SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/18/2019
11:29 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-3 “The
Means of Being Filled”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Ephesians
5:18b
Message of the
verse: “but
be filled with the Spirit.”
In Ephesians 4:1 we read “Therefore
I, the prisoner of the Lord, implore you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which
you have been called,” and the highlighted words show us a good analogy of a
moment-by-moment yielding to the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit filled life style yields every step to the Spirit of
God. As we move through life as a
believer we can take one thought at a time and give it to the Spirit, or
perhaps every step we take spiritually causes us to turn them over to the Lord
so that His Spirit will fill us in order to do the things that He has planned
for us to do, and as we continue to yield to the Spirit He will fill us and
empower us to accomplish what He wants us to accomplish for the cause of
Christ.
I really wish it were that simple to
follow this plan of walking in step with the Spirit, but as Paul writes in his
letter to the Romans we many times do the things we should not do and the
things we want to do we can’t do because of the sin-nature we have, so what we
have been talking about is difficult but we are not to give up.
John MacArthur writes “Not to be
filled with the Spirit is to fall back into ‘the deeds of the flesh…which
are: immorality, impurity, sensuality,
idolatry, sorcery, enmities, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these (Gal.
5:19-21). We do not have to consciously
choose to do the deeds of the flesh. If
we are not living under the control of God’s Word and Spirit, the deeds of the
flesh are the only things we can do, because the flesh is the only resource we
have in ourselves.
“The sole defense against the
negative power of temptation, sin, and Satan is the positive power of the Holy
Spirit. We have no power over those
evils, and to try to combat them in our own strength is to try to walk on water
by our own power. We sin spiritual
victories only when God’s Holy Spirit, does battle for us.
“But when we surrender to the
control of God’s Spirit, we find Him producing amazing things in us, things
which are entirely of His doing. Paul
calls these marvelous blessings the fruit of the Spirit, and they are: ‘love, joy, peace, patience, kindness,
goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control’ (Gal. 5:22-23). The person who is Spirit-controlled and who
bears the Spirit’s fruit is the person who belongs to Christ and who has ‘crucified
the flesh with its passions and
desires. If we live by the Spirit,’ Paul
continued, ‘let us also walk by the Spirit’ (Gal. 5:24-25). To walk in the Spirit is to fulfill the
ultimate potential and capacity of our life on earth as God’s children.”
The verse that goes
along with Corrie Ten Boom’s quotation if Matthew 6:31-32 “Do not worry,
saying, ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’…For your Heavenly
Father knows that you need all these things.” 7/18/2019 11:51 PM
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