It is the Word of God that we are going to read, it is not the
word of man, it is God's Word which He has caused by His Holy
Spirit to be written. And we shall read firstly two fragments of a
general character and then one or two of a more specific nature.
The first is Romans 8:9. "If any man hath not the Spirit
of Christ, he is none of His". That is God's Word; not mine or
anyone else's. "If any man hath not the Spirit of Christ, he is
none of His". Now, the word "Spirit" is spelt with a capital
"S" and it is necessary perhaps to point out that that does not
mean just the kind of disposition that the Lord Jesus had. It does
not mean that. We speak of people being of a very nice spirit, a
kind spirit, a good spirit about them; it does not mean that at
all; it means the Person of the Holy Spirit. It means having
dwelling within, the Holy Spirit; the third Person of the Godhead
who is known as the Spirit of Christ just as He is known in the
Word of God as the Spirit of God. "If any man hath not the Spirit
of Christ he is none of His" that is, he does not belong
to Christ.
Now the other passage, the second of these two, is in the letter
to the Ephesians 5:18: "Be filled with the Spirit". The first
brings us into a relationship with the Lord Jesus. Our
relationship with the Lord Jesus as saved men and women, as
children of God, depends entirely upon our having received the
Holy Spirit of God to dwell in us. That is a basic necessity to
the Christian life, to salvation. The second passage is just as
imperative and just as important for the purpose of God, and is
just as much in the nature of a command and a demand, "Be
filled with the Spirit".
Now, those are general passages. We turn to some more, of a more specific character, one in the
book of Exodus 29:42,43: "It shall be a continual burnt offering
at the door... and the tent shall be sanctified by My glory". We
will refer to that again later. Let us turn back to the New
Testament, 2 Thessalonians 2:13,14: "God chose you from the
beginning unto salvation in sanctification of the Spirit and
belief of the truth: He called you through our gospel to the
obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ". I want
especially to underline that little fragment, "In
sanctification of the Spirit". 1 Peter 1:2: "...in
sanctification of the Spirit". Back to 1 Cor. 6:11: "Ye
were sanctified... in the Spirit of our God".
Now we continue with our subject of being filled with the Spirit.
We have been seeing, as we have said, the absolute necessity for
being filled with the Spirit - we have had tremendously stressed
that that is God's will for us. We have seen that the new creation
in Christ Jesus is that creation which is indwelt by the Holy
Spirit, that God has brought into being a new creation, and "if
any man be in Christ there is a new creation, old things are
passed away, behold all has become new, and all things are of God"
and it is all the work of the Holy Spirit. Now as to being filled
with the Spirit, we want to know what is really basic to that. And
in the first place we must say an all-inclusive thing about it, a
thing which embraces everything else, and that is this: the
all-inclusive prerequisite of being filled with the Spirit is:-
Sanctification.
Now, I know that very often sanctification is put afterwards and
not before, and perhaps passages of Scripture would support that
if they were taken by themselves, but it is quite an imperfect and
inadequate apprehension of the meaning of sanctification to put it
after the filling of the Spirit. Sanctification comes before the
filling of the Spirit in one very important respect. But there are
three phases of sanctification which are the following.
Firstly, we are sanctified in Christ Jesus as an objective
thing, something altogether outside of ourselves. If you read
Hebrews 10 you will see how clearly that is set forth. The words
with which we are so familiar in Hebrews 10:10 "By the which
will we are sanctified". That is, "Lo, I come to do Thy will",
said the Lord Jesus, "...sanctified through the offering of the
body of Jesus Christ once for all". Then verse 14, "For by one
offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified". "By
the which will we have been sanctified by the offering of the body
of Jesus Christ once for all". That is something that is done
altogether apart from us, outside of us. That is a sanctification
which is in Him; our sanctification is perfected in Christ by the
work of His Cross. It is completed, it is absolute, it is secured
in the Person of the Lord Jesus by reason of what He did in His
Cross. And we who believe, who have faith in Him and His work, by
that faith inherit that salvation which is in Him, and then we are
said to be in Christ. And in Christ we are perfectly sanctified by
His own work apart from anything that we do. It is an objective
thing by reason of position.
We shall have a word further to say about that, but in the second
phase, following that, is a thing to be an act on our part. It
is an act by which we become voluntarily separated unto God.
Now
let us consider the nature of sanctification. What is
sanctification? It is a big word about which a very great deal has
been written, and so often the third phase of sanctification (to
which we will refer in a moment) is allowed to come in and confuse
the real meaning of this word. The Old Testament is full of this
word. The translation of the Hebrew word is "consecrated", or
another word is "devoted". And in the act of sanctifying, or
consecrating, or devoting a thing to God, what was done is simply
this: it was taken, separated from all its connections of every
kind, all its old relationships and associations and cleansed by
the efficacy of precious blood and from that time recognised as
wholly belonging to God. It was God's. It was for God. God had all
the rights in it, all the claims over it, and no one had any claim
to it but God. And it was, therefore, called a consecrated or a
sanctified thing.
Now, that is very simple, and that is the second
phase of sanctification. It is an act whereby we choose
deliberately to be wholly for God, separated absolutely unto God.
I do not mean that we go into monasteries or convents and break
away from other people of this world and business and so on, but
that henceforth every interest of ours is for God. Our interests
in our homes are God's interests; our interests in our businesses
are God's interests; our interests in people are God's interests.
Every kind of interest that we have in life is for God, for His
ends, for His purposes, for His glory. So we are sanctified unto
God and we will have no connection voluntarily, no association, no
interest, no kind of relationship that is not brought completely
into line with God's will, and God's purpose, and God's interest.
It is all now unto God, our life wholly for God. That is
sanctification by an act. We take our place in separation unto God
in Christ. The hour, the day, or the moment comes when we see the
great privilege which is ours of being God's and God's will for
us. And we consecrate (and we can rightly use the other word, we sanctify)
ourselves unto God - that is, we give ourselves wholly to the
Lord. That is sanctification in an act, the second phase.
The third phase of sanctification is the one which, for
most people, runs over all the rest, and that is the progressive
aspect that what is true in Christ as to our position, and what is
true by our deliberate act and choice of consecration to God, is
now, by the Holy Spirit acting, to be progressively reached in us.
This means that we are day by day being sanctified in the sense of
being made like Christ, being separated day by day from all that
from which He, as our representative, has been separated - from
the world, as an evil thing, and all those things which are
contrary to the mind of God. He has been separated by His Cross
from all that and wholly consumed unto God, but representatively,
for us. Christ there, wholly consumed to God is the type and
representation of every believer according to the will of God.
So,
He is sanctified as we are, we secondly choose to be related with
Him, joined with Him in that absolute consecration unto God,
consuming unto God, and then the Holy Spirit works that thing in,
in an experimental way, and makes it positional and conditional;
objective and subjective.
Now, the Lord is evidently concerned
about our foundations. There you have sanctification in its threefold aspect, and that
sanctification, especially in the first and second aspects, is
absolutely basic to the filling of the Holy Spirit. We can never
be filled with the Spirit until we have seen firstly that the Lord
Jesus is our Representative before God of a life absolutely given
to God, and then that we have taken upon the ground of that, a
deliberate and definite step and said, "As He is for God, so am I;
I choose to be joined with Christ in a total consecration to God.
In the same measure in which He has been consumed unto God, I
choose to be consumed unto God, and to be cut off from everything
that is contrary to God". And that ground alone is the only hope
of our being filled with the Spirit initially.
You see, the work of the Lord Jesus is basic to the work of the
Holy Spirit. That is why we read that magnificent passage in
Exodus 29. You ought to be really tremendously impressed by those
words. There it says, "It shall be a continual burnt offering...
at the door". The door is where you go in, this was access, and
that tabernacle was Christ in representation, in type, and you
come into Christ by way of a continual burnt offering at the door,
wholly consumed unto God. You pass through the door, the continual
burnt offering, and you make a straight line through, past the
manna, in through the holy place into the most holy place, and
what do you find? The Shekinah glory filling it. On what ground
does the Shekinah glory fill the tabernacle? What is it that
brings the glory of God in? It is that continual burnt offering.
That continual burnt offering represents the work of the Lord
Jesus in His Cross. The glory comes in because of the work of the
Cross, but what is the glory? The presence of the Spirit of God
who is called distinctly "the Spirit of glory". The Holy Spirit is
the Sanctifier. "It shall be sanctified by My glory" is this word,
in other words, sanctified by the presence of the Holy Spirit. The
Holy Spirit sanctifies the tent by His presence. He is the Spirit
of glory, but He only comes and sanctifies because of that
continual burnt offering at the door.
Two things are brought together, the first and the last: the
sacrifice, the burnt offering and the glory of sanctification, the
two things brought together; they are one. That is an alternative
way of saying just this, that sanctification by the Holy Spirit
demands the basic work of Calvary where there is an absolute
separation unto God. The Holy Spirit can only perform His work on
the ground that we have accepted Christ's work in the Cross, and
that work in the Cross, as we know, is that by which we are
separated from the old Adam, from the flesh, and from everything
that belongs to that creation which God has left and put aside,
and it is in that Cross: separation unto an entirely new creation
in Christ Jesus. The Holy Spirit works on the basis of Calvary,
the work of the Cross, and only so. "A continual burnt offering"
and "sanctified by My glory", sanctification of the Spirit. We
read again and again in the New Testament, "sanctification of the
Spirit", that is the Holy Spirit's sanctifying, but He sanctifies
on the basis of the work of the Lord Jesus in His Cross. That is
how we come to sanctification to begin with.
Now let us look at one or two other things in this connection of
sanctification by the Spirit. There must be a definite act of
faith in this matter. There must be faith's apprehension of and
testimony to Christ and His work in the Cross. Let us divide that
into these two halves.
There must be faith's apprehension of
Christ and His work in the Cross. I do not mean by "apprehension
of Christ" simply that you believe that Jesus Christ was a living
character in history, that He came into this world in a very
wonderful way, that He lived a very good life and went about doing
good, that He said very wonderful things and died a cruel death
and it is written that He rose again, but that you see clearly
that the Lord Jesus came into this humanity and represented us,
that He took upon Himself as a man, Himself sinless, the sin of
the whole race, and took the race and its sin and sinful nature in
His own Person to the cross where all the judgment of God was
poured out upon Him as representing the race, and that He died
under the judgment of God in our place, in our stead. We must see
that, and having died under the judgment of God, and having been
cut off as us, we see the all-inclusive Sinner by His own
voluntary act and choice, dealt with on Him by God. So far as God
is concerned there is no more need for any judgment of sin at all,
and when God raised Him from the dead He raised Him without any of
that sin which He had taken on Himself, which was never in Him by
nature, but which He had taken on. He was an entirely new
creation, sinless, beyond the need or the power of judgment, and
God took Him to His own right hand as representing a new race
which God was going to bring into being. And there He is, having
been our Representative in sin, death and judgment. He is now our
Representative in sinlessness and no-condemnation and eternal life
and glory. That is the Person of Christ and we must see Him
representatively or substitutionally, as ourselves in the mind of
God, and we by faith take Him as that.
Now, that is the simple gospel, and it will not do any of us any harm
to contemplate Him afresh in that way, that by faith we see Him as
our Saviour, and if we do not, the judgment which God meted upon
Him for us will have to come upon us because we have not accepted
our deliverance in Christ. We shall be held responsible for the
sin that Christ took upon Himself if we do not take Him as our
Sin-bearer. Being "in Christ" means that we have escaped
from the penalty and judgment of sin and the wrath of God, and
being accepted in Christ, we accept God's way of deliverance and
salvation.
Now we have to exercise faith in an act, a deliberate way, to
apprehend Christ and His work in the Cross, to take Him and His
work for ourselves, for it was for us individually. All that work
on the cross is as much for the individual as for the whole world;
for every one of us. Unto the great command of God to be filled
with the Spirit, with all that that means, one of these primary
things is a Divine act of faith in apprehending Christ in His
Person and in His work by the Cross. But then there is a second
part of that: bearing testimony thereto. In the Word, during the
first days of the Christian believers, immediately they saw this
great truth of Christ, what He was, and by faith accepted Him,
apprehended Him and His work for them, the very next thing that
they did was to give testimony to their faith and their acceptance
of Christ. They gave public testimony thereto. They declared
themselves as to where they stood, they let all who could see, see
where they were in this matter, and it is an essential part. It is
not enough that the Word of God says, "If thou shalt believe in
thine heart and confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, thou shalt
be saved" - there must be an open declaration as to where we stand
in this matter.
Now we go on, and it looks very much like repetition in what we
are further going to say, but it is not. The next thing towards
being filled with the Spirit is what we may call:-
An Absolute Yielding to God.
In the previous chapter another word was used - surrender. Now,
whether you like that or not, it is right; it is true, whichever
word you prefer: 'surrender' or 'yielding'. The New Testament seems to
use 'yielding' more than 'surrender'.
Romans 6:16,19: "Know ye not, that to whom ye present yourselves
as servants unto obedience, his servants ye are whom ye obey;
whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? I
speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your
flesh: for as ye presented your members as servants to uncleanness
and to iniquity unto iniquity, even so now present your members as
servants to righteousness unto sanctification." Note:
sanctification; yielding unto sanctification.
Now, what does this
yielding or surrendering carry with it? Romans 12:1: "Present,
yield your bodies", there is a first connection. 1 Cor. 6:19,20:
"Know ye not that your bodies are a temple of the Holy Spirit?" 2
Cor. 5:15: "He died for all that they which live should
henceforth... live unto Him who for their sakes died and rose
again." Now I am putting the emphasis on this because it is here
that the emphasis is not always put and not sufficiently put.
We perhaps very often accept the surrender or yielding of what we
call our "hearts" to the Lord, or our spirit to the Lord. And we
think of consecration or sanctification (or surrender or yielding)
as something that is inward; and rightly so. But it is the whole
being God claims: spirit, soul and body - that is what is
meant by entire consecration - by entire sanctification, that the
whole man or woman, spirit, soul and body is given to the Lord.
And to me it is a tremendous thing that God says, "Your bodies are
a temple of the Holy Spirit" and not just in the sense that the
Holy Spirit dwells in our hearts and our hearts are in our bodies
and in that way logically our bodies become a temple of the Holy
Spirit. No, in a more direct and immediate way God demands that
these bodies should be wholly under the control, government, and
sanctifying beauty of the Holy Spirit; that we cannot do one thing
with our bodies and another thing with our souls and spirits, that
we cannot be Christians somewhere inside and otherwise outside -
that the whole being is God's.
"Know ye not that your bodies are a
temple of the Holy Spirit", "Know ye not that ye were bought with
a price", "Know ye not that ye are not your own"? What does that
threefold interrogation mean? Why, that on every ground every bit
of us is claimed by God and should be recognised as belonging to
God, and we should yield utterly to God's ownership: spirit, soul
and body.
"Not your own". Man loves to be free to direct his own
course and choose his own way, and make his own arrangements and
judge his own judgments. But God claims to have the government of
man's life in every part and that is sanctification, that God's
rights are recognised in every part of our being. That is the
strong side, the side of demand, where rights come in: God's
rights. Oh, the unspeakable privilege and honour of having a whole
man belonging to God... that God should have His way and His pleasure
in a man's entire being - spirit, soul and body. Do you think that
you will lose anything if you give yourself to God? Do you think
that life will be a meaner, smaller, narrower thing by being
consecrated to God? Do you think that you will have to give up all
sorts of things and life will be stripped of its enjoyment and
pleasure if you become wholly God's? There never was a bigger lie
in the universe than that! Ask anyone who has let this world go
for God and they will say, "There is immeasurable gain". Some of
us know something of that and we would scorn to contemplate an
exchange with the unsaved; not because we have never known what
they know, not because we have never tasted what they are tasting;
it is because we have. At best there is a hollowness in their
hearts and it takes them all their time to keep it up. When one
bit of pleasure has been exhausted, they have to rush off and find
something more or life is going to fritter out and be a wretched
thing, but we have in our hearts an eternal satisfaction and we
are absolutely independent of that. The world says, "You never do
this and that, you never go here and there and it does not seem to
bother you very much". Yes, that is true, that is the testimony;
that is the fact.
Total consecration does not narrow life; it enriches life, it
brings you to the secret of life, making you know that you have got
a being. It brings you into the thought of God before this world
was created, "We were chosen in Christ before the foundation of
the world" and God purposed a purpose in His Son before the world
was. But you never discover this until you have accepted Christ
and then the very first thing a young convert knows is that they
have something to live for. They do not understand it, but they
feel, "Now I know why I have come into this world."
A purpose comes in, and to be wholly God's is not to lose; it is
to gain, to come into the expansion of everything.
Suffer these familiar repetitions. The Lord does want us to know
that to be wholly His is by no means to suffer loss, but to come
fully into His thought and purpose for us. "Yield your bodies".
Does that challenge us? Have we separated these things and thought
of sanctification as something which belongs to the inner man,
something spiritual, but we have not brought our bodies into that
realm? What are we doing with our bodies? They are God's; they are
temples of the Holy Spirit. And this was said to Corinthians, and
it was said to these Corinthians at a time when they were failing
to recognise this great fact, in order to correct them in their
conduct. They were the Lord's children, they had been born again,
but things were not just as they should be and they were making a
profession of Christ and in the religious realm they were carrying
out the Christian ordinances and regulations, but in the realm of
their bodies there were still some serious delinquencies and they
were not dividing between the two. "Don't you know that these
bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit? Don't you know that you
are not your own? Don't you know that you were bought with a
price? Therefore, glorify God in your body." That is
sanctification by the Holy Spirit, that is the work of the Cross,
you see, paving the way for the sanctification of the spirit unto
the glory following.
I mention three things, without dwelling upon them, as necessary
to the filling, or being filled with the Spirit and of remaining
filled with the Spirit. The next thing is: obedience. That is,
believing God and acting on your belief in God, obeying God in
everything upon which He puts His finger. That means not arguing
about it, questioning, doubting it, but if He has pointed out
anything, that you give God the benefit of the doubt, if there is
a doubt. You are obedient. Any reservation in that trust in God
which leads to implicit obedience, will at once grieve the Holy
Spirit and limit Him. And do not forget that "grieved" is a love
term. You cannot grieve anybody who does not love you. You may
injure them, you may in a way hurt them, but you cannot grieve
them. You only grieve people who love you, and when it says, "Grieve
not the Holy Spirit" it means: do not do despite to the love of the
Spirit, do not violate the Spirit's love for you. And that means,
in effect, that you will not for one moment tolerate anything that
the Spirit is against; if you do, you grieve the Spirit and
immediately He is limited. Obedience to the Spirit is obedience to the love of God and that
is basic to both being filled with and remaining filled with the
Spirit.
We must mention two other things, the first being prayer.
Do not neglect your prayer life; if you do, you will soon discover
that the Holy Spirit again is checked and the life of fulness of
the Spirit ceases to be your joyful experience. Watch your prayer
life. The enemy is always out to counter the mighty results of a
life filled with the Spirit and one of his main objects of attack
is the curtailment of personal prayer life, cutting it short,
interfering with it, putting his hand upon it to somehow encamp
upon the secret ground of your prayer life. And that is a work
against the Holy Spirit and the result of the Holy Spirit in your
prayer life.
The second thing is: the Word. A rich life in the Word of God is
indispensable to a life of the fulness of the Spirit. You must
dwell much in the Word. Do not think that the Holy Spirit is going
to be a sort of substitute for the Word of God. A lot of people
think the Holy Spirit will act and give them a message to speak
and they do not do anything with regard to the Word of God. It is
a pernicious peril. The word says, "Let the Word of Christ
dwell in you richly" and the Holy Spirit demands the
indwelling Word as the instrument and means of His work in us. The
mental grasp of the Scriptures is not enough; we do not want to
have a theoretical knowledge of the Lord. We want to live in the
Word of God in order that the Holy Spirit may illuminate it, bring
it up, and direct us by it.
You remember, everything in the days of Josiah's great revival was
"according to the word of God", how frequently that was repeated,
"according to the word of David", "according to the word of
Solomon", everything was "according to the Word". That is, they
had gone to the Word and their actions were being governed by the
Scriptures. And the Holy Spirit must govern our lives by the Word
of God. Look after your life in the Word. And do not forget that
the enemy equally is out to monopolise our time, but we have got
somehow to have this life in the Word of God. You will find that
any life truly filled with the Spirit, is a life richly endued with
the Word of God, a life that always walks with God in His Word.
These are simple, elementary, basic things, but very necessary.
Now we have come to see the ground on which we can be filled with
the Spirit. We have to ask ourselves, "What about my life in the
Word of God? Have I been neglecting that? Is that a poor shrunken
thing?" Shall we put that right now? What about our prayer life,
has that been less than we know that it ought to have been, much
less than the Lord would have it? What about our obedience? Is
there something where the Lord has spoken to us, something in
ourselves He has shown, perhaps rebuked us, something He wants us
to do or not to do? We know perhaps best ourselves just where the
point of obedience is raised for us with the Lord. What about the
Holy Spirit's life in us - is it checked by withholding obedience?
What about yielding the whole man to the Lord? What about these
bodies being presented as well as these souls? Where have we
violated the Spirit in the realm of our bodies? Have we asked,
concerning that bodily matter, "Is that according to the mind of
God? The way I use my body, treat my body, the way I deal with my
body, where I let my body go, is that glorifying? My indulgences,
is it all glorifying to God, is it for God that I do that?" Is
there anything in our bodies that we can say that cannot be for
the glory of God? "Present your bodies... Know ye not that your
bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit?" Then getting right
back to the first thing, of some whom it could not be said, "Your
body is a temple of the Holy Spirit" because the Holy Spirit has
never yet come in. Have you accepted the Lord Jesus in all the
work of His Cross for your salvation? Have you accepted Him by
faith? May that be a transaction between you and the Lord.