Be Filled with the Spirit

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

After three lectures on prayer, Finney turned to the source of all true prayer and all fruitful work: the Holy Spirit. His seventh lecture on revivals, On Being Filled with the Spirit, which Ochorus also carries as a sermon, takes Paul’s four words and presses them home with characteristic force. Its argument is simple. God commands Christians to be filled with the Spirit. Therefore they can be. Therefore, if they are not, it is their own fault.

A command and a promise

Finney began by answering an objection he knew well. When preachers stress that nothing good happens without the Spirit, hearers tend to conclude that they can do nothing until the Spirit comes, and so are under no obligation meanwhile. Finney wanted to close that door before he opened any other. The Spirit, he said, is promised to those who ask. And the Spirit is commanded: Be filled. “For God to command, is equivalent to an oath that we can do it.”

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him? MATTHEW 7:11

So it is a duty. It is necessary for growth in grace, for holiness, for usefulness, for honouring God. Finney would not let his hearers treat the fulness of the Spirit as a luxury for a spiritual elite. It is the normal Christian life, and its absence is a sin.

Why so many are empty

The most searching part of the lecture is Finney’s list of reasons why Christians are not filled. Some live hypocritical lives, and he told of a woman who begged her visitors to stay and then complained of them the moment they left. Some are given to levity. Some are proud of dress and position. Some are so worldly that their thoughts are all of getting money; they screw down the poor workman to the last penny and wonder why they have no spiritual life. Some have never fully confessed and forsaken their sins, but confess in general terms, guardedly, as if afraid of saying too much. Some are neglecting a known duty: a man who will not pray with his family, a young man who feels called to the ministry and will not go. Some resist the Spirit whenever a sermon touches them. And some, if they are honest, do not on the whole want the Spirit, because they do not want what He would require.

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

That last point is the sharpest. We may desire a thing on some accounts, Finney said, and still not choose it on the whole, like a man who admires an article in a shop but does not like the price.

What to expect

Finney then told his hearers what would happen if they were filled, and he did not make it sound comfortable. “I never knew a person who was filled with the Spirit, that was not called eccentric,” he wrote. You may be thought deranged, as Festus thought Paul was mad. You will feel great distress over the state of the church and the world, because you will see it as Christ sees it. You will meet opposition, sometimes from church leaders. You will have fierce conflicts with Satan, and even fiercer ones with your own corruptions.

I am not mad, most noble Festus; but speak forth the words of truth and soberness. ACTS 26:25

But you will have peace with God, flowing like a river, and peace of conscience. You will be useful whether you can go out or not; he told of a poor man, sick for years, whose diary after his death showed that he had set apart hours to pray for about thirty ministers and churches, and recorded, date by date, the churches for which he had been enabled to pray in faith for revival. You will be calm under affliction and unafraid of death. You will not be galled when people speak against you. And you will be wise in the use of means, because the Spirit will teach you how to time and apply the truth.

Yielding as air

His practical counsel was to be childlike and yielding. If you want the Spirit to remain, Finney said, you must yield to His gentlest motions, just as yielding as air. If He draws you to prayer, leave what you are doing and pray. And do not tempt God by passivity: “Do not tempt God, by waiting for his Spirit, while using no means to procure his presence.”

Quench not the Spirit. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:19

Where care is needed

This lecture is a tonic, but several of its emphases need balance.

First, Finney made the fulness of the Spirit sound almost entirely like an achievement of obedience. There is truth in this: we can grieve and quench the Spirit, and we can yield to Him. But Paul’s command is in the passive voice. Be filled. It is something done to us, as wine fills a vessel. The Spirit is a gift before He is a duty. The New Testament speaks of believers being filled again and again, often in answer to prayer and in moments of need, not as the reward for a sufficiently thorough self-reformation.

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

Second, his logic that command implies full ability — that God would be a tyrant to command what we cannot do — runs through all his theology, and we will weigh it in chapter ten. Here it is enough to say that Scripture often commands what only grace can supply, and then supplies it. Augustine’s prayer is the right response: give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt.

Third, Finney was careless in places about the difference between the Spirit’s indwelling, which every Christian has, and His fulness, which may ebb and flow. He told his hearers that without the Spirit they would go to hell, and that they would reasonably doubt their salvation. It is true that if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his (Romans 8:9). But a believer who has grieved the Spirit and lost the sense of His fulness is not thereby lost, and should be called back to Christ, not told he was never His.

Fourth, being called eccentric is not proof of spirituality. Some people are simply difficult.

What to keep

Keep the urgency. Finney was right that the church has made peace with living without the Spirit’s fulness, and that this is a scandal, not a normal condition. Keep the list of hindrances and work through it honestly. And keep the promise underneath the command: the Father gives the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Go through Finney’s list of hindrances slowly. Which one describes you? Confess it specifically.

2. Is there a known duty you have been avoiding? Do it this week, and see whether your prayer life changes.

3. Ask God daily this week to fill you with His Spirit, trusting His promise rather than your feelings.

4. When you feel a gentle prompting to pray or to act in love, obey it at once.

5. If you have lost the sense of God’s presence, do not conclude you were never His. Return to Christ and ask again.

A PRAYER

Holy Spirit, You dwell in me, and I have grieved You by pride, worldliness and half-hearted confession. Forgive me.

I want You on the whole, not only in part. Show me what I have been unwilling to give, and make me willing.

Fill me, as You filled the first disciples, that I may speak Your word with boldness and live in peace with God.

Make me yielding as air to Your gentlest leading, and useful wherever You place me. Amen.