08 - How to Be Filled with the Holy Spirit

Conservative, fundamental Christians all over the world agree that we ought to be Spirit-filled Christians. But there is very little counsel given, so far as I can learn, on what it means and how we can be filled with the Spirit and walk in the Spirit. Today I want to bring serious counsel on this topic, “How I might be filled with the Spirit.” What I have to say is not a sermon, rather serious spiritual counsel to Christians.

In Isaiah 8:13 are these words of God to the man of God, “Sanctify the Lord of hosts Himself, and let Him be your fear, and let Him be your dread. And He shall be for you a sanctuary.” We can see from the earlier part of the chapter that an invasion was threatening. Assyria was to come in like a mighty flood because the people had turned away from God. Yet even with this invasion threatening they were still turning away from God and trying to meet the invasion through an alliance of several nations. Only Isaiah heard a voice—only Isaiah. Every age has a few that hear the voice—God’s voice, and that alone. And only Isaiah saw the vision of what could be. To this greatest of all prophets God spoke strongly (Isaiah 8:11) and said, “Walk not in the ways of this people Israel.” He was commanded to stand against the popular trend. I do not like to say this, and I would not for the world say anything inadvertently that would make a rebel out of me. We have too many rebels, but they are mostly all rebels out of their own carnal heart. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as being a Protestant in the right sense of the word. There is such a thing as a quiet but firm and unshakable protest against the popular trend, even in religion. The man of God was told that he could not afford to go along with the masses of Israel, to follow the popular trend, but that he was to “sanctify the Lord God of hosts Himself,” and God would be to him a sanctuary. This reveals that if we make God our fear and our dread, then we have a secret sanctuary in the midst of a violent and dangerous world; the result is a witness to all the world. It says further on in the chapter, “I will wait upon the Lord. . . . I will look for Him. . . . Behold, I and the children which the Lord has given me are for signs and wonders in Israel from the Lord of hosts” (Isaiah 8:17-18). Isaiah’s name lives on, and the names of these alliance chieftains, whoever they were, have all been forgotten. Isaiah opens for us here the secret way to power. It is secret, not in the esoteric sense, but it is secret because so few people know anything about it or desire to follow. It is to sanctify the Lord Himself, that is, to set God aside as being all in all, to throw ourselves over on God Himself, to recognize God as our all-ness, and in personal experience make God everything. I suspect that this may sound rather dry to some of you young people whose blood runs hot and whose ambitions are high, but I must continue to say (for it is the word of the Lord and is confirmed in tens of thousands of human hearts through the years) that anything you seek outside of God is wrong. No matter how shining it may seem to be, nor how utterly desirable, if it is outside of God, it is wrong. Anything that comes to your attention that is outside of God is wrong—only God is right, and only the will of God is safe, for the will of God is the help of the universe, and this moral sickness, this languishing sickness that is on the race is the result of the race getting out of the will of God. We are ill because we have violated the law of life which is the will of God.

Experiencing God

We can make God our personal experience. Again I will repeat, as I often do, that we are not to apologize for the word experience. I grew up, I regret, in an atmosphere where I was taught to be ashamed to use the word experience, because some old lady once climbed a tent pole or some fellows rolled in the straw at a camp meeting in some fanatical bush-whacking service somewhere. They said, “That is experience—you must preach the Bible, not experience.” I preach the Bible in order that we might have experience. Certainly experience that does not bring out the Bible is invalid and will disappoint us, but the Bible without experience confirmed to us individually is just so much theology, so much learned lumber crammed into our heads out of which we can make no sanctuaries. I stress personal experience. There is such a thing as knowing God personally, having the experience yourself, having an encounter with God that is as bright and shining as any other experience in life—and much more so, because it engages a much more important Person. God will respond if we set Him aside in our heart. God, the all-embracing One, who fills all the world, is easily accessible. He is accessible to us in Christ. I got my fingers burned by some modernist on that “in Christ” business, so I have another preposition. I say that God is not only accessible to us in Christ but He is accessible to us as Christ. I know it is possible to say I have found God in Christ, but I have read poems where a dear lady said she found God in a butterfly’s wing or in a daisy, and I do not mean that when I say that we find God in Christ. I mean that we find God as Christ the Beloved. He is God acting the way God would act and doing what God would do and feeling as God feels and being what God is. So in Jesus Christ I find God, and He gives Himself to our faith as bread. For years I experienced disappointment in the communion service. I could not understand and embrace transubstantiation or con-substantiation or any substantiation I had heard about. I just could not get hold of them somehow. Even our plain little unbeautiful communion services bothered me as lacking luster and failing to feed my heart Then one day in secret prayer God said to my heart, “Son, faith is eating, and when you gaze at Jesus Christ in faith you are partaking of Jesus Christ.” After that I never had any more trouble at all because communion to me is partaking of Jesus Christ, the Bread of Life, with the mouth of faith—gazing upon Him and eating of Him, and having Him, and taking Him into my spiritual system by faith. Faith is not something to be apologized for—it is a faculty of the human spirit. Just as the mouth takes food into the stomach, so faith, and the gaze of faith, takes in the Lord Jesus Christ. God Almighty is all to you and me. So I say that we can have Him through faith and love, and we actually do have God—not a shadow of God, not a picture of God, not an echo of God but God Himself as Christ.

Fearing God

The Scripture says, “Make God your fear, and make God your dread, and He will be to you a sanctuary.” In God is complete safety. Whoever fears God enough never needs to fear anyone or anything else. One of the hardest words in the New Testament is in First John. It says, “Perfect love casteth out fear” (1 John 4:18). I have been afraid of everything that moved (and a lot of things that did not move) ever since I can remember. I have never been courageous, and I wondered how, if I love, can it be possible that perfect love will cast out fear? How can I ever get enough love to cast out fear? But I think I know now. It means if I fear God enough—if I have that delighted reverent trembling holy dread in the presence of the holy God—then I can, like Elijah, say, “I stand before Jehovah” (1 Kings 17:1; 1 Kings 18:15; 2 Kings 3:14; 2 Kings 5:16). Elijah was not afraid of King Ahab. Elijah was not dressed for a court, he had never read an etiquette book, and he had never been briefed on how to act in the presence of a king. He was a great big awkward fellow who walked flat-footed and, I suppose, had all the characteristics of the mountains where he had been bred, but he had absolutely no fear in the presence of Ahab. He said, “I stand before Jehovah.” That explains why he was not afraid of a mere king. Elijah had stood a lifetime in the presence of the mighty King. If I fear God enough I never need to fear anything else. I need fear no one and no thing because no one and no thing can finally injure me. I believe this with all that is inside of me—nobody can harm me. Put me in jail, yes, but not harm me; cut off my head, yes, but not harm me; rob me but not harm me; calumniate my name but not harm me, for harm must be understood in the divine context. And only that which finally harms me harms me at all. They can take my body and property and all the rest, but if I wear the red mantle of His holy shielding blood, I am a man as safe as if I had been in Heaven for millenniums. I want to say a word to young Christians, especially those who shall be missionaries and preachers. I urge you, take yourself out of the hands of men. God does not want us to be followers of men. He wants us to love them and to appreciate them and to admire them. He calls us to listen to them and to obey them if they have authority over us. God calls us to work with them and be harmonious and not be a rebel or assert our carnal individuality—He wants us to do all that. But He wants us to have a secret understanding with God so that we are in His hands. I think one of the most pitiful things in the wide world is a little, jittery, frightened preacher, just out of seminary, trying to get himself a job—the best one available—and for that reason taking the district superintendent or bishop out to lunch. I think it is pathetic—absolutely pathetic. I find it hard to keep contempt out of my heart and voice when I talk about a man like that. You do not have to do it, young person, you do not have to do it. As soon as you get proper training and get what you ought to know and get disciplined and taught how to think and learn the Word, then you look to heaven and say, “Now God, I am ready.” And then take the first thing God throws in your direction and go on from there. You never need to run around and polish the apple for the person that is next over you. I also urge you to ignore their threats and their flattery. Those are the two sources of danger—flattery and abuse. I had a tough time getting over flattery, and I am not yet quite over it, but I am getting there. My hide is getting thicker year by year because I have discovered that only those who do not amount to much criticize me. By that neat little trick of psychology I manage to get along with everybody. I might be amazed to know how many good people criticize me, but they never tell me. But we must take ourselves out of the hands of men. You say, “That is all right for an old fellow, but for me it is different—I am a young man.” No, it is not different for you. This is not for any age group. I think we make a mistake in dividing up spiritual experiences for different ages. Anything God can do for an older person He can do for a younger person, if the young person will concentrate and get sharply focused on God. That is the trouble with youth, they are all over the lot. Assemble yourselves sometime before God; get together once and look into the face of God. God will do anything for you that He did for anyone, regardless of age. Refuse to leave yourself and your future in the hands of men. Seek advice, take counsel, work with people, but have a secret understanding with God: “Oh, Lord God, thou art my all. Thou art my tomorrow as thou art my yesterday and today. Thou art my here and my there, my now and my then. Thou art all in all to me; time and space converge upon Thee. All that I have or ever hope to be is Thine.” You know, that works within a life; it gets within a life and works like a holy yeast within your spirit.

Everything in Christ

Let us think about God in Christ for a few moments. “Sanctify the Lord God Himself.” Sanctify Christ. Christ is the man-ward side of God. Christ is the side of God that looks toward the human race, and Jesus Christ is the way to God because He is Himself God. He is to our souls what our souls are to our bodies. Far too often in our age, Jesus is confined to religion. Sometimes I feel like saying, “They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid Him” (John 20:13)! You go to conferences and hear about prophecy, baptism, Jewish history, doctrines; you might even get a little Greek and Hebrew thrown in for dessert. You will hear all about the shelves and scaffoldings of religion, and they are good and necessary—you cannot have a sanctuary without walls, and you cannot have the walls without the scaffolding while they are being built, but I do not want to live on a scaffolding all my life. I want to get in where the sanctuary is and kneel and adore. Christianity, my friend, is dedicated to the adoration of Jesus Christ. It is not only to save you from the consequences of your sin, but to give you that which you were created to enjoy. It is to give you God. It is to break God down for you, so to speak, so that your created heart can get hold of God, so that the love of Jesus Christ will be real to you. If you glance back over church history you will find that almost all the mighty men whose names have come down to us—whose names we give to our babies, chapels and schools—were persons who had fallen delightfully in love with the person of Jesus Christ the Lord. They did not all agree on every point of doctrine. Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley would not have been caught dead in the same building if they had lived at the same time because one was a strong Calvinist and one was a happy Arminian. But they loved the same Savior, and so their hearts glowed and they blessed their generation and left behind them a stream of spiritual molten gold into which we dip down to this very day. God never asked them what school of theology they belong to, He asked them, “What think ye of my Son?” (Matthew 22:42). And they said, “Oh, God, we are in love with Him!” And God said, “All right then, I am too, and so we are agreed.” God blessed them in spite of their little aberrations, even as He will bless us despite our shortcomings. The love of Christ, I say, is the core of everything in the Christian faith. He is the complete solution—there is not a problem in your life but what He can solve it. If we throw ourselves out upon the Lord Jesus Christ, He is enough.

Christ Is Our Wisdom

Christ is made unto us wisdom for our pitiful ignorance. You know, friends, we just do not know how ignorant we are—we really do not. Somebody said that education is pushing back the frontiers of our ignorance—that is, the more we know, the more we know that we do not know. Einstein (or whoever your hero is in the intellectual world) only knows more than most of us just how little we do know. When I go into a library, I always come out blue. It takes me an hour and a half to get back up and get happy again. I see the books I have not read, the things I do not know, the subjects I am completely ignorant of, and it bothers me. It humbles me, and that is good for me. But nobody knows very much. Wisdom can only do a few things. If it were what it should be it could teach us how to live forever, how to be free from pain, how to keep our loved ones always by our side and never lose them in death. But it cannot do any of those things. So it just excites us and keeps us occupied and away we go. But when it is all over we have not known what we really ought to know. Jesus Christ is God’s wisdom given to His people. Jesus Christ will not teach you mathematics or biology; you will have to learn that the hard way. But all the essential spiritual and moral wisdom that makes saints, you will find in Jesus Christ, your Lord. You will find how to overcome the grave and how to overcome mortality. In Him you will gain immortality and all the dreams that every race has sought. All this you will find in the person of Jesus Christ, God’s Son.

Christ Is Our Righteousness

Jesus Christ is made unto us righteousness for our innate wrong-headedness. I suppose even more than our pitiful ignorance is our inexcusable wrong-headedness and our evil because we are evil inherently and continually. “Jesus Christ,” says Paul, “is made unto us . . . sanctification” (1 Corinthians 1:30) for our innate evil. He is made to us courage for our paralyzing fear, strength for our utter weakness, life for our helpless dying. Jesus Christ is life, even a better life than we lost. He is that eternal life. We may say, “God gives me eternal life, so now I have it.” But eternal life is not life that lasts always—it does that too—but it is the life of the eternal. “This is eternal life, that we might know [have correspondence with] thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent” (John 17:3). Eternal life is an everlasting right adjustment to God through Jesus Christ, just as eternal death is to be cut off from God. When God gives me eternal life, He does not give me a thing at all—He gives me a Person. Jesus is that life, and He is our eternal life, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, courage, strength—our all in all. So I urge you to fall in love with the Son of God. You will find in Jesus Christ power; you will find in Him everything that those who do not understand this are seeking out of Him. The fellow who has a particular hobby—what he is seeking out there on the fringes, you have got right in the center. That which he is trying to do way out there in the woods, you have here in the sanctuary. David said, “Then I understood when I went into the sanctuary” (Psalms 73:17). You will have more understanding in the sanctuary than anyplace else. There, in what the old writers call the penetralia, the deep inner part of your spirit, Jesus Christ will reveal Himself in all that God is to your soul, and you will find a treasure in Jesus Christ. Sanctify Jesus Christ; set Him apart; attach yourself to Him; dedicate yourself to Him; cut all the lines that bind you away from Him. Make Him your all in all, and He will become to you all that your happiest dream could conceive of Him, for Jesus Christ is wisdom and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

Oh Jesus, Jesus dearest Lord Forgive me if I say for very love Thy sacred name a thousand times a day. ¹

    Jesus Christ is all and everything. Have you found Him? Is He yours? He is not a church (and I believe in churches); not a religion (and I believe in the Christian religion); He is Jesus Himself, the Bread of Life, the Sun, the Star, your All-in-All. Will you now dedicate yourself to Him?

[This sermon was given at Wheaton College, Pierce Chapel, on October 2, 1952.]