How to Be Filled — L.E. Maxwell

The Holy Spirit’s Filling and Its Purpose

This is our sixth message on the subject of the Holy Spirit. We began last Sunday to cover four points. Being filled with the Spirit, for whom? Those born of the Spirit. What do we mean by being filled?

For what purpose do we want to be filled? And now we want to touch on how to be filled. Now this is the point that distresses many honest and anxious souls. The very nature of the subject can be perplexing.

Symbols of the Invisible Holy Spirit

Objectify the Father and the Son and focus our faith upon the throne of God. In that sense, the subject of the Father and the Son is not capable of such distortion and perplexity and misunderstanding as the subject of the Holy Spirit.

But his very character, viewless, invisible, and the very fact that we're told to believe not every spirit, and to consider, for instance, the symbols and emblems of the Spirit. For instance, he's likened to the wind, he's likened to breath, oil, the dew of the Spirit, the dove, the fire.

These are various emblems or symbols in God's attempt to get us to understand the working and moving and operation of the person, of the invisible third member of the Trinity. All these indicate an attempt of God, I say, by symbolism, to enable us to understand that subject which is in its character, very nature, puzzling and perplexing.

Conflicting Experiences and Partial Views

And there are other perplexities, so many differing experiences and differing voices concerning the subject, indicating, confirming what I've said about the perplexity of the subject. For instance, there are many views, each person speaking from a partial understanding of the Scripture, or a certain type of experience, the experience constituting a pair of spectacles through which the person reads the Bible from that on, a certain few verses, a certain few verses that have been blessed to a certain person, or a pattern set by a school of thought or by others for everybody else.

And there's perplexity by following others. And an ex cathedra claim on the part of many who would tell us, this is it. And so there have arisen over the past generation or so ago what was called the leapers, those who leaped when they got sanctified, those who were jumpers, who jumped when they got sanctified, those who were called Quakers because they waited, and waited on God until they quaked, and there arose the dubbing of them as the Quakers.

You'd never think of that when you read Quaker state oil, would you? Well, those are just indications of schools of thought from all the past. Now, I'm not aiming, God helping me, to present a view or my view, or as somebody here would say, I'm waiting for you to present the other side of the matter.

Interpreting Experience Through Scripture

You know what? I don't enter the subject like that. I have on my desk a letter which the man says, since I've had this wonderful experience, it helps me to interpret the Bible as never before. And I say he's wrong on the surface because you should never interpret your Bible by experience, but interpret your experience by the Bible.

And there's a whole lot of difference. As I so often said in class, there's quite a little difference as to whether I read my Bible like this or read it like that. When I get this between me and the Bible, I see things.

And a good many people put their experiences between them and the Bible, and it's amazing how it colors everything they look at in the Bible after that. When I read the Bible through these spectacles, I see things.

And that's the reason a lot of people see things, is because they have something between them and the Bible. Now that could—I could say more about that, and I may later. But I'm not aiming to present as it were the other side.

I have no axe to grind, no denomination to defend, or no sect set to defend. And I haven't, as far as I know, anything to promote, no cause to promote. I want to present, God helping me as nearly as I can see, an all-Bible concept concerning the subject, an all-Bible view.

Readiness, Reception, and Results

Now, in considering the subject of how, I would like to consider it under three points. I started out with four last time, and now I'm taking the fourth. I'm taking the fourth. We're under three subjects, and I'll likely take two of those today and start out again with number three, the third of the three.

Next Sunday. Now, here are the three. As to readiness, the how as to reception, and the how as to results. Now, as to readiness, whatever studies we have made in the way of preparation for the Spirit's fullness could be summarized in this way, under the fact that we are being made ready for fullness by emptiness, by an emptiness.

Emptiness as Preparation for the Spirit’s Fullness

Now, regarding emptiness, all fullness comes where there is emptiness. That is a priori. I'm going to consider the matter negatively first, and then positively. Negatively, a lot of people can never be filled with the Holy Spirit because they're so full of themselves.

They're so selfish and self-centered. Where would the Holy Ghost get in? That's for you to answer. Chucked full of themselves. Where would the Holy Ghost come? Because He is selfless. And until you are delivered from self-centeredness, where would He dwell?

Now, secondly, we are full of preconceptions and prejudices. Shall I put it in the parenthesis here? I heard of somebody the other day who's just waiting all the time, wondering, just curious, wondering what Mr. Max is going to say about tongues.

Well, isn't that deep? Aren't you deep? Just as deep as my little fingernail. Are you sitting here all this time getting nothing but that? Isn't that deep? Go look at yourself in the glass and ask yourself how deep you are.

Just call yourself a tin pan alley shallowness. I hope you're better than that. I do. If you're so curious and shallow, I can promise you, you're going to get nothing. You're getting nothing along the way, because I'm trying to teach the whole Bible subject as compactly as possible.

You need emptying. You need emptying of your notions. You're so full of notions. Where would the Holy Ghost dwell? Full of prejudices, full of preconceptions, full of all manner of stuff that has to go to the junk heap in the way of preconceptions and notions and curiosity.

Let's get delivered. Maybe we're just full of folly. Just full of folly and flit and flirt and fly by night and flighty and frivolous. Oh, so full of folly. Where would the Holy Ghost live in you when you're chucked, running over with tomfoolery?

Where would the Holy Ghost live? No room. No room here. You ought to write that over your forehead. No room for the Holy Ghost fullness in here. This is full of emptiness, full of emptiness. Nobody home.

Frivolity, folly, tomfoolery. Nobody home. Rooms to let, but not to the Holy Ghost. Full of the world. Just so full of the world. Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed. Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost.

Know ye not? You don't know that, do you? Some of you don't know that at all. No, never dawned on you. You've heard the verse, but you've never dawned on it. Present your body unto God, a living sacrifice.

The Body as the Holy Spirit’s Temple

Let me ask you a very direct question, which a dear friend of mine in writing on this subject puts it like this. He puts it, the subject is this. Whose body is yours? Whose body is yours? Jesus Christ never died to redeem me.

Is that what you say? Know ye not that ye are not your own? Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost? Ignorance, ignorance, stupidity. Ignorance. Whose body is yours? You try to answer that.

Present your body as an instrument of righteousness unto God. The temple, the temple, which temple you are. That's serious. And how serious. I've been so impressed of late again, and all I can say is, young people, and I suppose that young women are a bit more afflicted in this line than the young men, what slaves, what slaves of fashion you are.

Slavery to Fashion and Desire for Approval

If you had a hook in your nose and a ten-foot chain around you, you could never be more slave of fashion than you are. Just desperately scared to death of what the world's going to think or say. When I see some sort of an attractive young piece of femininity going down the street, I watch the women who watch her, just to see how they watch her.

And she knows it. Especially she's been able to attract. She can just walk along as though nobody's looking at her, and she knows that everybody is. And the most conscious thing she has in her system right that minute is all the feminine gays and the men too, as she goes by.

And that's the reason she dressed that way. And then if somebody would go right up and stare right at her, why, she'd be hurt. She'd just pretend to be insulted. And yet all she did it for was to get that.

And if they really did that, then she'd pretend, what a bunch of liars we are. And I mean liars. Because that's the reason you did it. And if they did it, you pretend to be insulted. A liar on the one hand, a deceiver on the other.

And asked to be filled with the Holy Ghost. What are you asking for? What do you mean? You want the Most High to dwell with that kind of junk? What slaves of fashion we are. My, how God's going to have to ransack some of us and get us delivered from a lot of this kind of junk.

The Reservoir as a Picture of Emptiness

I must be emptied of this kind of thing if I would be filled with the Spirit. Now what is a reservoir? Couldn't help but think about it. Went down. I like to go down and see how the old pond down here, that old dried up place, getting filled up because I know how much our men need that water.

Most of us sit here basking in good warmth all the time. We don't realize the headaches that those firemen go through. Takes two or three thousand gallons of good water just to heat us every day. I mean excess, wasted water.

I think that's about the right number. Most of us don't realize all that goes into that. And if we have to use the town water, it has to all be treated before it can be used, lest it boil over the whole of the place because it's too much soda and so on.

But these are problems. Now what's that old reservoir down there? That great hollow. Just a great emptiness.