The Beauty Of The Christ Life
Christ came to give us “beauty for ashes” – the beauty of His own Divine life for the ashes of our self-life. We have seen some of the characteristics of the self-life.
We have also seen that the way of the Cross – being broken and being emptied – is the only pathway that can lead us out of the darkness of our self-life into the full glory of the Christ-life.
This is why God has given us His Holy Spirit. He wants to fill our lives. The beauty of the Christ-life is brought to us through the fullness of the Holy Spirit.
Before considering the characteristics of a Spirit-filled person, there are a few common misunderstandings concerning the Holy Spirit and His ministry that need to be cleared up.
The Sovereignty of the Spirit, First of all, we must remember that the Holy Spirit is sovereign and works in varied ways. Jesus said, 4 Just as you can hear the wind but can t tell where it comes from or where it will go next, so it is with the Spirit” (John 3:8-LB).
You can’t control the wind – either its speed or its direction. So too with the Holy Spirit. And yet many believers think that they can control Him and make Him work according to their rules and patterns.
When the Second Person of the Trinity was here on earth, the Pharisees tried to tie Him down with their petty rules and traditions. But he refused to be locked up in their water-tight compartments.
The descendants of the Pharisees in evangelical Christianity are today trying to tie down the Third Person of the Trinity. But He refuses to work according to manmade patterns. He blows where He wishes.
We can hear the sound of His working, but He will not be controlled or directed by us. We cannot say that He should work in the same way in other lives as He has worked in ours; neither should we expect Him to work today in the same way as He worked in days past.
No. He is Sovereign. The best thing that we can do is to set our face towards the direction in which the wind is blowing and to let that wind carry us along.
The Holy Spirit cannot be tied down in any doctrinal compartment of any denomination. We shall find that He surprises us by the way He works. Both Pentecostals and non-Pentecostals need to recognize this.
The Holy Spirit may at times manifest Himself like a whirlwind. There may be deep stirrings of emotions and even physical reactions too. We must be willing to accept this. God spoke to Job out of a whirlwind (Job 38:1).
But we also need to remember that the Spirit may at times blow like gentle breeze. When Elijah heard the whirlwind, it said that God was not in the whirlwind (1 Kings 19:11).
No. Every stirring of the emotions is not from God. And so we must be careful. To Elijah, God spoke in a gentle breeze (1 Kings 19:19).
The Holy Spirit does not always blow like a tornado. Sometimes He does, but not always. We should not expect Him to blow like a whirlwind all the time in everyone’s life, just because He did so once in someone’s life.
Equally, we should not expect Him to blow always like a gentle breeze. We do need His blowing as a tornado upon many of our churches today, to uproot the things that are dishonouring to Christ therein.
The wrapping should never be mistaken for the gift. The Holy Spirit Himself is the Gift of the Risen Lord to His Church. When He falls upon people, it may be with shouts of Hallelujah, tears of joy, and the gift of tongues, or it may be quietly, silently, and without much emotion.
Temperaments vary, and the Spirit of God (unlike many Christians) is willing to adapt Himself to each temperament. It is foolish therefore to expect that others should receive the Gift in the same wrapping in which we received Him – whether spectacular or commonplace.
Only babies are taken up with the tissue paper in which a gift comes to them. Mature men recognize that the gift itself is more important than the wrapping. The Apostle Paul was converted through a vision of Jesus.
But he did not preach that all needed a similar vision before they could be saved. No. He recognized that it was the inner reality that mattered, in whatever wrapping it might come. So too with the fulness of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit and God’s Word Secondly, we need to remember that the Holy Spirit always operates in line with the Word of God – for He Himself has written that Word, and He does not change. We see this truth in the very first paragraph of Scripture.
When darkness covered the earth, the Spirit of God brooded upon it, and the Word of God went forth – “Let there be light”. And the joint operation of that Creative Word and of the Holy Spirit brought light where there was formerly darkness; it brought fulness and form where previously there were emptiness and shapelessness (Gen. 1:1-3).
The new birth is attributed to the implantation of the Word of God in us (1 Pet. 1:24), as well as to the operation of the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5). Sanctification, likewise is the result of the working of God’s Word and of the Holy Spirit in our lives (John 17:17; 2 Thess. 2:13). In the same manner, the fulness of the Holy Spirit and being filled with the Word of God go together.
This becomes clear when we compare Ephesians 5:18 to 6:9, with Colossians 3:15-21. In the Ephesian passage, we are told that giving thanks, praising God, and submitting to one another in Christ-like home relationships, is the result of being filled with the Spirit. Whereas in the Colossian passage, these same things are said to be the result of being filled with the Word of God.
We need to recognize this truth if we are to be balanced Christians. A steam engine needs not only steam in order to move forward, but also rail-tracks. We need the steam of God’s Spirit if we are to make spiritual progress, but we also need the rails of God’s Word to keep us from going astray.
One is not more important than the other. Both are equally important. Some who claim to be full of steam, have ignored the rails and got stuck in the mud.
Placing a premium on experience, they have not been careful to test everything by God’s Word, and as a result, have gone off the track.
Like a derailed engine blowing its whistle furiously, many of them make a lot of noise in their meetings, but there is no spiritual progress – no growth in Christ-likeness – in their lives.
Some others have gone to the opposite extreme. Although they have kept on the rails, they have despised the need for fullness of steam in the engine (or have imagined that they have the fullness when they haven’t), and they are stuck too.
They emphasize the importance of the Word of God and are careful about every jot and little in it – they keep admiring and polishing the rails. But they don’t recognize that they need to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
They are fundamental in their doctrines, all right – the rails are perfectly straight but there is not sufficient steam to move the engine. They are dead right in their doctrines, but they are also both dead and right!
Let us avoid both extremes.
Our Limited Knowledge Thirdly, we must recognize that even the best among us do not know everything about the Holy Spirit and His workings.
Some Christians give the impression that they have all the answers concerning everything that relates to the Holy Spirit. They have analyzed the Biblical teaching on the subject and neatly pigeonholed every verse.
I’m terribly wary of such people for I know they are wrong. We do not know everything. We know only in part – and especially when it concerns the ministry of the Spirit.
We need to acknowledge that our finite, sinful minds are not able to apprehend fully the greatness and the vastness of God the Holy Spirit. Dr. A. W. Tozer has said that the most profound statement in the Bible is found in Ezekiel 37:3, where Ezekiel says, “O Lord God, Thou knowest”.
I think there is a lot of truth in what Dr. Tozer said. We know to a certain extent. But we all come to a point where we have to say, “Lord God, I know this much, but there is so much beyond this that I don’t know.
I have just come to the fringe of Truth”. As Job said, “These are but the outskirts of His ways… How small a whisper do we hear of Him! But the thunder of His power who can understand” (Job 26:14-ASV).
Such an attitude will save us from a lot of carnal dogmatism on matters concerning the Holy Spirit, on which the Bible does not give us clear instructions. It will also give us a greater tolerance of others who do not see eye-to-eye with us on the Spirit’s ministry.
They may be wrong, but so may we. That which is clearly revealed in Scripture is for our instruction, but beyond that, we are not to speculate (Deut. 29:29).
No Short-cuts Fourthly, let us remember that there is no short-cut to the Spirit-filled life – no easy formula that guarantees success. In our day, when push-buttons have replaced hard manual labor, and when man has generally accepted a philosophy of easy, comfortable living, Christians can all unconsciously bring this attitude into spiritual matters as well.
The result is that we can think that there must be some simple formula for being filled with the Holy Spirit: take steps one, two, and three – and lo and behold, we are filled! But we don’t find any such formula in the Bible.
We must beware of trying to reduce the Holy Spirit’s operation in a person’s life into a set of formulas. The fulness of the Spirit is not a mechanical matter but a matter of life – and spiritual life cannot be expressed in formulas.
Don’t Boast that You Are Filled Fifthly, a fact to be noticed is that in the New Testament, although we read of certain people referred to as Tull of the Spirit’ (Acts 6:5; 11:24), no- one ever testified to being full of the Spirit himself.
I am not now referring to the baptism in the Spirit (or receiving the Spirit, as it is called in some passages), which is the initial experience of being filled with the Spirit.
Concerning this, the apostles expected every believer to have a clear testimony as to whether he had received the Spirit or not (Acts 19:2; Gal. 3:2).
But in Ephesians 5:18, Paul exhorted the Ephesian Christians (who had already been baptized in the Spirit) to be continuously filled with the Spirit (literal translation).
Those who walk in the Spirit in this continuous fulness could be referred to as men and women full of the Spirit. But this is something for others to notice, not for us to testify to. When Moses’ face shone with the glory of God, others saw it, but he himself was ignorant of it (Exod. 34:29, 30).
To be full of the Spirit is to be full of the Spirit of Christ, and it is by the fruit of Christ-likeness in our character that others will know that we are Spirit-filled. There is no need for us to testify concerning this, for our lives will speak louder than our words.
Paul’s Example There is perhaps no clearer description of the Spirit-filled life than in Paul’s statement in Galatians 2:20, “I am crucified with Christ. It is no longer I but Christ that lives in me”.
For what is the purpose of the fulness of the Spirit if it is not to reproduce the life of Jesus in us? And so the measure in which our self-life is crucified and the Christ-life manifested in us, is the true measure of our experience of the fullness of the Holy Spirit.
Paul told the Galatian Christians, “Brethren, I beseech you, be as I am” (Gal. 4:12). He was one who could ask others to follow his example. He did not have to say, “Don’t look at me, but look at Christ”.
He repeatedly urged others to look at the example of his own life and to follow him as he followed Christ (1 Cor. 4:16; Phil. 3:17). He had such a satisfying Christian experience, that even when in chains, he could tell King Agrippa,
“In spite of all that you have in the world, O king, I only wish that you could be as I am (spiritually)” (Acts 26:29). He was not boasting, for he said elsewhere, “By the grace of God, I am what lam” (1 Cor. 15:10).
Let us then look at the life and ministry of the Apostle Paul to see some of the characteristics of the Christ- life. We shall consider eight passages from Scripture where Paul describes his life and service, using this very same phrase, “J am”.
We shall look first at the characteristics of Spirit-filled service and then at the characteristics of the Spirit-filled life.
Spirit-filled Service There are four things that 1 would like to mention concerning Spirit-filled service, from the words of the Apostle Paul.
A Love-slave First of all, Spirit-filled service is the service of a love slave. In Acts 27: 23, Paul says, “…the God whose I am and whom 1 serve”. He was a love slave of his God. He retained no right to his own life.
He had given everything to his Master. The only proper basis for our consecration is a recognition of the fact that we belong wholly to God in the first place.
Giving ourselves to God out of gratitude for what He has done for us, though good in itself, is not the true basis for Christian consecration.
Love for Christ can be the impelling motive in our service for the Lord. But the basis on which we should dedicate our lives to God is the fact that He has purchased us on the Cross. We are therefore now God’s own property and have no right to ourselves.
And so, when a person gives his entire life to God, he is not doing God a great favour. No! He is only returning to God what he had stolen from Him.
If I were to steal a man’s money and later, convicted of my sin, were to return it to him, I would certainly not be doing that man a favor. I would go to him as a repentant thief.
And that is the only proper attitude in which we can approach Cod when we go to give out lives to Him. God has purchased us. When we recognize that, we arrive at the only proper basis for consecration.
Paul was a love slave of the Lord. Like the Hebrew slave, who could go free in the seventh year of his service, but chose to continue in that service because he loved his master (Exod. 21:1-6), Paul served his Lord.
He was not a hired servant, who worked for wages, but one who served without any rights of his own. The service of a love-slave is beautifully summed up in the following poem:
‘I’m but a slave!
1 have no freedom of my own,
I cannot choose the smallest thing,
Nor e’en my way.
I’m a slave!
Kept to do the bidding of my Master;
He can call me night or day.
Were I a servant, I could claim wages Freedom, sometimes anyway.
But I was bought
Blood was the price my Master paid for me,
And I am now His slave –
And evermore will be.
He takes me here, He takes me there,
He tells me what to do;
I just obey, that’s all –
I trust Him too.”
This is what it means to be a love slave. God is looking for those who are so yielded to Him, that they are always looking to Him to show them what He wants them to do, and not busy doing what they feel they should do for God.
A slave does not go around doing whatever he feels like. No. The slave asks, “Master, what do you want me to do?” And he does what he is told. The Bible says, “The most important thing about a servant is that he does just what his master tells him to” (1 Cor. 4:2-LB).
The Lord says,
“I’m seeking for one who will wait and watch
For My beckoning Hand, My eye;
Who will work in My manner, the work 1 give,
And the work I give not, pass by.
And oh the joy that is brought to Me
When one such as this I can find,
A man who will do all My will – who is set
To study His Master’s mind.”
“I sought for a man”, the Lord once said, “but I found none” (Ezek. 22:30). He is looking for love slaves today. But He finds so few. Evangelistic Passion – not Emotional Excitement Secondly, Spirit-filled service, is a service that recognizes its debt to others.
Paul said, “I am debtor to the Greeks (civilized) and to the Barbarians (uncivilized)” (Rom. 1:14). God has given us a treasure to share with the world. We are like postmen who go on their rounds with bags full of money and money orders to be given to various people.
Such a postman remains in debt to those people until he has finished paying off each one they’re due. He may have thousands of rupees in his bag, but not one paisa of it is his. He is a debtor.
The Apostle recognized a similar debt when God entrusted him with the message of the gospel. He knew it had to be given out. And he also knew that he would remain in debt to others until he had given them the message of salvation.
After twenty-five years spent in preaching the good news, Paul still says, “I am a debtor ”, and he tells the Roman Christians that he is now ready to come to Rome to clear his debt to the people of Rome. Notice the three “I am”s of Paul in Romans 1:14-16; “lam debtor …lam ready… am not ashamed to preach the gospel”.
Spirit-filled service is outgoing. Recognizing its debt to others, it is always ready to go and discharge that debt. The evidence of the Spirit’s fulness and the beauty of the Christ-life is seen not in thrilling emotional experiences but in a passion in the heart which says (as Mrs. F.C. Durham has so wonderfully put it):
“I am Thy slave, Thy, bondslave; nevermore Will
I will be free from this fierce urge within,
To spread from race to race, and shore to shore
The joyful news of pardon for man’s sin.
Give me the souls of men, or else I die,
Give me the love that counteth not the cost,
Give me faith in all barriers to defy,
Give me the joy of bringing home the lost”
Yes. Spirit-filled service has an evangelistic passion and is perpetually ongoing. It is concerned with the needs of others and does not just consider its own satisfaction. Christ Himself never once sought His own satisfaction (Rom. 15:3).
It needs to be emphasized in our day that the Spirit’s fullness and His gifts are not given merely for our emotional satisfaction. Much less are they given for exhibition to others. “Exhibitionism is common to the kindergarten”, says Dr. Tozer.
God wants us to be spiritually mature, and when we are, our passion will be neither emotionalism nor exhibitionism but evangelism.
Dr. E. L. Cattell, in his excellent book, The Spirit of Holiness, says that there are five perils in emotionalism, of which we need to be aware. I have found these very helpful myself, and list them below:
(1) The peril of losing sincerity in emotional form – feeling that God is not present in a meeting until that meeting has been worked up to a certain emotional pitch and a certain noise level!
We recognize God’s presence by faith and not by feelings, for God dwells not in our emotions but in our spirits.
(2) The danger of seeking emotional excitement instead of God Himself. Ecstasy becomes the god of some Christians.
(3) The peril of adverse witness when emotional expression is not kept under control. We satisfaction. Christ Himself never once sought His own satisfaction (Rom. 15:3).
It needs to be emphasized in our day that the Spirit’s fullness and His gifts are not given merely for our emotional satisfaction. Much less are they given for exhibition to others.
“Exhibitionism is common to the kindergarten”, says Dr. Tozer. God wants us to be spiritually mature, and when we are, our passion will be neither emotionalism nor exhibitionism but evangelism.
Dr. E. L. Cattell, in his excellent book, The Spirit of Holiness, says that there are five perils in emotionalism, of which we need to be aware. I have found these very helpful myself, and list them below:
(1) The peril of losing sincerity in emotional form – feeling that God is not present in a meeting until that meeting has been worked up to a certain emotional pitch and a certain noise level! We recognize God’s presence by faith and not by feelings, for God dwells not in our emotions but in our spirits.
(2) The danger of seeking emotional excitement instead of God Himself. Ecstasy becomes the god of some Christians.
(3) The peril of adverse witness when emotional expression is not kept under control. We shouldn t nauseate others by parading our piety before them. God is a God of order and He never calls us to go against principles of decency and order in our meetings.
And we shouldn’t call other people unspiritual just because they don t accept our crudities. Grace accepts torture, but it never tortures others.
(4) The danger of wasting our energies. William James, in his classic work on habit, says that it is harmful to submit to emotional experiences without giving them appropriate modes of expression in life.
For example, if you listen to a musical concert and are deeply stirred by it, you should let that emotional feeling find expression in some kind of action, like visiting your grandmother the next morning.
In the spiritual realm too, it is extremely harmful to work up our emotions with thrilling experiences, if we don t simultaneously give expression to them by going out to meet the spiritual and physical needs of others.
(5) The peril of false holiness. Satan can sidetrack us through emotional thrills. If you have offended your wife or some other person. God will want you to apologize to her/him before fellowship with God can be restored in your life.
But Satan can give you such a nice feeling in a high-pitched emotional meeting or in a “release in tongues”, that he can deceive you into believing that you are filled with the Spirit – when you obviously cannot be, for the main issue has not yet been settled.
It may be more spectacular and less humiliating for you to go and speak in tongues than to ask forgiveness from that wounded individual. But God expects you to do the latter first. Otherwise, Satan has fooled you with an illusive holiness.
I am not devaluing our emotions. God has created us with them and He does not want us to be like stones. But let us not forget that Spirit-filled service is always outgoing, thinking of its debt to others, and not just satisfying itself with experiences in the emotional realm.
We must also remember two important facts:
- Any experience received in an emotionally tense meeting may have been merely self-induced, and not from God at all.
- Any experience that makes a person lose control of himself is certainly not from God.
God does not want us to live depending on our feelings. He wants us to live by faith. This is why God sometimes allows us to feel spiritually dry. Such feelings of dryness are not always an indication of sin in the life.
They are often God’s attempts to shake us out of our dependence on feelings. We need to walk carefully in these days, for the Devil is leading many astray through an over-emphasis on emotions.
If we want to be delivered from Satan’s snares, let us remember that the beauty of the Christ-life is seen in an outgoing life.
Human Insufficiency Thirdly, Spirit-filled service is a service that is conscious of human insufficiency. Notice Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 10:1, “J am base among you” – or, in other words, “I don’t have an impressive personality”.
Tradition tells us that the Apostle Paul was only 4 feet 10 inches tall. He was bald and beset by an eye disease. He did not have a film star-like personality. The success of his labors did not depend on any human factor, for there was nothing impressive about his appearance or his speech.
Concerning his preaching, Paul writes to the Corinthians, “I was with you in fear and much trembling” (1 Cor. 2:3). When he preached, he felt conscious of his weakness, rather than of the power of God flowing through him.
This is a Spirit-filled service – for, remember, that a church was established in heathen Corinth as a result of Paul’s preaching.
When the Spirit of God speaks through a man, the man himself is not usually conscious of being God’s mouthpiece. I’m always wary of those folk who are so sure, when they stand in the pulpit, that God is speaking through them (and who are not hesitant to say so).
My experience with such people has been that God has never spoken through them at all. They’ve just had conceited ideas of being prophetic voices. The man through whom God speaks is usually not conscious of that fact at all.
The Apostle Paul says in one of his writings, “I think I am giving you counsel from God’s Spirit when I say this” (1 Cor. 7:40-LB). He was not sure whether God was speaking through him.
Yet we know that it was God’s Voice, for what Paul wrote has been included in Scripture. But Paul himself was unaware of it.
Yes, Spirit-filled service is one that is conscious of human insufficiency. As Paul says, When I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor. 12:10). The Spirit-filled servant of God goes again and again to God, like the man in the parable, saying, “I have nothing to give others.
Please give me the living bread” (Luke 11:5-8). The Lord’s servant is perpetually conscious of his own insufficiency.
Let us not have any mistaken ideas of Spirit-filled service. It has no great awareness of God’s power but on the contrary to fear and uncertainty. It is only long after the labors are all over that on looking back there will be the assurance that God did indeed work through us.
Fulfilling Our Calling Fourthly, a Spirit-filled service is a service that fulfills God’s specific calling. In Colossians 1:23, 25, Paul says, “I am made a minister”; and in 1 Timothy 2:7, “J am ordained an apostle” – ordained by the nail-pierced Hands of Jesus, and not by any earthly ritual.
God called Paul to be an apostle. This calling was given to him, as he himself says in Colossians 1:25. It was God’s gift – not something that he had achieved or earned through his faithfulness. He also says in the same verse that this calling was given to him for others.
It was a stewardship entrusted to him by God for the work of building up the Church.
God has a specific calling for each of us. It is futile to ask God to make us into something that He has not called us to be – for the Holy Spirit decides what gift each of us should have. Paul was called to be an apostle.
But not everyone has such a calling. What we do need to seek God’s face about is for power to do that to which he has called us. “Take heed to the ministry which you have received in the Lord, that you fulfil it”, was Paul’s advice to Archippus (Col. 4:17).
God does not put square pegs into round holes. He knows what His Church needs at a particular time in a particular place, and He prepares each of us, (if we are submissive) for a specific task – which may be quite different from what we ourselves want to do.
“Is everyone an apostle? Of course not. Is everyone a preacher? No. Are all teachers? Does everyone have the power to do miracles? Can everyone heal the sick? Of course not. Does God give all of us the ability to speak in languages we’ve never learned (tongues)? …
No” (1 Cor. 12;29, 30-LB). But God has placed each of these gifts in the Body of Christ. The important thing for us is to recognize what our gifts and calling are and to exercise that gift and fulfill that calling.
Spirit-filled service is a service that fulfills that specific calling that God gives us. If there is one gift that the New Testament specifically encourages us to seek, it is the gift of prophecy (1 Cor. 14:39).
This is perhaps the most needed gift in the church today. A prophetic ministry is one that rebukes, corrects, challenges, enlightens, encourages, and builds up (1 Cor. 14:3).
We need to pray that God will give us prophets in our churches, who will speak the truth of God, without fear or favor – men of a different caliber from the professional religious scribes, who are more interested in their salary, status, and popularity.
May the Lord help us each one to seek His face earnestly to find out what His calling is.
The Spirit-filled Life Let us look at four characteristics of the Spirit-filled life – again from the life of the Apostle Paul.
Perfect Contentment The Spirit-filled life is, first of all, a life of perfect contentment. In Philippians 4:11, Paul says, “In whatever state I am, I am content”. And such contentment brings with it fulness of joy and peace.
Hence Paul speaks of joy and peace in verses 4 and 7 of the same chapter. We can praise God only when we are perfectly content with all His dealings with us.
If we believe in a God Who is sovereign and Who can therefore make everything that befalls us work together for our good, then we can be truly content in all circumstances.
Then we can praise the Lord, like Habakkuk, even when the trees in our garden don’t bear fruit when our flock dies, and when we have suffered heavy financial loss – or in any situation.
Ephesians 5:18- 20, indicates that the result of the infilling of the Holy Spirit is an outflow of praise to God. The Apostle Paul could rejoice even when he was locked up in prison, with his feet in the stocks (Acts 16:25).
He was content even there and found nothing to complain about. This is one of the first marks of the Spirit-filled life.
When murmuring is found in a Christian, it is an indication that he, like the Israelites who murmured against God in the wilderness, has still not entered the promised land of victory.
Growth in Holiness Secondly, the Spirit-filled life is a life of growth in holiness. As a man’s own life increases in holiness so does his consciousness of the absolute holiness of God.
The two go together. In fact, the latter is one of the tests of whether a person really has the former. Twenty-five years after his conversion, Paul says, ‘7 am the least of the apostles” (1 Cor. 15:9).
Five years subsequently, he says, ‘7 am less than the least of all the saints” (Eph. 3:8). Still a year later he says, ‘7 am (notice, it is not “I was’, but “I am”) the chief of sinners” (1 Tim. 1:15).
Do you see his progression in holiness in those statements? The closer Paul walked with God, the more he was conscious of the corruption and wickedness of his own heart. He recognized that no good thing could be found in him (Rom. 7:18).
Charles Simeon once said that the principal mark of regeneration is a detesting of oneself. This is taught in Scripture too. In Ezekiel 36:26, 27, 31, God says, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you.
And I will put My Spirit within you… Then you will lathe yourselves for all the evils you did”. Only such a man will be able to fulfill the command in Philippians 2: 3 to esteem others as better than himself. Having seen his own corruption, he will no longer despise anyone else.
He will also be ready to confess failure immediately and will be willing to call sin, sin. The Spirit-filled man does not merely seek to give others the impression that he is growing in holiness, but will actually be doing so.
He will not testify of experiences and try to convince others of his theology of sanctification. He will have such holiness in his life that others will come to him, of their own accord, and ask him the secret of his life.
It makes no difference whether our doctrine of holiness is Calvinistic, Arminian, or Wesleyan. True holiness comes only to the man who seeks after it with all his heart and not to the one who has merely the correct teaching in his bead.
Take the example of two godly men with diverse doctrines of sanctification, who lived in the 18th century – David Brainerd and John Fletcher. Brainerd was perpetually bemoaning his sinfulness and his lack of devotion to God.
Fletcher, on the other hand, felt that he had been entirely sanctified and thereby purged completely of self-centeredness. Who was actually the holier of the two? I believe that both could have been equally saintly men, despite the radical difference in the way they looked at themselves.
Their different temperaments and their differing understanding of the doctrine of sanctification accounted for their differing estimate of their own hearts. Likewise with George White Field and John Wesley and with Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney.
They held different doctrines of sanctification, but they were all saintly men whom God used equally. The secret of holiness is discovered not (as some think), through a study of Greek words and tenses in the New Testament but through a wholehearted and sincere desire to please God. God looks at our hearts, not at our brains!
Growth in holiness will always be accompanied, as in Paul’s case, by an increasing consciousness of one’s own sinfulness in the sight of God.
A Crucified Life Thirdly, the Spirit-filled life is a life that is crucified. Paul said, “J am crucified with Christ” (Gal. 2:20).
We have already seen something of the meaning of the Cross in the last two chapters.
We have seen that the way of the Cross is the way that leads to the fullness of the Spirit. But every time the Cross leads to the Spirit, the Spirit leads back to the Cross. The Spirit and the Cross are inseparable.
The Cross is a symbol of weakness, shame, and death. The Apostle Paul had fears, perplexities, sorrows, and tears in his life (See 2 Cor. 1:8; 4:8; 6:10; 7:5). He was considered a fool and a fanatic.
He was often treated like dirt and garbage by others (1 Cor. 4:13). All this is not incongruous with the Spirit’s fullness. On the contrary, the Spirit-filled man will find God leading him farther and farther, down the pathway of humiliation and death to himself.
The Spirit-filled man is one who does not care for the honor of men. He accepts humiliation and reproach gladly. He glories in nothing but the Cross (Gal. 6:14).
He does not glory in his gifts and abilities, nor even in his deeper life experiences. He glories only in dying to himself perpetually.
The Cross is also the symbol of Divine love. God’s love for man was manifested in God dying on the Cross for men. Such love characterizes the Spirit-filled man as well.
Between him and every other person, there is a Cross on which he dies to himself in order to love the other. This is the real meaning of love.
Watchman Nee, in his booklet, Two Principles of Conduct, tells the story of two Christian farmers in China who had their fields halfway up a mountain slope and who would get up early in the morning and water their fields during the day.
Some other farmers, who had their fields lower down, came one night and dug a hole in their irrigation channels and let all the water flow down from the upper fields to the lower ones. This happened for seven days in succession and the two Christians wondered what to do.
They finally decided that as believers they should show these other farmers the love of Christ. And so they got up the next morning and watered the lower fields first, and then their own.
They put a Cross between them and the other farmers and died for their own rights on it. Those non-Christian farmers when they saw this being done for two or three days, were broken, and came to the Christians and said, “If this is Christianity, we want to know more about it”.
Jesus said that when the Holy Spirit came upon His disciples, they would receive power to be His witnesses. The word “witnessed in the original Greek, is a word, martus, from which we get the word “martyr” (It is translated as “martyr”, in Acts 22:20; and in Rev. 2:13 and 17:6).
So the literal meaning of Acts 1:8, is that when the Holy Spirit came upon the disciples, they would receive power to be martyrs – martyrs, not just in the sense of dying once on a stake, but martyrs who would die to themselves daily. And so, a Spirit-filled witness is one who lives tile crucified life.
Continuous Enlargement Fourthly, the Spirit-filled life is a life that is continuously seeking greater degrees of fullness. “J am pressing on”, says Paul, nearly thirty years after his conversion, and as he was drawing to the end of his life (Phil. 3:14). He still has not attained.
He is seeking a still greater degree of the fulness of the Spirit of God in his life and is therefore straining every spiritual muscle toward this goal. “I am not perfect (complete)”, he says in Philippians 3:12. But in verse 15, he seems to say the exact opposite:
“Let us who are perfect (complete) be thus minded”. This is the paradox of the Spirit-filled life – complete, and yet not complete; in other words, full and yet desiring a greater degree of fullness The Spirit-filled state is not a static one.
There are greater and greater degrees of fulness. The Bible says that the Holy Spirit leads us from one degree of glory to another (1 Cor. 3:18) – or, in other words, from one degree of fullness to another.
A cup can be full of water; so can a bucket; so can a tank and so can a river. But there is a vast difference in quantity between the fulness in the cup and the fulness in the river.
The newborn convert can be filled with the Spirit immediately on conversion. The Apostle Paul too was a Spirit-filled man at the end of his life. But there is a vast difference between the fulness of the newborn convert and the fulness of the mature Apostle. The former is like a full cup whereas the latter is like a full river.
The Holy Spirit is constantly seeking to enlarge our capacity so that He can fill us to a greater degree. This is where the Cross comes in. There can be no enlargement in our lives if we avoid the pathway of the Cross.
This is why the Corinthian Christians were so shallow. They gloried in gifts and ignored the Cross. And so Paul exhorts them again and again in his two epistles to them, to accept the Cross in their lives. He exhorts them to be thereby enlarged (2 Cor. 6:13).
If we accept the Cross consistently in our lives we shall find the cup becoming a bucket, the bucket becoming a tank, the tank becoming a river and the river becoming many rivers.
At each stage, as our capacitor enlarges, we shall need to be filled and filled again. Thus will be fulfilled in us the promise of the Lord Jesus, “Rivers of living water shall flow from the inmost being of anyone who believes in me (He was speaking of the Holy Spirit)” (John 7:38, 39-LB).
This also explains why Paul exhorts the Ephesian Christians to ‘be continuously being filled with the Spirit” (Eph. 5:18). Paul obviously never believed in a once-for-all experience of being filled with the Spirit.
What he is speaking of here is a continuous enlargement of capacity for greater degrees of fulness.
Paul himself accepted the Cross always. He says in 2 Cor. 4:10, “Always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body (in ever-increasing degree)”.
One aspect of the Cross that he accepted was the disciplining of his bodily appetites. The fullness of the Spirit is never a substitute for discipline and hard work. Paul still needed to pommel his body and bring it into subjection.
He says, “Like an athlete I punish my body, treating it roughly, training it to do what it should, not what it wants to” (1 Cor. 9:27- LB). He disciplined his eyes in what they read and looked at, his ears in what they listened to, and his tongue in what it spoke. He disciplined his life in every area, Thus he was enlarged.
Thank God for the crises He gives us in our lives. Let us not forget that every crisis must lead to a process. Christ is not only the Door, He is also the Way. If we enter through the narrow gate, we have to walk the narrow way.
Let us never be guilty of emphasizing the crisis to the exclusion of the process. The new birth is a crisis, but spiritual life in the present tense is the important thing, not just the memory of a date in the past. Some are unable to remember the date when the crisis of the new birth took place.
But we don’t say that a man is dead merely because he can’t remember his birthday! And yet, alas, to some Christians, the testimony of an experience is the only test of life!
In relation to the fullness of the Spirit too, the important thing is the present tense reality of it, manifested in Christlike living and service. The memory of an experience in the past, however wonderful, is by itself of no avail.
God is looking for men and women who will never be content with mere experiences and “blessings”, but who will take up the Cross daily and follow Jesus and thus manifest in their lives and in their service the reality of those words, “It is no longer I, but Christ that lives in me”. This, and this alone is the Spirit-filled life.
“Not I, but Christ, be honored, loved, exalted,
Not I, but Christ, be seen, be known and heard;
Not I, but Christ, in every look and action,
Not I, but Christ, in every thought and word.
Not I, but Christ, in lowly silent labor,
Not 1, but Christ, in humble earnest toil;
Christ, only Christ, no show, no ostentation;
Christ, none but Christ, the gatherer of the spoil.
Christ, only Christ, no idle word e’er falling,
Christ, only Christ, no needless bustling sound;
Christ, only Christ, no self-important bearing,
Christ, only Christ, no trace of I be found.
Not 1, but Christ, my every need supplying,
Not I, but Christ, my strength and health to be;
Christ, only Christ, for spirit, soul, and body,
Christ, only Christ, live then Thy life in me.
Christ, only Christ, ere long will fill my vision,
Glory excelling soon, full soon I’ll see;
Christ, only Christ, my every wish fulfilling,
Christ, only Christ, my all in all to be.
Oh, to be saved from me, dear Lord,
Oh, to be lost in Thee,
Oh, that it may be no more I,
But Christ that lives in me.”
Amen and Amen