09 - Be Filled with the Spirit

I think I have never said anything to you as important as what I am planning on saying tonight. I want to use this simple and very familiar text: “Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18).

What I will say (outside of some notions I might import which can scarcely be avoided as long as we are on earth and human) is nothing new, nothing strange, nothing extreme, nothing fanatical, nothing that you cannot believe and experience and stay in any gospel church in the world. It is nothing that is not believed by every fundamentalist or conservative Bible Christian in the world. The difference is that I insist, if it is true, then we ought to do something about it. That is all. I just bring in from the perimeter, the outer edge of things, a truth that is believed by everybody and hold it on me like a white light and insist, “Let us make this work; let us do something about this!” “Be filled with the Spirit.” You can call it “be getting filled,” or “be being filled,” and it adds up to the same thing. It is the will of God that His people should be Spirit-filled people—all of them, not only missionaries and preachers, but all of God’s people, everywhere. I also have four other texts, and I am going to give them at the close of this message. This will be the first time you ever heard anybody preaching a sermon where there were four points in the conclusion and only one in the body of the sermon. It may confuse the homeletical department, but at least I will be getting across what I want to say. I do not think that we are quite ready. I do not find Christians ready as a rule—the rank and file, average, good Christians—to hear the simple biblical way of being filled with the Spirit, because there are a number of things we need to get settled. First, we need to be sure that we can be filled with the Spirit. This would seem to be unnecessary since Paul commands us to be filled; and yet this whole topic has been so confused by the devil and by weird and strange men who let their flesh go that good honest Christians have been frightened and driven away from the green pastures. The devil has frightened them and told them there were serpents hidden the grass. You can be, as a Christian, filled with the Holy Spirit. Every Christian has the Spirit or he could not be a Christian. We are baptized into the body of Christ by the Holy Spirit and made members of the body by the work of the Spirit uniting us to the body of Christ in regeneration. “If any man has not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His” (Romans 8:9), and Christ dwells in us unless we are reprobates (2 Corinthians 13:5). I think that ought to settle that. Every Christian does have a measure of the Spirit. But you must be convinced that it is God’s will for you to be filled with the Spirit—that it is a part of the total plan of redemption, that when He said, “It is finished,” He included this. You have got to be convinced of this, or you will have no faith concerning it. You must believe that this is not abnormal or unusual; in fact, it is abnormal not to be Spirit-filled. God means His people to be Spirit-filled and the abnormalities within the church are where we are not Spirit-filled. We must also be sure, restfully sure, that there is nothing strange or weird about all this, but that it is God Almighty’s plan for all of His children to be filled with the Spirit and walk in the Spirit. We have got to be sure to the point of conviction, because if we are not sure we cannot possibly exercise faith. We must be sure that there is no need to persuade God. We need not come to God and ask Him to do something that He has declared He is willing to do, or try to coax God into a frame of mind that He has been in since the beginning of the world. Unless we are restfully convinced of this, I recommend that you do not do anything at all except search the Scriptures, meditate on the Scriptures bearing this truth, remain calm and confident, and put away fear and worry and irritation, because these are never of God. The Holy Spirit is the Comforter; He comforts the heart. Where there is panic and intimidation and great fear, we may be sure we are victims of an overheated imagination or of the devil himself, because the blessed Lord Jesus never irritated anybody except bad men. When willing, hungry people came, no matter how sinful, no matter how far from the truth, no matter how far down in the moral gutter, the Lord Jesus Christ tenderly helped them and never turned an angry face to a seeking heart. He sent Pharisees, scribes, Saducees, and liars away licking their wounds every time. But if your heart is tender toward God and you only want the will of God, you will get the kind, courteous treatment that our Lord Jesus Christ is famous for. Always you will get it from Him. You must not only know and be sure that you can be filled with the Spirit as a Christian, but you must desire to be. Here I will run into the first real question you will have in your mind: “Mr. Tozer, would you waste our time and yours by saying that we must be sure that we desire to be? Why, everybody desires to be filled with the Spirit!” I am not sure of that at all. If they do, it is not a conclusive or inclusive desire; it is a fugitive longing rather than a desire. Everybody is as holy as he wants to be, and everybody is as full as he wants to be. It has to be so, because our Lord said, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6), and the filling is in exact proportion to the hunger. So if we are not filled, it is because we are not sufficiently hungry. One of the old saints of God, in generations gone by, had the reputation for being a very godly man and for being able to help people with the Word. Young folks and students and young preachers from afar would come to him and he would just give them a word and send them away. It was a gift of God to the man. One day two young preachers came to see him who had walked a long way. He walked out to meet them, greeted them and said, “You are as holy as you want to be; good-bye.” He turned away and closed the door. They looked at each other, walked slowly down the steps and told it all around everywhere. “This man, we went to him for help, and he just said, ‘You are as holy as you want to be,’ and brought the interview to a conclusion.” Well, it worked all right, and it is true. Everybody is as holy as he wants to be. When I say “want to be” I mean “really want to be”—to a point where it burns in your heart. The old devotional writers used to say that desiring and receiving are all one piece. In God they were not separated. One end of a pencil is the desire, the other end of the pencil is the receiving of the desire, and they are always together. You cannot separate them because since Christ died on the cross and the holy Comforter has come, all grace is to us-ward and all has been taken out of the way by the blood of the Lamb. There is nothing standing in the way but our lack of desire. Consequently, the desiring and the receiving are all one piece. It is said, “You have some feeling of God or you would not want any more of God. The fact that you desire God proves that you have some of God.” That is good, Biblical teaching, brethren, and so I say you must desire to be filled. Let us examine the extent of your desire. Do you want to be possessed by a spirit who is like Jesus—pure, gentle, sane, wise, healing and loving—but who will nevertheless be Lord of your life? Jesus exercises His lordship through the Holy Ghost; He cannot exercise it any other way. Therefore, the Spirit of God will demand to be Lord of your life. Do you truly want to be in gentle and loving possession of an indwelling Spirit that will be Lord over you (that will make Jesus be Lord over you, to be technically correct)? It seems to me that it is here where some of us stick. We want to be saved, but we want to be lord over our lives. That is at the threshold of life; we must be willing that the Holy Spirit become, in Jesus’ stead, Lord over our lives. Next, are you sure you want a personality to take possession of your personality? Let me describe Him and what He will do: He will expect obedience to the written Word and to the living Word in heaven—and this obedience will get no help from Him. He will expect obedience from you, and He will not tolerate in you the self-sins. He will not tolerate self-love. He will not tolerate self-righteousness. He will not tolerate self-indulgence, not any of the hyphenated sins that have self in them. He will deal with them, and He will bring you to repentance. He will chastise and discipline until He gets your consent to take them out of your life. He will not live with them. He will not move in where these self-sins are in fullness of measure. Although, as I say, He certainly dwells somewhere in the recesses of every believer’s heart or that person would not be a believer indeed. You will find this blessed Holy Spirit in sharp opposition to the world’s easy ways. We live in a degenerate hour when Christianity, it seems to me, needs a mighty reviving from somewhere, for the business of the church now seems to be to get along with the world and to go the world’s way with the least possible opposition. But the Holy Ghost says, “Never mind the opposition of the world.” He expects it, just as Jesus Christ in whom He dwells in fullness of perfection, experienced opposition as long as He lived on earth, and just as the Church that names His name has had it, wherever she has been a pure and holy Church. Instead of your taking Christianity and molding it to fit the world, to avoid the disgrace of the cross, the Holy Ghost will insist that you leave it as it is, and walk with God in the light of New Testament truth, without caring what the world says about you. Such a lifestyle will bring you in conflict with the world, for the ways of God and the ways of man do not parallel each other. They intersect each other, and where their intersection is there will be heat, friction, opposition, trouble and maybe persecution. The Holy Spirit will not allow you to boast or show off or strut or shine. Much of modern Christianity is run by strutters and shiners and show-offers, but “we are persuaded better things concerning you brethren, and things that accompany salvation” (Hebrews 6:9). I do not believe that you want it that way. God will not allow you to boast. If you do catch yourself boasting, you will feel tough inside until you have lifted your heart and said, “Forgive me, God.” He will not allow you to seek a place in the sun, or show off, or seem to be somebody. He will put humility in you and insist on keeping it there. The Holy Spirit will also take the direction of your life away from you. I have practically said that before, when I said that He would be Lord of your life. He will reserve the right to discipline you and strip you, maybe, of some things you think are indispensable. He might even hurt you a little in the process, as a father must a child for the child’s everlasting good. I do not leave the impression that you will always be standing in the corner under the discipline of God, but I do mean to say that when it is necessary you will. When the Spirit deals with you, you will be a disciple, and He may strip away from you many loved and dangerous things—things that you think are harmless but that He knows are deadly. He will take them away from you as He took Isaac away from Abraham, and yet purified their relationship and gave Isaac back; that is always God’s way. The thing that you hold in your own right may be dangerous, but once God has broken your heart and taken it away from you He may give it back to you, and it’s perfectly harmless after God pulls its sting. Ultimately, He does not care what you have, but He has to pull its sting first. He has to pull the poison fangs out of it, and then He hands it back and says, “Now use this for My glory.” Whatever it may be— a gift, a girlfriend, an ambition, a desire for some kind of work, a possession. Whatever it may be, as long as you hold it, it has got a poison tail on it, but God will take it, purify it, hand it back, and say, “There, now you can have it because I have disciplined out of you the thing that made it dangerous in you.” Not only must you be sure that you can be filled with the Spirit, and sure that you desire to be, but you must be sure that you need to be. Can you not get along all right by yourself? Most Christians can; that is why we are in the fix we are in now. That is why the world is laughing at us; that is why we are imitators and not initiators. That is why we keep a weather eye on the latest from Hollywood and Broadway and then create something religious—a weak imitation of Frank Sinatra or somebody else. There was a day when the world followed the church. She took the initiative; she was aggressive. But it has changed now, and we are down on our knees imitating the world. The church is like a poor old withered hag, rather than the beautiful, full-blooded bride of the Lamb we are intended to be. That we should stand by the world’s highway and stretch out our withered hand for a dime from the world is a disgrace. There was a day when the church could say, “Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee . . . rise up and walk.” (Acts 3:6). Today the church says, “Now, now, please do not take me wrong: I think the same as you only I have Jesus; that is the difference. I am just like you only I have Jesus.” That is the kind of unholy, unscriptural, hybrid mongrel Christianity that we are propagating at great expense and time and labor in our day. The Christianity of the cross never tries to please the world, but dares to stand on its two legs, and let the world come around. Emerson, down on a lower level, said, “Plant yourself on your instincts and the world will come around to you.” The church of Jesus in the early days never tried to please the world. The church planted itself on its spiritual instincts, took God and the cross, and said, “Here we are; we can be nothing else, so help us God,” and the world came around to them. Can you get along on the dead level? If you can, then I have nothing much to say to you, only God bless you, sleep well. But I wonder if you can really get along well the way you are. If you can, then all right, pay no attention. If we cannot agree, then we will not disagree. We will still nod and smile as we pass each other. But do you feel you can go on the way you are and resist discouragement, obey the word, understand the truth, bring forth fruit, live in victory, win men to God, die in peace and meet Christ with joy? Do you think you can do that in the state you are in now? I do not think you can, and I do not think you think you can. I think we all have to say, “If thy presence go not with [us], carry us not up hence” (Exodus 33:15). If God does not fill us, then please God, do not expect anything of us, for You know us. You know that in our hearts “dwelleth no good thing” (Romans 7:18). This desire, and I am assuming now you have it, must become all-absorbing. It must be for the time the biggest thing in your life. If there is anything bigger, then you will have very little satisfaction in the realm of which I speak. I am not sure that anybody has ever been Spirit-filled who did not first go through a time of disturbance and anxiety. That does not contradict what I said before, for it is a holy, healing anxiety; at the same time there is a sense of God’s being there. It is not despair, but it is disturbance and disappointing emptiness. Perhaps you remember a classic illustration of Moody, the self-assured man, who was out preaching and winning souls. Then Mother Cook told him, “Son, what you need is to be filled with the Spirit.” He had not had the idea that he could be filled educated out of him, fought out of him or beaten out of him yet, so he believed her. “I never changed a sermon,” he later said, “ but a wonderful new power came into the ones that I had been preaching.” That, I say, is a classic example of a spiritual experience. But there came that disappointing emptiness when he knew that the man who was beginning to get the attention of the Christian world was not what he should be. Disappointing emptiness, I say. Some people want to be blessed all the time. If they cannot be blessed all the time, they are unhappy, bothering God about it, worrying and saying, “Now, God, I do not feel as good today as I did at four o’clock yesterday. What is the matter here?” We spend our time chinning ourselves on religious bars, pulling ourselves up and letting ourselves down all the time. Do not be afraid of feeling bad; do not be afraid of letting God come into your soul and do some plowing. You cannot have fruit or grain until you do some plowing. God may even send somebody to do the plowing whom you do not like at all and think is unworthy to run a plow over you. David said, “The plowers plowed upon my back: they made long their furrows” (Psalms 129:3). God did not do it, He just sent a fellow that David did not like to do it. You see, if God always came in royal dignity, waved His wand and allowed us to stand there like we were having our picture taken, that would be all right—but we would go to Heaven proud as Lucifer. So the Lord may let somebody come along that is no good, some preacher (maybe like me) and just plow your back a little. You think, “Why that fellow, he does not know as much as I know, and here you are sending him, God, to plow me.” So humble yourself and let God plow you, and do not be afraid of emptiness. The saints of God have all had to go through those times of emptying out, those times of getting rid of that Adamic bounce. You know, that Adamic bounce to the ounce that comes as standard equipment. We have got it, we cut its hair differently and give it another name, but it is old Adam, nonetheless. It is old self-confidence. Especially if he has read a book, and he is so sure of himself, but he is old Adam, nevertheless, and God has been finished with Adam ever since the day that He cast him out of the garden. God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before me” (Genesis 6:3). He slays the flesh and raises the man up in newness of life. Dying is not easy. I have not died in the physical sense, but I have been through some dying in the interior sense, and I well know it is not easy. That is why I never could follow this “happified” Christianity. There is “joy unspeakable and full of glory” (1 Peter 1:8); there is rapture and flights of spiritual delight; there is joy in the Holy Ghost; there is sweet healing worship; there is all that in the church of God. But it is on another level; it is a spiritual thing. It is something that has gone into the grave and come out again. But the poor church in our day does not know that, so she is importing her joy for ten cents a dozen from the world and then tagging the name “Jesus” onto it, saying, “Now we’re religious.” You are not religious—it is just old Adam with another tag on him. You can get that same kind of thrill in a night club—they play certain music and say, “That sends me.” I have seen religious meetings that were just “sent,” that was all. But there is another kind of joy, the joy that seeks me through pain, “the joy that was set before Him” that enabled Him to endure the cross (Hebrews 12:2). Once you have tasted of that joy you’ll smile at any other kind of joy. You may have to go through a time of skinning and of harming and injuring old Adam, but Jesus Christ your Lord will be with you. He went through that way first and came out, and now He is in glory forevermore, “bringing many sons unto glory” (Hebrews 2:10) and teaching them obedience by the things they suffer (Hebrews 5:8). All this that I am talking about, the destruction of my natural and boisterous life, my human confidence and all the rest, does not earn any gift for me, and it does not make me dear to God. I have been dear to God since the beginning of the world and before, but it does break up the plot of ground, and it does empty the vessel. D. L. Moody, when he preached on these things, used to take two glasses and a pitcher of water and he would try to pour water into a full glass. He would say, “You cannot get water into a glass that is full.” Then he would pour it out and say, “Now it can be filled!” You can only fill an empty vessel. That rollicking camp meeting song we sing sometimes, “Bring your empty earthen vessels,” is very true to the Scriptures. You have to be empty. If there is anything hidden there, God cannot fill you very full, so empty your hearts. To return to the question, how can I be filled with the Spirit? I give you four texts. You can think them over and pray over them. First, Romans 12:1-2 : I beseech you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. “Present your bodies”—that is, present an empty vessel. Do not present a full vessel, or an unclean vessel. Present a vessel where the blood of Jesus has cleansed away the stains, and you have said to Him, “Pardon, oh, Lord, my transgressions and have mercy upon me according to Thy righteousness and wash away all my sins.” Present a clean vessel. Second, Luke 11:9, Luke 11:11-13 : Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. . . . If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? If he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? If ye then, being 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? There are two ways to look at this text. The first is the way it is now being interpreted so as to destroy all its meaning; the second is in the light of Christian experience down through the centuries. Certain interpreters say this cannot possibly be a spiritual principle laid down, so they dismiss it. These interpreters, as a rule, seem to me to be more determined to prove a point than to be Christ-like—more determined to interpret a verse in line with preconceived theology than to be filled with the Holy Ghost. The lips that usually speak against this are pretty cold lips. But over against men’s interpretations which say this is not for us is the long line of superior saints, prophets, reformers, missionaries, evangelists, pastors and holy people of God down through the years who have not been told that it is wrong to open your vessel and say, “Fill me, Lord.” But I have been hearing that it is wrong to do it. I know better because I asked, and He gave me. Third, Acts 5:32 :

. . . the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey him.

He gives the Holy Spirit to them that obey Him. I have covered that, but it is the third point in my little talk. Fourth, Galatians 3:2. Paul says, This only would I learn of you. Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?

It is a rhetorical question. The answer is, “By the hearing of faith, of course.” Faith alone is the vessel that can receive. Faith alone can open the tap and fill with the Spirit. I want to watch my language for I do not want to leave a sentence with you that Satan could twist or harm, so when I say receive I do not mean receive in the sense that He is far away and must come to your heart. I mean receive or be filled in the sense that He fills His people with the Holy Spirit. Even after Pentecost it was written that “Peter, filled with the Holy Ghost, said . . .” (Acts 4:8). There was nothing incompatible with sound theology embraced by the apostles, surely, and they were filled, sometimes, with the Holy Ghost. God wants to fill you. I give you this, and here is the only place I expect to run into trouble with some of you good, careful Bible expositors, but I give you this and I do not give you the text, so if you want to disbelieve me, we will still be friends. I have not heard that anyone ever was filled who did not know he had been, and I have never heard of anybody being filled gradually. You think with me for a moment about the Old Testament and the New Testament—do you ever remember of any place in the Old Testament when the Holy Spirit came gradually? No place. Ever hear of any place in the New Testament where He came gradually? No, He did not. I do not say that God never did. But I do say He never recorded an instance where He did. Always the Holy Spirit is self-announcing and self-validating; you do not have to be told. A great man of God who is now in heaven and whom Dr. Edman¹ and I greatly admire, once preached from the text, “Out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38). And some dear brethren, careful expositors, took him to lunch afterwards. After they had gotten him nicely settled, the soup had been disposed of and they were ready for the main course, they said, “Now, dear brother, we think that was a good sermon, but oh, you were woefully unbiblical in your exegesis. That did not mean what you thought it meant at all.” (He had taught that they would be filled with the Spirit, and out from within them would flow rivers of living water.) They said, “That does not mean that. We will show you what that means dispensationally.” They went along and dispensationalized a while. Pretty soon one of them got honest with himself and came down off his theological pedestal. He bowed his head, and the tears began to flow. He said, “Brother, we have the right exegesis, but you have the rivers.” I would rather have the rivers than the right exegesis. But I am not apologizing for bad exegesis, either! I think I have given you a fair presentation. If we do not believe this, let us stop singing, “Holy Spirit, Heavenly Dove.” Let us stop singing “Fill Me Now” and all those revival hymns and choruses. Let us stop it and be honest with ourselves. If it is not biblical and the belief in it is unscriptural, let us take it out of our hymnbooks. Why sing in our hymnbooks what we deny in our lives? But if it is true, then let us begin to expect wondrously that He will “Fill Me Now” with Himself. Are you with me on this? Is not this more than anything else—that God should give you full increased measures of His blessed Holy Spirit to be your Comforter, your Mentor, your Inner Teacher, your Guide, to give you an unction from the Holy One? While your teacher is teaching your intellect, this Holy One is teaching your heart, to keep, rebuke, encourage and comfort you—that is what He is here for. Oh, we have neglected Him so shamefully. We have forgotten Him days without end. Let us not do it any more. Let us expect Him to fill us.

[This message was delivered at Pierce Chapel, Wheaton College, on the evening of October 2, 1952.]