Filled with the Spirit
“Be filled with the Spirit.” Eph. v:18. “Ye are complete (filled) in Him.” Col. ii:io.
emphatic word in both these verses is ‘’filled,” It is the Greek pleroo, which means to fill full, so full that there will be no room left empty. It does not mean to have a measure of the Holy Spirit, but to be wholly filled with, and possessed by, the Holy Ghost, and utterly lost in the life and fullness of Jesus. It is the completeness of the filling which constitutes the essence of the perfect blessing. A fountain half full will never become a spring. A river half full will never become a water power.
1. It 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. Christianity all centres in a living Person, and its very essence is the indwelling life of Christ Himself.
2. This Person is the true fullness of every part of our life.
He fills all the requirements of our salvation, all the conditions involved in connection with our redemption, reconciliation, justification.
And so we are “complete in Him.’’ “For by one offering He hath perfected forever them that are sanctified,” and we are as fully saved as if we had never sinned.
Christ fills the deeper need of sanctification. He has provided for this in His atonement and in the resources of His grace. It is all wrapped up in Him, and must be received as a free and perfect gift through Him alone. “For of Him are ye in Christ Jesus who of God is made unto us sanctification.”
He is the fulness of our heart life. Christ will give us His heart as well as His Spirit, and will love in us with the love which loves “the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind,” and which loves “one another even as He has loved us.”
Christ will fill all the needs of our intellectual life. Our mental capacities will never know their full wealth of power and spiritual effectiveness until they become simply the vessels of His quickening life, and these brains of ours are laid at His feet simply as the censers which are to hold His holy fire. He will fill the needs of our body, for His body has been constituted, by the resurrection from the dead, a perpetual source of physical energy, sufficient for every physcial function and every test of human life.
Christ will fill all the situations of providence and all the needs that arise in our secular callings and the circumstances of our daily life.
Finally, to be filled with Christ is not only to be filled with the Divine life in every part, but it is to be filled every moment. It is to take Him into the successive instants of our conscious existence and to abide in His fulness.
It is the secret of holiness. There is a measure of the Holy Spirit’s life in every regenerate soul, but it is when every part of our being is filled with His love and possesed for His glory that we are wholly sanctified.
It is the secret of happiness. A heart half full is only full enough to make it conscious of its lack. It is when the cattle are filled that they lie down in the green pastures. ‘’These things have I spoken unto you that my joy might remain in you and that your joy might be full.’’
It is the secret of power. The electric current can so fill a little wire that it will become a force to turn the great wheels of the factory, and the overflowing sluice of the village stream has power enough to run a score of factories all along the river banks, but it is simply because it is overflowing. Only full hearts accomplish eflfectual work for God. Only the overHow of our blessing blesses others.
‘‘For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us, unto Him be glory in the Church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages: world without end. Amen” (Eph. iii. T4-21L