The Fulness of the Spirit

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

The last address in The Secret of Guidance takes as its text four words from Ephesians, and it opens with a sentence that sums up the burden of Meyer’s ministry after Leicester: “Nothing can compensate the Church, or the individual Christian, for the lack of the Holy Spirit.” What a full stream is to a mill-wheel, he says, the Spirit is to the Church. Without Him we stand powerless before our difficulties and our enemies, however good our organisation or our preaching.

A thread or a river

Meyer is careful not to say that ordinary Christians have no Spirit. If they had none, he says, they would not be Christians at all. But in many of us He is present only as a thin thread, a silver streak, a shallow brook. Why, he asks, should we be content with that?

He traces the want of the Spirit in four common complaints. Do you lack assurance, happy one day and troubled the next? It is the Spirit who witnesses with our spirit that we are children of God. Do you lack victory over sin? The Spirit lusts against the flesh, and sin can no more stand before Him than darkness before the morning. Do you lack the fruits of holiness, the tender and unselfish spirit you see in others? It is the Spirit’s fruit, not ours. Do you lack power in service? It was when the first Christians were filled with the Holy Ghost that they spoke the word with boldness.

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

For all, not for a few

Meyer insisted that the fulness is not the privilege of an elite. Before Pentecost, he says, the fulness of the Spirit was given to the few — to an Elijah, an Isaiah, a Daniel. Since Pentecost it has been poured out on the many: on women and children, obscure thinkers, hidden workers, servants and handmaids. He takes Peter’s words at Pentecost as the charter of every believer’s claim.

For the promise is unto you, and to your children, and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call. ACTS 2:39

And he makes a striking argument from the form of the text. Be filled with the Spirit is a command, as plain as the command on the same page that husbands love their wives. We obey it at our peril. But Meyer adds, “all God’s commands are enablings.” He never tells us to become what He is not prepared to make us.

Five conditions

As with guidance, Meyer sets out conditions for receiving the Spirit’s fulness. They are worth hearing, because they protect the teaching from its dangers.

There must be desire. God does not give this gift to those who are content without it. Meyer suggests reading the Acts of the Apostles to stir the desire up, and the lives of men like Brainerd, Martyn and McCheyne.

The motive must be right. Here Meyer is at his sharpest. If we want the Spirit in order to have a certain experience, or to draw people to ourselves, or to be happy, we will probably be disappointed. “God will not find water for us to use for turning our own water-wheels.” The Spirit’s one passion is the glory of Christ, and He will fill only those who share it.

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

Scripture must be honoured. This is one of the most important things Meyer ever said, and it is the best guard against the excesses that have often attended teaching on the Spirit. Some, he warns, have so magnified the inner light that they have neglected the Word, and this is the parent of all kinds of evil, because then we have no test for the voices within. “We must not be content with the Spirit without the Word, or with the Word without the Spirit.” The Word is the Spirit’s chosen instrument, and the two run together like the two rails of a line.

The Spirit must be allowed to do as He will. That means daily obedience, and the painful business of letting the self-life decrease while Christ increases. A look, a word, a refusal can grieve Him. Meyer does not soften this, but he adds that the Spirit is the Spirit of love, and will ask nothing without a reason we would approve if we knew what He knows.

And the gift must be received by faith. As we received Christ, so we receive the Spirit’s fulness: ask, then take, then rise and go on reckoning that God has kept His word. There may be no rushing wind and no tongue of fire. Do not look for them, Meyer says; “believe, in spite of feeling, that you are filled.” The feeling will come in its time, and the fruit will begin to show.

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

Not once for all

The sixth point of the address is perhaps the most valuable, and it corrects the danger in all the others. It is not enough, Meyer says, to be filled once for all. The apostles who were filled in the second chapter of Acts were filled again in the fourth. So he urges his readers to seek a fresh filling every morning, and again whenever they are aware of leakage — after exhausting service, or when some new duty or new temptation opens up. “Happy is that man who never leaves his chamber in the morning without definitely seeking and receiving the plenitude of the Spirit!”

He even finds three tenses in Acts. There is filled, a sudden decisive experience for a particular work. There is were being filled, as though the process were always going on. And there is full, the settled condition of a man like Stephen.

And the disciples were filled with joy, and with the Holy Ghost. ACTS 13:52

Reading him with care

Meyer was a leading voice of Keswick, and teaching like this has been read in two quite different ways. Some have taken it as a call to one great crisis after conversion that settles the matter, a baptism of the Spirit that divides Christians into two classes. Later Pentecostal movements took up his language of enduement and baptism of fire and ran with it in directions he did not go; he himself thought the special gifts of the apostolic age had been withdrawn, though he wondered aloud whether the Church’s unfaithfulness was partly to blame.

The best reading of Meyer is his own sixth point. The fulness of the Spirit is not a trophy won once but a daily dependence, sought again and again, tested by the Word and shown in fruit and in Christ-exalting service. And he closed the address with a humility that should disarm anyone tempted to make his words a system: there was more in the doctrine, he said, than he had grasped, and “The fiery baptism of the Holy Spirit may be something far beyond.”

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law. GALATIANS 5:22–23

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Which of Meyer’s four complaints — lack of assurance, victory, fruit or power — describes you most? Bring it to God by name.

2. Examine your motive. Why do you want more of the Spirit? For His glory or for your experience?

3. Begin tomorrow morning, before you leave your room, by asking to be filled afresh, and then thank God that He has kept His word.

4. Keep the Word and the Spirit together: read a passage of Scripture before you pray for guidance or power.

5. Is there a small disobedience that may be grieving the Spirit? Deal with it today.

A PRAYER

Holy Spirit, I have lived on a thread when You meant me to have a river.

Fill me, not for my own comfort or name, but that Christ may be magnified in my body, whether by life or by death.

Keep me close to the Word You gave, and make me obedient in the least things.

Fill me today, and again tomorrow, and every day until I see Him. Amen.