Let me ask you a question. Have you ever wanted more of God? Have you ever wanted to see Him more fully, know Him more intimately and love Him more deeply? My belief is, if we are truly born again followers of Christ, then the Holy Spirit will place that desire within us and it will be up to us to nurture it.
David expressed this idea very well in Psalm 42.
As the deer pants for the water brooks,
So my soul pants for You, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God;
When shall I come and appear before God? Psalm 42:1-2 (NASB)
Here we are given a word picture of a deer who is so thirsty that it is literally gasping in anticipation of its next drink. Then David says that his soul thirsts for God just like that deer who was desperately searching for water. And just like the physical life of that deer depends on finding that water source so does our spiritual life depend on the presence and power of God. Without Him and without His Spirit in us we are spiritually bereft.
I think it is important here to make a distinction between being given the gift of the Holy Spirit (which happens to every believer at the time of salvation) and being filled with the Spirit (which is an ongoing process that can ebb and flow depending on our walk with God). My focus here is on the believer who already has the Holy Spirit living in their hearts because they are truly a born again child of God but wants to go further in their walk with the Lord and to seek Him ever more strongly.
If you have never made a profession of faith in Jesus Christ and you aren’t sure if you have the Holy Spirit living in you then I would encourage you to read this which explains very simply and very well what it takes to be truly born again and how the gift of the Holy Spirit is received.
For the rest of us, what must we do to be filled with the Spirit? Before I answer that question let me confess to you that I am not wise or experienced enough to answer it without a lot of help. I am still learning and growing and indeed the motivation for writing this is because of my own searching and questioning and wanting to be closer to the Lord. And in that searching I found this wonderful piece by John Piper and this is just a small part of what he has to say on the subject:
And that leads us now to our final, all-important question of how we can obey this command to be filled with the Spirit. We are in the same predicament we were in last week. We are commanded to be full, and yet we are not the filler; the Spirit is. The answer to this predicament in the New Testament is that God has ordained to move into our lives with fullness through faith. The pathway that the Spirit cuts through the jungle of our anxieties into the clearing of joy is the pathway of faith. Luke says of Stephen in Acts 6:5, that he was “a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit,” and he says of Barnabas in Acts 11:24 that he was “a good man full of the Holy Spirit and of faith,” The two go together. If a person is filled with faith, he will be filled with the Spirit, the Spirit of joy and peace.
The complete article can be found here and I would highly encourage you to read it because it has been a very great help to me. But I love the fact that Mr Piper distills the entire process down a very simple yet powerful truth, the truth of our faith. When we take care to nurture and strengthen our faith and to act on it then we open ourselves up to being filled with the Spirit. For new Christians the idea can sometimes seem mystical or magical but the actual truth of the matter is that a person with strong active faith is a person who will be filled with the Spirit and strong, active faith is dependent upon our knowing and obeying God’s word.
Once we realize that then we can see that the process goes like this: Read and study God’s word —–> Act on what we have studied by faith that what God’s word says is true and right —-> be filled with the Spirit and produce the fruits of the Spirit in our lives. And isn’t that a wonderful thing to know and understand?!