Baptism, Filling, Anointing

Our Heavenly Father, help us in this meeting this afternoon to have our eyes closed to the things of the world and open to those things which shall make for righteousness and peace and the power of the Holy Ghost. We pray thee, our Father, that we may remember this afternoon as the time of our surrender. Hear us, we pray thee; answer us, we beseech thee; and we will give thee all the praise through Jesus Christ, our blessed Redeemer. Amen.

SUBJECT — “”baptism, FILLING, ANOINTING.

shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost” (Acts 1: 5).

“And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:4).

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor” (Luke 4: 18).

Those of you who were present this morning will remember that we were talking concerning Christ, and we were applying the tests to our lives to know if we needed a better apprehension of him. I am sure that we have learned the lesson to-day that it is impossible to separate the Spirit of God from Jesus Christ, and it is certainly impossible to separate the Sou of God from the power of God. It is high time that we were learning the lesson that some of us have already learned, that we are to. cease seeking an experience, and seek him; and when we have found him, we have found the secret of power and blessing. When we turn over the Holy Scriptures we find many expressions concerning this theme presented in my texts.

But I believe we may find to-day that these three expressions are closely related, one to another; that there is for every believer in Christ a baptism of the Holy Ghost; that there is for each believer many infillings of the Holy Ghost; and there is for every one who would do a service for him a special anointing for that same service. It was so with the early disciples, and it is so to-day.

It was after his crucifixion, and the placing him in the tomb, and the glorious resurrection, and after forty days had passed, and he had taken his disciples out near to Bethany, that suddenly he was parted from them, and he said. Go back and wait until ye be endued with power from on high. One, two, three, four, — ten days pass, and suddenly, in the fullness of time, the Holy Ghost came. He rested upon them with power. There was a marvelous transformation of character. Boanerges, the son of thunder, was changed into the beloved disciple; he changed his character, and therefore his name was changed. Your character may have defects, and if you let the same Spirit have the same right-of-way in your lives, he will drive out the sin that hinders Gods growth in you, just as in the early disciples. We are living to-day in the dispensation of the Holy Ghost. He is as near as the atmosphere you breathe. And it is possible for us to have the same Spirit that filled Stephen and Peter fill us. He is ready now to fill you. and to fill me.

I said to a friend once, who is a business man, ^TIow long would you keep a man in your employ who is only half for you V He said, ‘T would keep him until I found it out.’’ ^‘You know,” he said, cannot trust a man who is only partially for my interest”; and I am sure God cannot trust you and me with his power until we reach the place where we are fully his. Everything in our lives must be his. Until we do surrender he cannot trust us.

But when I say the Spirit of God came at Pentecost, I do not want you to think he was not in the world before that. You have only to turn over the pages of the Old Testament to see him in his mighty power. I have a friend who says you have in the dove an emblem of the Spirit, and whenever you find a dove in the Old Testament, you have some picture of the third Person of the Trinity. And he said, when Noah opened the window of the ark and sent out the dove, it flew out over the water, and found no resting-place, and returned again to the ark; then he 16t it fly again, and the little dove flies here and there, and finds an olive-leaf, and comes back and rests upon the hand of. Noah. (The olive in the Old Testament and in the New, is the emblem of peace.) Then the third time the dove flew forth, and came back no more forever. Just so the Spirit of God came. He came to teach Moses, and Isaiah, and Abraham in the Old-Testament time. He came when Christ was crucified. He plucked, as it were, the olive-branch of peace from the cross, and bears it back to God to say peace has been made in the death of the Son. But when Pentecost — the fullness of time — was come, he came, and he has not gone back since that day. He is in the world to-day, finding his resting-place in the hearts of the believers; and so I donT speak of him as one far away, but as one near at hand, and right here among us.

This is a time when you must determine whether you will be Spirit-filled and Spirit-controlled, or whether you will be filled with and controlled by the things of the world. God is no respecter of persons, remember.

If any of you women here say, “It cannot apply to me, for the whole trend of my life stands in the way,” I would like to have you remember Mrs. E. M. Whittemore. She is a lady of culture and social position; she turned away from the church for the time being, with the consent of the minister, and inaugurated the “Door of Hope,” whose door stands wide open by day and night for the fallen girls of the great city. When Mrs. Wliittemore met the ministers at Winona Conference, a minister of fifty years said, after her story, “I have never heard of anything to equal it in power.” The woman was just filled with the power of God. No, your culture is not in the way. Another would say, “Well, I think it is my ignorance; if I could have gone to the seminary and received proper training, I can understand how I could have power among men, but my ignorance is in the way.” Dear brother, your ignorance is not in the way. Dr. John Hall said that of all the men who influenced New York for Christ, the most influential was not a minister. He stood above a coffin as he said it, and in that coffin was the body of the poor old river thief. It was in Dr. W. M. Taylor’s church. In that casket were the remains of Jerry McAuley, an ignorant man, but a man filled with the power of God. He lives to-day in that city; his ignorance was not in the way. My brother, your ignorance is not in the way.

‘Well,” says some one, “it is my intellect; if I had not had the training of the schools, and had my mind not been led in certain lines, I might have what other men have experienced.” But your intellect cannot be in the way. When the Spirit of God can control uncultured intellect, it is not in the way. It is a help and not a hindrance, if only controlled by the Holy Ghost.

When Mr. Meyer came to Philadelphia, I met him, and was to take him to the Christian Association. We went to the hotel, and he said, “Just a moment of prayer before we go to the meeting”; and, falling on his knees there at the bedside, this is the prayer he offered (he was to be with us three days in services): “Blessed God, one day is with thee as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. Help us to do three thousand years’ work in these three days in this city.” And he rose up with tears in his eyes, and went away to move his audience as I have rarely seen an audience moved. I would like to say, There is a man of brilliant intellect, and controlled by the Holy Ghost.

Then, I think I would be right in saying Mr. Finney was a brilliant man intellectually. And yet there was a man who frequently could get no further than his text. He would announce it, and then, as in the beginning, the Holy Ghost would fall upon him. His intellect was not in the way. Your will is in the way. Your ignorance or your culture is not in the way. I dare to say it in the presence of the bishops of your church, and I believe they will say I am right. Listen to it: If any of us are not Spirit-filled men, it is because we have got some barrier in the way of God. Oh, may he show us the hindrance, and help us to take it away, and may the Holy Ghost fill us this afternoon!

The baptism with the Holy Ghost, according to my testimony this morning, came at the time when you said “Yes” to God, when you really became a child of God. “Hold on,” you say, “for a moment. If that is true, why have I had this anxiety, and longing, and fear?” Why, it is easy to explain; it is because you and I have not apprehended him as we should. A man died in London the other day, in the poorhouse. He had a little property out in England, but he realized nothing from it, and left it lying there waste and empty. “It was not worth anything,” he said; and there it lay until he died, and some of the members of his family inherited it, and they found a copper mine on it. They are living in luxury, and he died in poverty. The point is this: There is much in Christ for

you and me which we do not know, and we are poor because we do not investigate our birthright and appropriate it. Do you know Christ? Do you? God grant that this afternoon when I ask you, you will say, “Yes, I do know him, as I have never known him before.”

Well, if there is this baptism at regeneration, what does it mean to be filled with the Spirit of God? Well, it means, first of all, that all there is in me I definitely surrender to God, and I say, “O God, come in and fill me.” That is what it means. Turn to Galatians 3: 14. I will read it for you: “That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith/* You notice it doesnT say “the Spirit through faith,” it says “the promise of the Spirit.” What is the promise of the Spirit? “Ye shall receive power.” What is necessary, then, in order to be filled? Simply to step out on the promise of God, claiming our birthright, and living in it.

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If any of you went to the World’s Fair, you remember the electrical building. You remember the door could only be opened in one way; no one could open it as an ordinary door might be opened. How did you do it? There was only one way to get in, and if I wanted to go in I had to step on a mat outside the door, and an electric current opened the door, and I walked in. I throw down before you the promise of God, ‘We shall receive power.” Step out on the promise, and do it to-day.

Second, let the surrender be complete. I know when I talk to you about giving up everything to Christ, I am asking you to do the most difficult thing in the world. It is easier to bend a bar of cold steel than to bend your will. The help is in a little sentence Mr. Meyer gave to us. I was sitting in my home in the country, reading the account of the Northfield Conference, and I caught this little sentence from one of Mr. Meyer’s addresses: “If you are not willing to give up everything to God, are you ready to say, ‘I am willing to be made willing’?” I had days, and weeks, and months, and years of struggle to reach the one ambition of my life, and it was now within my grasp, but that seemed to stand in my way, so I said, “I will put him to the test.” I shall never forget the day. Then the thing against which I had struggled for years was the easiest thing to give up that I have surrendered in all my life. Can you say it, — “I am willing to be made willing about everything”?

Next point: ^^RecTcon self dead to sin/^ Many people are

making a mistake here. Paul said. Reckon yourselves dead to sin. He never said, “Reckon sin dead to you.” Then, what did he mean when he said, “Make no provision for the flesh”? Why, it means, I once had the old nature of the flesh, and then I was born from above, and received the nature of God; it means that I have two natures in me. When I live in the flesh, I turn my eyes to the world, and I will be like it; but when, by the Spirit, I turn my eyes toward Christ, I become like him. So, if you come to the place this afternoon where you say, “I will make no provision for the old nature,” dear friend, you have come to the place of blessing. The world has been against God from the beginning, and it never was more against him than to-day.

If you come to the place where you say, “I definitely surrender everything I have to God,” then the manifestation of his fullness will depend upon the individual. It is not likely that your experience will be like mine, or mine like yours. Mr. Moody was on the street when the blessing of God began to roll in upon him. The rest of the day and all of that night he was on his knees, and at last he had to rise from his knees and say, God, stay thy hand.” I have often said I would give everything I have in this world if I could have an experience like that, but I never could have.

F. B. Meyer kneeled in a Keswick tent, wearied in body and mind, and about him the people were shouting, and singing, and praying, having received the Holy Spirit. Mr. Meyer slipped up on the hillside in the darkness and prayed, “Blessed God, isn’t there some way to receive this blessing without this confusion?” And the Lord whispered, “Child, take the gift of power from the hand of the risen Saviour as you took the gift of pardon from the hand of the crucified Saviour.” By faith F. B. Meyer rose from his knees, and looked out upon the starstudded sky, and said, do take him,” and, as he said himself, it was faith without emotion.

“Oh, my friends, if there has never been a day of surrender, make it now, on this fourth day of May, and say, my God, I will live for thee; I believe thy power is in me and back of me; I rest on thee.”

“Well,” you say, “are there more fillings than one?” Certainly. If you give me the privilege of addressing this large body of ministers a number of times, doesn’t it stand to reason that I will soon give out if I do not breathe in as much as I breathe out? If I give out what God has given me, how can I give out more until I go to him for a fresh supply? I don’t think there would be so many powerless preachers if we took the time to breathe in as much as we breathe out.

Then again, if you are filled, you will glorify Christ. You remember in the seventh chapter of John and the thirty-ninth verse, “But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given; because that Jesus was not yet glorified.”

You must glorify him if the Spirit is to be poured out. I do not understand how a minister can go into the pulpit and preach anything but the gospel. The gospel is the true power of the day. If you preach the gospel, and preach it simply and sincerely, the church will not be slow to receive it. No man has any right to believe that the Spirit of God will give hjs testimony to anything but Christ in the pulpit. If you have the Spirit of God, you must glorify Christ; and if you fail here, then you will seek to be filled again.

This is also true when we neglect to obey. It is a principle in science, that if you would command a force, you must obey the laws of that force. That is, if you would command the force of a mountain stream, you must put your wheel in the way of that stream, and you will command the stream as you have need. I believe to-day if we would command the power of God, we must obey God. But if we neglect to obey, we must be filled again.

Now, we come to the testing-point. How about the anointing? For every sermon we preach, for every song we sing, for every lesson we would make plain to our scholars, we must have an anointing of the Holy Ghost. Can you tell me why Charles G. Finney was such a power? I know. I was in western New York the other day, and they told me how he was to address an audience in the schoolhouse. Late the night before he could not be found. In the morning, he was still out; it was near to half past ten, and still he had not appeared. At last, out in the loft of a barn they found him, lying on his face on an old buffalo-robe. “O Lord God,” he was saying, will never rise from my face, I will never stand before those people, until I have an anointing of the Holy One.” He rose up finally, and entered the building. They tell me he began his subject, got no further than the text, when he stopped. He was overcome. It was the anointing of the Holy Ghost. Do we wait like that? It would be an unusual thing, brethren, if some day my people should go into my church and look up into the pulpit and I would not be there; and they would send out, and find me on my knees waiting for the touch of God! Brethren, have we ever done that? I believe if we oftener waited thus we would have a right to stand up before the people and preach, and know that we have the power of God back of us.

Now we come to the test: Are you a child of God? “^’^en you are an heir of God and a joint heir with Jesus Christ. Everything in Christ is yours. Will you make this the time of surrender? It is the fourth of May, 1899. It is fifteen minutes of four o’clock in the afternoon. Can you make it as definite as that? “O God, this is the time I surrender; now fill me; fill me!” Those of you who will, just rise and come and kneel here at his altar. (Hundreds of people came forward at this invitation.) Now, dear brethren, tell what you will do. Speak it out in a sentence, and tell him what you will do.

O Lord our God, show us just what we have in Christ, and help us to lay claim to our inheritance now. We want to remember this as the day and the hour — yes, we want to remember this as the minute when we began a life wholly for thee.

Let us each one ask God to make the surrender complete, and to let this day be a day of beginning a new experience. Write it down on the fly-leaf of your Bible — “Here, Lord, I give myself to thee.” And then put the date and the hour. You will want to remember it.

“Lord God, set thy seal on every resolution made.” We pray thee that this may be a day never to be forgotten even in eternity. God’ help us to be true. In Jesus’ name. Amen.