The Filling of the Holy Spirit

Quickly, let us turn to the Word of the Lord, Ephesians chapter 5, verse 18. For our visitors, we are completing a series on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. The Lord has blessed us greatly through this series, and we are trying to seal this precious people with God’s call to a life of spiritual vitality, a life of energy, power, authority, and spiritual effectiveness.

Ephesians chapter 5—we are actually going to begin with verse 15. Begin with verse 15 of Ephesians. It says there: “…see then that you walk diligently, not as fools but as wise, making the most of the time, because the days are evil…”

The apostle Paul begins by speaking to the people and says: “…therefore, watch diligently how you walk, not as fools but as wise…” He says: “…do not be foolish, but be understanding…”

When I hear that word “foolish,” I immediately think of the five foolish virgins. Do you remember the five unwise virgins who did not keep oil in their lamps? In the Bible, oil is a symbol of the presence and fullness of God. Those five young women did not take the time to keep their lamps ready for the coming of the bridegroom when he arrived to visit the family and consummate the wedding. Five of them were wise and sensible and had their lamps ready.

The Bible always invites God’s people to understand the mysteries of the faith. That is why we are preaching about the baptism of the Holy Spirit, because people—God’s people—need to be alerted to the importance of living lives filled with the Holy Spirit. And the Lord is saying to Lion of Judah: Be understanding; watch diligently how you walk. Brothers and sisters, let us not walk foolishly; let us not walk in a vague, aimless way; let us not walk carelessly. Let us be attentive as we seek and investigate where the lessons and truths are that God wants us to learn, so that we may live victorious lives.

Let us not be foolish; let us make the most of the time; let us knock, seek, and ask, because the days are evil. We live in days when, if you are not well supplied with the power of God, you will have great difficulty surviving in this spiritually oppressive world, where so many spiritual hosts are doing harm, where the devil, as never before, goes about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.

The days are evil, and they were evil when Paul spoke in the midst of the Greco-Roman Empire that persecuted the church. In our time there is persecution against the church in other, subtler ways, but it exists as well. And the devil goes about blinding the church, subverting and killing the church’s vitality. Therefore, we must be alert. It says: “…therefore, understand what the will of the Lord is…”

And here it is; here he gets to the heart of the matter. This is where I want to go. He says: “…do not get drunk with wine, but be filled with the Holy Spirit…” Do not get drunk with wine, in which there is disorder, but rather be filled with the Holy Spirit. Here he is rephrasing and restating the same idea of being understanding, of not being foolish, of being diligent, and the way to do that is by being filled: Be filled with the Holy Spirit.

There is an experience, there is a condition in the Bible, which I am going to lay out for you during these minutes, called the fullness of the Holy Spirit. God wants his people to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

And what does he want…? How does a person become filled with the Holy Spirit? How does a person live in the fullness of the Holy Spirit? Look, he himself gives us the recipe here. He says: “…speaking among yourselves with psalms, with hymns and spiritual songs, singing and praising the Lord in your hearts, always giving thanks for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ…”

What Paul does here is simply sketch a very quick picture of a life filled with the Holy Spirit. He could have added a number of other qualities and activities of a person filled with the Holy Spirit, but he quickly pointed out a few here. For example, he says, “speaking among yourselves.” How important it is for our conversation to be edifying. The Word of the Lord says that our speech should always be seasoned with salt, pleasing to the Lord.

There are times when we spend our lives talking about foolish things that do not edify at all. On the contrary, as it says, foolish words, empty words. And we talk about everything—and praise God, of course we do. We love sports, and praise God for the Red Sox; hopefully they will win the championship again, and that is fine. But there are many Christians whose only topics of conversation are sports, soap operas, the news, and depressing things. But how wonderful it is when we talk among ourselves about the Holy Spirit, about the Word of God, about the things of the Lord, and we mutually edify one another and share.

When I went up there to greet Brother Gilberto and we began… we did not talk about his very nice suit and his very elegant tie and all that. We immediately began talking about ministry. He identified himself as a missionary, introduced me to his children, and spoke about his experiences in Italy and Spain, because… time is short, brothers and sisters, and when you have a passion for the kingdom of God, you immediately get to the reason you came. You can talk about many things, and that is lovely, but how wonderful it is when we Christians edify one another by talking about the Word of God. What does that do? We mutually edify one another; it raises our spiritual level.

You can identify a person who is filled with the Holy Spirit because that person has a passion for God and is always talking about God… Such a person is like an overflowing fountain, always pouring out blessing, praise, and glory to the Lord, because the mouth speaks out of the abundance of the heart.

If your heart is empty of spiritual things, you will not talk about spiritual things. But if your heart is filled with spiritual vision and passion for the kingdom of God, the Word of God will flow freely from your mouth. And you will want to talk about the things of the kingdom of God.

Speaking among yourselves with psalms—those psalms… Paul had only the Old Testament to refer to. I believe he meant the entire Word that existed, all the Scripture of that time; a psalm is simply an example of the Word of the Lord. How wonderful it is when our lives are grounded in the Word of God. Brother, if you want a life filled with the Holy Spirit, you cannot do without the Word of the Lord; you have to read the Bible.

Brothers and sisters, unfortunately, for many of us the only time that Bible is moved is on Sunday, when we take a little something and wipe off the dust that has gathered since the previous Sunday, and then pick it up again to take it to church—if we even do that, brothers and sisters. And it is not that I am trying to make you feel guilty or anything like that, right? But if you do feel guilty, perhaps that is a good thing; you should feel a little guilty.

We must read the Word of God; we must read the Word of the Lord, brothers and sisters. Without the Word of God, there is no spiritual growth. You can read any number of books. Look, nowadays computers and the Internet offer incredible resources from tremendous writers. Early this very morning, I was reading some of the writings of E. M. Bauns and A. B. Simpson, great men of God from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But do you know what? None of those writings compares with the nourishment that comes directly from the Word of the Lord.

The Word of God contains the nutrients; it is like climbing a tree and picking the fruit directly from the plant. It is the difference between eating a fresh steak that has just been cut and eating canned food that has been sitting on the supermarket shelf for six months. There is a very great difference. The Word of God is a word that has life within it.

Brothers and sisters, do not stay too far away from the Word of the Lord for too long. You need to feed on the Word of God. Keep your Bible active; keep your Bible in use. The Lord does not mind if you underline things and if the pages… I love seeing those Bibles that are battered, with pages that are all worn out here and there, and whose back—the… how do you say it? The cover—is completely worn out, and so on, because they are being used. That honors the Lord. Use your Bible, mark it, write notes in it, because there is power in that.

It says: “…speaking among yourselves with psalms, with hymns…” What does that refer to? A life of praise to the Lord. In what other way can you live a life filled with the Holy Spirit? By praising and glorifying the name of the Lord. Amen.

Something unleashes the power of God when we praise and worship the Lord. Something begins to warm up inside your spirit when you begin singing a little chorus in the morning and your voice cracks because it is still dry and all constricted, but you begin to worship the Lord, and your vocal cords begin to loosen. Little by little, that sad, gloomy creaking turns into beautiful praise to the Lord. God is glorified. That is what is called a sacrifice of praise to the Lord.

Brothers and sisters, a person filled with the Holy Spirit is a person who loves to worship the Lord. God is never very far from praise, and God loves a people who worship him, a people who take time to sing and worship him. Why do we take time? We could quickly sing two choruses, get to the reason we came, and be done with it. But it takes time to enter the Most Holy Place, the place of intimacy with God. We have to pass through layers of secularity, weariness, and distraction. And if we concentrate on praise, little by little we descend, descending like a submarine until we reach the depths of God’s presence, and it is there that he begins to do things in our lives. There God meets with you; there God speaks to you; there God challenges you; there God confronts you; there God heals you; there God begins to move powerfully in your life. And you leave refreshed, or perhaps you leave drenched in sweat—either one is fine—because the Lord… you had an encounter with the Lord, because God did something in your life.

But we must worship the Lord. Praise flows freely from the mouth of a person filled with the Holy Spirit, and a person who is filled—a church filled with the Holy Spirit—knows that worshiping the Lord and praising the Lord is absolutely important.

There is a passage in which Elisha finds himself in the wilderness among the army of Israel, and two kings are lost in the wilderness. They have run out of water; the horses and the army are about to die of thirst. And one of the kings, who is a God-fearing man, says, “Is there not a prophet of God here among this great army?” No one knows how, but Elisha happened to be there among them. They call Elisha, and the Bible says that before prophesying, Elisha called for what is known as a musician. What is a musician? A musician was probably someone who played a percussion instrument, a harp, a tambourine, or a drum—we do not know—but he had that man play. He had him play first; he had him offer praise first, because where there is praise, something releases the anointing and blessing of God.

Then, after that man had played, Elisha prophesied and declared that water would come from different places. And it says that all the cisterns that had been empty were filled with water so that the people—the armies—could drink and all those men would not die, because where there is praise… we… the people of God must use praise as a platform for bringing forth the presence of God.

It is a key. Do not ask me why; these are mysteries of God. One would think that he would not need such things, but it is in the Bible, and let me tell you, I cannot be holier than the Bible, nor can I understand the mysteries of God better than the Bible does.

When we worship the Lord, when we offer praise, I believe what it does is this: that layer, that hard crust of reason, secularity, time and space—the mind far removed from God, the carnal mind, the mind absorbed by the cares and struggles of life—through praise, the spirit begins to warm up. Through praise, that hard mentality that cannot receive the Word of the Lord begins to dissolve and dissipate. Praise softens and massages the spirit, and then the spirit warms up and can receive the emanations of God that are there, waiting for someone to understand them, receive them, and act upon them. Do you understand?

That is why the praise of God’s people is so important, both collectively and as a way of life that understands the mysteries of praise.

In these latter times of the church, when God wants to do great things in the world, God has unleashed a wave of praise unlike anything before in history. This whole movement of praise and worship music has arisen in this time to prepare the church to receive the Word and the power and the move of God in this time. That is why there have been great revivals of praise and worship in Australia and New Zealand. God is doing tremendous things through praise and worship. In the United States, the places where God has moved have always been accompanied by great praise and worship.

And interestingly, in the eighteenth century, when there was a great revival—the Great Awakening—right here in Massachusetts with Jonathan Edwards, and later during the second great revival in the nineteenth century, there was always a revival in praise and worship.

Do you know that here in New England and in Europe, for many years the Calvinist Puritan church believed that praising the Lord with instruments and songs and having decorations in the churches was against the will of God? And God had to bring it out of that captivity and teach them that no, God likes praise, that he likes music, that he likes instruments.

A church that worships the Lord is a church where the Holy Spirit of the Lord can rest. A person who learns the secrets of worship has great power. When there is difficulty in your life, when you feel sad, when you feel tired, when there is no reason in your life to praise the Lord, that is when you should praise the Lord the most. When there is barrenness in your life, do not wait until you feel the desire to praise; worship him by faith, praise the Lord by faith.

There is a little chorus that says: praising God when things go well for you, how good that is; praising God when you have no problems, what a good thing; but if you praise him amid your brokenness, that holy Christ moves within you, amen.

Hallelujah, when we praise the Lord from our innermost being simply because he deserves to be praised, and I say to myself: my soul, praise Jehovah, as the psalmist says; my soul, praise the Lord even if you do not feel it; praise him anyway.

What does Isaiah 54 say? It says, “…rejoice, O barren woman, you who did not give birth; break into song and shout for joy, you who were never in labor, because the children of the desolate woman are more numerous than those of the married woman, says Jehovah…” The Spirit tells a barren woman who has never given birth: praise the Lord, glorify the Lord; and that praise unleashes the blessing of God.

Do you know that praise unleashes the power of God and that you do not need to feel fervent to praise the Lord? If you feel cold, praise him. That is when God is most glorified in praise that arises from a posture of faith, a posture that simply knows that, in order to open a door, you do not have to believe whether the key works or not, be happy that you have a key or not, be depressed or happy; you put the key into the keyhole and the door opens, yes or no? Regardless.

When there is faith in God, faith does not have to be an emotion. Faith is simply an acknowledgment of the word of God, of what God says; you act in faith, and that faith is what does the work.

Praise the Lord, “…speaking among yourselves with psalms, with hymns, praise, and, it says, spiritual songs, spiritual songs....” Is that redundant? Is it simply another way of saying hymns?

Many commentators who are more intelligent and learned than I have suggested that the idea of spiritual songs—and there are texts that support it—is singing in the Spirit. Singing how? Singing in tongues. The apostle Paul speaks of whether I pray with the understanding or whether I sing with the understanding or in the Spirit… When the Pauline language often speaks of singing or praying in the Spirit, it means singing in tongues because of the context in which Paul explains this. It is not one hundred percent clear, but that is very… contextually, it is the most natural and safest interpretation.

When it speaks of spiritual songs, it is speaking of those free songs, those songs in tongues, those spontaneous songs. They are not the songs we sing here that have already been prescribed—and glory to God for them—but do you know, brother, that in the Spirit you can be a composer for God and also sing your own words of love to the Lord, you know? And I believe those are the most beautiful words before the heart of God: the words you sing to the Lord about how grateful you are, about how loving you feel toward your God, about the things he has done. Those words are worth more than the works of Bach or Beethoven or Mendelssohn or those great composers, or Handel with his Messiah.

Look, praise that comes from the heart, from a grateful heart, is worth more to the Lord than an exalted composition by someone who may have been a thousand miles away spiritually when he wrote it.

Many of the praises written throughout the centuries of Western history were written by men who were simply writing because that was what was culturally done at the time. They were not men of faith, and they wrote masses and different classical compositions, and that does not mean… But when a person filled with the Holy Spirit, filled with love for the Lord, filled with gratitude, decides to praise the Lord in his own words, God’s heart is inevitably touched by it.

Spiritual songs are songs that come from the heart, from the soul, songs that are not predetermined, spontaneous songs. God loves spontaneity in praise; God loves worship that comes forth unprepared, that comes from a posture of faith.

Listen to me, how delicate and risky it is when you stand here before hundreds of people and God tells me, “Praise me,” and I begin to sing, and I do not know what I am going to say, and I do not know what is coming next. I am finishing one phrase and do not know what the next one will be, but I simply have to listen to the Spirit of God and praise him.

That is something… I have not sought it; it is not something I have programmed myself to do, but rather something God has gradually done over time, and I find that it is a blessing to my life, and I believe it is also a blessing to the church.

When a call is made, brothers, let us lift our voices and sing new songs to the Lord. Did you hear that phrase, new songs? That idea of a song that comes forth fresh—it is a Hallmark card that you have written with a personal message bearing the name of your God, your beloved, Christ Jesus.

Listen to me, praise drawn from a heart that is passionate and creative toward God is special praise. I am thinking specifically of someone in the word of the Lord. Do you remember that woman of ill repute in the Bible who came before Jesus with an alabaster jar full of perfume, broke it, and poured that jar of perfume over the Lord’s head, and shed tears of gratitude because the Lord had freed her from a life of perversion, and dried with her own hair the tears she had shed upon the body of her beloved? And there was a man there, a religious Pharisee, a Pharisee who observed the letter of the law, a Pharisee who had given the Lord only a basic, religious reception. He did not wash his feet; he did not kiss him, as was customary to honor an important visitor; he did not invite him to sit in the choicest place in his home. He simply invited him to see what he would say.

And there was that man, devoid of spiritual understanding, looking at this woman, full of passion, inventing an act of praise with an alabaster jar, because there was nothing in all the Pharisaic writings that said the Lord should be praised with an alabaster jar of perfume. The Holy Spirit dictated that to her, and she offered a spiritual song, an act of praise invented in the moment, fresh, taken out… bread taken from the oven at that very moment, and she worshiped her Master with that perfume.

And do you know what the Lord said to him? The Pharisee was watching him, because the religious church sees the people of God worshiping him with joy, with gladness, with originality, and says: these people are crazy; they are excessive; they are so exaggerated; they are not elegant; they are not dignified; look how strident they are; look how they shout.

People who do not have the Holy Spirit do not understand the importance of moving and praising the Lord in the Spirit. When David danced before the entire multitude because of his joy at seeing the ark of God enter Jerusalem again, Michal, who was there—his wife, the daughter of a king, dignified, well educated, very elegant, very conscious of her nobility—saw David take off his clothes and dance in his underwear before all the people, before CNN and all the nation’s television cameras, and said: listen, how you have embarrassed yourself, how you have demeaned yourself—the king, the president of the nation, dancing as though he were some young man at a disco there in front of everyone. And David told her: it was before my God that I did it, and I wish I could make myself even more contemptible, David said.

Michal remained barren for the rest of her life; she never had children, because the religious church that does not praise the Lord in spirit and in truth has no children. It is not effective in praise, it is not effective in worship, it is not effective in evangelism, it is not effective in the moving of the Holy Spirit; it remains barren. And David told her: it was God who preferred me over your father. She was Saul’s daughter, because God prefers the heart of a devoted man to a woman who loves the Lord.

David was a man with many flaws. He made grave and serious mistakes, but he had a heart that desperately loved God, and God wanted that man to serve him and praise him.

Then that woman… God told her… the Lord Jesus said to the woman—he said to the Pharisee: you did none of those things for me, but from the moment I entered, this woman has not ceased pouring perfume over my body. She has blessed me with her tears and dried her tears with her hair, and this, he says, she has done: she has anointed me for my burial.

This woman did not know that she was participating prophetically in an act of cosmic, historic proportions, and that she was prophesying beforehand the anointing of the lifeless body of the crucified Christ and anointing him for his burial. She was acting out, carrying out a prophetic act involving the body that would be anointed with spices and washed after his death.

Why? Because when you praise the Lord in the Spirit, when you dare to take tentative steps of faith and begin praising the Lord and praying and worshiping in the Spirit, when you open your mouth… Sometimes we say: look, God has anointed you; you have cried out; you have asked for the baptism of the Holy Spirit; open your mouth and, by faith, speak in tongues. And people say: no, first an angel has to come and say, “Say rabacaza,” or, “Say carabayanda,” and then I will say it. No, you have to open your mouth in faith. Open your mouth. You are going to feel panic; you are going to feel ridiculous; you are going to feel ashamed; you are going to feel like a fool. But do you know what? There is power in that crucifixion.

When a man or woman crucifies the self, crucifies the sense of dignity, crucifies the sense of reason, crucifies the sense of what makes sense, and does it because God says so, in that death there is resurrection and there is blessing.

The power of God can flow through that empty space you open up to the Lord, and God can then speak through you and do things that you do not even understand you are doing.

That woman there, before a small audience of people, was doing something that would be testified to and witnessed by billions of people over two thousand years, just as we are doing here today. She did not understand that, but, moved by the Spirit, she offered the Lord perfect worship, coming from the heart of God to honor the Christ who was to be crucified—spiritual songs. Let us worship the Lord in Spirit, in truth.

When God tells you to do something, do it. When God tells you to speak to someone, speak to that person; and even if you make a fool of yourself, do it. It is better to make a fool of yourself while trying to do the will of God than to preserve all your dignity and miss the opportunity to be used by God. How good it is when we obey the Lord and do things that make no sense but have the power of God enclosed within them.

Once King Joash, I believe that was his name, came to visit Elisha on his deathbed, the great prophet of God. And Elisha, with the little energy he still had left—and he still had a little prophetic impulse left—said to the king: take some arrows in your hands, take some arrows, take some arrows in your hands. And the king took out a few arrows. I imagine that he had them with him or asked one of his soldiers, one of his bodyguards, to give him a few arrows. And he told him: now take those arrows in your hand and strike the ground. And the king must have said: well, it looks as though the illness has attacked him quite seriously; the poor man probably has Alzheimer’s, right? But I am going to do it to humor and please him. So there, indifferently, he struck the ground a couple of times with those blessed arrows.

And I imagine that the prophet of God sat upright in his bed, still filled with the prophetic strength he had left, and said to him: you simpleton, you idiot—he probably said—if you had struck four or five times, you would have completely destroyed the Syrians, the most terrible enemy Israel had; but now, because you struck only twice, you will defeat them twice. He missed the greatest opportunity of his life. It is as though, during the Cold War, the United States could have destroyed all of Russia and completely wiped it off the map at no cost whatsoever.

They missed the opportunity; he missed the opportunity because he did not discern. He was not a man of the Spirit. He did not discern God’s moment; he did not discern that if he acted on the prophet’s word, God was there at that moment and he was going to become a conduit for what God wanted to do, so that the will of God could flow through history at that moment. And he could not do it because he did not discern the Spirit; he did not listen to the voice of the Spirit.

Many times the voice of the Spirit will come in ways that you do not even understand; the prompting of the Spirit will come here mixed up with other thoughts, wrapped in a mental package with other ideas and other things. But if you have faith—look, believe that what is there is from the Lord, take hold of it, believe it, and act on it—and you will see that God will bless you. We must discern the Spirit, move in the Spirit, live in the Spirit, and act in the Spirit.

God wants to do great things through the church in this time, and he is waiting for vessels; he is waiting for instruments through whom he can move—men and women filled with the Holy Spirit, capable of discerning the movement of God at a given moment in their lives and willing to let God work and move, to become instruments.

And brothers and sisters, the prophetic movement of God does not necessarily come accompanied by heralds with trumpets; it comes humbly, through the stirring of your soul, of your spirit.

You have to discern, you have to dare, and you have to take steps of faith in the name of the Lord, beginning to walk by faith.

How do you fan into flame the gift of God within you? Simply by blowing on it, acting, trying, making an effort, taking baby steps, babbling, making mistakes, stumbling, and experimenting until you gradually become stronger and learn to discern the voice of God truly in your life. But first you have to be willing to look foolish; first you have to be willing to feel uncomfortable; you have to be willing to make mistakes from time to time.

Many people do not enter into the prophetic movement of God because they want everything ready, prepared, and done completely right from the outset, but that is not how it works; all gifts are developed by exercising them.

How did Billy Graham become the great preacher who evangelized millions of people on earth? By making baby efforts.

Billy Graham writes in his biography that the first time he preached—he says that when he was invited to preach, he took five sermons with him, just in case one ran out before his allotted time, right? He says he preached all five sermons in about ten minutes, and then he had nothing else to preach. But what a work that man did afterward—the gift of an evangelist, right?

The gift of an evangelist is developed by exercising it, cultivating it, studying it, just like the gift of the prophet, the gift of the apostle, the gift of the teacher, and the gift of the pastor. All those gifts are exercised and developed by exercising them. That is why the apostle Paul tells Timothy, “I advise you to fan into flame the gift of God that is in you through the laying on of my hands.”

The gift of God comes into your life, and then you have to exercise it in order to develop it. As you exercise and practice it, you are going to make mistakes; you are going to… you are going to miss it many times. But you are also going to hit the nail on the head, and your life will see that yes, it is real. Then you will continue growing in the use of the gift, become more firmly established, and make greater use of the gift.

Gifts are developed by using them, brothers and sisters; that is the mystery, right?

So, “..... psalms, hymns, speaking among yourselves with spiritual songs, singing and praising the Lord in your hearts.....”

I see something interesting here: in your hearts. Many times we believe that the only praise given to the Lord is public praise, the praise offered here when we gather together. And for many of our brothers and sisters, the only time they are actually praising the Lord is when they are in church. We still retain that remnant—with all due respect, I say this—of the Catholic Church, where one remembers God only when one goes to church on Sunday for a quickly rushed-through Mass, and then we do not think about him again until the following Sunday… Twenty minutes, and the priest had better hurry because I have to get home quickly to eat—and many times that is all there is, right?

And brothers and sisters, anyone who depends solely on the church for their spiritual life is lost—even anyone who depends solely on being with other believers. Some people like to pray, but they do not pray unless they have someone else to pray with, and they are always looking for people with whom to pray. But do you know what? God also likes you to pray, worship, and serve in your own personal intimacy with him, sometimes with inexpressible words, as the Bible says, with groanings that cannot be expressed, sometimes in bed at two in the morning when you have awakened and cannot get back to sleep.

Look, instead of starting to think about things that make you anxious—and I say this from personal experience—begin to pray. You wake up at three in the morning and cannot get back to sleep… How many can say amen to that?

Listen, look how many insomniacs there are here in the church! I am in good company. But do you know what? During those times when you are lying there, somewhere between sleep and reason, use that time to praise the Lord; use that time to worship him; use that time to pray. Present your family, present your church, present your community, and present your problems to the Lord. Confess the presence of God, the power of God, and God’s goodwill toward your life.

Look, drift in and out of sleep, and before you know it, it is eight in the morning, the little birds are singing, and you fell asleep without even realizing when it happened.

For me, the best sleeping pill is prayer. Sometimes I begin to pray, and in a moment I am already lost in sleep. How wonderful it is to fall asleep praying. It is interesting: many times, the best way to get a good, refreshing sleep is to take a little time to pray first. Get into bed, pull that blanket snugly up around your neck, and then begin to pray to the Lord, begin to talk with him, begin to praise him. Put on some soft music by Marcos Witt or one of those singers, and let God’s little angels come and carry you away to the heavenly throne. I assure you that neither nigthwill nor any other medicine of that sort will do what this does, right?

“.....In your hearts.....” You need to set aside time alone with God to pray with those inexpressible groanings. Look, there are times when all you have left with which to praise the Lord is a groan. Has that ever happened to you? There are times when there is so much pain in your heart, so much difficulty in your life, and such a lack of wisdom about how to pray that the only thing you can do is groan. Do you know that I believe a groan is the purest form of communication a human being has? It is the groan, because a groan is simply air and sound; that is all. It has no… it has no verbs, it has no grammar; you use nothing except “mmmm,” something that comes out of you. All you are using is air and vocal cords; that is all. It is communication reduced to its most fundamental level of all. And do you know what? God is a perfect interpreter of groans; he speaks groans perfectly well. That is a language, even if you do not know it; it is called groanings.

Use that language; groan to the Lord. When you do not know how to pray, groan. Where does the benefit of tongues come from? Tongues are simply a mysterious language that does not depend on preestablished grammar, does not depend on a human format, and does not depend on anything prepared beforehand. It is simply an individual in contact with something within his own being that he himself does not understand, verbalizing pure things before a God capable of interpreting the simplest and most obscure movements of the human soul. That is what tongues are.

And let me tell you: artists—and modern poetry and modern literature, which have advanced tremendously, as well as linguistics and other things—the more modern and advanced poetry has become, the more it has entered into speaking in tongues.

Look how interesting that is… There are modernist poets and poems that are pure nonsense: Dadaist poets and other modernist, surrealist poets and those sorts of… The more modern poetry and literature press against the walls of their genre, the more they enter into the abuse of and experimentation with language. Why? What are they doing? They are trying to push language, to take it to its maximum capacity to express the ineffable—the artistic experience, the poetic experience, the spiritual experience that language cannot encompass.

So they take language and begin to force it. It is like taking a vessel and kicking it to make it wider so that more can fit inside it. And every form of expression that seeks depth, agility, and the capacity to encompass must enter the experimental realm; it has to enter into babbling. You have to speak nonsense and depend on that nonsense to express what is inside the human being.

And that insight, which poets have taken thousands of years to discover, was already revealed in the word of the Lord two thousand years ago.

Speaking in tongues is simply verbalizing energy. That is what language is: language is verbalized energy; that is all. I am not a linguist, but I can tell you that this is a good definition: it is energy, feelings, and impressions placed in the vessel of language.

And when we speak in tongues, what we are saying is: Lord, I myself do not know what I am feeling, but you are able to interpret it. Does the Bible not say that the Spirit of God guides us with inexpressible groanings when we do not know what to say to the Lord? Speaking in our hearts, speaking in your hearts, praising the Lord in your hearts.

A life filled with the Holy Spirit, a life possessed by the power of God and moving in the energy of God, continually speaks about the things of God, speaks the word of the Lord, speaks and worships the Lord with hymns, speaks and worships the Lord with songs and original expressions of the Spirit, sings and praises the Lord in season and out of season, in private or in public, allows itself to be guided by the inexpressible groanings of the Holy Spirit, and always gives thanks for everything to God the Father.

A person filled with the Holy Spirit is a grateful person, someone who knows that nothing they have is their own and that they have earned nothing they have received, but that it is solely by the grace and mercy of God. A person is… What did I tell you?… Amen.

What did the Lord say to Simon the Pharisee when this woman worshiped him with her simple but very profound praise? He said, “Because this woman was forgiven much, she loved much.” Do you see?

And it is something, brothers and sisters: when you know where God has brought you from, when you know everything you have received from God without deserving it, the only thing that will remain is a desire to praise him and give thanks to the Lord.

Do you know how you can tell when a person is filled with the Holy Spirit? When that person is grateful to God, when that person gives glory to God for everything, when that person knows that God brought them up out of the miry clay, set their feet upon a rock, and made their steps firm, and now they are like a slave who will go wherever the Lord leads… like a grateful little dog… Whatever God wants to do with them, they will do it, because they know that their life belongs to God alone.

When the demon-possessed man from the region of the Gadarenes was set free from his demonic bondage, he came to Jesus and said, “Lord, I want to go with you; let me go with you.” You have seen those children who cling to their father or mother and want them to take them wherever they go, and who begin to scream when their father leaves them.

A person who is grateful to the Lord, a person who knows who God is, is someone who has laid everything at the Lord’s feet. It is a person who no longer lives for themselves, who says with Paul, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” because that person knows, as Paul knew, that he is the worst of sinners, and even so God saved him and called him into his service.

Oh, how God loves the grateful person! How God loves the person who holds nothing back, who gives God whatever he wants, who surrenders whatever God asks of him even before he asks for it, because he is grateful for what God has done in his life.

Let us stand. I ask the musicians to come up here. That is a life filled with the Holy Spirit, brothers and sisters, I assure you. That word you have just received is the word of God, because I did not come here to preach about that. I came to preach about the filling of the Holy Spirit, but listen to the nine o’clock sermon and you will see that it is completely different from this. Yet it is the same thing: it is the filling of the Holy Spirit, the life filled with the Holy Spirit. Later we will speak about that in greater depth, but this is the word God wants for your life; it is the freshly baked bread God wants for your life. Cultivate these attitudes; cultivate these practices.

If you feel far from God and the courts of the Lord do not appeal to you, perhaps it is time for you to seek a fresh anointing of the Holy Spirit again, a fresh filling of the Holy Spirit in your life. If you do not feel the power that the Bible says a son or daughter of God should have, ask the Holy Spirit to fill you.

Be filled with the Holy Spirit; be filled with the Holy Spirit. Say with me: I want, I want to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Lord, fill me; Lord, visit me; Lord, anoint me with your Spirit. I want your fullness; visit me. Hallelujah. Thank you, Lord; thank you, God.

Take a moment to ask the Holy Spirit to fill you; ask the Holy Spirit to baptize you; ask the Holy Spirit to make his water flow within you. Hallelujah, we worship you, Lord; we bless you, we bless you, Lord. We want to be filled with your Holy Spirit; we want more. Refresh us, Lord, with your water.

Oh, we love your dwelling place, Father; we love your word; we love the presence and the moving of your Holy Spirit, Lord. Oh, we bless you, Father; we worship you; we glorify you. Glorify the Lord and give thanks to God. Let that word sink deep…

Let that word of God seep deeply into your spirit. The Holy Spirit of God wants you to be filled with the Holy Spirit. I always find myself addressing the young people, the young people of our church, because God desperately wants you to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

Young people, the times are evil, particularly for you. The enemy is out to get you; the enemy is out to possess you; the enemy is out to corrupt you; the enemy is out to defile you.

You are living in a perverse time in the history of humankind, and for you to walk as the Lord wants you to walk, you will need a special anointing; you will need a special seal, like those animals that live in the sea. They have a special coating, an oily coating, that allows them to glide through the water and also warms their bodies in the midst of the very cold oceans.

And I am telling you right now that God wants to put an anointing, an oil, all over you and inside you to protect you, cover you, and warm you as you walk through a very arid, very cold—a deathly cold—generation. And he wants to make you men and women of God, capable of receiving the emanation from the throne of heaven and the message that he wants to send you. But that will not come unless you are filled with the Spirit, unless the Holy Spirit of God is poured all over you. And I urge you, in the name of Jesus Christ, to go and obtain oil and wine from the storehouses of the throne of God, and to ask the Holy Spirit to fill you with his flame, with his fire, with his water, and to pour his rain upon you.

I beg you in the name of Jesus Christ: do not take lightly the call of the Holy Spirit upon your life. You are receiving much, and much will be expected from you. So I call upon you in the name of Jesus Christ: do not be lukewarm; do not be a covert Christian; do not live a double life.

Hear the word of the Lord right now. The Lord is saying, “I want passionate, passionate young people. I want a passionate young generation.

I want men—young men and young women—completely given over to me and to my claims of lordship over their lives. And if they take me seriously, I will take them seriously, and I will bless them, and I will send my oil; I will send my Spirit upon them; I will send my new wine upon them. I will make giants of them; I will make them a Gideon generation; I will make them powerful, powerful witnesses for me.

Wherever they go, my signs and my wonders will follow them; and wherever they speak, my word will speak powerfully through them, and many will come to a saving knowledge of my Son. And I will prepare the harvest, and I will prepare the time for the coming of my Son. But they must take it seriously; they must walk in complete integrity before me; they must pay the price; and they must sacrifice their dreams, and they must sacrifice their pleasures, and they must sacrifice all those things that they value so much and put me above them all. And if they do that, I will pour my treasure upon their lives, and I will deign to use them, and I will use them mightily as I have not used many other generations before or since.

This is the word of the Lord for you, young people. Receive it in the name of Jesus; receive it in the name of Jesus. Pay the price, pay the price, pay the price. Take God seriously. Ask the Lord to tear away from you every covering that is not pleasing to him, and let your bare heart be touched by the hand of God and set on fire for him. This is the word of the Lord.”

Yes, Lord, we worship you and bless you, Lord. We thank you, Father, for your words, Lord. Plant your word deep within our hearts. We want to be a people pleasing to you, Lord. We want to be a people who bring a smile, Lord, to your wounded Father’s heart. Pour out your Spirit upon this generation, Lord. We want to see your glory; we want to see your name established, Lord, in this land. We want the banner of Jesus flying over the rooftops of New England and of this nation, Father, for the glory of Jesus. Thank you, Lord. We worship you; we bless you. Thank you, Lord. Thank you.