II. THE SECRET OF HIS FULLNESS. YIELDING TO CHRIST Yield yourselves unto God. Rom. 6:13. Present your bodies unto God. Rom. 12:1. Paul, a bond-slave of Jesus Christ. Rom 1:1. THE SECRET OF HIS FULLNESS Granted, then that we have received the gift of the Holy Ghost; that we have been baptized with Him; that He has come into our lives to abide forever; what then is the secret of His fullness, of His abundant life of Peace, Power, and Love? We answer: THE ABSOLUTE, UNQUALIFIED SURRENDER OF OUR LIFE TO GOD, TO DO HIS WILL INSTEAD OF OUR OWN. Thus, 1. When we SURRENDER OUR SINS and believe, we RECEIVE the Holy Spirit; when we SURRENDER OUR LIVES and believe, we are FILLED with the Holy Spirit. 2. THE RECEIVING of the Spirit is God’s answer to repentance and faith; THE FULLNESS of the Spirit is God’s answer to SURRENDER and faith. 3. At CONVERSION the Spirit enters; at SURRENDER the Spirit, ALREADY ENTERED, takes FULL POSSESSION. The supreme, human condition of the fullness of the Spirit is a life that is WHOLLY SURRENDERED TO GOD to do His will. This is true: 1. IN REASON. To our mind, all the clouds that have been hindering the clear outshining of this great truth into our soul, will vanish away before him who will ponder carefully the great scriptural and experimental truth of: THE TWO-FOLD NATURE OF THE BELIEVER. Note first the situation of the sinner. He has but one nature - “the old man.” He is declared absolutely to be dead in trespasses and sins. He has the self-life, but not the God-life within him. He walks in the flesh, and in that only. The Spirit may and does strive with him, but not in him, for only “he who is Christ’s” hath that Spirit. But now comes a wonderful change. He repents and believes on the Lord Jesus Christ. What happens? He is born again, born from above, born of God, born of the Spirit. And what do these phrases signify? Simply that a new life, a divine life, the life of God has come into him. God Himself, in the person of the Holy Spirit, has come to dwell in him; he has received the Holy Spirit. He has now what the sinner does not have - a new nature. But when the new life, the Spirit came in, did the old life, the “old man,” go out? Alas, not he! If he had, then, TO RECEIVE the Spirit would be at once and forever TO BE FILLED WITH HIM, for HE would have FULL possession. But this is not the case. The old life does not go out when the new comes in; upon this God’s word and our own experience are painfully clear. But now, as a believer, he has, as it were, a dual nature. In him are both “the flesh” and “the Spirit” - the old life and the new. These two co-exist. Both dwell in him. But as deadly foes, they struggle for the mastership of his life. “The flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh.” For each wants not only to be in him but to have full possession. Each desires to fill him. The problem is changed. It is no longer how shall he receive the Spirit. That is settled; he has received Him. But he finds him a joint-tenant with the flesh. Wherefore the question now is, having two natures within him, how shall he be filled with one of them? How shall he know the fullness and abundant life of the Spirit, and be delivered from the life and power of the flesh? The answer seems clear. How else could he be filled save by YIELDING HIMSELF WHOLLY to that one which he would have fill him? He has the power of choice; he can yield himself to either. Is it not clear that whatever life he yields himself to, that will fill him? When he once yielded himself a servant of the flesh (Rom. 6:19) was he not “filled with all unrighteousness”? (Rom. 1:29) Even so now just in proportion as he yields himself to the Spirit (Rom. 6:19) will he not be filled with that Spirit? It is as though the sweet fresh air of spring-time should enter a ten-roomed house full of foul odors. You open up one chamber to it, but leave the rest closed and in possession of the old, fetid atmosphere. Truly the pure air has entered, but how can it fill the house until you yield that house wholly to it, throwing open every nook and cranny to its fragrant breath? Or, it is as though a fountain were fed by two strong springs bubbling up from the ground, one of water, the other of oil. There is no doubt that the fountain has received water, for it is constantly inflowing. Yet how can it be filled with water save as it yields itself wholly to its life-giving stream, and refuses to yield itself to the oil? Even so it is with the Holy Spirit. True He has come into every believer’s heart, and abides there, and will abide forever. Yet every believer thus co-indwelt by the flesh and the Spirit may so continue to yield to the flesh as to thwart, choke up, and clog all manifestation of the fullness of the Spirit who is within him. This fact that, even after the Spirit has been received, there may be a mastership of Self in our lives through failure to yield to the Spirit, is a full and sufficient explanation of all lack of fullness of the Spirit. He who knows the awful power of that self-life in himself; its enmity with God; its carnality; its grieving and quenching of the Spirit; its deadly blighting of all the blessed fruits of the Spirit; its fierce and desperate resistings of his efforts to enter into the full life of the Spirit, needs no other explanation of the failure of the fullness of the Spirit than the fullness of Self. The trouble is not a Spirit un- entered, but a spirit un-yielded to, and thus shorn of an opportunity to manifest the very fullness He desires. The remedy is clear, logical, inescapable; a refusal to yield the life longer to the mastership of self, and a surrender to the Spirit, that “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus may make us free from the law of sin and death.” It is true again: 2. IN REVELATION. God’s Word is clear upon it. Paul again and again calls himself the “bond slave” of Christ, yielded to Him wholly to do His will, not his own. “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice…unto God.” (Rom. 12:1.) Hear Paul thus exhorting believers, “YIELD yourselves unto GOD.” “NEITHER YIELD…unto sin.” - TO WHOM ye YIELD yourselves servants HIS servants ye are.” (Rom. 6:16.) As ye HAVE YIELDED… servants to iniquity, even so YIELD…servants to righteousness unto holiness.” (v. 19.) “But now being set free (Greek) from sin (God’s act in Christ) and become servants to God (your act of surrender, needful to make you realize that freedom which is in Christ), ye have your fruit unto holiness” (v. 22); i.e., ye know the power, blessing, fullness and fruitage of the Holy Spirit to whom you have now yielded. Notice both the impressive repetition and the significant position (Rom. 6) of his exhortation to yield ourselves to God. It follows the fifth chapter of Romans. That is, as soon as the believer, justified by faith, has received the Holy Ghost (v. 5) he is urged to yield himself to God, wholly and absolutely. Why? Because Paul knows the two-fold nature of the believer; knows that with whatsoever he would be filled, to that he must yield; knows that if he would be filled with the Spirit he must yield to Him, otherwise he will go on living in the power and fullness of the flesh. Thus the absolute yielding of our lives to God is the first great step after conversion urged in His Word. Upon every convert, having received the Spirit, and while his heart is glowing with the love of Christ who has saved him, should be pressed home, earnestly and tenderly, the claim of that Christ upon his redeemed life, and His loving call to him to yield it to Him in absolute, unreserved surrender. There is no other way in reason, in revelation, or in practice. Alas for our blindness! Converts are exhorted to study the Word; to be diligent in prayer; to abound in good works; to give of their substance unto the Lord; to be faithful in church services; to join her various societies, and to busy themselves in her countless round of activities. But, (woe unto us!) in omitting the one supreme condition which God reveals, we fail to lift the single flood gate which alone will let into our lives His coveted fullness. That this act of surrender is the pivot upon which the gate of His fullness swings open, is also seen in 3. THE EXPERIENCE OF GOD’S CHILDREN. Is it not true of all of you, beloved, who walk the pathway of the blessed life? The Holy Spirit painted in your secret soul pictures of a walk with God which persistently refused to fade, even amid all your failures and falling short of them. There were yearnings after a richness and fullness of life in Christ which never ceased to haunt your soul. There were voices that called you for years to untrodden heights of communion, privilege, and service. You made many mistakes; you were misled by false teaching; you groped earnestly in the darkness after the truth. But now, with the peace and joy of an established life in Christ Jesus filling your soul, as you look back over the past do you not see that the pivotal point of blessing and fullness was the surrender of your life to the Lord Jesus Christ? Whether long years in coming to this crisis, or reaching it in a single bound, every consecrated child of God knows that this act of surrender to God was the supreme step that brought him into the fullness of the closer walk with God. Your experience may have been complicated, confused, difficult to interpret; but that this act of surrender was the culmination of it all, and this fullness of the Spirit, the outcome of such act, God’s response of grace to that act, all will testify. The lives of such men as Carey, Martyn, Paton, and Livingstone, vividly show forth this truth. The fullness and power that marked their lives from the divine side went hand in hand on the human side with an unqualified, unwavering surrender of life in its fullest sweep, to do the will of Him that sent them. Only such can bring His fullness. Again, that surrender is the secret of fullness is proven by:- 4. THE RESISTANCE OF THE FLESH. We may be assured that a step which the self-life supremely opposes is the supreme step the Spirit would have us take. That point at which the Flesh masses its most desperate resistance must be the point to which the Spirit is most desirous of bringing us; must be the key-point of the situation. Above all else is the deliberate resolve to surrender the life to God this step, this point. How clamorously the hostile Self-life protests against it! We will lead meetings; sign pledges; fill official position; draw checks even to the half of our fortune; yea, do anything else; but how vehemently and desperately the Self-life opposes our yielding our life to God in full surrender! Does any one question that self-will is the stronghold of the Flesh, and that the act of surrender storms the stronghold and is the act which the Spirit most desires and the Flesh most resists? Then let that man or woman try to make such a surrender. Let them say to God “Here Lord I give up all my plans and purposes, all my desires and hopes, and accept Thy will for my life. Whatever Thou dost want, take; whatever Thou wouldst have come, send; wherever Thou wouldst have me go, lead; whatever Thou wouldst have me surrender, reveal. ‘Lo I come to Thy will.’” Immediately how the powers of the Flesh will assail this decision! What clamorous protests! What fierce hostility! What agonizing struggles! What deathly swoonings of the soul at the mere thought! What bitter tests of pride and reputation! What sweeping sacrifices loom up unthought of before! The pulpit; the mission field; yielded idols; surrendered professions, or occupations or possessions; how these all start up like spectres before the trembling soul! That day on which a child of God decides to yield his will to God will scarce have passed its meridian ere he will stand appalled at the revelation of his own unwillingness to do God’s will; will be astonished and humiliated beyond measure at the desperate and repeated onslaughts of the selflife, to drive him from the new stand he has taken. Just as the frantic cries and wild flutterings of the mother bird prove that your disturbing hand is near her nestlings, so does the passionate resistance of Self to the consecration of your life prove that through this act the self-life is in deadly peril of overthrow under the mighty hand of God. Child of God, does not this very shrinking, this fierce enmity of the flesh, prove that his stronghold is unmasked; that his secret is betrayed; that the very thing he most vehemently resists is that, above all others, which God wants you to do? Have you done it? For: 5. THERE IS NO SUBSTITUTE FOR YOUR ACT OF SURRENDER. When God states a condition of blessing, no other condition, however good elsewhere, can be substituted. This is why all your crying, and waiting, and petitioning - yea, even agonizing before God - have accomplished naught but to leave you grieved, disappointed, and dazed at lack of answer. You have been praying instead of obeying. Prayer is all right with obedience, but not instead of it. “Obedience is better than sacrifice.” So it is better than prayer if it is the thing that God is asking. We are not petitioning God; He is petitioning us! Hear Him through His servant Paul: “I beseech you, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice.” Have you done this? When we petition God to do something for us, we expect Him to act. When God petitions us to make Him a present of our bodies as a living sacrifice He expects us to act. But lo, we turn to and begin to pray, for, we say, is prayer not a good thing? Forsooth, it is, but not well spent if used to dodge obedience! How subtle the flesh is! How in our blindness we do play at cross-purposes with God! “Abraham,” said God, “because thou hast done this thing, I will bless thee” (Gen. 22:16). And what was this thing upon the doing of which the blessing of God came to him as never before? It was the yielding of his all to God in the surrender of his son. Child of God, have you done this thing? No other thing will avail. Constant prayer, importunate entreaty, wearisome waiting, attempts at believing, reckoning it done - all these are of no avail to you if you will not do this thing. This unyielded life is the very citadel of Self. God will not force it. But when its key, the Will, is voluntarily handed over to him, then He floods the life with His fullness of blessing. Would you know His “I will bless thee”? then “do this thing.” Absolutely, unreservedly, confidingly yield yourself, your life, your all into His hands for time and eternity. It will not do, in lieu of this, to give money, to give time, to give service, only. Thousands are trying thus to silence conscience and rob God. We must needs give ourselves. How grieved would that true lover be whose betrothed would answer his petition for her heart, herself, by proffering her purse, houses, or lands! How much more must God be grieved by our poor attempts to bribe Him by giving Him everything else except the one thing He wants - ourselves. “My son, give me thine heart.” There is a giving which is instead of ourselves; and there is a gift of ourselves. One is the poor bribe of legalism to Love; the other the joyful response of love to Love. So in falling short of giving ourselves to God we fall short of the one supreme gift He desires. For God gave Himself, gave all to us. If our response to the lover of our soul falls short of the true- hearted surrender of ourselves, we thereby show that we do not fully trust Him. But the shadow of such distrust haunting the unsurrendered heart is the barrier that keeps it from the fullness of God. For God cannot give fullness of the Spirit to him who does not have such fullness of trust as to yield his life to Him. Wherefore, beloved, knowing that naught but this can bring to your heart His fullness of life, see to it that you omit it not. Know too, that 6. THE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THIS FULLNESS OF THE SPIRIT IS, IN A TREMENDOUS SENSE, IN YOUR OWN HANDS. The question now rests with you. Not that it is not all of God and of grace. Verily it is. But in Christ Jesus the grace phase of it is complete. That is, God has already done all He can do for us in giving Christ. He “hath blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ Jesus.” Do we want God to pour out the fullness of the Holy Spirit? He has done so in Christ. “In Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily” (Col. 2:9). Do we want God then to put us “in Christ” where the fullness dwells? He has done so: - for “of Him are ye in Christ Jesus.” (I Cor. 1:30) There is but one thing left, and that is yours. It is to so yield yourself to the Christ to whom you are united as to give Him opportunity to pour out His fullness in and through you. This you must do. Do not attempt to throw the responsibility on God. If you do, He will throw it back upon you, and rightly too, for that is where it belongs. All these years He has been doing this. Have you been too blind to see it? He stands pledged to give you to know His fullness so soon as you surrender your life wholly to Him, but He does not stand pledged to surrender it for you, or to make you surrender it. He will not coerce your will. There He stops and waits - as he has been waiting all these years - for you. Do not say, either, “I have prayed; I have waited; I have wrestled and agonized; I have tried to believe it done,” and the like. Do you not see that in all this you are calling on God to do something instead of obeying His command to do something yourself? The question is have you YIELDED? Bought with a price, and not your own, have you taken your hands off your own life and consecrated it wholly, unflinchingly, eternally to the Lord Jesus Christ, to be His loving bond-slave forever? It is not now a question of His fullness; that is limitless. It is a question of your receptiveness, your surrender. Is He worthy of trust, of absolute trust? Then how child-like will you trust Him? How absolutely will you yield to Him? With what self-abandonment will you throw yourself upon Him? How far up toward the height of His perfect surrender will you climb? He will meet you where you meet Him. The only limit to His fullness is that which you impose in the limitation of your surrender. The more absolutely, sweepingly, irrevocably you yield yourself, time, talents, possessions, plans, hopes, aspirations, purposes, yea all to Jesus Christ, vouching yourself His loving bond-slave to do and suffer His will, the more you shall know the blessed fullness of His Spirit. You may have all the fullness you will make room for. In a profound sense it rests with you. What a tremendous thought! To go through all the long years of life with the privilege, peace, and power of the blessed life within your grasp at any hour and yet to have missed it! And are you faint-hearted, timorous, slow to trust Him absolutely? Are you loath to surrender your will, and afraid of His will? Think a moment what that will is for you. The bleeding Son of God hanging between heaven and earth for you; translation from death to eternal life; sons and daughters of God; fullness of His Spirit; peace, joy, fellowship in Him; instant, jubilant glorification at His coming; triumphant sharing in His Kingship; eternal ages of unending bliss in His presence - this is His known will for you. And yet you fear His will! The soul’s high treason, this, against its awful, loving Lord! Beloved, at the very core of thy spiritual life, nestles a deadly cobra of unbelief which thou would’st do well, by this one deliberate, trustful act of surrender, to crush, ere it strike its fangs deeper into thy heart. The daring cliff-climber, trusting a frail rope, swings out with dauntless heart over the dizzy abyss, while beneath him the cruel rocks and roaring, treacherous sea, eagerly await to slay him if he falls. But thou, beloved, when thou dost this day swing thyself out in blind and simple trust in Him, will find no cruel fate awaiting thee, but the strong hands that catch thee were pierced - for thee; the side to which thou art pressed in loving embrace was riven - for thee; the heart that throbs with joy at thine obedience once broke - for thee. Yet, the Christ who beseeches thee is the Christ of love, desiring to fill thee with His own fullness of love. Therefore fear Him not, but, entering into the secret place, fight the battle; endure the suffering of the cross; cease not until you have honestly laid your life at His feet; and verily, “He will give thee the desire of thine heart.”
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 07:04:42 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015