I believe in complete realism; salted, down to earth realism. Not everybody listening to me is going to be filled with the Spirit. But some are and some do, and I thank God. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what percentage; but I will be able to tell you that every once in awhile, somebody comes to me with a shining face and says “well it happened, God did it.” And from that time on their lives are transformed; they are changed people. Now, unless you are convinced about this, I recommend that you do not do anything yet. I would not want people to come and kneel down and ask God to fill them when they were not prepared. That discourages many people and confuses them. They go away and will not come back and say, “There is no use for me,” and they get discouraged.
I would like to have you meditate on the scriptures, read the Word, and see for yourself what God the Lord has spoken. That is first. Before you can be filled with the Spirit, you must be sure that you can be.
Second, you must be sure that you desire to be. But you say, “Doesn’t everybody desire to be filled?” And the answer is no. I suppose a lot more people desire to be full, but not many desire to be filled.
Some would like to challenge me on this. I want to be responsible for what I say and I declare that before you can be filled with the Spirit, you must have desire; and some people do not desire.
For example, are you sure you want to be possessed by a Spirit? There are two kinds of spirit possessions: evil spirit possession, where a spirit takes over a human personality as in the days of Jesus and makes them filthy, dumb or evil. Jesus used to cast such spirits out. They were spirits and they possessed these persons.
The Holy Spirit also wants to possess us Christians. This Spirit is like Jesus. Do you want to be possessed by a Spirit that is like Jesus? A Spirit pure, gentle, sane, wise and loving; for that is exactly what He is like. The Holy Spirit is pure, for He is the Holy Spirit. He is wise, for He is the Spirit of Wisdom. He is true, for He is the Spirit of Truth. He is like Jesus, for He is the Spirit of Christ. He is like the Father, for He is the Spirit of the Father. This Spirit wants to be Lord of your life, and He wants to possess you so that you no longer are in command of the little vessel in which you sail. You are a passenger on board or one of the crew, but you are definitely not in charge. Somebody else is in charge of the vessel.
Unfortunately, we do not want it to be that way because we were born of Adam’s corrupted flesh, and we want to boss our own lives. I ask you; are you sure you want to be possessed by the blessed Spirit of the Father and the Son? Now, do you want your personality to be taken over by someone who is like this? He will expect obedience to the written Word. We would like to be able to be filled with the Spirit, or full of the Spirit, and then more or less do as we please. But the Holy Spirit who inspired the Scriptures will expect obedience to the Scriptures. And if we do not obey the Scriptures, we will quench Him. He will have obedience and people do not want to obey the Lord.
Every believer is as full of the Spirit as we actually want to be. This sounds like a shocking thing, but it is true. Everybody is as full as they want to be. Everybody has as much of God as he desires to have. The average Christian does not always have as much as he prays in public he might have, or even in private, because there is a fugitive impulse comes to us. We want the thrill of being full, but we do not want to meet the conditions that we have to meet, so we do not want it badly enough to be filled.
Say that you wanted a Cadillac. Some of you have them and some of you want them, but here is Brother Jones; for instance, and he would love to have a Cadillac, but he is not going to buy one and I will tell you why. He does not want one badly enough to pay for it. He wants it, but he does not want it badly enough to meet the terms. Therefore, he goes out and drives his Chevy and that is the way with the Christian. We want to be full, but we do not want to be full badly enough; so we will settle for something less.
We say, “Lord, we’d like to be full. It certainly would be wonderful but we don’t want it enough to lay down that kind of money.” We do not want to pay the price; we do not want to meet the cost.
The Holy Spirit will expect obedience and will not tolerate self-sins. Self sins, what are they?
Well there is self-love. The church is full of self-love now. In fact, we cultivate it and go to school to learn how to put on and show off. God the Holy Ghost will never allow that. He might allow some Christians to be like that, but He will never allow you to be like that. He will never allow a Spirit-filled Christian to be like that. He is the Spirit that brings humility to the heart; and that humility will be there, or He will be quenched and grieved and He will not fill.
Then there is self-confidence. We are positive we can do things and the Holy Spirit wants to destroy your self-confidence.
As a businessmen, you make decisions; you’ve got your telephones all over your desk, you buy and sell in big amounts, you make decisions and you’re proud of the fact that you run that and make these decisions. Then, you go home and run the house. There is one thing you will not run, brother. You will not run your life after the Holy Ghost gets control. You will not run it anymore; the Holy Ghost will run your life. And the reason you are not filled and full now is that you want to run your life the same as you run your business. You will not dictate to the Holy Ghost. That is the trouble with us; we are dictators, we want to run our lives. We are so full of confidence.
Then we are full of self-righteousness.
We lie to God continually. A man will say, “I am a worm.” However, if his wife called him a worm there would be trouble at home. He does not believe it; he is lying to God. He gets down and says, “Oh, Lord, there’s no good thing in me.” But if you called him a liar, his face would turn white and he would demand what you mean. He does not mean it; he is just lying.
He says he is bad, but he does not believe it. The Holy Spirit wants to take all of that out of you, my friend. He wants to take Adam’s righteousness out of you and put another kind in.
And there is self-indulgence. The Holy Spirit wants to take all that out. Along with self-love, self-pity and all the self-sins infesting your life. He wants to take them out. Are you sure you want to be treated like that? Are you sure you want to be filled and possessed by that kind of Spirit? If you are not, if you do not desire to be, then of course you cannot be, because God is a gentleman; the Holy Ghost is a gentleman. He will not come in where He is not wanted.
Then, are you sure you want to be controlled and led by a Spirit who will stand in sharp opposition to the world’s easy ways?
The church in our day has become so much like the world that you cannot tell the difference any more. There are a few things we do not do: we do not drink, and most Christians now do not smoke. However, outside of that, they do about everything everybody else does along with trimming their income tax. They take their wives out at lunch and write it on the forms that it was a business engagement. Then we smile and think we are getting away with something. Brother, you are just leaking; your spirit is leaking, your soul is leaking. Scriptures say you put it in “bags with holes in it.”
The Holy Spirit will not allow crooked deals. He will not allow sharp shavings; you have to be honest to be filled with the Spirit. Do you want to be filled with the Spirit bad enough so you can stand against the easy ways of the world, live the life of a Christian, the hard life of a Christian?
The Holy Spirit will not allow you to boast or show-off. He will never allow that.
Every time I have boasted about anybody up until now, they have backslid on me. God never allowed me to boast about a convert; he has always backslid as far as I have been able to discover. Every time I have boasted about a crowd, they petered out on me. Every time I have boasted about anything, it went to pot and I thank God for it, because God will not allow that. If I was not His child and His Spirit was not trying to control me and was not succeeding in some measure, I would never hear from God on it. As soon as I start to show off a little bit the Lord sets me flat, and that is exactly the way I want to keep it. That is the way you will be, too. The Lord will never let you show off or boast.
He will take the direction of your life away from you altogether; and He will reserve the right to test you and discipline you, and strip away from you many things that you love and are dangerous to you. We want God and all this too.
A philosophy abroad in Christian circles today says, “I’ve got God and all this too.” I find in the New Testament, when people had God they did not have very much else. They had God and they were rich, but they did not have much else and often times they had to get rid of what they had for Christ’s sake.
Our fathers lived this way, but in this 20th century Western Civilization, Canada and the United States are like that together on this. We are rich and well-to-do and have too much. We do not know what it is to suffer and our churches have become a middle class church. We do not know what it is to be poor; we do not know what it is to suffer and lose things, but our fathers did. They paid the price and we will not pay the price. We read books on being filled but we will not meet the conditions.
Consequently, we are all as full as we want to be, my brethren. You are as good a man as you want to be. You are not as good a man as you think you want to be, but you are as good a man as you really want to be. Our Lord said, “blessed are they that do hunger and thirst, they shall be filled.” And if the hunger and thirst is theirs sufficiently, they shall be filled. If there is a man hungering after God and is not filled, then the Word of God is broken. We are as full as we hunger to be.
Sometimes we would like to be like D.L. Moody. We would love to be like A.B. Simpson, but not bad enough, and the result is of course we just go on our mediocre way.
I said before you can be filled you must be sure you can be, and you must be sure that you desire to be and you must be sure that you need to be. Why are we interested in this whole subject at all? Can’t you get along all right the way you have been? You received Jesus, you said, and were converted and your sins were forgiven. You took a course in the New Testament somewhere and you know you have eternal life and no man can pluck you out of God’s hands. In the meantime, you are having a wonderful time going to heaven.
Isn’t that enough? Why talk about all this; why do I preach it and why do you come to hear it? Are you sure you can’t get along all right the way you are? Or do you feel you just cannot go on, resist discouragement and obey the scriptures, understand the truth and bring forth fruit and live in victory without a greater measure of the Holy Spirit than you know now.
If you have not reached that place then I do not know that there is much I can do. I do not think there is anything anyone can do. I wish I could take the top of the heads of every one and pour the holy oil of God down, but I cannot. I can only do what John the Baptist did when he pointed to Jesus and said, “Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world,” then he faded out of the picture and after that, everyone was on his own.
You had to go to the Lord Jesus Christ and receive help from Christ on your own. No man can fill me and no man can fill you. We can pray for each other, but I cannot fill you and you cannot fill me.
This desire must become all absorbing. I want you to hear this; that the desire to be filled must become all-absorbing in your life. If there is anything bigger in your life than your desire to be a Spirit-filled Christian, then you will never be a Spirit-filled Christian until that is cured. Never. If there is anything bigger in your life than your longing after God, then you will never be a Spirit-filled Christian.
Here is a young couple coming to the altar to be married. As the young woman walks down the aisle to meet her husband-to-be and take the vows of marriage. If she should suddenly discover something bigger in his life than she, when they ask the question will you, she would say, “I will not.” She wants to know that she is the biggest thing in his life. If there something bigger in your life, your social and human life, anything bigger than that partner, then yours is not going to be a happy life.
If there is anything bigger in your spiritual life than God, anything bigger than your yearning after God, then you will never be filled. I have run into Christians, who have for years wanted to be filled in a vague sort of way. But the reason they are not filled is they have other things they want more. Because they want it more they either get it or try to get it, but they do not get God. God will not come rushing into a human heart unless He knows He is the biggest thing and nobody has a desire bigger. When God knows that, then God relaxes and rests and smiles and pours out this which “ye now see and hear” as Peter put it.
Now is the desire to be filled with the Spirit the all-absorbing thing in your life? If it is not, then I repeat, we will never get anywhere until it is.
Now I will say this again, I am not sure anyone was ever filled with the Spirit without first having a time of disturbance and anxiety. When I say I am not sure, I mean judging by the Old Testament, the New Testament and Christian Biography and personal experience. And from those four or five ways of testing, I conclude that nobody was ever filled with the Spirit without first having a time of disturbance and anxiety. The Lord’s people wanted to be happy, like little children. They want the Lord to give them a rattle; they want to cackle and laugh and they want to be happy. They are going to be happy regardless, but the Lord’s happy little children very seldom are filled with the Holy Ghost, because God cannot fill them because they are not ready to die to the thing that makes them happy.
God wants His children to be joyful but not the cheap happiness of the flesh; it is the joy of the resurrected Christ. But before He can fill us, there must be a disturbance and an anxiety. Adam has to die.
It is almost humorous in that Old Testament passage when Saul captured Agag, the sheep and the cattle. Finally, along came Samuel, with his eyes blazing and he said, “Where’s Agag?”
He knew Agag was a type of the flesh and that Agag would never be subject to the will of God, could not be and he had to get rid of old Agag. Samuel got a sword. My father used to wet his razor and pull a hair out to see if it would work. When he knew it would cut the hair then he knew it was sharp enough. I can imagine Samuel with that sword, and when Agag saw him, he said, “Verily the suffering of death is past, verily the miseries of death are over.” But it was not too long before he was hacked to pieces before the Lord. Samuel did it and got rid of him.
He is a figure there, a type, an illustration at least. Well that has to die, that is why I say there has to be disturbance and anxiety and disappointment and emptiness. I suppose that no Christian who has been filled with the Spirit after his conversion, no Christian but lost his joy. I know I did.
I had a lot of joy when I was first converted; real joy. I was a happy Christian, and to be filled with the Spirit God emptied my joy and showed me it was about half carnality and animal spirits. Sometimes he lets people fall flat on their faces, which shocks them because they thought they were better than that. No, you are not better than that; you just found out how bad you were.
Then there is a despair that comes on the heart of people. Despair with self. As long as you imagine you will make it all right, if you do not want to be too religious, you will make it all right. But it will be a mediocre half-dead Christianity. That is what the trouble is with us. But when you reach that place of despair, when nobody can help you; when you’ve gone to the last person, you’ve written the last editor, and followed the last evangelist around, and hunted up the last fellow to counsel with him, and when nobody can help you any more you’re in a state of inward despair; that’s when you should never despair, because you’re near the kingdom. That is getting close, getting near the place where God can do something for you.
But there comes that despair with self; that emptying out of you and that inner loneliness. You know it is part of my belief, I think it is from the scriptures, that God wants to get us to a place that if we only had Him we would still be happy. We do not need God and something else. It is God and something else that is the trouble with us; but when we get God and satisfied that we can have God and nothing else, then God gives us himself and lets us have other things too.
Most of us are too social to be lonely. If we feel a little bit lonely we rush to the telephone and call Ms. Yakity and the next thing we know we have used up a half hour and the buns or biscuits have burnt. However, it is talk, talk, talk. We rush about and it is a social fellowship. There comes a place in your Christian life, my friend, when you will arrive at a place where instead of Ms. Yakity being a consolation to you she will be a pest, and she will not be able to help you at all; there will be nothing she can do for you. It is loneliness for God; you are lonely for God and you want God so bad you are miserable. You are getting close then. You are near to the kingdom, and if you will only keep on you will meet God. God will take you in and fill you and He will do it in His own wonderful, blessed way. I would even say there comes darkness.
The old writers talked about the dark night of the soul; a time of emptying, a time when it became dark all around us. We are too carnal to allow our hearts to get dark with longing for God now. We are so determined to be happy that if we cannot be happy by the Holy Ghost, we will drum up a lot of happiness. We are “rock and rollers,” and we are going to get happy somehow if we have to beat it up with a tom-tom. All right, you can have that kind of happiness if you want it. But if you don’t want it, and you’re dissatisfied with it; and you want the joy that comes out of Joseph’s new tomb open now forever; you want the joy that comes from the Holy Ghost; a well of water springing up within you forever. Then you’ll likely have a loneliness and inner darkness and despair with self, and you’ll wonder what happened to you, and you’ll say, “Am I backsliding?” No, you are not backsliding; you are going on with God.
Now somebody will accuse me of being a legalist and saying this disturbance and anxiety, disappointment and despair and all that, earns the Spirit of God. No, that does not earn the Holy Ghost. The Holy Spirit is a gift. He is a gift from the Father to His Children. He is a gift from the wounded side of Jesus to His Children. You cannot pay down one red penny for Him. You cannot turn your finger over it; He is a gift 100 percent.
But what this does for you is not earning the Spirit but it breaks up your fallow ground and it empties the vessel. I say you cannot be full unless you are filled. And the trouble with us is that we are full of too many things now. And God cannot empty us until He brings us to that place of anxiety and emptiness and despair with self. Then, when we are emptied of these things, then the blessed Holy Ghost at least has an opportunity to come in.
D. L. Moody used to take a glass of water for an empty glass and fill it and then ask, “How can that be filled, how could I fill that with milk and how could I fill that glass?” The obvious answer is, you got to empty it. Then Moody would pour it out into another vessel as an object lesson.
There must be an emptying and detachment from the interests of life. Most of us are too concerned with life. We are busy making a living so that we can die of gallbladder trouble or have a heart attack. We are busy making a living, dashing about, keeping our sails up, keeping our business up. Now it is all right and if you are right with God; God will bless you and I am sure He will bless your business too. But most of us do not bother too much about that. We expect to do it and we just want the Lord to have the chariot ready when we are ready to die. Therefore, we kill ourselves long before our time and the Lord takes us home to heaven, so we think.
Brethren, is this too rough? Am I demanding too much? I do not think so. I think I am chilly and cold compared to what I ought to be. I am nowhere near what Charles Finney would have been if he were preaching, or John Wesley or any of the other preachers God blessed and honored.
I will give you four texts, on this matter of how to be filled with the Spirit. Of course, up to now, I have given you conditions and those conditions are part of the how. I give you four texts and I want you to take them. An archangel from heaven could not do any better than to give you the scripture and say believe the Word of God.
First, Romans 12:1-2. You know what it is; I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God that you present your body, that is present your vessel. That’s first. A vessel that hasn’t been presented will not be filled, and a vessel that isn’t presented can’t be filled. Present your vessel. I think that God wants us to be intelligent. He wants us to come to Him. If you are in a breadline somewhere in the poor European countries where they have to come with their cups for milk and come with their basket for their bread and you stood back there and didn’t present your cup you wouldn’t get the milk. If you didn’t present your basket you wouldn’t get the bread, and if you don’t present your personality you won’t get fullness of the Spirit of God. Present your vessel.
I give you another verse, Luke 11:9-13. It says, “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone; or if he shall ask a fish, will give him a serpent; or if he ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?” The answer to all those questions is no. So Jesus draws His conclusion; “If ye then be evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him.”
First, you present your vessel and you ask. That is perfectly logical and perfectly clear. One man who does not believe much in being filled has a note on this verse and says he thinks there is only one person who ever took advantage of that. That is what he thinks. Some of God’s people all over the world have taken advantage of that. They did not hear that was not for them, so they believed it and they asked and they were filled. How much more shall the Holy Spirit be given to them that ask God, so you ask.
The next is Acts 5:32, “We are his witnesses of these things and so is also the Holy Ghost whom God hath given to them that obey him.” There must be obedience there. Spirit of God will not give a disobedient child His blessing. He will not fill a disobedient child with the Holy Spirit. There must be obedience there. Obedience to the word, obedience to the Spirit, obedience to the risen Lord. You must be an obedient Christian. He gives His Holy Spirit to them that obey Him.
The fourth text is Galatians 3:2, “This only would I ask of you; received ye the Spirit by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith?” And of course, the answer is by the hearing of faith. Are you so foolish then having begun in the Spirit are you now going to be made perfect by the flesh. You are not filled with the Holy Ghost by law keeping; you are filled with the Holy Spirit by faith and obedience to your Lord.
I want to say the most shocking thing yet. This is the thing that gets you in trouble for saying, but I want to say it.
Here is what people do not want to hear, but I will stand by it so help me God because I do not find it in the Old Testament, or in the New Testament, or anywhere in Christian Biography, or in Church History, or in personal testimonies. I never heard of anybody who had ever been filled with the Holy Ghost who did not know it.
Now some people would like to think they are filled and do not know it; one man tried to explain that. He said that now there is such a thing as static electricity. He said you take a hold of a piece of metal and then you take a hold of another piece of metal or touch it and the sparks will fly off your fingers. You were not filling anything, but you had been full all the time and did not know it. Well the Holy Ghost is not electricity and your soul is something else.
That is a bad illustration, because he is violating the Old Testament and the New Testament, Christian Biography, Church History and all the testimonies of the Spirit-filled saints.
Nobody was ever filled with the Holy Ghost who did not know he had been.
Too, nobody in the Old Testament nor the New Testament nor Church History or Biography was ever filled with the Holy Ghost who did not know when they were filled.
Nobody was ever filled who was filled gradually. Ah, that is where we hide; this filling gradually stuff. The devil knows that if he can just say, well we want to be filled gradually. You don’t have to worry about it because it’s so slow that you can always encourage yourself; well I’m a little fuller today than I was yesterday, or at least I’m fuller this year than I was last year.
Chances are you are not; but there is no place in the Old Testament where it says the Spirit came on him gradually. Did you ever see it? I never did. The Holy Spirit fell upon them; He came upon them. He filled them, but it was an instantaneous act, never a gradual filling. That is the place for carnal preachers and carnal church members to hide. You can tell how, little by little, slowly the sun comes up, and slowly we open like a flower to the sunshine. Beautiful, you know; lovely poetry but nonsense theologically, and nobody ever got anywhere that way.
Personally, I like the word anointing better than baptism. I am not at all sure that theologically we are not baptized into the body of Christ when we are born again. But the word I want to use is anointing. That anointing is not a gradual thing. When they poured oil on a man’s head, it was not gradual. When they poured oil on a fellow’s head, it was turning the thing over and pouring it out. It ran all over the beard and down on the skirts of his garments. And everybody for a quarter of a mile around knew they had poured oil on him, because it was the oil of frankincense and myrrh and aloes and cassia and smelled up everything around with its beautiful fragrance. It did not happen gradually; it happened instantaneously.
Now there is where people don’t want to be talked to. They say get out with that fellow because I’m perfectly willing to be full of the Spirit, but I don’t want to go through the experience of being filled with the Spirit. I am perfectly willing to go on, teach my Sunday school class and tithe and give to missions and be good and witness to the girl beside me at the desk but I do not want to be filled. No, we do not want to lose face you know. Adam does not want to lose face. He wants to be blessed and go to heaven and wear a crown and rule over five cities, but he does not ever want to come to the place where the Lord chops him down.
That is why we are where we are brethren. That is why we are the weak people that we are these days. The Lord’s people want Jesus to do all the dying, and they want to do all the chuckling. They do not want to know what the cross means.
“Oh Cross that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from thee; I lay in dust life’s glory dead, and from the ground there blossoms red, life that shall endlessly be” (George Matheson).