Be Filled with the Spirit, Part 1

Ephesians 5:18

Let's look together at Ephesians 5:18 to 21, you follow in your Bible as I read, "And be not drunk with wine, in which is excess, but be filled with the Spirit, Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, Giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God."

Let's pray together. Father thank You for this great word and Lord I feel somewhat inadequate ah, even to deal with such a grandiose concept as the filling of the Spirit, and yet I know Lord how practical and essential it is and that it is indeed a command, and so Lord give Your wisdom as I speak and wisdom to those who hear that we might be obedient and comprehend the fullness of this that You say to us, in Christ's name. Amen.

Now you will remember if you've been with us for any time that we are discussing the Book of Ephesians verse by verse and have been for a long time now but, we have, have found out that we are to walk a worthy walk, we are to live a certain lifestyle, that God has defined for us the perimeters of our living very, very clearly and we've gone through 4, 5, and 6 or 4 and 5 of Ephesians and we'll go through chapter 6 in the future, and we find that all of these chapters really describe how the Christian is to live. And the key to how the Christian lives in right here in chapter 5 verse 18. Do you realize that if 5:18 was not in the Book of Ephesians the Book of Ephesians could never be fulfilled? If this one verse was deleted from this Book everything in it would be legalistic. If this one Book was removed you would be the great engine, the great vehicle described in chapters 1 to 3, you would still have your road map in chapters 4, 5, and 6 but you wouldn't have any fuel to get you going anywhere. You'd be functioning completely in the flesh apart from this beautiful statement in chapter 5 verse 18, "Be filled with the Spirit." That is the heart of the whole matter, that is the energy of the worthy walk, that is the key to living the Christian life, that's at the bottom of all of it, you can never walk in humility, you can never walk in unity, you can never walk different that the world walks, you can never walk in light, you can never walk in love, and you can never walk in wisdom unless you are energized by the Spirit of God. The life of God in the soul is the only thing that can produce that kind of living, you see. If that weren't true then unregenerated people could live like that.

And so this is the heart of the matter in verse 18, it opens up to us horizons of tremendous understanding. And by the way I guess we'd have to say that ah, if you don't obey chapter 5 verse 18 you're the biggest fool of all. In verse 15 it says, "See that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but as wise." And the biggest fool of all would be the one who tried to walk a humble oneness, a unique kind of life, walk in love, walk in light, walk in wisdom, fulfill all the will of God and do it in the flesh, that's the biggest fool of all. A Christian must do it in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Now what does it mean to be filled with the Spirit? Well many people are confused about this. Some people think it means you get some divine zap, some people think that this is what happens when you speak in tongues and you know there are people who say, well have you been filled with the Spirit, they sort of isolate you, they have the zapped and the unzapped, you know if you've had some kind of ecstatic experience you've got it, if you haven't you don't, and there's a lot of you know, variation and discussion about this concept. There are people on the one hand who say it's when you get some ecstatic zap and there are people on the other hand who approach it very stoically and simply recognize it as ah, the idea that the Holy Spirit is present and so forth and so on, it has very little impact on anything practical. But both are wrong, it is not a stoic kind of thing and it is not an ecstatic zap, it's not either one. The filling of the Spirit is a very profound reality and we want to understand it as best we are able, as we share this morning.

Now let's look at three points just to give you a framework for what we're going to say. We are going to look at the contrast, the command and the consequences. Now we've already looked at the contrast, we're going next time to look at the consequences so today we're going to focus on the command itself, and the command is, "Be filled with the Spirit." That's the command. Now let me just mention the contrast for you that may have forgotten or may not have been here.

First the contrast in verse 18, "Be not drunk with wine, in which is asotia," or dissipation or debauchery or hopeless incurable sickness, and that's what that leads to, "but be filled with the Spirit." There is the contrast between drunkenness and being filled with the Spirit, and we've tried to point out to you in the last couple of weeks that drunkenness was a method used in pagan religions to induce a supposed communion with the deities. In other words it isn't a social issue that he's talking about primarily although that certainly is  true ah, before you were a Christian you might get drunk when you become a Christian you shouldn't, it's true in a social element, but it's a theological issue that, that he really focuses on. The pagans would be drunken and thus they felt they would induce a high level of religious consciousness and commune with the gods, and I mean when they got drunk they really got drunk, they would even vomit so that they could drink more, and we have even discovered archaeologically that there are places where they had pits for just that purpose. They would induce a, a stupidity of drunkenness that they believed would elevate them to commune with the gods, and the Apostle Paul is contrasting that very starkly by saying, you commune with God, you go through your worship of psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, you live your lives of wives submitting to husbands and husbands loving wives etc. You do all of this not as it is induced by drunkenness but as it is induced by the filling of the Spirit of God, you see. Completely different. Paul points out that we find our joy and we find our exhilaration and we find our communion with God, we find the basis of our worship, the motivation for our liturgy if you want to call it that from being filled with the Holy Spirit. They are evil, vile, orgiastic, debauched, liturgy of, of ah, evil music connected with evil dancing connected with sexual immorality was induced by drunkenness. Our true worship, our beautiful music, our communion with God is brought on by the power of the Holy Spirit. And so the, the stark contrast between the drunken orgiastic worship of the pagan systems and the Spirit filled beauty of the worship of the true   God is in the mind of Paul, and he's saying, as a Christian you've got to leave that stuff and you've got to come to this point, that you're filled with the Spirit.

Now this is a common contrast in the Scripture, look at Luke 1:15 for example. It says in Luke 1:15 regarding John the Baptist, and we discussed this at length in an earlier message, "For he shall be great in the sight of the Lord," and here is one of the things that will characterize him, "shall drink neither wine nor strong drink; but he shall be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother's womb." There's that same contrast, he won't be a drinker, he will be Spirit filled, he will not have his religious attitudes induced by wine and strong drink but by the Spirit of God, he will not be influenced on the inside b drinking but by the Spirit of God, he will not be motivated by what alcohol does to his brain but by what the Spirit of God does to his mind. In other words he will be guided by the Spirit of God in contrast to that which guides so many people in drunkenness.

Look at Acts chapter 2 and we find the same contrast again, on the day of Pentecost you'll remember it says in chapter 2 verse 4 that "They were all filled with the Holy Spirit," they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, "and they began to speak with other languages, as the Spirit gave them utterance." And here were the disciples and they began to speak all these languages and it even names the languages over in verse 9, it lists the various languages again in verse 10 and verse 11, and they were speaking all of these wonderful works of God in languages they'd never learned, the Lord miraculously gave them the ability to do that and, and the point was when they were filled with the Spirit at the day of Pentecost this is what happened. So being filled with the Spirit they did this, but the people said, in verse 12, "They were all amazed, perplexed, and they said, What meaneth this? And others, mocking, said, These men are full of (gleukous) new wine." This is just another pagan orgy, this is just a typical Gentile pagan kind of religious activity, see. They were seeing it and to a Jew it would be a very distasteful thing, of Gentiles who induced their worship through drunkenness, this is just that, they have stooped to a Gentile kind of worship, they have stooped to a paganism, they expressed their worship to God in this unacceptable manner, and it's a mocking thing because they use the word gleukous they're, they're, they're full of new wine. In other words ah, even the mildest stuff, they can't restrain themselves from getting drunk on even the weak stuff and here it is early in the morning. In other words they must have set out to get drunk.

Gleukous was fresh wine; it would have a minimum amount of fermentation and would be mixed with water as we saw in our last couple of studies. And they say here it is early in the morning and they're already bombed on the fresh kind of wine, they're mocking them, boy they've induced this drunkenness, these are typical pagan activities, and so they mock them. And then they say who wants to listen to what they have to say? Peter stands up and says in verse 15, "These are not drunk, as you suppose." This is not drunkenness; this is the filling of the Spirit. But the world in its stupidity sometimes doesn't know the difference between the expression of a pagan worship and that that is real. And so the comparison is used several times.

Now let's go back to Ephesians 5:18 and we find the same comparison again, "Be not drunk with wine, in which is excess, but be filled with the Spirit." And I'm sure Paul has in his mind the account at Pentecost, I'm sure he's looking back and thinking of that very thing, the day when the apostles and disciples were first filled with the Spirit of God they did things which looked to others as if they were drunk and exercising a pagan style of worship. And so there's the contrast.

Now let's look at the command, and we're just going to spend our time on this and it's just a tremendous truth. Many of you know this and you've studied it before but many of you haven't and many of you are new and, and so we want to take our time and share these thoughts with you, just a tremendously rich command. Look at it in verse 18, "Be not drunk with wine, in which is excess, but be filled with the Spirit."

Now what he's saying is that this is something that I demand of you, this is a command. There is in the Greek language an indicative mode which is the statement of fact and there is an imperative mode which is a command, this is an imperative. Be, being, kept filled with the Spirit. This is a command for the believer, this is not an option, this is not a suggestion, God rarely if ever has made a suggestion. He makes commands and He states facts, He doesn't deal in suggestions. In fact there are very few optional things with God, this is not one, this is a command. And you know it concerns me deeply that many so called Christians never know what it is to be filled with t he Spirit. Do you know there are, there are some Christians who are never really committed to this principle, and all of us at some times in our lives fail to fulfill it, but it is no less a command. And you know I really worry about this because today you know there's a lot of material coming out and there's a lot of literature and there's a lot of discussion about the fact that you can be a Christian and not even bother with any of these things, there's a sort of a new category in the middle. Over here you've got the natural man, unsaved, unregenerate, on the way to hell, over here we've got the spiritual Christian loves the Word, loves the Lord, obeys the Lord, walks in the truth, walks in the commandments, walks in the light, and in the middle you've got this new box that you can stick people, they're the saved and indifferent, you know? They got them out of hell but they're never going to get them into much kind of Christianity, I mean they're just sort of the uncommitted ah, I, I ah, read yesterday an article by a prominent theologian who says, these are the people who ah, who are saved but never walk in the light. I don't understand that myself, I can't quite comprehend that if you were saved out of darkness into the Kingdom of His dear Son and if we walk in the light as He is in the light I don't know what that's supposed to mean. But anyway what he was saying was, they come‑they're saved but they never get out of the darkness, they're saved but nothing ever happens and we've made a little convenient box, we've got the natural and the spiritual and the carnal, we just jam everybody in there and we can say, well you're all right, you're saved, you're going to go to heaven, it's okay if you don't choose to really get on with the Christian life uhm, you know you'll still make it all right, you're not going to lose your salvation, you'll go waltzing into heaven and you just won't have as big a place as the rest of us but that'll be all right, it's heaven after all. And you have that very comfortable category, but you know that isn't the way it is, with God. The Lord doesn't say, now if you want to be one of the committed then do this, if you just want to be in the carnal box it's an option, He doesn't deal like that this is a standard that God established, and I don't think the Lordship of Christ is optional, I think it's essential to saving faith. And I don't want to pile people up in a comfortable little box that says you can be a Christian and not do anything.

Listen, the Lord has commanded us to be filled with His Spirit and anything less than that is flat out flagrant disobedience, and if your life is characterized by that kind of disobedience First John says you're not a Christian no matter what you think. So this is critical people. True Christians whose faith is real will not be content to deny the Lordship of Christ, true Christians who faith is real will not be content to deny the filling of the Spirit of God, they will not be content to live comfortably in a carnal box where they can just sort of say, well I'm one of those who doesn't choose to go to step two. No. I think this is a command and I think it's a command because God says it binds itself on every believer, and the only thing to do with a command of God is obey it.

Now let's talk specifically about the meaning of filling. What does it mean? Okay, what does it mean? I'm going to give you several thoughts here so I think you'll find this fascinating. And I want you to get the basics clear, all right? So let's start at the ground floor, okay? First point, every Christian possesses the Holy Spirit in all His fullness, all right? Every Christian possesses the Holy Spirit.

Recently I heard a Christian say, oohh, you know I've been a Christian for a long time and I just found out that I didn't have the Holy Spirit. And since I, I asked God, He gave me the Holy Spirit everything has changed. Yeah, well you've been a Christian a long time but you didn't have the Holy Spirit? Well you know bless that person's heart, I heard what they were saying and I understand it was a, you know that they‑what they discovered in their life was what obedience will do for you not getting the Holy Spirit. The point is this, every Christian from the moment he believes possesses the Holy Spirit, there is no such thing in existence as a Christian without the Holy Spirit. You see it is the life of God in you that, that is the redeeming reality. When you become a child of God, God takes up residence by His Spirit within you, there's no such thing as a Christian without the Spirit of God.

Let me show you that, look at Romans 8:9, Romans 8:9, I'm going to try to approach it from maybe a little different angle, but Romans 8:9 is a fascinating Scripture. By the way, most of the time that the word carnal or fleshly is used in the Bible it's used to speak of unsaved people not Christians. And here's a good illustration, "Carnal mind" he says in verse 7 "is enmity against God; is not subject to the law of God, neither can be. So, then, they that are in the flesh (or carnality) can't please God." Here carnal means unsaved; here he's saying if you're carnal you're unsaved. People say, well I'm just a carnal Christian. The reality may be you could be a carnal Christian a la First Corinthians 3 or you could be carnal period, a la Romans 8 and not even saved at all. So if you, if you're comfortable with your carnality you'd better examine yourself to see whether you're really saved, because it's just as possible that you're carnal, Romans 8 rather than carnal First Corinthians 3. There can be Christians who act carnally but carnality is mostly characteristic of unbelieving people, they're there are at enmity against God, they are not subject to the law of God, they can't be subject to the law of God, they can't please God. But verse 8, "You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit," If you're a Christian you're in the Spirit, if you're a Christian you're not in the flesh. Now look at the end of‑then he says, "if so be that the Spirit of God dwells in you." In other words, you are, when you're a Christian you are in the Spirit, because the Spirit of God dwells in you, and then at the end of the verse, "Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his." Do you see? If you don't have the Holy Spirit it's not that you're carnal, it's not that you haven't gotten Him yet, you're not saved. If anybody doesn't have the Spirit of Christ he doesn't belong to Christ, transverse, if anyone belongs to Christ he has the Spirit of Christ, do you see? It's a simple statement. The end of verse 9, "Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. But if Christ be in you," verse 10, see? In other words if you're a Christian with Christ in you, you possess the Holy Spirit. I just want you to get that from the very beginning, some of you are new Christians and you might not understand that. You as a Christian possess the Spirit and He's there in fullness, He's there in totality there's no doses, you don't get Him in bits and pieces, you don't have to say, oh God, I've heard people say, give me more of Your Spirit. There isn't anymore to get, He doesn't come in units, He's there totally. Every believer possesses the Spirit.

Now look at First Corinthians 12:13, another important verse dealing with the same reality. First Corinthians chapter 12 verse 13, now here again we have the same emphasis and it's quite interesting to me to know that the Corinthians were carnal Christians. Their carnality was the carnality of, of the Christian, they were Christians living like they weren't Christians in many cases, and I'm sure some of them weren't Christians at all they were just faking it. But he says to those, even though they were sinful people, even sinful Christians he says, "For by one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Greeks, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink one Spirit." The word into is best left out. We have been all made to drink one Spirit. All believers have taken in the Spirit; all believers have been baptized into the body of Christ. And beloved let me hasten to tell you that the baptism of the Spirit is not an experience, the baptism of the Spirit is non-experiential, you don't feel it, you don't know it happens, you can't experience it, nothing happens to you physically speaking when that occurs, because here it tells us that by one Spirit were we baptized into the body of Christ, the baptism of the Spirit of God is the act by which the Holy Spirit puts you into the body of Christ when you believe, it is a theological reality, it is not an experience it is an act by which Christ, the baptizer through the agency of the Spirit places you in the body. So when you're saved you're put in the body of Christ, and then the end of the verse says, "and you drink the Spirit." That is you take in the Holy Spirit. Every believer, it says it right there, we were all baptized and we have been all made to drink one Spirit, there's no Christian who hasn't taken the Spirit, none, we all possess the Holy Spirit.

Now go back. First Corinthians 6:19, to chapter 6 verse 19,/now here he's telling the Corinthians about their, their immorality, they were committing fornication, they were going to bed with harlots, ah, they were doing just rotten, evil, vile things, and he says to them, "What?" And you expect him to say, why don't you get the Holy Spirit, so you can get your life cleaned up? But he doesn't say that. He doesn't say, what you Christians need is the Holy Spirit. Well if you'd just get the Holy Spirit you wouldn't have this problem, no he doesn't say that. On the contrary he says this, "What? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you," he says, look, he doesn't say, if you'd just get the Holy Spirit you wouldn't act like that, he says, you'd better stop acting like that because you're defiling the Holy Spirit who's already there, do you see? Don't you know your body's the temple of the Holy Spirit? Don't you know you're defiling the Spirit of God who's in you?

You see even when a Christian lives in sin the Holy Spirit is still there, do you see the point? He's still there He's just defiled there. Or if you want, Ephesians 4:30 he says, "Grieve not the Spirit of God." Or First Thessalonians 5:19, "Quench not the Spirit." You can quench the Spirit, you can pour the water of your sin on His fire of holiness, you can grieve the Spirit, by the way the Spirit is He not it, He is a personality and He sorrows and He grieves and He is anguished by our sin, and He is defiled when the temple which is our body is defiled. So you see every believer possesses the Spirit, "If any man have not the Spirit, he's none of his." Every believer is baptized into the body and drinks of the Spirit, every believer is the temple of the Spirit of God. Galatians 2:20 puts it another way, he says, "For I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth (where?) in me." You see? The Spirit of Christ lives in me. Look at John chapter 7, you know when I first understood this doctrine it was the most mind boggling truth imaginable to me that the God of the universe, the very God of very God, God Himself sovereign, Almighty and majestic could take up residence in my body was an inconceivable reality to me, what a thought, and that is exactly the truth of the New Testament. In John 7:37, "In that last day, the great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried out, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture said, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water."

Now who gets the rivers of the living water? He that believes, anybody that believes, anybody that comes and says I'm thirsty and I want to drink and takes Christ gets the rivers, and what are the rivers of water? Verse 39, "This spoke he of the Spirit, whom they that believe on him should receive." Stop right there, who gets the Spirit? They that what? Believe. You see it's the simple act of saving faith that gives you the Holy Spirit, He becomes the river of living water, and He takes up permanent residence in our lives. And you can never lose that. We're not like in the Old Testament where you hear the Old Testament saints say, "Take not thy spirit from me." God doesn't do that in this age, the Spirit is a permanent resident in the life of the believer. And that's why, now listen, that's why of all the commands in the New Testament, and there are myriads of them, of all the commands in the New Testament listen to this, there is never a command to be baptized with the Spirit, never, never. There are seven references to the baptism of the Spirit in the New Testament, not one of them is in the imperative mode, not one of them is a command, you are never commanded to be baptized by the Spirit because the baptism with the Spirit is when you're placed in the body of Christ and that happens at the moment you're saved.

Second, you are never commanded anywhere in the New Testament to be indwelt by the Spirit, never, that is also a promise already guaranteed, you're never commanded to be sealed by the Spirit or kept secure, that is also a gift of God, Ephesians 1 you've already been sealed, you've already been baptized, you've already been indwelt, those are never given as commands. The command is this, Ephesians 5:18, "Be (what?) filled with the Spirit." That's different. Not indwelt, baptized, or sealed but filled. You say, well what does it mean? Well in the first place it's the very opposite of the pagan kind of activity and the pagan ecstasy, the verb means this, let me give you the verb rendering in its literal sense and then I'll show you how it works out. It means to‑the literal present tense indicative says, be, it Is a passive, be, being, kept filled with the Spirit. And the idea of be, being, kept is a constant, be, being, kept. You do