And, you know, ignorance is bliss in a sense. You think you've got it at first, and then the more you study it, the wider and wider it becomes. And so we haven't even begun to exhaust the tremendous depth of meaning that is here, even though we've spent sixth and now a seventh lesson looking at it. But the major truth of the passage is easy to identify. The major truth of this brief passage is that all our Christian living, all this issue of living the Christian life, walking the worthy walk, the whole idea of the Christian's experience is based upon the concept of being filled with the Spirit. At the end of verse 18, you have the statement, but be filled with the Spirit, or be being continuously kept filled with the Spirit, and that becomes the heart of the issue in the Christian life. Only as we are filled with the Spirit of God, that is, as we are controlled by the Spirit, moved along by the Spirit, yielded to the Spirit, directed by the Holy Spirit, only as our lives are functioning in response to the Spirit of God, do we really know the power of God in our lives? You cannot experience the power of God, or move in the will of God, or know the fulfillment and the blessing of God unless you are filled with His Spirit. In Galatians chapter three, the Apostle Paul said to the Galatians in verse three, are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now made perfect in the flesh? In other words, you know you were born again of the Spirit, you know you were saved by the Spirit, you know you entered into the body by the Spirit, do you think that having begun in the Spirit, you could be perfected in your flesh? The answer obviously is of course not. We were redeemed by the Spirit of God, we were born again by the Spirit of God. We were implanted with an eternal, incorruptible seed by the Spirit of God, Peter says. And having begun in the Spirit, we will be made perfect only in the Spirit. In other words, as we ascend the scale of maturity, we grow only insofar as we're filled with the Spirit. When we are not filled or controlled by the Spirit, we flatten out and there's no progress at all. The growing times of our life are the times when we are controlled by the Holy Spirit. Then and only then does the flow of the power of God function within us. Now, every believer possesses the Spirit and needs at each moment in life to be yielded to the Spirit of God. That's the key to this passage, and we've been looking at that. I might just expand your understanding of that by pointing this out to you that all of the key leaders in the New Testament are characterized specifically as people filled with the Spirit. For example, it says of Jesus Christ himself, in Luke chapter 4, verse 1, and Jesus being full of the Spirit. And in John 3.34, it says that God gave not the Spirit by measure unto him. In other words, he didn't measure out some dose of the Spirit, but rather gave unto him the fullness of the Spirit. Jesus even said, The things I do, I do by the power of the Spirit of God. He was full of the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist, the forerunner of our Lord Jesus Christ, the greatest man who had ever lived up until his time. Of him it is said in Luke 1, and he shall be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb. And his mother, Elizabeth, and his father, Zacharias, both of them were also filled with the Holy Spirit. As you move further along in the New Testament, you find, for example, in Acts chapter 4, that Peter, the great apostle, is filled with the Spirit of God. We know he was filled with the Spirit along with everybody else on the day of Pentecost. But in chapter 4 and verse 8, it specifically says, Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said unto them, Peter, filled with the Spirit. Further, we move into chapter 6 of the Book of Acts, and we find the first officials selected for the early church, and it says of these individuals that they should be men full of the Holy Spirit. And verse 5 says, They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, and Philip and Procorus and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenus and Nicholas, a proselyte of Antioch. In other words, those who were given to the leadership of the early church apart from the apostles, those who were to serve the people, were those who were filled with the Spirit. Stephen, of course, is one of them filled with the Spirit. Later on in chapter 7, verse 55, when Stephen was being stoned, but he, being full of the Holy Spirit, looked up steadfastly to heaven. Later on, we meet another wonderful individual, who takes up practically all the rest of the New Testament, a man by the name of Saul who becomes Paul. And to him, Ananias says that he would receive his sight, and in Acts 9 17, be filled with the Holy Spirit. So the Apostle Paul knew what it was to be filled with the Spirit. In Acts 13 9 it says, Then Saul, who is called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, set his eyes on him, and said, There was a wonderful man who was in the company of the Apostle Paul, a man that we know as the one who was a comforter. His name is Barnabas, and it is said of Barnabas in verse 24 of Acts 11, he was a righteous man and full of the Holy Spirit. You see, all the way from John the Baptist and Jesus and the Gospels to the key people in the book of Acts, to those who become really the writers of the New Testament in part, the concept of the filling of the Spirit of God is central. There's no way that an individual believer can function in the power of God apart from the control of the Spirit of God. And so this becomes the bottom line, people. This becomes standard number one. We go back to the place where we yield the control of our lives to the Spirit of God. And of course, what happened was people who were filled with the Spirit of God were able to function with such power that it was said of them, they have turned the world upside down. The reality of yielding to the Holy Spirit releases the divine power to enable us to do the things that only God can do. If you're ever going to do greater things than these, as Jesus said, if you're ever going to know what it is, to do exceedingly abundantly above all you can ask or think, according to the power that works in you, you'll only know it as you're filled with the Spirit. And we saw that. That means to be controlled by the Spirit or yielded to his power. That is, self has died, self-will has died, sin is confessed and removed from your life, and you're obedient to the Spirit of God. You know, it always amazes me that people are on a sort of a search to try to reproduce today the early church. I guess this is part of what's going on in my lifetime. I can't speak for the generations before, but immediately, in the generation before, I'm not sure that it was intense as it is today. But there has been, since I was a seminary student a few years back, a tremendous effort to recapture the meaning of the early church. And I guess I've been a part of that effort myself, to redefine how did the early church do it? How did they do it in the Book of Acts? How did they structure themselves? What was their MO, you know, modus operandi? What were their methods? What were their functionings? How were they structured leadership-wise? How did the laity respond? How did they work with people they sent out to mission fields? How did they commission and ordain? And how did they work with discipline in the church? And how did they reach their world? And how did they evangelize? And how did they edify? We always are after recapturing the early church. And we hear a lot about renewal of the church and the regeneration of the first century church. And you know, I think in many ways, we've made it much more complicated than it is. You see, the key to reproducing the power of the early church is not the modest operandi of the early church, it's the same Holy Spirit who was in the early church. That's all. And when the church in the twentieth century is indwelt by the Spirit of God, as it is, and when it becomes filled with the Spirit of God, as God wants it to be, then it will be the twentieth century church under the divine definition. It is not a matter of recapturing methodology, it is a matter of being filled with the Spirit of God. Then we'll turn the twentieth century world upside down. Perhaps we should be less concerned with the academics of a restructured church and more concerned with the inspiration of a spirit-filled life, because that's bottom line. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of understanding the concept of filled with the Holy Spirit. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong, and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way.