Shared…
Filled With the Spirit
The Holy Spirit has now become the great Reservoir and system of distributing pipes and channels through which His fullness flows into us, and there is nothing which God requires of a man, or which man can ever need in the varied exigencies of life but Christ possesses for us, and we may have an exact adjustment to our every need by simply receiving Him. This is the meaning of that beautiful expression, “Of His fullness have all we received, even grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and reality came by Jesus Christ.” All other systems gave us merely the ideas of things or the commandments or laws which require them of us. But Christ brings the power to realize them and is Himself the reality and substance in our hearts and lives. He is the Great Typical Man. But He is more than a pattern or a type, exhibiting what we ought to be, and demanding our imitation. He is also the Living Head and Progenitor of the very life which He Himself exhibit, begetting it in each of us by a living impartation of His very being, and reproducing Himself in us by the very power of His own life, and then feeding and nourishing this life by the Holy Spirit out of His own being.
Christ’s Person, therefore, is far more than a pattern. It is a power, a seed, a spring of Living Water, nay, the very substance and support of the life He requires of us.
2. This Person is the true fullness of every part of our life. The idea of filling implies universality and completeness in the range within which He fills us. We are not filled unless we are filled in every part. This is just what Christ proposes to do in our full salvation.
He fills all the requirements of our salvation, all the conditions involved in connection with our redemption, reconciliation, justification. He just takes the indictment against us and fills it in with His own precious atonement, and in His own blood writes, “Settled forever.” He takes the broken law and the sad and humiliating record of our failures, omissions and transgressions, and fills it up with His own perfect righteousness and writes over all our record, “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth,” “Accepted in the Beloved;” “He was made sin for us who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.”
And so “we are complete in him.” “By one offering he hath perfected forever them that are sanctified,” and we are as fully saved as if we had never sinned.
Now beloved, the great thing is to realize right here that this is complete, and, at the very threshold, to begin to enter into the fullness of Christ by recognizing ourselves as fully justified and forever saved from all past sin and transgression through the complete redemption of Jesus Christ. The lack of fullness in our subsequent experience is largely due to doubts and limitations which we allow to enter here. Christ’s work for our redemption was finished and when we accept it, it is a complete and eternal salvation.
Again, Christ fills the deeper need of sanctification. He has provided for this in His atonement and in the resources of His grace. It is all wrapped up in Him and must be received as a free and perfect gift through Him alone. “For of him are ye in Christ Jesus, who of God is made unto us sanctification.” Is sanctification the death of the sinful self? Well, this has been crucified with Him already upon the Cross, and we have but to hand it over to Him in unreserved committal and He will slay it and bury it forever in his grave. Is sanctification a new life of purity, righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost? Still more emphatically is it true that Christ Himself must be our life, our peace, our purity, and our full and overflowing joy.
Again, He is the fullness of our heart life. There is no place so sacred to us as our affections, no place so claimed by the great adversary of our souls, and so impossible to regulate by our own power and will. But Christ will give us His heart as well as His Spirit, and will love in us with the love which loves “the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind,” and which loves “one another even as he has loved us.” Oh, how blessed that we have One who will really fill all the delicate and infinitely difficult and varied requirements of these sensibilities and affections, which carry with them such a world of possibility for our own or others’ weal or woe.
Again, Christ will fill all the needs of our intellectual life. Our mental capacities will never know their full wealth of power and spiritual effectiveness until they become simply the vessels of His quickening life, and these brains of ours are laid at His feet simply as the censers which are to hold His holy fire. He will think in us, remember in us, judge in us, impart definiteness and clearness to our conceptions of truth, give us the tongue of fire, the illustration that both illuminates and melts, the accent and tone of persuasiveness and sympathy, the power of quick expression and utterance, and all the equipment necessary to make us “workmen that need not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” Not of course without diligent and faithful attention to His wise and holy teaching, as He leads us in His work to see at once our own shortcomings and His full purpose for us. We must be taught of God, and teaching is sometimes very gradual, and even slow; but “He will guide us into all truth,” and “perfect that which concerneth” our education and preparation for His work and will; and the mind that the Holy Spirit quickens and uses shall accomplish results for God which all the brilliancy of human genius and the scholarship of human learning can never approach.
Again, He will fill the needs of our body, for His body has been constituted, by the resurrection from the dead, a perpetual source of physical energy, sufficient for every member of His body the church, and adapted to every physical function and every test that comes in the pressure of human life, and the experience of a world where every step is beset with the elements of disease, suffering and physical danger. Christ is the true life of a redeemed body, and His Holy Spirit is able so to quicken these mortal bodies, as He dwells within us, that they shall receive a supernatural vigor directly derived from our exalted Head.
Again, Christ will fill all the situations of providence and all the needs that arise in our secular callings and the circumstances of our daily life. There is not one of them that may not be recognized as coming from Him, and meant to prove His all-sufficiency in some new direction. Oh, had we the faith to see God in everything as it meets us day by day, every chapter of life’s history would be a new story of the romance of heavenly love in its magical power to transform darkness into light, difficulty into triumph, sorrow into joy, and the earthly into the heavenly; and Christ would be enabled to manifest Himself in His grace and power to innumerable witnesses, who never hear of Him from a pulpit, or read the story of His grace in anything else but human lives, in whom they would thus behold Him.
Prayed…
There is a fountain flowing from heaven bringing a refreshing life, full of joy
We believe for deliverance and healing today
Father, You have given us the ability to receive all that the Holy Spirit has to give
You fill every department and compartment of our lives, O God
The fullness of the precious Holy Spirit enables us to be Your hands and Your feet
We are conscious every moment of every day that all of our sufficiency and all of our ability is of You
Your Spirit helps us go beyond on our own limitations and human abilities, and we move on over into the fullness of You
The scope and the realm of God is the operation of the kingdom of God
We want to experience You in a new way and in a greater dimension
There are great moves and great activity in the realms of the spirit
The fullness of Your Spirit flows to us and through us
Looking for a furtherance, Father
We are looking for some great releases; there is a need of a reaming out
The same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead—the great revealer, the great unveiler
He takes a hold together with us
The great pray-er, praying out all of the mysteries
Praying in a new way, the way in which we should go
It is a new day
Watching what we see and what we say, it’s by the Holy Spirit more this day
Reservoirs of life
Living water, the life-giving waters of God, the floods of the Holy Spirit
It is the supernatural life and flow of the Holy Ghost
Men have wondered about it, but now we must move over into the greater
Combinations, Father
A greater outpouring of Your Spirit even more than we have seen
All of the possibilities in God
A Holy Spirit show
There is exhilaration right now
Staying steady on those things that have already been done
Every heart, part, and position would stay steady in the flow of Your Spirit
Reaching out and reaching ahead
A mission, a mission!
Over each day over, plan and purpose—stand in it and move with it; it is a move of God
It’s being revealed for the Church to begin to see a greater flow
We must go and yield and yearn to know
That’s the love of God, in us and through us today
There are many more steps to be made
Continually moving with Your Spirit
Tuned in—in a greater way
We will keep following Your ways and Your plans
Thank You, Father, for what You have done in our lives
You have moved on us so that You can move through us
There is a call today, to go further
Praying over leaders and those in authority, that Your influence would be revealed upon them
Refresh, renew, and revive them today, O God
Divine visitation by Your Spirit
We are waiting on You, Lord
Applying the blood over every step that we take today
Praying for supernatural assistance and help for those who are in authority
That there would be a greater anointing and an increase in Your touch, Lord
Declaring that no weapon formed against us would prosper
Pleading the blood and confessing that everything is going to be alright
There is more than enough to do what we need to do
Today is a good day, and we will rejoice and be glad in it
Everything whole, everything restored, and everything right
