1 3 0 (5) Obey implicitly the known will of liod. It has been already pointed out that the Holy Spirit is bestowed to make the doing of the will of God pos- sible to us, and hence by simple deduc- tion it follows that any wilful depar- ture from the Divine will involves a loss of the enduement. The prayer of the Spirit-controlled heart is ever: " L o r d, what wilt T h o u ?" and the ac- tion of entire obedience is always • towards co-operation with the indwell- ing ¡Spirit. This is absolutely essential, both with regard to our own lives and to the calls of service which come to every one so filled, if the power is to be maintained. And each act of obedi- ence enlarges the capacity for recep- tion, and each step of f a i th leads into a still larger room—from grace to grace, from strength to strength, from glory to glory. One word remains to be added here to what has been said above as to steps which lead to the personal filling of the Spirit. There is a real difficulty to come, connected not with the filling, but with the necessary emptying of self, and it must be pointed out that nowhere in the Word of God is seli- emptying laid upon us as a condition of receiving the gift of the Spirit. Further, it is as impossible for self to accomplish the emptying as to attain the fullness. There are two ways in which a glass containing air may be emptied. The air may be exhausted by an air pump—a laborious process and one which can never be wnolly success- ful, the creation of an artificial vacu- um being almost impossible. But any child can empty the glass of air by fill- ing it with water. The more water it contains the less air, and. when en- tirely filled with the one element it is correspondingly emptied of the otheT. And we need to remember that God empties us by the Divine method of displacement. We are only self-emp- tied by being Spirit-filled. Thus to be emptied is a consequence and not a condition, and God's call is not to be emptied of self, but to " b e filled with the S p i r i t ." In grace as in nature, the less is comprehended in the greater. What is required as the price of power; however, is a willingness to be emptied, and then in the enablement of the Spir- it a continuous looking away from self —even from the thus emptied self, and a looking off unto Jesus, who. increas- ingly becomes to us, by the guidance and teaching of the Comforter, Lord and King. From " T h e Price of P owe r ," by Rev. J. Stuart Holden.
portion, and He who has taught us our need knows the impossibility of our living aright apart from His endue- ment. Often we have heard such a prayer as " L o r d, if it be Thy will, fill me with Thy S p i r i t "; whereas noth- ing could be more clearly expressed in His Word than that this is already His will. To pray in this fashion, then, is but to ignore ' ' the exceeding great and precious promises," and indeed savors strongly of unbelief. God is only hon- ored when He is trusted. Hence when entirely yielded to Him, the soul must claim and take by faith the " P r om i se of the F a t h e r ." I take the promised Holy Ghost, I take the gift of Pentecost, To fill me to the uttermost, I take; He undertakes. (4) Reckon that God fulfills His Word. If the former step of claiming is faith in action, this further step of reckoning is faith at rest. But just here so many lose their way and be- cause of an absence of feelings and conscious realization of the fulfilled promise are often tempted to conclude either that the whole promise is a de- lusion, or that they have failed to con- fess, yield, or claim in the right way. Now to such there , is but one message —Believe God. Just as at conversion the soul rests upon God's faithfulness to forgive and to receive, so now, apart f r om anything in the nature of emo- tional consciousness, He must be trust- ed to make good His Word. Beckon- ing that the promise is fulfilled, the soul must now step out to do the next obvious duty and to face the next dif- ficulty in life or service, expecting that the Holy Spirit's power will be mani- fested. Nothing behind, nothing before, The steps of faith fall on a seeming . void, And find a rock beneath. And in this matter it is the experi- ence of many who have sounded God's f a iWu l n e ss to deepest depths, that the infilling of the Holy Spirit is invari- ably accompanied by a humbling sense of human weakness, and with the Mas- . ter Himself the Spirit-filled disciple can only say, " I can of mine own self do n o t h i n g ." And this simple act of faith which secures and seals the promise, leads to the last step in this scale of ascending purpose and power, the final and un- changed attitude of. the Spirit-filled life.
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