The Path to Power and Usefulness: A. W. Tozer (Transcript)

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We might as well be realistic about this. I believe in complete realism, salty, down-to-earth realism. Might as well face up to it. Not everybody that’s listening is going to be filled with the Spirit. But some are, and some do.

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 a while, 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’re changed people.

Preparing for the Spirit

Now, unless you’re convinced about this, I recommend that you don’t do anything yet. I wouldn’t want people to come and kneel down and ask God to fill them when they weren’t prepared. That discourages a lot of people, and gets them confused, and they go away and then they won’t come back. And they say they’re no use, and they get a sort of discouragement on their spirit. I don’t want that.

I’d like to have you meditate on the scriptures, read the word, and see for yourself what God the Lord has spoken. That’s 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. 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, as I’ve said. Now, I suppose a lot of you’d like to challenge me on this, but a preacher is in the position where he doesn’t get challenged, at least not at the time.

And the preachers, as a result, they’ll develop a ministerial immunity, and they say a lot of foolish things that they can’t prove because nobody can stop them. But I don’t want to do that. I want to be responsible for what I’ve said, and I want responsibly to declare that before you can be filled with the Spirit, you must desire to be, and that some people don’t desire to be.

Spirit Possession and Its Impact

Are you sure, for instance, that you want to be possessed by a spirit? You’ve heard of spirit possession, I’m sure. But there are two kinds of spirit possession. There is the evil spirit possession, where a spirit takes over a human personality, as in the days of Jesus, and makes them filthy or dumb or evil. And Jesus used to cast such spirits out. But there were spirits, and they did possess these persons.

But now 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, that is pure and gentle and sane and wise and loving? For that’s exactly what He’s like. The Holy Spirit is pure, for He’s the Holy Spirit. He’s wise, for He’s the Spirit of wisdom.

He’s true, for He’s the Spirit of truth. He’s like Jesus, for He’s the Spirit of Christ. He’s like the Father, for He’s the Spirit of the Father. But He 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. But you’re a passenger on board, or one of the crew, but you’re definitely not in charge. Somebody else is in charge of the vessel.

But we don’t 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’s 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 also expect obedience to the scriptures. And if we do not obey the scriptures, we quench Him. He will have obedience, the Spirit will. And people do not want to obey the Lord, they just don’t want to, so a lot don’t desire to be Spirit-filled. You see, we’re as full as we actually want to be.

The Challenge of True Fulfillment

This sounds like a shocking thing, but it’s true. Everybody is as full as he wants to be. Everybody has as much of God as he desires to have. Now, he doesn’t always have as much as he prays in public that he might have, or even in private, because sometimes there’s a fugitive impulse that comes to us. We want the thrill of being full, but we don’t want to meet the conditions that we have to meet, so we don’t want to be filled bad enough to be filled.

Suppose that you wanted, say, a Cadillac automobile. Some of you have them, and some of you want them. But here’s Brother Jones, for instance. I don’t think there are any Jones’s here, so that’ll be safe to use Jones. Here’s Brother Jones, and he’d love to have a Cadillac. But he’s not going to buy one, and I’ll tell you why. He doesn’t want one bad enough to pay for it.

He wants it, but he doesn’t want it bad enough to meet the terms. You go down there, and they show you a big black boat lying there on four wheels, and say, “$6,000, $7,000.” He shrugs and goes out. He wants it, but he doesn’t want that bad. So he goes out and drives his Chevy. And that’s the way with the Christians. We want to be full, but we don’t want to be full bad enough. No, we’ll 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 don’t want to pay the price. We don’t want to meet the cost.”

Obedience and the Self-Sins

Now, the Holy Spirit will expect obedience, I say, and He will not tolerate the self-sins. Self-sins, what are they? Well, there’s self-love. I have said and written, and I repeat, that the Church is full of self-love now. In fact, we cultivate it. We go to school and learn how to put on and show off, and the Holy Ghost will never allow that. He won’t allow it. He’ll allow some Christians to be like that, but He’ll never allow you to be like that. He’ll never allow Spirit-filled Christians 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. And then the self-confidence. We’re very sure that we can do things, and the Holy Spirit wants to destroy your self-confidence.

Here are you businessmen. You make decisions. You’ve got your telephone all over your desk, and you buy and sell in big amounts, and you make decisions, and you’re proud of the fact that you run that. You make this decision. You go home and you run the house and you run. But there’s one thing you won’t run, brother, you won’t run your life after the Holy Ghost gets control. You won’t run it anymore, or the Holy Ghost will run your life.

And the reason you’re not filled and full now is that you want to run your life the same as you run your business. You’re the boss, and take it to your letter. You dictate, you dictate. Well, you’ll not dictate to the Holy Ghost. But that’s the trouble with us.

We were dictators. We want to run our lives. We are so full of confidence, and then we’re full of self-righteousness. We lie to God continually. People lie to God continually. They say, “Oh God, I’m a worm and no man.” But if his wife called him a worm, there would be trouble at home. He doesn’t believe it; he’s lying to God.

And 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’d say, “What do you mean?” He doesn’t mean it. He’s just lying. He says he’s bad, but he doesn’t believe it. So, God wants to take all of that out of him, my friend. He wants to take Adam’s righteousness out of him and put another kind in.

And self-indulgence. He wants to take all of that out. The self-love, self-aggrandizement, the self-sins. He wants to take them out. Well, are you sure you want to be treated like that?

The Church and the World

Are you sure that you want to be filled and possessed by that kind of a Spirit? If you’re not, you don’t desire to be, then of course you can’t be. Because God is a gentleman, the Holy Ghost is a gentleman, He won’t come in where He isn’t wanted.

Well, are you sure that you want to be led and controlled 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 can’t tell the difference, really. There’s not very much difference. There are a few things we don’t do. We don’t drink, and most Christians now don’t smoke.

Confronting Worldly Practices

But about that side of things, they do about everything everybody else does. And they trim their income tax and do all sorts of things. Take their wife out to lunch and write it on the returns that it was a business engagement. And then we smile and think, “No, you’re not getting away with anything, brother.”

No, you’re just leaking. Your spirit’s leaking. Your soul’s leaking. Scripture says, “You put it in bags with holes in it,” the treasure, and we put things in bags with holes in them. Those are leaks. And the Holy Ghost is a Holy Spirit. And He will not allow crooked deals. He will not allow sharp shavings.

You’ve got to be honest to be filled with the Spirit. Do you want to be filled with the Spirit bad enough? Do you want to be filled with the Spirit bad enough that you can stand against the easy ways of the world and live the life of a Christian, the hard life of a Christian? And then the Holy Spirit won’t allow you to boast or show off.

The Humility Required by the Spirit

He’ll never allow that. Every time I boasted about anybody up to now, he backslid on me. God never allowed me to boast about a convert. He always backslid, as far as I’m able to discover. Every time I boasted about a crowd, He always petered out on me. And every time I boasted about anything, He went to pot. And I thank God for it, because God won’t allow that. If I wasn’t His child and His Spirit wasn’t trying to control me and wasn’t succeeding in some measure, I’d never hear from God on it.

But as soon as I start to show off a little bit, the Lord sets me flat, and that’s exactly the way I want to keep it. And that’s the way you’ll be, too. The Lord will never let you show off nor boast. Well, He’ll take the direction of your life away from you altogether, and He’ll reserve the right to test you and discipline you and strip you and strip away from you many things that you love them, but they’re dangerous to you, and He’ll strip them away.

The Cost of Following Christ

We want God in all this, too. There’s a philosophy abroad, you know, in Christian circles. “I’ve got God in all of this, too.” Well, I find in the New Testament that people, when they had God, didn’t, as a rule, have very much else. They had God and they were rich, but they didn’t have much else, and oftentimes they had to get rid of what they had, for Christ’s sake. That’s the way our fathers lived, but in this twentieth-century western civilization in Canada, the United States are like that, together on this. Rich and well-to-do and having too much, and we don’t know what it is to suffer, and our churches have become a middle-class bourgeois kind of church, you know. We don’t know what it is to be poor, don’t know what it is to suffer and lose things, but our fathers did.

Our fathers did, and we don’t. They paid the price, and we won’t pay the price. We read books on being filled, but we won’t meet the condition. But we’re all as full as we want to be, my brethren. You’re as good a man as you want to be. You’re not as good a man as you think you want to be, but you’re as good a man as you really want to be. Because the scripture says, “Blessed is the day that hunger and thirst, they shall be filled.” And if the hunger and thirst is there sufficiently, they shall be filled.

And if there’s a man in Toronto that’s hungering after God and isn’t filled, then the word of God is broken. We are as full as we hunger to be. I say there’s a fugitive impulse comes to us sometimes. We’d like to be like D.L. Moody, we’d love to be like A.B. Simpson, we want to be like Sophie the Scrubwoman or Holy Ann or Billy Bray or Luther, but we don’t want to bad enough. And the result is, of course, that we just go on our middle way, mediocre way. Well, now, are you sure you need to be?

The Desire and Need for the Spirit

I’ve 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 on all right the way you’ve been? You received Jesus, you said, and you got converted and your sins were forgiven and you took a course in the New Testament somewhere and you know you got eternal life and no man can pluck you out of God’s hand.

In the meantime, you’re 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 that you can’t get along all right the way you are, or do you feel you just can’t go on, resist discouragement and obey the scriptures and 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 haven’t reached that place, then I don’t know that there’s much I can do. I don’t think there’s anything that I can do. I wish I could. I wish that I could take the top of the head of every one of you off and pour the holy oil of God down into you, but I can’t. I can do only 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, everybody was on his own. He had to go to the Lord Jesus Christ and receive help from Christ on his own.

No man can fill me and no man can fill you. We can pray for each other, but I can’t fill you and you can’t fill me. Well, 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’s anything bigger in your life than your desire to be a Spirit-filled Christian, then you’ll never be a Spirit-filled Christian until that’s cured. Never.

If there’s anything bigger in your life than your longing after God, then you will never be a Spirit-filled Christian. Here’s a young couple coming to the altar to be married, and as the young woman walks down the aisle to meet her bridegroom-to-be and to take the vows of marriage, if she should suddenly discover, or in any way be able to discover, that there was something bigger in his life than she, when he asked the question, “Will you?” She’d say, “I will not.” She wants to know she’s the biggest thing in his life.

Any husband or wife listening to me, if there’s something bigger in your life, in your social and human life, anything bigger than that partner, then your yearning is not going to be a happy life. If there’s anything bigger in your spiritual life than God, anything bigger than your yearning after God, then you’ll never be filled.

I run into Christians, they’ve been for years wanting to be filled in a vague sort of way, but the reason they’re not filled is that they’ve got other things they want more, other things they want more. And because they want it more, they either get it or they try to get it, but they don’t get God. God won’t come rushing into a human heart unless He knows He’s the biggest thing, and nobody has any desire bigger than that. When God knows that, then God relaxes and rests and smiles and pours out this which you now see and hear, as Peter put it.

The Process of Being Filled with the Spirit

Now, is the desire to be filled with the Spirit the all-absorbing thing in your life? If it isn’t, then I repeat, we won’t ever get anywhere tonight until it is. Now, I’ll say this again, that I’m not sure that anyone was ever filled with the Spirit. And when I say I’m not sure, I mean, judging by the Old Testament, the New Testament, and Christian biography, and personal testimony, and personal experience, I say I have those four or five ways of checking. One is the Old Testament, the other the New Testament, the other is post-biblical times, Church history and 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 want to be happy. They’re like little children. They want the Lord to give them a rattle, and they want to cackle and laugh, and they want to be happy. And they’re going to be happy regardless. But the Lord’s happy little children very seldom get filled with the Holy Ghost, because God can’t fill them because they’re not ready to die to the thing they ought to die to.

Now, He wants His children to be joyful, but it’s not the cheap happiness of the flesh, it is the joy of a resurrected Christ. But before He can fill us, there must be a disturbance there, and an anxiety. The Adam has to die. Remember, it’s almost humorous, that Old Testament passage, when Saul captured Agag and the sheep and the cattle, and finally along came Samuel with his eyes blazing, and he said, “Where is Agag?” He knew Agag was a type of the flesh. He knew that Agag was you, me. And he knew that Agag would never be subject to the will of God, and couldn’t be. And he had to get rid of old Agag. And he said, “Where is Agag?”

And he got a sword. My father used to wet his razor and pull the hair out and try it out to see if it would work. And when it got so to cut the hair, he knew it was sharp enough. And I can imagine Samuel with that sword.

The Encounter with Agag

And when Agag saw him, he said, “Verily the suffering of death is past.” He said, “Verily the miseries of death are over.” But it wasn’t very long until he was hacked to pieces before the Lord. Samuel did it. He got rid of him. He’s a figure there, a type, an illustration at least, of that that’s got to die. That’s why I say there’s got to be disturbance and anxiety and disappointment and emptiness. I suppose that no Christian who had 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 me of my joy and showed me that it was about half carnality and, you know, just animal spirits. He wants to deliver you from it. Disappointment and emptiness. Sometimes He lets people fall flat on their faces and that shocks them because they thought they were better than that. No, you’re not better than that.

You just found out how bad you were. And then there’s a despair that comes on the heart of people. Despair with self. As long as you imagine you’ll make it all right, that you don’t want to be too religious, you’ll make it all right. As long as you feel that way about it, you’ll make it all right. But it’ll be a mediocre, half-dead Christianity. And that’s what’s the trouble 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 anymore and you’re in a state of inward despair, that’s when you should never despair because you’re near the kingdom.

The Journey to Emptiness

That’s getting close. You’re 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’s part of my belief, I think it’s from the scriptures, that God wants to get us to a place where if we only had Him we’d still be happy. We don’t need God and something else. It’s God plus something else that’s the trouble with us. But when we get God and are satisfied so that we can have God and nothing else, then God gives us Himself and lets us have other things, too.

But until we reach the place where it’s only God, where there’s that inner loneliness, most of us are too social to be lonely. If we feel a little bit lonely, we rush to the telephone and call Mrs. Yackety. And the next thing we know we’ve used up a half an hour, and the buns are burnt or the biscuits. But it’s talk, talk, talk, and we rush about, and it’s social fellowship.

But there comes a place in your Christian life, my friend, there ought to be, and will if you’ll follow on to know the Lord, when you’ll arrive at a place when instead of Mrs. Yackety being a consolation to you, she’ll be a pest. And she won’t be able to help you at all. There won’t be anything she can do for you.

Seeking God Alone

It’s loneliness for God. You’re lonely for God, and you want God so bad you’re miserable. You’re getting close, then. You’re nearer to the kingdom, and if you’ll only keep on, you’ll meet God. God will take you in, fill you, and He’ll do it in His own blessed, wonderful way. I would even say there comes a 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. But we’re too carnal to allow our hearts to get dark with longing for God now.

We’re so determined we want to be happy that if we can’t be happy by the Holy Ghost, we’ll drum up a lot of happiness nowadays. We’re religious rock-and-rollers, you know, that we’re going to get happy somehow if we’ve got 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, the well of water springing up within you forever, then you will likely have a loneliness and an inner darkness and a despair with self, and you’ll wonder what happened to you, and you’ll say, “Am I backsliding?”

The Process of Being Filled

No, you’re not backsliding. You’re going on with God. And now somebody says, “Now, Mr. Tozer, I knew he was a legalist, and he’s saying that this disturbance and anxiety and disappointment and despair and all that, that earns the Spirit of God.” No, that doesn’t earn the Holy Ghost. The Holy Spirit’s a gift. He’s a gift from the Father to His children. He’s a gift from the wounded side of Jesus to His children. You can’t pay down one red penny for Him. You can’t turn your finger over. He’s a gift, 100 percent. But what this does for you is not to earn the Spirit, but it breaks up your fallow ground.

It empties the vessel. I say you can’t be full unless you’re filled. And the trouble with us is that we are full of too many things now, and God can’t empty us until He brings us to that place of anxiety and emptiness and despair with self. Then when we’re emptied of these things, then the blessed Holy Ghost at least has an opportunity to come in.

Moody used to take a glass of water, or an empty glass, and fill it, and then say, “Now, how can that be filled? How could I fill that with milk or wine? How could I fill that glass?” He’d say, “I’ve got to empty it,” and then he’d pour it out into another vessel as an object blessing.

Detachment and Surrender

So there must be an emptying and a detachment from the interests of life. Most of us are too much concerned with life. We’re busy making a living so that we can die of gallbladder trouble or have a heart attack. We’re busy making a living, dashing about keeping our sales up and keeping our business up. Now, it’s all right, and if you’re right with God, then God will bless you, and I’m sure He’ll bless your business, too.

But most of us, we don’t bother too much about that. We expect to do it, and we just want the Lord to have the carrot ready when we’re ready to die. So 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 don’t think so. I think that I’m way unchilled and cold compared with what I ought to be. I’m nowhere near what Finney would have been if he were preaching, or John Wesley, or any of the other preachers that God blessed and honored. Now, I’ll give you four texts. This is 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.

Scripture and Surrender

I give you four texts I want you to take, and an archangel from heaven couldn’t do any better than to give you the scripture and say, “Believe the word of God.” First, Romans 12:1 and 2. You know what it is. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God that you present your bodies,” that is, present your vessels. 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 vessels. I think that God wants us to be intelligent.

He wants us to come to Him. If you were in a bread line somewhere in one of some of the poor European countries where they have to come with their cups for their milk and come with a basket for their bread, if 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 the fullness of the Spirit of God. Present your vessel. That’s first, Romans 12:1 and 2.

I give you another verse, Luke 11:9-13. Maybe I’d better go over and read that one, because it’s quite lengthy. It says, “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that’s a father, will he give him a stone? Or if he shall ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If he asks an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?” The answer, of course, to all those questions is no.

So Jesus draws His conclusion. “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?” One man who doesn’t believe much in being filled has a note on this verse, and the note says that he thinks there was only one person who ever took advantage of that. That’s what he thinks.

The Universality of the Holy Spirit’s Gift

There are some of God’s people all over the world that have taken advantage of that. They didn’t hear that it wasn’t for them, and so they believed it, and they asked, and they got filled. “How much more shall the Holy Spirit be given to them that ask God?” And so, you ask. First, you present your vessel and you ask. Now, that’s perfectly logical and perfectly clear.

Then next is Acts 5:32. “We are witnesses of these things,” he said, “and so is also the Holy Ghost, whom God hath given to them that obey Him.”

Obedience: A Prerequisite for the Spirit’s Filling

There must be obedience there. The Spirit of God won’t give a disobedient child His blessings. He won’t 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.”

And then the fourth text is Galatians 3:2. “This only would I ask of you,” he said, “Received ye the Holy Spirit by the workings of the law, or by the hearing of faith?” And of course, the answer is, “Why, by the hearing of faith.” He said, “Are you so foolish then, having begun in the Spirit? Are you going now to be made perfect by the flesh?” You don’t get filled with the Holy Ghost by law-keeping. You get filled with the Holy Spirit by faith and obedience to your Lord. So we have these four texts.

The Misconception of Gradual Filling

I’m not finished yet. 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 are the four texts: Present your body, Romans 12:1. Ask, Luke 11. Obey, Acts 5:32. And believe, Galatians 3:2. To hear is what people don’t want to hear. But I’ll stand by this, so help me God. Because I don’t find in the Old Testament, nor in the New Testament, nor anywhere in Christian biography, nor in Church history, nor in personal testimony, I never heard of anybody who had ever been filled with the Holy Ghost who didn’t know it.

Now, some people would like to think they’re filled and don’t know it. One man tried to explain that. He said, “Now there’s such a thing as static electricity. 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 weren’t feeling anything, but you’d been full all the time and didn’t know it.” Well, the Holy Ghost isn’t electricity, and your soul is something else. That’s bad, that’s bad illustrating, bad. Because he’s violating the Old Testament, he’s violating the New Testament, he’s violating Christian biography, he’s violating Church history, and he’s violating all the testimony of the Spirit-filled saints.

Instantaneous vs. Gradual Filling

Nobody was ever filled with the Holy Ghost who didn’t know he had been, too. Nobody in the Old Testament or the New Testament, or in Church history or biography, was ever filled with the Holy Ghost who didn’t know when he was filled. Nobody was ever filled gradually. Ah, that’s where we are, this filling gradually stuff, you know. 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 a flow 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 aren’t. But there’s no place in the Old Testament where it ever says the Spirit came on him gradually. Did you ever see it? I never did. The Holy Spirit came on, no, He never came on anybody gradually. He fell upon them, He came upon them, He filled them, but it’s an instantaneous act. It’s never a gradual filling. But that’s the place for carnal preachers to hide, and it’s a place for carnal Church members to hide.

The Misunderstanding of the Spiritual Filling

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. Say, “Well, I’m going to be gradually filled.” No, you’re not, brother. You’re going to be filled as an act, or you’re not going to be filled. I’m sure of that. Thank God for everything we have, and everything He’s done, and all the grace we have.

And I repeat, I think I said it last week, that every Christian has a measure of the Holy Spirit, and don’t you let anybody argue you out of that. “If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His,” so that He gives a deposit of the Holy Ghost. But I’m talking now about the filling and the fullness and the anointing of the Holy Ghost. I like the word “anointing” better than “baptism.”

The Anointing of the Holy Spirit

I’m not at all sure that theologically we’re not baptized into the body of Christ when we’re born again. But the word is “anointing” that I want to use. That anointing is not a gradual thing. When they poured oil on a man’s head, it wasn’t gradual. When they poured oil on a fellow’s head, it was turned the thing over and poured it out, and it ran all down over the beard and down on the skirts of his garment, and everybody a quarter of a mile around knew he’d had oil poured on him, because it was the oil of frankincense and myrrh and aloes and cassia and cinnamon, and it smelled up everything around with its beautiful fragrance. It didn’t happen gradually. It happened instantaneously.

Resistance to Spiritual Surrender

Now, there’s 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’m perfectly willing to go on and teach my Sunday school class and tithe and give commissions and be good and witness to the girl beside me at the desk, but I don’t want to be filled.”

We don’t want to lose face, you know. Adam doesn’t want to lose face. He wants to be blessed and go to heaven and wear a crown and rule over five cities, but he doesn’t want to ever come to the place where the Lord chops him down, hews him down. He doesn’t want that. That’s why we’re where we are, brethren. That’s why we are the weak people that we are in these days.

The Lord’s people want Jesus to do all the dying, and they want to do all the chuckling. They don’t want to know what the cross means. “O cross that lifteth up my head, I dare not ask to hide from thee. I lay in dust life’s glory dead, and from the ground there blossoms red life that shall endless be.”

Now, my friends, I’m through. Just 8:30 on the head, and I’m done. I have no more to say on this particular talk. The next time I talk, it will be on how we can cultivate the Spirit’s companionship two weeks from tonight. But now what are we going to do about it? What did you do, you that went in the prayer room here? I guess 200 people went in there. I didn’t count them, but I’d guess.

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