Day 2: Filled With The Spirit
Scripture: Acts 4:31
After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.
Devotional: We are filled on the regular. As humans we can be: full of food, full of ideas, full passion, full of love.
But full of God? That’s an odd idea.
It’s not in our framework, not as westerners.
God is beyond. God is out there. God is above. And if he exists,
He is not here. He is not close. And he is certainly not within me.
Every once in a while you might hear an old time church person talk about Jesus living “in my heart.” But most who say that mean it hypothetically, not literally.
Being filled with the Holy Spirit is a radical concept, even for the American church.
The church of Acts, however, was constantly being filled with the Holy Spirit. Pimplemi (the Greek word for filled) shows up six times in Acts, when talking about a believer’s or a community’s experience with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit of Jesus would fill entire groups at a time, and individuals on the regular. Relationship with God was not a theory for the early church. The Holy Spirit was not a concept to them. He was an experienced reality. They expected God’s very presence, his very person, to fill them. Regularly.
Many Christians have a tendency to push God’s presence off to the end of their lives. They show no hunger for God and thus, cannot be filled. “I’ll experience God when I die and go to heaven,” they think. The American church overall thinks this way as well. The resources of the church are a huge stumbling block to seeing God move in power. We rely on our own strength, programming, money, and strategies.
Imagine if the believers from today’s passage thought that way. They were facing persecution after being criticized by the local religious authorities. Their community could not continue if God did not intervene. The Christian life would have been totally unsustainable for these believers without the tangible filling of the Holy Spirit. They had hit a barrier. But God responded. He provided them power to speak boldly, love to live sacrifically, and courage to persevere.
The believers in Acts were filled in times of desperation and surrender. You cannot be filled if you are not first empty. You will not eat if you are first not hungry. A church that is not honest about its need for God will not hunger after him and cannot experience his fullness. The Holy Spirit fills in times of hunger, repentance, weakness, persecution, and desperation.
To see awakening, we must first be awakened to our need for God.
The Apostle Peter was filled in Acts three times, Paul at least twice, and the church as a whole at least twice. Paul goes as far as to command that we be “filled with the Holy Spirit” (Eph 5:18). We are meant to regularly pursue this filling. It can lead to profound intimate experiences with God where we feel his love, the gifts of the Spirit are given, or where we know God with our hearts in a deeper way. But many times the filling of the Holy Spirit is something we must simply trust has happened.
The important question is this: Are you living life in our own strength and under our own control? Or, are you humble and available for God, expecting him to meet your needs and to fill you tangibly from the inside out?
Prayer: If you are hungry for God then pray with me Andrew Murray’s (classic S. African revivalist) four verbal steps to being filled by God’s Spirit:
Step 1: Say I must be filled - knowing that God commands it and you need it.
Step 2: Say I may be filled - believing that it is God’s promise to all believers
Step 3: Say I should be filled - willing to surrender all for the earl of great price.
Step 4: Say I shall be filled - claiming the promised gift of God, purchased by Christ.
* I borrowed from Simon Ponsonby for today’s devotional. If you are interested in learning more about the filling of the Holy Spirit then I suggest his book, More: How You Can Have More of the Spirit When You Already Have Everything in Christ