Excerpt from “Herald of His Coming”
Filled With The Spirit Of Christ
By A. B. Simpson (1843 – 1919)
“...Be filled with the Spirit” (Eph. 5:18). “...Ye are complete (filled) in Him...” (Col. 2:10).
The emphatic word in both these verses is “filled.” It is the Greek word which means to fill full, so full that there will be no room left empty. This is the thought which, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, we desire to impress in this message. It does not mean to have a measure of the Holy Spirit, and to know a good deal of Christ, but to be wholly filled with, and possessed by, the Holy Spirit, and utterly lost in the life and fullness of Jesus. It is the completeness of the filling which constitutes the very essence of the perfect blessing. A fountain half full will never become a spring. A river half full will never become a water power. A heart half filled will never know “the peace of God which passeth all understanding” (Phil. 4:7) and the power which flows from the inmost being, as “rivers of living water” (John 7:38).
The Nature of the Filling
The filling is all connected with a living Person. We are not filled with an influence; we are not filled with a sensation; we are not filled with a set of ideas and truths; we are not filled with a blessing, but we are filled with a Person. This is very strange and striking. It is wholly different from all other teaching. Human systems of philosophy and religion all deal mainly with intellectual truths, moral conditions or external acts. Greek philosophy was a system of ideas; Confucianism is a system of morals; Judaism is a system of laws and ceremonies; Christianity all centers in a living Person, and its very essence is the indwelling life of Christ Himself. He was not only its Head and Founder, but He is forever its living Heart and Substance, and the Holy Spirit is simply the agent and channel through whom He enters, possesses and operates in the consecrated heart. This reduces Christian life to great simplicity. We do not require to get filled in a great many compartments, and with a great many different experiences, ideas, or influences, but, in the center of our being to receive Him in His personal life and fullness, and then He flows into every part and lives out His own life in all the diversified experiences and activities of our manifold life.
Shall we then realize, beloved, that God has made each of us, not a self-contained world of power and perfection, but simply a capacity to receive Him, a shell to hold His fullness, a soil to receive His Living Seed and fertilizing streams, and to produce, in union with Him, the fruits of grace? And shall we realize, on the other hand, that God has so constituted Christ and the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Christ, as perfectly to meet and satisfy the capacities and possibilities of our being; so that, while we are nothing without Him, His life and grace equally require us for their full development? Into His living Son God has poured all His fullness, so that “in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9). 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 fulness have all we received, and grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ” (John 1:16-17). 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 exhibits, 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 the very substance and support of the life He requires of us.
Christ 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 its own perfect righteousness and writes over all our record, “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth” (Rom. 10:4); “Accepted in the Beloved” (Eph. 1:6); “He hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21).
And so we “are complete in Him” (Col. 2:10). “...By one offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified” (Heb. 10:14), 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.

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Mike