part of the purchase of the blood of
Christ.
And there isn't anything about the spirit-filled
life that is extra, or abnormal, or strange,
or queer, but it is the way Christians
are supposed to be.
Now, before you can be filled with the
spirit, you must be sure to the point
of conviction.
If you have any doubt, if somebody dropped
a doctrinal question in your mind, and left
the impression with you that you received everything
God has for you the day you received
Christ as your Savior and Lord, you'll never
get anywhere.
Now, not everybody that listens to me is
going to be filled with the spirit.
We might as well be realistic about this.
I believe in complete realism.
Salty, down-to-earth realism.
Might as well face up to it.
Not everybody that's listening is going to be
filled with the spirit.
But some are, and some do.
I thank God I wouldn't be able to
tell you what percentage, but I will be
able to tell you that every once in
a while somebody comes to me with a
shining face and says, well it happened, God
did it.
And from that time on, their lives are
transformed.
They're changed people.
Now, unless you're convinced about this, I recommend
that you don't do anything yet.
I wouldn't want people to come and kneel
down and ask God to fill them when
they weren't prepared.
That discourages a lot of people, and gets
them confused, and they go away and then
they won't come back.
And they say they're no use, and they
get a sort of discouragement on their spirit.
I don't want that.
I'd like to have you meditate on the
scriptures, read the word, and see for yourself
what God the Lord has spoken.
That's first.
Before you can be filled with the spirit,
you must be sure that you can be.
Second is, you must be sure that you
desire to be.
You say, doesn't everybody desire to be filled?
And the answer is no.
I suppose a lot more people desire to
be full, but not many desire to be
filled, as I've said.
Now, I suppose a lot of you'd like
to challenge me on this, but a preacher's
in the position where he doesn't get challenged,
at least not at the time.
And the preachers, as a result, develop a
ministerial immunity, and they say a lot of
foolish things that they can't prove, because nobody
can stop them.
But I don't want to do that.
I want to be responsible for what I've
said, and I want responsibly to declare that
before you can be filled with the spirit,
you must desire to be, and that some
people don't desire to be.
Are you sure, for instance, that you want
to be possessed by a spirit?
Now, you've heard of spirit possession, I'm sure.
But there are two kinds of spirit possession.
There is the evil spirit possession, where a
spirit takes over a human personality, as in
the days of Jesus, and makes them filthy,
or dumb, or evil.
And Jesus used to cast such spirits out,
but there were spirits, and they did possess
these persons.
But now the Holy Spirit also wants to
possess us Christians.
This spirit is like Jesus.
Do you want to be possessed by a
spirit that is like Jesus, that is pure,
and gentle, and sane, and wise, and loving?
For that's exactly what he's like.
The Holy Spirit is pure, for he's the
Holy Spirit.
He's wise, for he's the spirit of wisdom.
He's true, for he's the spirit of truth.
He's like Jesus, for he's the spirit of
Christ.
He's like the Father, for he's the spirit
of the Father.
But he wants to be lord of your
life, and he wants to possess you, so
that you no longer are in command of
the little vessel in which you sail, but
you're a passenger on board, or one of
the crew, but you're definitely not in charge.
Somebody else is in charge of the vessel.
But we don't want it to be that
way, because we were born of Adam's corrupted
flesh, and we want to boss our own
lives.
I ask you, are you sure you want
to be possessed by the blessed spirit of
the Father and the Son?
Now, do you want your personality to be
taken over by someone who's like this?
You will expect obedience to the written word.
We would like to be able to be
filled with the spirit, or full of the
spirit, and then more or less do as
we please.
But the Holy Spirit, who inspired the scriptures,
will also expect obedience to the scriptures.
And if we do not obey the scriptures,
we'll quench him.
He will have obedience, the spirit will.
People do not want to obey the Lord,
they just don't want to, so a lot
don't desire to be spirit-filled.
You see, we're as full as we actually
want to be.
This sounds like a shocking thing, but it's
true.
Everybody is as full as he wants to
be.
Everybody has as much of God as he
desires to have.
Now, he doesn't always have as much as
he prays in public that he might have,
or even in private, because sometimes there's a
fugitive impulse that comes to us.
We want the thrill of being full, but
we don't want to meet the conditions that
we have to meet, so we don't want
to be filled bad enough to be filled.
Suppose that you wanted, say, a Cadillac automobile.
Some of you have them, and some of
you want them.
But here's Brother Jones, for instance.
I don't think there ain't Joneses here, so
that'll be safe to use Jones.
Here's Brother Jones, and he'd love to have
a Cadillac.
But he's not going to buy one, and
I'll tell you why.
He doesn't want one bad enough to pay
for it.
He wants it, but he doesn't want it
bad enough to meet the terms.
You go down there, and they show you
a big black boat lying there on four
wheels, and say $6,000, $7,000.
He shrugs and goes out.
He wants it, but he doesn't want that
bad.
So he goes out and drives his Chevy.
And that's the way with the Christians.
We want to be full, but we don't
want to be full bad enough.
We'll settle for something less.
We say, Lord, we'd like to be full.
It certainly would be wonderful, but we don't
want it enough to lay down that kind
of money.
We don't want to pay the price.
We don't want to meet the cost.
Now, the Holy Spirit will expect obedience, I
say, and he will not tolerate the self
-sins.
Self-sins, what are they?
Well, they're self-love.
I have said and written, and I repeat,
that the Church is full of self-love
now.
In fact, we cultivate it.
We go to school and learn how to
put on and show off.
And God, the Holy Ghost, will never allow
that.
He won't allow it.
He'll allow some Christians to be like that,
but he'll never allow you to be like
that.
He'll never allow a Spirit-filled Christian to
be like that.
He is the Spirit that brings humility to
the heart, and that humility will be there,
or he will be quenched and grieved, and
he will not fill.
And then self-confidence.
We're very sure that we can do things,
and the Holy Spirit wants to destroy your
self-confidence.
Here, you businessmen, you make decisions.
You've got your telephone all over your desk,
your telephone's all over your desk, and you
buy and sell in big amounts, and you
make decisions, and you're proud of the fact
I run that.
I make this decision.
You go home, and you run the house,
and you run.
But there's one thing you won't run, brother.
You won't run your life after the Holy
Ghost gets control.
You won't run it anymore.
The Holy Ghost will run your life.
And the reason you're not filled and full
now is that you want to run your
life the same as you run your business.
You're the boss, and take it to your
letter.
You dictate.
Well, you'll not dictate to the Holy Ghost.
But that's the trouble with us.
We were dictators.
We want to run our lives.
We're so full of confidence, and then we're
full of self-righteousness.
We lie to God continually.
People lie to God continually.
They say, oh God, I'm a worm and
no man.
But if his wife called him a worm,
there'll be trouble at home.
He doesn't believe it.
He's lying to God.
And he gets down and says, oh Lord,
there's no good thing in me.
But if you called him a liar, his
face would turn white, and he'd say, what
do you mean?
He doesn't mean it.
He's just lying.
He says he's bad, but he doesn't believe
it.
So God wants to take all of that
out of you, my friend.
He wants to take Adam's righteousness out of
him and put another kind in, and self
-indulgence.
He wants to take all of that out,
the self-love, self-aggrandizement, the self-sins.
He wants to take them out.
Well, are you sure you want to be
treated like that?
Are you sure that you want to be
filled and possessed by that kind of a
spirit?
If you're not, you don't desire to be,
then of course you can't be, because God
is a gentleman.
The Holy Ghost is a gentleman.
He won't come in where he doesn't want
to.
Well, are you sure that you want to
be led and controlled by a spirit who
will stand in sharp opposition to the world's
easy ways?
The church in our day has become so
much like the world that you can't tell
the difference, really.
There's not very much difference.
There are a few things we don't do.
We don't drink, and most Christians now don't
smoke.
But outside of that, they do about everything
everybody else does, and they trim their income
tax, and do all sorts of things.
They take their wife out to lunch and
write it on the returns that it was
a business engagement.
And then we smile and think, no, you're
not getting away with anything, brother.
No, you're just leaking.
Your spirit's leaking.
Your soul's leaking.
Scripture says you put it in bags with
holes in it, the treasure, and we put
things in bags with holes in them.
Those are leaks.
And the Holy Ghost is a Holy Spirit,
and he will not allow crooked deals, and
he will not allow sharp, sharp shavings of
your, you've got to be honest to be
filled with the Spirit.
Do you want to be filled with the
Spirit bad enough?
Do you want to be filled with the
Spirit bad enough that you can stand against
the easy ways of the world and live
the life of a Christian, the hard life
of a Christian?
And then the Holy Spirit won't allow you
to boast or show off.
He'll never allow that.
Every time I boasted about anybody up to
now, he backslid on me.
God never allowed me to ever boast about
a convert.
He always backslid, as far as I'm able
to discover.
Every time I boasted about a crowd, he
always petered out on me.
And every time I boasted about anything, he
went to pot.
And I thank God for it, because God
won't allow that.
If I wasn't his child and his Spirit
wasn't trying to control me and wasn't succeeding
in some measure, I'd never hear from God
on it.
But as soon as I start to show
off a little bit, the Lord sets me
flat.
And that's exactly the way I want to
keep it.
And that's the way you'll be, too.
The Lord will never let you show off
nor boast.
Well, he'll take the direction of your life
away from you altogether, and he'll reserve the
right to test you and discipline you and
strip you and strip away from you many
things that are—you love them, but they're dangerous
to you—and he'll strip them away.
We want God in all this, too.
There's a philosophy abroad, you know, in Christian
circles.
I've got God in all of this, too.
Well, I find in the New Testament that
people, when they had God, didn't, as a
rule, have very much else.
They had God and they were rich, but
they didn't have much else.
And oftentimes they had to get rid of
what they had, for Christ's sake.
That's the way our fathers lived.
But in this twentieth century Western civilization, Canada
and the United States are like that together
on this.
Rich and well-to-do and having too
much, and we don't know what it is
to suffer, and our churches have become a
middle-class bourgeois kind of church, you know.
We don't know what it is to be
poor.
We don't know what it is to suffer
and lose things.
But our fathers did.
Our fathers did and we don't.
They paid the price and we won't pay
the price.
We read books on being filled, but we
won't meet the condition.
But we're all as full as we want
to be, my brethren.
You're as good a man as you want
to be.
You're not as good a man as you
think you want to be, but you're as
good a man as you really want to
be.
Because the scripture says, they that hunger and
thirst, blessed is they that hunger and thirst,
they shall be filled.
And if the hunger and thirst is there
sufficiently, they shall be filled.
And if there's a man in Toronto that's
hungering after God and isn't filled, then the
word of God is broken.
We are as full as we hunger to
be.
I say there's a fugitive impulse comes to
us sometimes.
We'd like to be like D.
L.
Moody.
We'd love to be like A.
B.
Simpson.
We want to be like Sophie the Scrub
Woman or Holy Ann or Billy Bray or
Luther, but we don't want too bad enough.
And the result is, of course, that we
just go on our middle way, mediocre way.
Well, now, are you sure you need to
be?
I've said before you can be filled, you
must be sure you can be, and you
must be sure that you desire to be,
and you must be sure that you need
to be.
Why are we interested in this whole subject
at all?
Can't you get on all right the way
you've been?
You received Jesus, you said, and you got
converted, and your sins were forgiven, and you
took a course in the New Testament somewhere,
and you know you've got eternal life, and
no man can pluck you out of God's
hand.
In the meantime, you're having a wonderful time
going to heaven.
Isn't that enough?
Why talk about all this?
Why do I preach it, and why do
you come to here?
Are you sure that you can't get along
all right the way you are, or do
you feel you just can't go on, resist
discouragement, and obey the scriptures, and understand the
truth, and bring forth fruit, and live in
victory without a greater measure of the Holy
Spirit than you know now?
If you haven't reached that place, then I
don't know that there's much I can do.
I don't think there's anything that I can
do.
I wish I could.
I wish that I could take the top
of the head of every one of you
off, and pour the holy oil of God
down into you, but I can't.
I can do only what John the Baptist
did when he pointed to Jesus and said,
Behold the Lamb of God that takes away
the sin of the world, and then he
faded out of the picture.
And after that, everybody was on his own.
He had to go to the Lord Jesus
Christ and receive help from Christ on his
own.
No man can fill me, and no man
can fill you.
We can pray for each other, but I
can't fill you, and you can't fill me.
Well, this desire must become all-absorbing.
I want you to hear this, that the
desire to be filled must become all-absorbing
in your life.
If there's anything bigger in your life than
your desire to be a spirit-filled Christian,
then you'll never be a spirit-filled Christian
until that's cured.
Never.
If there's anything bigger in your life than
your longing after God, then you will never
be a spirit-filled Christian.
Here's a young couple coming to the altar
to be married, and as the young woman
walks down the aisle to meet her bridegroom
-to-be and to take the vows of
marriage, if she should suddenly discover, or in
any way be able to discover, that there
was something bigger in his life than she,
when he asked the question, she'd say, I
will not.
She wants to know she's the biggest thing
in his life.
And any husband or wife listening to me,
if there's something bigger in your life, your
social and human life, anything bigger than that
partner, then your yearning is not going to
be a happy life.
If there's anything bigger in your spiritual life
than God, anything bigger than your yearning after
God, then you'll never be filled.
I run into Christians, they've been, they've been,
oh, for years wanting to be filled in
a vague sort of way, but the reason
they're not filled is that they've got other
things they want more, other things they want
more.
And because they want it more, they either
get it or they try to get it,
but they don't get God.
God won't come rushing into a human heart
unless he knows he's the biggest thing, and
nobody has any desire bigger than that.
When God knows that, then God relaxes and
rests and smiles and pours out this which
you now see and hear, as Peter put
it.
Now, is the desire to be filled with
the Spirit the all-absorbing thing in your
life?
If it isn't, then I repeat, we won't
ever get anywhere tonight until it is.
Now, I'll say this again, that I'm not
sure that anyone was ever filled with the
Spirit.
When I say I'm not sure, I mean
judging by the Old Testament, the New Testament,
and Christian biography and personal testimony and personal
experience.
I see I have those four or five
ways of checking.
One is the Old Testament, the other is
the New Testament, the other is post-biblical
times, Church history and biography and personal experience.
And from those four or five ways of
testing, I conclude that nobody was ever filled
with the Spirit without first having a time
of disturbance and anxiety.
The Lord's people want to be happy.
They're like little children.
They want the Lord to give them a
rattle, and they want to cackle and laugh,
and they want to be happy.
And they're going to be happy regardless.
But the Lord's happy little children very seldom
get filled with the Holy Ghost, because God
can't fill them, because they're not ready to
die to the thing they ought to die
to.
Now, he wants his children to be joyful,
but it's not the cheap happiness of the
flesh.
It is the joy of a resurrected Christ.
But before he can fill us, there must
be a disturbance there and an anxiety.
See, Adam has to die.
Remember, it's almost humorous, that Old Testament passage,
when Saul captured Agag and the sheep and
the cattle, and finally along came Samuel with
his eyes blazing, and he said, Where's Agag?
He knew Agag was a type of the
flesh.
He knew that Agag was you, me.
And he knew that Agag would never be
subject to the will of God, and couldn't
be.
And he had to get rid of old
Agag.
And he said, Where's Agag?
And he got a sword.
My father used to wet his razor and
pull the hair out and try it out
to see if it would work.
And when it got so to cut the
hair, he knew it was sharp enough.
And I can imagine Samuel with that sword,
and he pulled out a...
And when Agag saw him, he said, Verily,
the suffering of death is past.
He said, Verily, the miseries of death are
over.
But it wasn't very long until he was
hacked to pieces before the Lord.
Samuel did it.
Got rid of him.
He's a figure there, a type, an illustration
at least.
But that just got to die.
That's why I say there's got to be
disturbance and anxiety and disappointment and emptiness.
I suppose that no Christian who'd been filled
with the Spirit after his conversion, no Christian
but lost his joy.
I know I did.
I had a lot of joy when I
was first converted.
Real joy.
I was a happy Christian.
And to be filled with the Spirit, God
emptied me of my joy and showed me
that it was about half carnality and, you
know, just animal spirits.
He wanted, he wants to deliver you from
it.
Disappointment and emptiness.
Sometimes he lets people fall flat on their
faces.
And that shocks them because they thought they
were better than that.
No, you're not better than that.
You just found out how bad you were.
And then there's a despair that comes on
the heart of people.
Despair with self.
As long as you imagine you'll make it
all right, that you don't want to be
too religious, you'll make it all right.
As long as you feel that way about
it, you'll make it all right.
But it'll be a mediocre, half-dead Christianity.
And that's what's the trouble with us.
But when you reach that place of despair,
when nobody can help you, when you've gone
to the last person, you've written the last
editor and followed the last evangelist around and
hunted up the last fellow to counsel with
him, and when nobody can help you anymore
and you're in a state of inward despair,
that's when you should never despair because you're
near the kingdom.
That's getting close.
You're getting near the place where God can
do something for you.
But there comes that despair with self, that
emptying out of you, and that inner loneliness.
You know, it's part of my belief, I
think it's from the scriptures, that God wants
to get us to a place where if
we only had him, we'd still be happy.
We don't need God and something else.
It's God plus something else that's the trouble
with us.
But when we get God and satisfied so
that we can have God and nothing else,
then God gives us himself and lets us
have other things, too.
But until we reach the place where it's
only God, where there's that inner loneliness, most
of us are too social to be lonely.
If we feel a little bit lonely, we
rush to the telephone and call Mrs. Yackety,
and the next thing we know, we've used
up a half an hour, and the buns
are burnt or the biscuits.
But it's talk, talk, talk, and we rush
about, and it's social fellowship.
But there comes a place in your Christian
life, my friend, there ought to be, and
will if you'll follow on to know the
Lord, when you'll arrive at a place when
instead of Mrs. Yackety being a consolation to
you, she'll be a pest.
And she won't be able to help you
at all.
There won't be anything she can do for
you.
It's loneliness for God.
You're lonely for God, and you want God
so bad you're miserable.
You're getting close then.
You're nearer to the kingdom, and if you'll
only keep on, you'll meet God.
God will take you in, fill you, and
he'll do it in his own blessed, wonderful
way.
I would even say there comes a darkness.
The old writers talked about the dark night
of the soul, a time of emptying, a
time when it became dark all around us.
But we're too carnal to allow our hearts
to get dark with longing for God now.
We're so determined we want to be happy
that if we can't be happy by the
Holy Ghost, we'll drum up a lot of
happiness nowadays.
We're religious rock and rollers, you know, that
we're going to get happy somehow if we've
got to beat it up with a tom
-tom.
All right, you can have that kind of
happiness if you want it.
But if you don't want it, and you're
dissatisfied with it, and you want the joy
that comes out of Joseph's new tomb open
now forever, you want the joy that comes
from the Holy Ghost, the well of water
springing up within you forever, then you will
likely have a loneliness and an inner darkness
and a despair with self, and you'll wonder
what happened to you, and you'll say, am
I backsliding?
No, you're not backsliding.
You're going on with God.
And now somebody says, now, Mr. Toter, I
knew he was a legalist, and he's saying
that this disturbance and anxiety and disappointment and
despair and all that, that earns the Spirit
of God.
No, that doesn't earn the Holy Ghost.
The Holy Spirit's a gift.
He's a gift from the Father to his
children.
He's a gift from the wounded side of
Jesus to his children.
You can't pay down one red penny for
him.
You can't turn your finger over.
He's a gift 100 percent.
But what this does for you is not
to earn the Spirit, but it breaks up
your fallow ground.
It empties the vessel.
I say, you can't be full unless you're
filled.
And the trouble with us is that we
are full of too many things now, and
God can't empty us until he brings us
to that place of anxiety and emptiness and
despair with self.
Then when we're emptied of these things, then
the blessed Holy Ghost at least has an
opportunity to come in.
Luther used to take a glass of water,
or an empty glass, and fill it, and
then say, now how can that be filled?
How could I fill that with milk or
wine?
How could I fill that glass?
And say, I've got to empty it.
And then he'd pour it out into another
vessel as an object blessing.
So there must be an emptying and a
detachment from the interests of life.
Most of us are too much concerned with
life.
We're busy making a living so that we
can die of gallbladder trouble or have a
heart attack.
We're busy making a living, dashing about, keeping
our sales up and keeping our business up.
Now, it's all right, and if you're right
with God, then God will bless you.
And I'm sure he'll bless your business too.
But most of us, we don't bother too
much about that.
We expect to do it, and we just
want the Lord to have the spirit ready
when we're ready to die.
So we kill ourselves long before our time,
and the Lord takes us home to heaven,
so we think.
Brethren, is this too rough?
Am I demanding too much?
I don't think so.
I think that I'm way unchillied and cold
compared with what I ought to be.
I'm nowhere near what Finney would have been
if he were preaching, or John Wesley, or
any of the other preachers that God blessed
and honored.
Now, I'll give you four texts.
This is how to be filled with the
spirit.
Of course, up to now, I have given
you conditions, and those conditions are part of
the how.
I give you four texts I want you
to take, and an archangel from heaven couldn't
do any better than to give you the
scripture and say, believe the word of God.
First, Romans 12, 1 and 2, you know
what it is.
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies
of God that you present your bodies, that
is, present your vessels.
That's first.
A vessel that hasn't been presented will not
be filled, and a vessel that isn't presented
can't be filled.
Present your vessels.
I think that God wants us to be
intelligent.
He wants us to come to him.
If you were in a bread line somewhere
in one of some of the poor European
countries where they have to come with their
cups for their milk and come with a
basket for their bread, you stood back there
and didn't present your cup, you wouldn't get
the milk.
If you didn't present your basket, you wouldn't
get the bread.
And if you don't present your personality, you
won't get the fullness of the spirit of
God.
Present your vessel.
That's first, Romans 12, 1 and 2.
I give you another verse, Luke 11, 9,
13.
Maybe I'd better go over and read that
one, because it's quite lengthy.
It says, If a son shall ask bread
of any of you that is a father,
will he give him a stone?
Or if he shall ask a fish, will
he give him a serpent?
If he ask an egg, will he offer
him a scorpion?
The answer, of course, to all those questions
is no.
So Jesus draws his conclusion.
If ye then, being evil, know how to
give good gifts unto your children, how much
more shall your Heavenly Father give the Holy
Spirit to them that ask him?
One man who doesn't believe much in being
filled has a note on this verse, and
the note says that he thinks there was
only one person ever took advantage of that.
That's what he thinks.
There are some God's people all over the
world that have taken advantage of that.
They didn't hear that wasn't for them, and
so they believed it, and they asked, and
they got filled.
How much more shall the Holy Spirit be
given to them that ask God?
So you ask.
First you present your vessel, and then you
ask.
Now that's perfectly logical and perfectly clear.
Then next is Acts 5.32. We are
witnesses of these things, he said, and so
is also the Holy Ghost whom God hath
given to them that obey him.
There must be obedience there.
The Spirit of God won't give a disobedient
child his blessing.
He won't fill a disobedient child with the
Holy Spirit.
There must be obedience there.
Obedience to the word, obedience to the Spirit,
obedience to the risen Lord.
You must be an obedient Christian.
He gives his Holy Spirit to them that
obey him.
Then the fourth text is Galatians 3.2.
This only would I ask of you, he
said, receives ye the Holy Spirit by the
workings of the law, or by the hearing
of faith?
And of course the answer is why, by
the hearing of faith.
He said, are you so foolish then, having
begun in the Spirit?
Are you going now to be made perfect
by the flesh?
You don't get filled with the Holy Ghost
by law-keeping.
You get filled with the Holy Spirit by
faith and obedience to your Lord.
So we have these four texts, and I'm
not finished yet.
I want to say the most shocking thing
yet.
This is the thing that gets you in
trouble for saying, but I want to say
it.
Here are the four texts.
Present your body, Romans 12.1. Ask, Luke
11.
Obey, Romans 5.
And believe, Galatians 3.2. The ear is
what people don't want to hear, but I'll
stand by this, so help me God, because
I don't find in the Old Testament, nor
in the New Testament, nor anywhere in Christian
biography, nor in Church history, nor in personal
testimony, I never heard of anybody who had
ever been filled with the Holy Ghost who
didn't know it.
Now, some people would like to think they're
filled and don't know it.
One man tried to explain that.
He said, now there's such a thing as
static electricity.
He said, you take a hold of a
piece of metal, and then you take a
hold of another piece of metal, or touch
it and the sparks will fly off your
fingers.
You weren't feeling anything, but you'd been full
all the time and didn't know it.
Well, the Holy Ghost isn't electricity, and your
soul is something else.
That's bad.
That's bad illustrating.
Bad.
Because he's violating the Old Testament, he's violating
the New Testament, he's violating Christian biography, he's
violating Church history, and he's violating all the
testimony of the Spirit-filled saints.
Nobody was ever filled with the Holy Ghost
who didn't know he had been.
Two.
Nobody in the Old Testament or the New
Testament or in Church history or biography was
ever filled with the Holy Ghost who didn't
know when he was filled.
And nobody was ever filled who was ever
filled gradually.
Ah, that's where we are, this filling gradually
stuff, you know.
The devil knows if he can just say,
well, we want to be filled gradually, you
don't have to worry about it, because it's
so slow that you can always encourage yourself,
well, I'm a little fuller today than I
was yesterday, or at least I'm fuller this
year than I was last year.
Chances are you aren't.
But there's no place in the Old Testament
where it ever says the Spirit came on
him gradually.
Did you ever see it?
I never did.
The Holy Spirit came on, no, he never
came on anybody gradually.
He fell upon them, he came upon them,
he filled them, but it's an instantaneous act.
It's never a gradual filling.
But that's the place for carnal preachers to
hide, and it's a place for carnal church
members to hide.
You can tell how little by little, slowly
the sun comes up, and slowly we open
like a flower to the sunshine.
Beautiful, you know, lovely poetry, but nonsense theologically.
And nobody ever got anywhere that way.
Say, well, I'm going to be gradually filled.
No, you're not, brother.
You're going to be filled as an act,
you're not going to be filled.
I'm sure of that.
Thank God for everything we have, and everything
he's done, and all the grace we have.
And I repeat, I think I said it
last week, that every Christian has a measure
of the Holy Spirit, and don't you let
anybody argue out of that.
If any man have not the Spirit of
Christ, he's none of his, so that he
gives a deposit of the Holy Ghost.
But I'm talking now about the filling and
the fullness and the anointing of the Holy
Ghost.
I like the word anointing better than baptism.
I'm not at all sure that theologically we're
not baptized into the body of Christ when
we're born again.
But the word is anointing that I want
to use.
That anointing is not a gradual thing.
When they poured oil on a man's head,
it wasn't gradual.
When they poured oil on a fellow's head,
it was a turn the thing over and
poured it out, and it ran all down
over the beard and down on the skirts
of his garment, and everybody a quarter of
a mile around knew he'd had oil poured
on him, because it was the oil of
frankincense and myrrh and aloes and cashew and
cinnamon, and it smelled up everything around with
its beautiful fragrance.
It didn't happen gradually.
It happened instantaneously.
Now, there's where people don't, they don't want
to be talked to.
They say, get out with that fellow, because
I'm perfectly willing to be full of the
Spirit, but I don't want to go through
the experience of being filled with the Spirit.
I'm perfectly willing to go on and teach
my Sunday school class and tithe and give
commissions and be good and witness to the
girl beside me at the desk, but I
don't want to be filled, no.
We don't want to lose face, you know.
Adam doesn't want to lose face.
He wants to be blessed and go to
heaven and wear a crown and rule over
five cities, but he doesn't want to ever
come to the place where the Lord chops
him down, hews him down.
He doesn't want that.
That's why we're where we are, brethren.
That's why we are the weak people that
we are in these days.
The Lord's people want Jesus to do all
the dying, and they want to do all
the toppling.
They don't want to know what the cross
means.
O cross that lifteth up my head, I
dare not ask to hide from thee.
I lay in dust, slash glory dead, and
from the ground there blossoms red life that
shall endless be.
Now, my friends, I'm through.
Just 8.30 on the head, and I'm
done.
I have no more to say on this
particular talk.
The next time I talk, it will be
on how we can cultivate the Spirit's companionship.
Two weeks from tonight.
But now what are we going to do
about it?
What did you do, you that went in
the prayer room here?
I guess 200 people went in there.
I didn't count them, but I'd guess