The Indwelling and the Fullness

Even the Spirit of truth …for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. JOHN 14:17

Simpson wrote more on the Holy Spirit than on any other subject except Christ Himself, and his treatment has a particular character that distinguishes it from much that has been written since. It turns on two questions that are constantly confused. The first is whether a believer has the Holy Spirit. The second is how much of the believer the Holy Spirit has. Most of the trouble in this area comes from answering the second question as though it were the first.

A Person, not a power

His first insistence was elementary and constantly neglected: the Holy Spirit is a Person. The pronouns in the upper room discourse are personal — he, not it — and the activities ascribed to Him are the activities of a person. He teaches, guides, reminds, convinces, forbids, appoints, intercedes. He can be grieved, which no force can be. He can be lied to, resisted and quenched.

And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. EPHESIANS 4:30

Simpson pressed the practical consequence hard. If the Spirit is a power, the question is how to get more of Him and how to use Him. If He is a Person, those questions are impertinent. You do not use a person. The question becomes how not to grieve Him, and how much of you He has. He put it in a form that has been repeated ever since: the issue is not whether you have the Holy Spirit but whether the Holy Spirit has you.

With you, and in you

The verse at the head of this chapter contains a distinction that Simpson regarded as the hinge of the whole subject. He dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. Before Pentecost the Spirit was with the disciples — accompanying, empowering, working alongside. After Pentecost He would be in them. The Old Testament records the Spirit coming upon particular people for particular tasks and departing again. The New Testament describes something unprecedented: permanent residence in ordinary believers.

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? 1 CORINTHIANS 3:16

Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. ROMANS 8:9

Simpson was careful with that last verse, because it settles a question people still get wrong. The indwelling Spirit is not the possession of an advanced class of Christian. Every believer has Him; nobody is a believer without Him. Whatever the fullness of the Spirit means, it cannot mean receiving a Spirit one previously lacked.

His work is to glorify Christ

Here is the feature that most distinguishes Simpson’s teaching, and it is the best safeguard against the excesses that have attended this doctrine.

He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you. JOHN 16:14

The Holy Spirit’s stated purpose is not to draw attention to Himself. It is to make Christ real — to take what belongs to Jesus and make it actual in believers. This yields a test that can be applied to any teaching, meeting or movement claiming the Spirit’s authority. Does it leave people occupied with the Spirit and His manifestations, or occupied with Christ? A ministry genuinely full of the Holy Spirit will tend to talk about Jesus, because that is what the Spirit does. It also explains why the Fourfold Gospel has no separate wheel for the Holy Spirit, which puzzles some readers. It is not an omission. In Simpson’s thinking the Spirit administers all four — the agent by whom Christ is Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer and Coming King within us.

Full of what is already there

If every believer has the Spirit, what is the fullness, and why does Paul have to command it?

And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit. EPHESIANS 5:18

Simpson’s answer began with the grammar. The verb is an imperative, which means the fullness is not automatic; and it is continuous, which means it is not a single event to be obtained and filed away. His illustration was the difference between a vessel that contains water and one that is full of it. A jar with an inch of water in it and a great deal of air is not empty — but it is not full either. The filling of the Spirit is not the arrival of more Spirit from outside. It is the Spirit occupying more of the person. That explains Paul’s contrast. A man under the influence of drink is controlled by it; his speech, judgement and behaviour are governed by something other than himself. To be filled with the Spirit is to be under His government at that level.

And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they were assembled together; and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness. ACTS 4:31

The people filled in Acts 4 include several who had already been filled in Acts 2. The fullness is repeatable, which is fatal to any scheme that treats it as a once-for-all attainment.

Simpson set out what a believer may do, and was careful that none of it becomes a technique for extracting something from God. Emptying: a vessel already full of something else cannot be filled, and the practical work is honest inventory of what occupies the space — ambition, resentment, a hidden appetite, self-pity. Asking, on terms that could hardly be more generous.

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? LUKE 11:13

Obeying, since the Spirit is given to the obedient, not to the impressive (Acts 5:32). And taking by faith. What God promises is received by faith, not produced by feeling. A believer who has emptied, asked and obeyed may take the fullness on the strength of the promise and go about his business, whether or not anything registers emotionally.

The question of tongues

No account of Simpson on this subject can avoid the controversy that broke over his movement after 1906, and his handling of it is one of the more instructive episodes in his life. The Pentecostal revival spread rapidly through the constituencies nearest to his own, and the question pressed on him was whether speaking in tongues is the necessary evidence that a believer has been baptised or filled with the Spirit. Simpson did not answer from the sidelines. He wanted everything God had. In August 1907 he returned to the pine woods at Old Orchard where he had been healed, and asked God for a fuller baptism of the Spirit with all His gifts and graces. He did not speak in tongues, then or afterwards.

His conclusion was threefold. Tongues is a genuine gift of the Spirit, not to be despised or forbidden. It is not the necessary evidence of the Spirit’s fullness, since Scripture nowhere makes it the test and Paul asks plainly whether all speak with tongues, expecting the answer no (1 Corinthians 12:30). And believers should not make it the object of pursuit, because the Spirit distributes gifts as He wills rather than as we select.

But all these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will. 1 CORINTHIANS 12:11

The policy he settled on has marked his movement ever since: seek not, forbid not. It cost him. He lost people who wanted more and people who wanted the door closed. Christians still divide over this, and readers of this book will hold different views. What is worth learning from Simpson is not necessarily his conclusion but his method: he examined the Scriptures, sought God about it personally at real cost, refused to despise believers whose experience differed from his own, and declined to make a secondary matter into a test of spirituality.

The evidence that is not disputed

Whatever one concludes about the gifts, Scripture is not ambiguous about what the Spirit’s fullness produces.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance. GALATIANS 5:22–23

But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth. ACTS 1:8

Character and witness. A man filled with the Spirit becomes more like Christ and more useful to Christ, and any claimed fullness which produces neither should be examined rather than celebrated. The power is given for witness — not for personal exhilaration, not for a sense of spiritual arrival. Simpson pressed this hard, because he had watched the deeper life become, in some hands, an elaborate form of self-cultivation, while the city outside remained unevangelised and the poor unvisited.

Most of what the New Testament attributes to the Spirit is, besides, unspectacular: assurance that we are God’s children, help in prayer when we do not know what to ask, the slow production of character.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought. ROMANS 8:26

A believer who has never had a dramatic experience and who prays, endures, loves awkward people and grows slowly kinder is exhibiting the work of the Holy Spirit as certainly as anyone. And a believer anxious about whether he has been filled can stop examining his sensations and ask a more answerable question: since last year, has anyone been helped through me who would not otherwise have been?

How He leads

If the Spirit indwells the believer, how does His guidance actually arrive? Simpson’s answer was deliberately unspectacular.

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. ROMANS 8:14

He identified several ordinary means, and insisted they normally agree. The Word comes first and governs the rest; most of what God wants from a believer on any given day is already written. Then the inward witness — a settled peace about a course, or an inward check against it — taken seriously but never made decisive on its own (Colossians 3:15). Then circumstances, which God arranges, and counsel, which He supplies through mature believers who know us and are not impressed by us. A believer should be slow to act on one of these against the others. An impression that contradicts Scripture is not the Spirit, whatever it feels like. Believers who elevate impressions to the level of revelation become unteachable, since any objection can be answered by appeal to a private message no one else can examine. Simpson had watched this wreck people. The Spirit who speaks within is the same Spirit who wrote the Word, and He does not contradict Himself.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Stop asking for more of the Spirit and start asking what part of you He does not yet have.

2. Take an honest inventory of what fills you. Name one thing displacing Him, or one thing you know grieves Him, and deal with it before seeking any further experience.

3. Ask plainly, on the strength of Luke 11:13, and then act as though God has answered rather than waiting for a sensation.

4. Apply the John 16:14 test to whatever teaching you are under: does it leave you occupied with Christ? Test any claimed fullness, your own included, by character and witness.

5. Where you differ from other Christians about the gifts, adopt Simpson’s posture: study honestly, seek God personally, refuse contempt.

6. Thank God this week for the unspectacular evidences — assurance, help in prayer, slow growth in kindness. These are His work.

A PRAYER

Holy Spirit, I have treated You as a power to be obtained rather than a Person to be obeyed. Forgive me.

You dwell in me. I do not need to fetch You from a distance or persuade You to come. The question is how much of me You have, and I think we both know the answer.

Show me what fills the room. Empty me of the ambition, the grudge, the appetite, the self-pity that leaves so little space. I ask, because my Father has promised, and I take You at Your word whether or not I feel anything.

Take the things of Christ and make them real, until I am more like Him and more useful to Him, and occupied with Him rather than with my own experience. Amen.