Day 8: Be Filled With the Holy Spirit

When God Speaks: How to Recognize God’s Voice and Respond in Obedience

Lose my mind. Become more intimate. Those were the key points that I walked away with today. Along with this: When God’s people are filled with the Holy Spirit, they know when He’s speaking, they know what He’s saying and they are enabled to obey.

What does that mean, lose my mind? Why did I write that down? I think that I mean give up control of my thoughts and actions completely. Hard to do. I’m a guy. I like control. I hate being submissive and I hate being told what to do. Yet, that is exactly what Jesus said that I must do, I must become a servant in all areas of my life.

Honestly, I don’t want to be a servant! I want to be King! I don’t want to wash other people’s feet. I don’t want to submit to other people’s authority. The whole concept seems strange to me.

Yet, in reflection, the only time that I’m truly happy is when I do become as a servant. When I do submit myself to the Holy Spirit. At all other times, I’m but a leaf in the wind, blown here, blown there, just making my way through the day randomly.

And why intimacy? I mean, it’s one thing to be intimate with SU but God? God? Why would I need to be intimate with God? Why on earth did I write that down? I think because I understand now how my marriage is as strong as it is.

For years, I was married but lived a separate life. I wasn’t a part of a team, I wasn’t a partner with this wonderful woman that God had blessed me with. But over years, as we shared our life together, as we shared everything that is our life, the highs, the lows, the day to day routines, we came to know each other intimately. I can finish a sentence of hers. She can glance at me a certain way across a room and I know what she is saying.

That, I think, is why I wrote the word intimate down. That is the closeness that I need to strive for. I need to allow my relationship with the Holy Spirit to become such that we are one; that I no longer need to work to give up control, the control just IS.

One of the things that worked for SU and I over the years is our regularly scheduled “date night”, a specific time set aside just for us. For years we have done that, typically on Thursday nights. Oftentimes, people misunderstand what I’m saying and think that “date night” is for wining and dining, with a little fun afterwards.

It isn’t that at all! It is a commitment to each other, saying that the other person is so important that I am willing to put all else aside and just spend time with you. That, I think, is also the way that we must relate to the Holy Spirit. We must make a commitment to spending time with Him in order to fully understand Him and to grow intimate with Him.

So that is pretty much what I took away from today’s study. How can you be filled with the Holy Spirit? Blackaby put it this way:

• Believe that what God says about the Spirit is true.
• Ask God to work in you in all the ways He promised and purposed.
• Yield All of your life to God and His work.
• Live your life in obedience to God’s working in you daily.