Welcome to our program. Now today
I'm going to be preaching from the book of Ephesians chapter
5. I'm going to begin in verse 17
and the title of the message is Filled with the Spirit and
of course we're talking there about the Holy Spirit, a believer,
a Christian being filled with the Holy Spirit. Now I suppose
that one of the most misunderstood and to be very frank with you
one of the most abused subjects in religion today, or especially
the religion that goes by the name of Christianity a lot of
times, has to do with the subject of the work of the Holy Spirit
in salvation, and the continual work of the Holy Spirit in the
inspiration, energizing, motivation, and the filling of the Spirit
in the believer. Many people have so many different
ideas about that, but the only way that we can know the reality
of being filled with the Holy Spirit is to go to the Word of
God. Now, one thing that you need
to understand about the Holy Spirit is that He is the Spirit
of Truth. Now, the Bible teaches that we
worship one God who subsists in three distinct persons. There's
the person of the Father. God the Father represents the
sovereign authority of the Godhead. And then there's God the Son,
the second person of the Trinity. God the Son is the Lord Jesus
Christ and He is the Redeemer. He is the one who fulfilled all
righteousness on behalf of God's elect, the Church, His people. And He represents that which
glorifies the whole Godhead, Father, Son, and Spirit. For
in Him, the Bible says in Colossians chapter 2 and verse 9, dwelleth
all the fullness of the Godhead bodily, and you are complete
in Him. What that means is that the communication
of God, the triune Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to His
people, to fallen sinful man, and to redeemed sinners is through
Christ. You're not going to know the
Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit except through the Lord
Jesus Christ. The Bible says that he is the
second person of the Trinity. He is the Alpha and the Omega,
the ever-living Word of God, and he became flesh and dwells
among us. He's the God-man. And then there's
the third person of the Trinity, which is the Holy Spirit. Now
the Holy Spirit is a person. He is very God of very God. And
when we talk about the Trinity, it's important that we understand
we're not talking about three different or separate gods. It's
important that we understand that we're not talking about
one God in three different forms, or even one God in three different
roles. We're talking about one God who
subsists in three distinct persons, each one equally, co-equally,
in every attribute of their nature, God. Now, I'm the first to tell
you, or I'm certainly not the first to tell you, but I'm one
of the many who will tell you that we cannot understand this
fully. We cannot grasp it. We cannot
explain it. There are no earthly illustrations
that adequately communicate it to our minds. It's a truth of
Scripture, and we accept it because God says it. And that's the only
reason we accept any truth, because God said it. I may have told
you before that I was traveling through a town one time and I
saw a sign outside of a church building and it said, God said
it, I believe it, that settles it. And I disagree totally with
that sign because what it should read is this, God said it, that
settles it. And that's the way it goes. If
God said it, that settles it whether I believe it or not.
Now God's saying it and that being the settlement of it, that
should cause me to believe it. So we think about these things,
you cannot explain, the infinite nature of God cannot be grasped
and fully understood by the limited, the finite mind of human beings,
and especially sinful human beings. But we preach God the Father,
God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Well, each person in
the Godhead has a distinct role and office and work in the salvation
of God's people. As I said, the Father represents
the sovereign authority. of the Godhead. God the Father
is the one who chose the people before the foundation of the
world. It is the Father who justifies the ungodly. And he does so based
upon the redemptive work of Christ, the obedience unto death of the
Lord Jesus Christ, his blood, his shed blood, and his righteousness
imputed or legally accounted to the charge of his people.
Because that's what he did, he went to the cross having the
sins of his people legally charged or imputed to him, and he died
for those sins. So the Son represents the redemptive work of the Godhead,
he is the glory of the Godhead. Now the Holy Spirit, the person
of the Holy Spirit, he is, he represents, and his office is
the application of all that the Father purposed and all that
the Son purchased. It is God the Holy Spirit who
applies in time to each and every one of God's people, Christ's
sheep, His Church, in each successive generation all that Christ earned
and acquired for His people on the cross of Calvary. The fruit
of Christ's work on Calvary is eternal life, spiritual life,
and it's eternal and spiritual life given to spiritually dead
sinners. Well, it is the Holy Spirit by
the Word of God who applies that in the new birth. Now keep that
in mind. You see, the Holy Spirit is a
person. He is God. We worship God. One God. God the Father, God
the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Now Paul, in Ephesians chapter
5, he continues with his encouragements and his instructions and his
exhortations to the church at Ephesus. And he tells them in
verse 17, wherefore, or for this reason, now what he's talking
about is based upon the fact that we are one with Christ,
we're children of God, children of the light, and we're to walk
as children of the light. We're not to blend in with the
world. We're not to take up the ways of the world. And he says,
for that reason, be ye not unwise. Now man by nature is a fool.
Now the scripture teaches that. The wisdom of men to God is foolishness. And that's why the wisdom of
God to man is foolishness. And what a thing to say concerning
God. But that's the way man is by
nature. That's the way we all are before we come to a saving
knowledge of Christ and God's way of salvation. We don't know
God. We're spiritually dead in trespasses
and sins until we're born again by the Holy Spirit. But now those
who have been enlightened by the Spirit, those who have been
born again by the Spirit, Christ said you must be born again or
you cannot see the kingdom of heaven. That is, you cannot understand
it. You cannot know the nature of that kingdom, the ground and
foundation of that kingdom. You can't know that the salvation
that that kingdom requires and provides in Christ. You can't
even know the king unless you're born again. He says, you must
be born again or you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. That means
enter in your understanding. You must be born again. And before
we're born again, we're fools. So the wise here, he says, be
ye not unwise. The only way that I can not be
unwise is by the power of the Spirit who imparts into me life,
spiritual life, and truth that shows me the reality of what
I am by nature, a sinner, a sinner who cannot earn salvation, and
a sinner who does not deserve salvation, one who is totally
impotent to save himself. Even my best works are inadequate. In fact, they're wicked and evil
in the sight of God. Man at his best state, the scripture
says, is altogether vanity. You see, a wise man, in God's
sight, is one who knows his frame. He knows the reality. He knows
the disease. For all that sin and come short
of the glory of God. And there's none righteous, no
not one. None that doeth good. So, for me to be wise and not
be unwise, I must be led of the Spirit, given spiritual life
and knowledge and truth, to show me my sinfulness and my lostness,
and the Spirit drives me to Christ. for all of salvation, Christ
and Him crucified. He shows me the glory of Christ.
He shows me my need of Christ. He shows me how Christ, alone,
by Himself, in my place, died for my sins and satisfied the
justice of God. He shows me that God can only
be both a just God and a Savior, a righteous judge and a loving
Father. based upon the righteousness
that Christ worked out in his obedience unto death without
my works. And that's the wisdom of God.
Christ is the wisdom of God. And you know, Paul wrote about
that in 1 Corinthians chapter 1 when he talked about what sinners
who are perishing in unbelief see as the gospel. He called
it the foolishness of preaching. What the world calls foolishness,
God calls the wisdom of God. He talked about the Jews. The
Jews were looking for signs and wonders. Christ said a wicked
and adulterous generation looks for signs and wonders. But what
do God's people, in the wisdom that God has given them, look
for? By the power of the Holy Spirit. They look for Christ
and Him crucified. That's the wisdom of God. He's
the wisdom and the power of God. And so when he says, be ye not
unwise, and then he continues with this in verse 17. Now here's
how I can be not unwise. He says, but understanding what
the will of the Lord is. The will of the Lord. People
run around all the time saying, I just don't know what the will
of the Lord is. Now let me tell you something about that. When
you speak of the will of the Lord, you've got to make a distinction
that the Scripture makes. For example, There are many things
in God's will that we do not know except after the fact. And that's called the providence
of God. God is the sovereign ruler and governor of this world. God is not one who just created
this world like you would a clock, wind it up and let it run down
and walk off and leave it. God is vitally, powerfully involved
in the events of this world, every second of it. He is the
determiner of all these things. He declares the end from the
beginning. Known unto God are all his ways
from the beginning. And that's God's providence.
Now, when it comes to the will of the Lord in God's providence,
we cannot know what God's will is until afterward. For example,
I don't know what the next hour is going to hold for me. I think
about it, I pray about it, and I can speculate on it. But only God knows what's going
to happen in the next hour for me. Now there were prophetic
utterings in the Old Testament and some in the beginning of
the New Testament, but those were revelations given by God
to men. It's not things that they came
up with on their own. So God's will concerning my everyday life,
what's going to happen the next hour, the next week, next year,
I don't know until it happens. Now that's part of what the Bible
calls the secret things. Over in the book of Deuteronomy
chapter 29 and verse 29, there's a very significant verse there,
and it says, the secret things belong to God. What God wills
in everyday life, we know after the fact. But now there's also
the revealed will of God. And that is what God reveals
of himself to us and what he commands. which is found right
here in this book. How do I know the will of God
concerning, for example, the salvation of a sinner? Somebody
says, well, you don't know who God's going to save. You're right.
But I know this. By revelation from God, the will
of God is that any sinner who's going to be saved is going to
be saved by God's grace through Christ. That's what the will
of God is in salvation. He's going to save His people
by bringing them to Christ. He sent Christ into the world
to redeem them from their sins. He sent Christ into the world
to satisfy law and justice and bring forth everlasting righteousness.
I know this about you. If you're going to be saved,
you're going to be saved God's way according to His will by
grace based on the blood and righteousness of Christ. And
that's called the revealed will of God. Now, here's another aspect
of that. We have all kinds of things in
this book here that we study and we read and God tells us
to do. We know that is His revealed
will. For example, next week I'm going to deal with the relationship
of husbands and wives as a reflection of Christ and His church. And
He says, wives, submit yourselves unto your own husband. Now, are
you wives? It is the revealed will of God
for you to submit yourself to the authority of your husband
in your home. There's no argument there. Now,
will you do that? I don't know. But I know that's
what God's revealed will is. Now, if you refer back to Deuteronomy
29, 29, it goes on and it says the secret things belong to God.
It goes on to say the revealed things belong to us. And what
that's saying is we're accountable for what God reveals to us. Now,
go back to Ephesians 5.17, then, and put it in this context. Wherefore
be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.
What he's saying here is that a believer is to seek the wisdom
of God by the power of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, in the Word
of God. I want to be immersed in the
Word of God, the will of the Lord. I want to do the will of
God. I'm a sinner, and I cannot save
myself by doing anything. But Christ made this statement.
He said, I always do the will of my Father, and that's my salvation. Now what we're seeing here is
some specifics of what it is to be filled with the Spirit.
To be filled with the Spirit is to be born again by the Spirit
of God. That's where it starts. And when the Spirit of God, in
the new birth, imparts life, spiritual life, that's called
regeneration. and brings a sinner, by God-given
faith, to a saving knowledge of Christ and repentance of dead
works, here's what he does. He convinces that sinner of sin. Now what that means is that to
be filled with the Spirit is to be continually aware that
I'm a sinner, at my worst and at my best, and I cannot save
myself. That all the blessings of God's
grace in Christ are given freely to me, not because I deserve
them, and certainly not because I earned them. I'm a sinner and
I'm in every second of my life in need of God's mercy and God's
grace. There's never a time that I can
look at myself and say, now I'm adequate, now I'm ready, now
I'm deserving of God's favor. No, sir. My only hope of salvation
is Christ. That's my ever continual abiding
awareness. I know that it's of the Lord's
mercies that I'm not consumed. And I continually come to the
mercy seat. A sinner who continually seeks
that way is filled with the Spirit. And the more I see that, the
more I see my own sinfulness, the more I see my own wretchedness,
the Spirit goes on to convict me of the glory and the power
and the grace and the love and sufficiency of Christ and Him
crucified. That's another thing that shows
being filled with the Spirit. You see, this is the wisdom of
God. This is the will of God. To be convinced that Christ is
my hope and my surety, and that in Him I'm safe, I'm secure,
He loves me continually, He embraces me as His child and as one of
His sheep. He said, I give my life, lay
down my life for the sheep. to know that His blood is sufficient
to cover me from all my sins, to cleanse me from all of my
sins, to know that His righteousness imputed to me is sufficient to
continually in eternity justify me before the Holy Father and
to give me free access and entitlement to His presence. It's seeing
the glory of Christ. Now, in verse 18, he tells them,
he says, be not drunk with wine wherein is excess, but be filled
with the Spirit. Now, certainly he's speaking
of just plain old drunkenness there. But the issue here in
Ephesus had to do with religious-oriented drunkenness. There was a great
temple to the false goddess Diana. in Ephesus. And the economy of
the city revolved around that temple and many times the Gentiles
would hold sexual orgies, drunken orgies, in honor of Diana. And sometimes these people who
had been in that culture would go to them, especially those
who before they were born again, but even believers who got caught
up in that stuff for a while And so Paul tells them, he says,
don't be drunk with wine. Now, sometimes drunkenness with
wine, especially in the Old Testament, is used as a metaphor for false
religion and false doctrine. Well, don't be drunk with any
of it. You know what excess of alcohol does to the human body?
It clouds the vision, it impairs your ability to do anything,
to respond, to walk, to judge things. And so he says, don't
be drunk with that stuff. Don't be in excess of wine. Now,
I know a lot of people take that to the extreme and they forbid
anything. They say, don't taste anything,
touch anything or handle anything. That's not what it's saying.
The Bible teaches everything in moderation. But don't be drunk,
he says, with wine. But now what's the opposite?
Be filled with the Spirit. Now let me talk a little bit,
speak to you a little bit about this filling of the Spirit as
it relates to people today and how people see it today. You
know most people when they talk about being filled with the Spirit,
they're talking about a second work of grace or a higher form
of grace wherein a real dedicated believer who has prayed enough
or prayed through enough or whatever, begins to exercise spiritual
gifts such as speaking in tongues. Now, first of all, the issue
of speaking in tongues has been so abused and confused today
that it's not even close to what the Scripture teaches about it.
For example, in the book of Acts, at Pentecost, where we see the
descending and the filling of the Holy Spirit on that great
day, which was the beginning of the New Testament church,
when Peter preached that message, it spoke of those who were filled
with the Spirit and they spoke in tongues. Now many people today
claim to do that and they talk about speaking in tongues. The
way they speak in tongues is some kind of a heavenly gibberish
that people cannot understand. And I've seen preachers on television.
They'll be preaching and all of a sudden they'll just say
some confused language and people say they're speaking in tongues.
Now listen to me very carefully. That is not being filled with
the Spirit and that is not biblically speaking in tongues. The speaking
in tongues. Languages is what that is. That
word tongue is glossia. We get the English word glossary
from. Glossary is like a dictionary
where you have words that can be understood and definitions.
And so when you speak in tongues, the speaking in tongues back
then was preaching the gospel in languages that could be understood. There were people at Pentecost
who didn't understand the language that Peter was speaking. And
so they had to hear it, and God meant for them to hear it. So
he gave those men the ability to speak or to hear the gospel
in their own language. And this is what Paul's talking
about here being filled with the Spirit. It has nothing to
do with gibberish or confusion. He says in verse 19, speaking
to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. That's worship. Singing and making melody in
your heart to the Lord. That's worshiping God. Verse
20, giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Submitting yourselves
one to another in the fear of God. The fear of God there is
not a legal fear of punishment, but it's a worshipful fear. It's
a reverence and a respect unto God. So to be filled with the
Spirit is to be filled with truth that can be understood. Paul
spoke of it in 1 Corinthians 14 when they were abusing the
gift. They were speaking in tongues
in different languages, but people didn't understand them, and Paul
said, God is not the author of confusion. If anyone speaks in
tongues today, it's a language that somebody can understand.
Paul said in 1 Corinthians 14, he said, let there be one speak
in tongues and let there be an interpreter. And what do they
say? If they're speaking in tongues,
as they are filled by the Holy Spirit, They're exalting Christ. They're speaking according to
this Word. For if they speak not according to this Word, Isaiah
said in Isaiah 8 verse 20, there's no light in them. To be filled
with the Spirit is to be filled with Christ. It's to be filled
with truth. To be filled with the Spirit
is to be filled with faith in Christ. It's to be filled with
love for Christ and His people. To be filled with the Spirit
is to be filled with a knowledge of the Scriptures. To be filled
with the Spirit is to be filled with a reverence and a respect
for God that brings fear and worship and service. To be filled
with the Spirit is to be filled with a desire to obey God in
everything. To be filled with the Spirit
is to be filled with a desire and a power that God gives to
fight the warfare of the Spirit and the flesh in a way that's
godly. To be filled with the Spirit
is to be filled with grace. To be filled with the Spirit
is to worship God in truth and in spirit. So when we hear Christ
preached and we hear Him exalted and we see sinners coming to
faith in Him and repentance, that's to be filled with the
Spirit, to be convicted, the Scripture says. It's an unction,
John said in 1 John chapter 2. It's an unction and that's a
power. And it's a power only the Holy Spirit Himself gives
to God's people. Someone said, how do I know if
my convictions are of the Holy Spirit? I'll tell you exactly
how you can know. And this is how you can know
if you're filled with the Spirit. Anytime you have problems and
troubles and grief over sin, where do you find relief? Where
do you find peace and comfort and salvation and assurance?
My friend, if you find it anywhere but in Christ and Him crucified,
it's not the Holy Spirit. To be filled with the Spirit,
is to be filled with the joy and the peace that can only come
from Christ as the Redeemer and the Savior of His people. Well,
I hope this helps you to understand this vital issue of being filled
with the Spirit. And if you'd like to get a copy
of this message, listen to the announcers. He'll give you the
details. The title of the message is, Filled with the Spirit. And I hope you'll join us next
week for another message from God's Word.