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What Does the Holy Spirit Do for You? (1)
On the day of Pentecost, people thought the apostles were “filled with new wine” (Acts 2:13). If so, they could tell by the words or actions of the person. What the apostles were doing was not like a person drunk on new wine, but men who were “filled with the Spirit” (2:4). The more they spoke, the people could tell they were not influenced by wine, but with the Holy Spirit.
People can tell through your words or actions what has “FILLED” your life. They know if it is wine or some other drug influencing you. For the Christian, the influence upon his/her life should be the Holy Spirit. From the time we have “received the gift of the Holy Spirit” until the day of “our inheritance” (Ephesians 1:14), we should be “filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). As Romans 8:14 says, “For as many as are led by the Spirit, these are the sons of God.”
How do you fill up a Christian with a Spirit you cannot see? The Holy Spirit is a divine being. He is real, but He cannot be physically and personally dropped in like intravenous fluids.
Think about Jesus coming to the world. John 1:1 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Then v. 14 says, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, glory as the only begotten from the Father) FULL of grace and truth.” In the 1st and 2nd centuries, it was difficult to understand how God became flesh. Deity in a body was hard to comprehend. To testify such, the Jews thought was blasphemous (John 8:57-59). However, John 1:14 and Philippians 2:6-8 say it happened.
Much of the writing of Colossians is Paul’s declaration of the deity of Jesus, which opposed the Gnostics’ teaching that Jesus did not have a body of flesh and blood. To them, matter was evil and deity cannot live in a body made of matter.
People today get bogged down in the process of how spiritual can occupy flesh and blood. They lose sight of the scripture saying Jesus became flesh. Is it for us to figure out how? Can we not accept it by faith? It happened. Jesus was God in the flesh, and He was FILLED with “grace and truth.”
Those who spend hours attempting to figure out how Jesus became flesh have difficulty in understanding how the Spirit fills the Christian. Some “go beyond” what is written, while others do not search at all. They view being filled with the Spirit as some mysterious sensation. We might simplify matters if we would repeat in our minds that the Holy Spirit IS A SPIRIT! That is why it is difficult to explain being filled with Him, but we accept it is done by faith.
Consider 1 Corinthians 16:9, where it says, “Or know you not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, which is in you, which ye have from God...” As stated before, once we have received the gift of the Holy Spirit in obedience to the truth by Jesus Christ, our relationship with the Spirit, God, and Christ is such that they exert influence upon our lives as we daily yield to Them. The words in v. 15 say our bodies are “members of Christ.” As Christians redeemed and having received the Holy Spirit, should we be led by anyone other than the Holy Spirit? Certainly not.
Being “filled with the Spirit” does not imply a person can work miracles. Consider John the Baptist in Luke 1:15: “He shall be filled with the Holy Spirit.” But, he never performed miracles (John 10:41). Luke 1:41 says Elizabeth was “filled with the Holy Spirit,” but she never performed miracles. Such filling of the Spirit influenced their words and actions daily. It was not an effort to give them poiwer to do supernatural acts.
When the Bible says in Genesis 6:11-13 that “the earth...was filled with violence,” what does that mean? It was filled with people where “the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” A heart full of evil was the cause for the words and actions of violence. There was not a supernatural force placed upon man to rebel. A similar thought is found in Proverbs 12:21: “There shall no evil happen to the just: but the wicked shall be filled with mischief.”
In Exodus 31:1-5, God filled Bezalel “with the Spirit of God.” Notice what being filled brought or motivated him to have or do: wisdom, understanding, knowledge, and all manner of workmanship.
Luke 4:28-29 says the Jews “were filled with wrath,” and it caused them to “rise up and cast” Jesus out of the city. Even in Ananias, Satan had “filled his heart to lie” (Acts 5:3). The Jews in v. 17 “were filled with jealousy.” What moved these people to words, attitudes, and behaviors is what filled them or dwelt within them.
If you had a glass of water, you would describe that glass as “filled with water.” If you did not want it, you would pour it out, then put in tea instead. Then your glass would be “filled with tea.”
Therefore, when you read Ephesians 5:18, you have a contrast between two causes an the resulting effect from each cause. The The cause of “wine” brings the effect of “riot’ (wasting), whereas the cause of the “Spirit” brings the effect of being filled and is connected with: being wise (v. 15), redeeming the time (v. 16), understanding the will of the Lord (v. 17), not involved in drunkenness or any mind altering substance (v. 18), speaking to one another in songs (v. 19), prayer (v. 20), and submission to one another (v. 21).
Those are all the resulting effects of being filled with the Spirit. A Christian should understand his/her life primarily needs to be filled with the Spirit, not wine. Second, others would say, based on hearing and watching him/her, they are filled with the Spirit, not wine. Being filled with the Spirit is not that complicated when you are not trying to insert some supernatural phenomenon.
