I want to look at the life filled with the Holy Spirit from a more practical angle and show how this life reveals itself in our daily walk and behavior.
#1: When you think about being “filled with the Holy Spirit,” what comes to mind? Power for ministry? Spiritual gifts? Or transformation of character? Be honest about what you’ve been seeking.
In the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit often came upon people as a divine Spirit of revelation, revealing God’s mysteries, or as a Spirit of power to do God’s work. But He did not live in them permanently. Now, many Christians just want the Old Testament gift of power for work, but they know very little of the New Testament gift of the indwelling Spirit—the Spirit who lives in them, renewing and transforming their whole life.
#2: Have you been seeking the Holy Spirit mainly for power to serve God, or for the transformation of your own character? Which do you think God prioritizes?
When God gives the Holy Spirit, His great purpose is the formation of a holy character in us. It is a gift of a holy mind and spiritual nature. What we need above everything else is to say:
“I must have the Holy Spirit making my whole inner life holy if I am really to live for God’s glory.”
#3: Complete this sentence honestly: “When I think about the Holy Spirit, I mostly want Him to help me _______________________________________________.” Is your answer about character transformation or about ministry effectiveness?
You might say that when Christ promised the Spirit to the disciples, He did it so they might have power to be witnesses. True, but they received the Holy Spirit in such heavenly power and reality that He took possession of their whole being at once—and that’s what made them holy men fit for doing the work with power. Christ spoke of power to the disciples, but it was the Spirit filling their whole being that produced the power.
#4: Have you been trying to get power for ministry without first allowing the Spirit to transform your character? How’s that been working?
I want to focus on the passage found in Galatians 5:22:
“The fruit of the Spirit is love.”
We read that “Love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:10). I want to speak on love as a fruit of the Spirit with two purposes. First, let this word be a searchlight in our hearts, giving us a test by which to measure all our thoughts about the Holy Spirit and all our experiences of the holy life.
#5: Here’s the searchlight test: Has this been your daily habit—to seek to be filled with the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of love? Yes or no?
Let us examine ourselves by this standard. “The fruit of the Spirit is love.” Has it been your experience that the more you have of the Holy Spirit, the more loving you become? In seeking the Holy Spirit, we should make this the first thing we expect. The Holy Spirit comes as a Spirit of love.
#6: Rate yourself honestly: In the past year, have you become MORE loving toward difficult people, or have you remained about the same (or gotten worse)?
Oh, if this were true in the Church of Christ, how different her condition would be! May God help us to grasp this simple, heavenly truth: The fruit of the Spirit is a love that shows in our lives, and as the Holy Spirit takes real possession of our lives, our hearts will be filled with real, divine, universal love.
#7: Think of the most unlovable person in your life right now. Do you love them with genuine, divine love? Or are you just being polite and civil while harboring resentment or indifference?
One of the great reasons God cannot bless His Church is the lack of love. When the body is divided, there can be no strength. During their great religious wars, when Holland stood nobly against Spain, one of their mottoes was: “Unity gives strength.”
#8: Do genuine love and unity characterize the church you attend? Or is there division, gossip, factions, and cold relationships? Be specific in your assessment.
It is only when God’s people stand as one body—one before God in the fellowship of love, one toward each other in deep affection, one before the world in a love that the world can see—only then will they have power to receive the blessing they ask of God.
#9: When was the last time you actively worked to create unity in your church? Or have you been part of the problem—spreading criticism, taking sides, or staying coldly distant?
Remember: if a vessel that should be one whole is cracked into many pieces, it cannot be filled. You can take a broken piece of a vessel and dip out a little water into it, but if you want the vessel full, the vessel must be whole. That is literally true of Christ’s Church.
#10: What specific division or broken relationship in your church needs healing? What role have you played in that division? What will you do about it this week?
If there is one thing we must pray for, it is this: “Lord, melt us together into one by the power of the Holy Spirit. Let the Holy Spirit, who at Pentecost made them all of one heart and one soul, do His blessed work among us.”
Praise God, we can love each other in divine love, for “the fruit of the Spirit is love.” Give yourselves up to love, and the Holy Spirit will come. Receive the Spirit, and He will teach you to love more.
#11: Are you willing to be “melted together” with believers you currently dislike or disagree with? What would that cost you?
Now, why is it that the fruit of the Spirit is love? Because God is love (1 John 4:8).
And what does that mean?
It is the very nature and being of God to delight in giving Himself away. God has no selfishness. God keeps nothing to Himself. God’s nature is always giving. In the sun and moon and stars, in every flower you see it, in every bird in the air, in every fish in the sea—God gives life to His creatures.
#12: If God’s nature is to give and not hold back, but your nature is to hold back and protect yourself, whose nature are you living by? God’s or your own?
The angels around His throne, the seraphim and cherubim who are flames of fire—where do they get their glory? It is because God is love, and He pours into them His brightness and His blessedness. And we, His redeemed children—God delights to pour His love into us.
And why? Because God keeps nothing for Himself. From eternity, God had His only begotten Son, and the Father gave Him all things. Nothing that God had was kept back. “God is love.”
#13: God gave you Jesus—His absolute best, His everything. What are you still holding back from God that you think is too valuable to give?
One of the early church fathers said we cannot better understand the Trinity than as a revelation of divine love—the Father is the loving One, the Fountain of love; the Son is the beloved One, the Reservoir of love in whom the love was poured out; and the Spirit is the living love that united both and then overflowed into this world.
#14: The Spirit who indwells you is the same Spirit of love who exists between the Father and Son. Does your life reflect this? Or does something else dominate your life more than love?
The Spirit of Pentecost, the Spirit of the Father and the Son, is love. And when the Holy Spirit comes us and to others, will He be less a Spirit of love than He is in God? It cannot be. He cannot change His nature. The Spirit of God is love, and “the fruit of the Spirit is love.”
#15: If the Spirit living in you is love, but you are not loving, what does that reveal about who is actually controlling your life?
Why is the fruit of the Spirit love? That was the one great need of mankind. That was the thing which Christ’s redemption came to accomplish: to restore love to this world.
When humanity sinned, why did we sin? Selfishness triumphed—we sought self instead of God. And look! Adam immediately began to accuse the woman of leading him astray. Love for God was gone, love for others was lost. Look again: of the first two children of Adam, one became the murderer of his brother.
#16: In your own sin patterns, isn’t selfishness at the root? Your impatience, your anger, your lust, your greed—isn’t it all about getting what YOU want?
Doesn’t that teach us that sin robbed the world of love? What a proof the history of the world has been that love was lost! There may have been beautiful examples of love even among non-believers, but only as a small remnant of what was lost. One of the worst things sin did for humanity was to make us selfish, for selfishness cannot love.
#17: How much of what you call “love” is actually just disguised self-interest? Do you “love” people who make you feel good, serve your purposes, or meet your needs?
The Lord Jesus Christ came down from Heaven as the Son of God’s love. “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son” (John 3:16). God’s Son came to show what love is, and He lived a life of love here on earth—in fellowship with His disciples, in compassion for the poor and miserable, in love even for His enemies. He died the death of love.
#18: Jesus loved His enemies. Name your enemies (or those who have hurt you most). Are you loving them the way Jesus loved His enemies?
And when He went to Heaven, whom did He send down? The Spirit of love comes to drive out selfishness, envy, and pride, and bring the love of God into the hearts of people. “The fruit of the Spirit is love.”
And what was the preparation for the promise of the Holy Spirit? You know that promise is found in John chapter 14. But remember what comes before it in chapter 13. Before Christ promised the Holy Spirit, He gave a new commandment, and about that commandment He said wonderful things.
#19: Jesus gave the new commandment to love BEFORE He promised the Spirit. Are you waiting for a feeling of love before you obey the command to love? Or are you obeying the command and trusting God to give the feeling?
One thing Christ said was: “Just as I have loved you, so you must love one another.” To them, His dying love was to be the only standard for their conduct and relationships with each other. What a message to those fishermen, to those men full of pride and selfishness! “Learn to love each other,” said Christ, “as I have loved you.”
And by the grace of God, they did it. When Pentecost came, they were of one heart and one soul. Christ did it for them.
#20: Jesus’ love for you—forgiving, sacrificial, patient, unfailing—is supposed to be your standard for loving others. How far below that standard are you currently living?
And now He calls us to live and walk in love. He demands that even if someone hates you, you still love them. True love cannot be defeated by anything in Heaven or on earth. The more hatred there is, the more love triumphs through it all and shows its true nature. This is the love that Christ commanded His disciples to practice.
#21: Who hates you or has deeply hurt you? Are you currently loving them, or are you nursing your wounds and justifying your bitterness?
What more did Christ say? “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
You all know what it is to wear a badge. And Christ said to His disciples in effect: “I give you a badge, and that badge is love. That is to be your identifying mark. It is the only thing in Heaven or on earth by which people can recognize Me in you.”
#22: If love is the only badge that identifies you as a Christian, and an outsider observed your life this past week, would they know you belong to Jesus? What would they have seen?
Don’t we begin to fear that love has fled from the earth? If we were to ask the world, “Have you seen us wearing the badge of love?” wouldn’t the world say: “No. What we’ve heard about the Church of Christ is that there’s not a place where there isn’t quarreling and division.”?
#23: What’s the reputation of your church in your community? Are you known for love or for something else (judgment, hypocrisy, division, being political)?
Let us ask God with one heart that we may wear the badge of Jesus’ love. God is able to give it.
And what did Christ say further about this love? “A new commandment I give to you” (John 13:34). It was new in the divine meaning which Christ put into it. It was new in the power with which He could inspire it in them—the power of His Holy Spirit. The love of which Christ spoke was something new—a love that this world had never yet known.
#24: Be brutally honest: Is your “love” for other Christians any different from the kindness and friendliness that decent non-Christians show? What makes it supernatural?
Another thing Christ said: “That they all may be one . . that the world may believe” (John 17:21).
Christ’s unity in His people was to be the great proof to the world of His divinity. How much Christian men and women have talked and thought and spoken and written about the truth! And how we have debated it! That is not the thing that is to convince the world. It is when we love each other—the gentle, humble, Christlike love—that is the power that will convince the world.
#25: Have you been trying to convince unbelievers through arguments and debates? How’s that working? When was the last time someone came to Christ because they saw supernatural love in your church?
“That they all may be one . . . that the world may believe.”
If we want to pray with power, expect the Holy Spirit to come down in power, and truly want God to pour out His Spirit, we must enter into a covenant with God to love one another with a heavenly love.
#26: Are you willing to enter a covenant right now—a solemn promise to God—that you will love every believer He puts in your path, even the difficult ones?
Are you ready for that? Only that is true love that is large enough to include all of God’s children—the most unloving, unlovable, unworthy, unbearable, and difficult. If my promise of absolute surrender to God was true, then it must mean absolute surrender to divine love to fill me—to be a servant of love, to love every child of God around me.
#27: List three Christians you find most difficult to love. Are you willing to surrender to God’s love, filling you specifically for them? If not, your “absolute surrender” was just words.
“The fruit of the Spirit is love.”
Oh, God did something wonderful when He gave Christ, at His right hand, the Holy Spirit to come down out of the heart of the Father and His everlasting love. And how we have degraded the Holy Spirit into a mere power by which we do our work! God forgive us! Oh, that the Holy Spirit might be honored as a power to fill us with the very life and nature of God and Christ!
#28: Have you reduced the Holy Spirit to a tool for your ministry success? Or are you letting Him be what He really is—the living presence of God’s love in you?
“The fruit of the Spirit is love.” Why is this so? And the answer comes: That is the only power in which Christians can really do their work.
Yes, that’s what we need. We need not only love to bind us to each other, but we need divine love in our work for the lost around us. Don’t we often take on a great deal of work, just as people take on works of charity, from a natural spirit of compassion for our fellow humans?
#29: Why are you serving in ministry? Out of guilt? Duty? To look spiritual? To fill a slot? Or from genuine love for God and people?
Don’t we often undertake Christian work because our pastor or friend calls us to it? And don’t we often do Christian work with a certain enthusiasm, yet without having been baptized in love?
People often ask: “What is the baptism of fire?”
I have answered more than once: I know no fire like the fire of God, the fire of everlasting love that consumed the sacrifice on Calvary. The baptism of love is what the Church needs.
#30: Have you been serving without love? Just going through the motions? Doing “God’s work” but without God’s heart? When did you last weep over a lost soul?
To get that baptism of love, we must begin at once to get on our faces before God in confession, and plead:
“Lord, let love from Heaven flow into my heart. I am giving up my life to pray and live as one who has given himself up for everlasting love to live in and fill him.”
#31: When was the last time you got on your face before God and begged Him to fill you with love? Or have you been trying to work for God without first being filled with love for God and people?
Ah, yes, if the love of God were in our hearts, what a difference it would make! There are hundreds of believers who say:
“I work for Christ, and I feel I could work much harder, but I don’t have the gift. I don’t know how or where to begin. I don’t know what I can do.”
Brother, sister, ask God to baptize you with the Spirit of love, and love will find its way. Love is a fire that will burn through every difficulty.
