God has clearly commanded you and me to “be filled with the Spirit.” But an unconfessed sin or resistance to His authority will block the “flow” of His life within us. If we do not deal with it, our spiritual lives become stagnant and we lose our attractiveness and usefulness to God. And we have nothing refreshing about us that would draw other people to Christ.
What is hindering you from being filled with the Holy Spirit? To be filled with the Holy Spirit is to be under His moment-by-moment control. He has not been given to you so that you can keep Him confined to a particular area in your life. Let Him loose! He is Lord! The amount of power you experience to live a victorious, triumphant Christian life is directly proportional to the freedom you give the Spirit to be Lord of your life!
I understand that a turkey and an eagle react differently to the threat of a storm. A turkey reacts by running under the barn, hoping the storm won’t come near. On the other hand, an eagle leaves the security of its nest and spreads its wings to ride the air currents of the approaching storm, knowing they will carry it higher in the sky than it could soar on its own. Based on your reaction to the storms of life, which are you? A turkey or an eagle?
It’s natural for me to be a turkey in my emotions, but I have chosen to be an eagle in my spirit. And as I have spread my wings of faith to embrace the “Wind,” placing my trust in Jesus and Jesus alone, I have experienced quiet, “everyday” miracles:
His joy has balanced my pain.
His power has lifted my burden.
His peace has calmed my worries.
So . . . would you spread your wings of faith and soar?!
God is righteous and just. But God is also loving and merciful. He cannot be less than Himself. Satan, in his temptation of Adam and Eve and in his plan to defeat the purpose of God, failed to take into account the very character of God. He failed to realize one very important thing – how much God loved the man and woman He had created and the depths to which His grace would go in order to bring them back to Himself. It never entered Satan’s wicked, self-centered imagination that God would commit the fullness of His eternal, divine nature to bring man back into a right relationship with Himself. It never occurred to Satan, who ever seeks his own preeminence, that the Creator of the universe would lay down His own life in atonement for man’s sin. But that’s exactly what happened. The solution to the problem of sinfulness is the cross of Jesus Christ.
To worship God means to attribute worth to God through obedience to God, preoccupation with God, and praise of God. The Samaritan woman at the well in Sychar said, in essence, “Oh, well, I worship God.” And Jesus corrected her, “You Samaritans worship what you do not know.” Why was her worship invalid? Because she was substituting the traditions and rituals of her religion for a personal relationship with God through faith. So Jesus explained, “God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth” (John 4:24, NIV).
What does it mean to worship “in spirit and in truth”? To worship God in spirit means to worship Him in deepest sincerity from the heart as one who is indwelled by the Spirit of God. To worship Him in truth means to worship Him honestly, without hypocrisy, through faith in His Word, both the Living Word, which is Jesus, and the written Word, which is the Bible.
Following supper the night before He was to be crucified, Jesus unburdened His heart to His disciples. He knew He was going not only to the cross but, after the resurrection, back to His Father in heaven. His disciples would be like orphans. Had He taught them all they needed to know?
The disciples must have begun to sense His heavy burden. Without Jesus, how could they ever meet their own needs, much less the needs of the multitude? They had given Him their very lives for three years. How could they possibly manage without Him?
Jesus knew their fears. So He began to tell them how they would go on in His absence. He told them they could live, not just somehow, but triumphantly, because “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you . . . I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever” (John 14:18, 16, NIV, emphasis added). Jesus would remain with them, not physically, but in the invisible person of the Holy Spirit.
