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You have heard this preached, and you came away confused or frightened or both. In one place they told you it happened the day you believed and there is nothing further to seek.
A.W. Tozer-based teaching on being filled with the Holy Spirit: who it is for, its cost, hindrances, and how to receive it. Includes a heavy product promotion.
Key Takeaways
- Being filled with the Holy Spirit requires full surrender of one's life, not just an added spiritual experience.
- Ephesians 5:18 is a command applicable to all believers, making fullness the normal Christian life.
- The fullness of the Spirit is a continuous, daily posture rather than a single event.
- Hindrances such as grieving or quenching the Spirit commonly block fullness and must be addressed.
- The video contains substantial sales promotion for a paid devotional product alongside its teaching.
What the video covers
- The video opens by addressing believers confused about a second experience of the Holy Spirit, framing the teaching around Tozer's teachings on the Spirit's fullness.
- Tozer's first question to seekers is whether they truly want to be filled, since the Spirit demands full surrender and will not share a heart with cherished sin.
- The speaker argues Ephesians 5:18 is a command ('be filled'), implying the fullness is a normal, commanded Christian life rather than a special prize, and lack of it is disobedience.
- The video contrasts wanting the power of Pentecost while keeping private control, warning against seeking results without submission to God's government.
- Filling is described as a continuous present reality requiring daily return rather than a one-time event.
- Steps to receive the Spirit are outlined, including asking plainly, receiving by faith as one receives Christ, and obeying God.
- Biblical marks of the Spirit's work are discussed, such as glorifying Christ, using Peter's transformation as a model.
- Hindrances are named, distinguishing grieving the Spirit from quenching the Spirit, with quenching leading to spiritual dormancy.
- A large portion of the video promotes a paid '30-day War Room manual' with bonus books and a money-back guarantee, using urgency and social proof.
- The promotional segments are significant enough that they shape the video's commercial nature beyond its teaching content.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Confusion About the Second Experience
- 01:05Channel Intro and Community Greetings
- 02:01Promotion of the War Room Manual
- 04:39Tozer's Question: Do You Really Want It?
- 07:15Ephesians 5:18 as a Command
- 11:55Biblical Examples of Fullness and Hindrances
- 16:40Closing Appeal and Final Promotion
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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In another they told you there is a second experience, handed you a list of evidences you have never had, and you went home quietly certain that whatever this is, you do not have it. And somewhere in between you did what most
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honest believers do. You asked God for it once privately with real intent. Nothing appeared to happen, and you have not asked again since.
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Tonight we will not argue about terms, and we will not hand you a list of sensations to look for.
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We are going to walk through it in order, who it is for, what it costs, what actually blocks it, and how a man receives it. And you will see the one question Tozer put to men before he would tell them anything else.
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The question that stopped most of them where they stood. Based on the teachings of A.W. Tozer, the Chicago pastor who gave 44 years to the ministry, wrote The Pursuit of God on his knees on the floor of a night
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train, and said plainly that the spirit of God is not given to the curious or the idly inquisitive.
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We made this video, and we believe God can use it to speak to you tonight.
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Before we go further, if you are watching from Ohio, from Manila, from Nairobi, from Texas, type the name of your city in the comments. We read them, and we pray over them.
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And if this message finds you tonight, press the like button, not out of vanity. When you press like, YouTube puts this video in front of somebody else who is awake at this exact hour searching for exactly this, and has no
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idea it exists. One press of your thumb can carry it to a stranger who needs it. And now a direct and honest word from us, the ones who make these videos.
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This message is going to end in a few minutes, and what you do in the 10 minutes after it ends will matter more than anything you feel during it.
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Because here is the truth about the fullness of the spirit. And it is the reason we built what we are about to tell you about.
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Nobody is filled on a Sunday for a whole week. The command in Ephesians is a continuous present. Be being filled. Not an event you attend once, but a place you return to every morning.
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And nothing you feel tonight will survive a Tuesday. Tuesday has traffic and a job and a phone and people pulling at you.
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Feeling does not survive Tuesday. Structure survives Tuesday. So we built one. It is called the war room manual. 30 days of spiritual strategy.
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And of everything we have ever made, nothing has helped more people in their walk with God than this.
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It is not a devotional written to make you feel warm for 8 minutes. It is a plan.
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30 days, 30 battle-tested entries, one page a night, about 5 minutes. And every night it ends by putting one concrete thing in your hands to do before you sleep. The first 10 days rebuild the altar.
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The broken promises, the prayer life you have restarted 11 times. The wreckage you have never actually dealt with.
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Days 11 through 20 build the morning watch, which is the room where a man is actually filled.
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And they teach you how to keep standing there on the mornings you feel absolutely nothing. And days 21 through 30 take you into intercession.
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Praying with real authority for your house, your children, your city, the names you carry and cannot fix.
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More than 600 believers have already walked these 30 days. And what they write back is almost always the same sentence.
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It finally became daily. And when you get it tonight, you are not getting one book. Three more books come with it, completely free.
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So you walk these 30 days with four resources in your hands instead of one.
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Now, hear us carefully because this matters more than any sale. The Bible is the word of God, the foundation, and the final authority, always. And no book written by men will ever stand where that book stands.
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The manual does not replace your Bible. It was built to get you back into it on your knees every single day, and it carries a 30-day guarantee.
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Walk all 30 days, and if it has not changed the way you pray, write to us and we send your money back, no questions asked.
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So, do this right now before the message starts and you forget. Go to the pinned comment and open the first link, the very first one, and get your War Room manual and your three free books tonight.
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Do it now while it is in front of you. Then come back and hear every word of what follows. I want to begin where almost nobody begins, which is not with how, but with whether you want it, because that is where Tozer began, and I
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think it is the most honest thing ever said on this subject. He would not give a man the steps until the man had answered one question, and the question was this: Are you sure you want to be filled with the Holy Spirit?
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Now, most of us answer that instantly, and we answer it wrongly because we have in mind what we think the fullness would do for us. We are thinking of power. We are thinking of a settled peace. We are
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thinking of praying with a liberty we have watched in somebody else and envied. So, let me tell you what you would actually be asking for. The Holy Ghost is a pure spirit, and he is called in scripture the spirit of holiness. He
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will not share a heart with a cherished sin. He does not negotiate about it. He does not overlook it on the grounds of your general usefulness, and he will not make an exception for the particular one you have decided is minor.
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He is a jealous spirit. That word is in your Bible. The spirit that dwelleth in us lusteth to envy, or as it is better rendered, he yearns jealously over us.
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He wants all of you. And the man who wants to keep 9/10 of his life for himself and give God a tithe of it is not a candidate for the fullness of the spirit, and he is Lord.
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This is the part we go quiet about. To be filled with the spirit is not to acquire an attachment for your existing life. It is to hand over the deed. He may lead you where you had not intended
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to go. He may take from you something you are fond of. He may send you to a small work when you had your heart set on a large one, or to a large one when you wanted to be left alone.
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He is gentle as a dove, and he will not force a door, but where he is received, he reigns.
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So, I ask you again, and now you know what you are answering. Are you sure you want this? Because here is what I have observed in 40 years. Most Christians do not want to be filled with the Holy
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Ghost. They want the results of being filled without the government of being filled. They want the dove without the yoke. They want the power of Pentecost with the private life of Corinth, and God, who is merciful, does not give them
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what they ask for, because to give a man that much of himself while the man is still sovereign over his own life would ruin the man. Now, having said that, let me take the opposite fear away from you,
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because there are people listening who have gone to the other extreme and concluded this is not for them at all.
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Go to the fifth chapter of Ephesians and notice the grammar, because the grammar settles more than any argument. and be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled with the Spirit. That is an imperative. It is a command in
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exactly the same breath and the same sentence form as the command not to be drunk. And Paul is not writing to apostles. He is writing to the ordinary congregation at Ephesus, tradesmen, slaves, housewives, recent converts out of paganism. Now, follow the logic
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because it is inescapable. A command implies the power to obey it. God does not command his people to do what he has made impossible for them, which means the fullness of the Holy Spirit is not a prize for a spiritual
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aristocracy. It is the normal Christian life commanded of everybody. And then the sharper edge of the same logic, and I say it without pleasure, if it is commanded, then the lack of it is not a misfortune. It is a disobedience.
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We have been in the habit of speaking about the unfilled Christian life as though it were a sad accident like poor health.
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It is nothing of the kind. There is a command in the book with your name on it, and most of us have been quietly declining it for years while calling ourselves orthodox.
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And the Greek will not let us off either. The verb is a present continuous passive. It is not be filled once, it is be being filled, go on being filled, keep on being filled, which tells you two things at once.
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That no single experience, however genuine, settles this for life. And that there is no such thing as a man who was filled in 1947 and is running on it still.
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And if you want that proved out of the history rather than out of the grammar, the book gives it to you in two chapters. In the second of Acts, the 120 were all filled with the Holy Ghost.
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Nobody disputes that one. It is the great instance. Now, turn two chapters on, the same men, perhaps eight weeks later, under threat from the council, praying in a house, and the record says, "And when they had prayed, the place was shaken where they
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were assembled together, and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they spake the word of God with boldness." All filled again. The same people who had been filled at Pentecost. Nobody in that room said, "We have already had
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this." They asked for boldness, and heaven filled them a second time, and the Holy Ghost did not treat the request as a slight on his earlier work. So, do not let anybody tell you that one experience, however real, has settled
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this question for the rest of your life. Pentecost was not a vaccination, and the fact that God filled those men twice in eight weeks ought to free you to come and ask him tonight, whatever happened to you in 1979.
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Now, let me clear up the confusion you came in with, because two things are being mixed together, and they are not the same thing at all. Every believer has the Holy Spirit. Paul is blunt about it. If any man have not the spirit of
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Christ, he is none of his. There is no such creature as a Christian without the spirit. If you are in Christ, he indwells you. And nothing I say tonight should make you doubt that for one moment.
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But having the spirit and being filled with the spirit are two different conditions, and the difference is not a matter of how much of him you have.
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He is a person, and you cannot have a fraction of a person. The difference is how much of you he has.
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Let me put it as plainly as I can. You may have the spirit, and the spirit may not have you. He may be resident in a man and not president in him. He may indwell a house in which there are three
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rooms he has never been permitted to enter, and a man in that condition is genuinely saved and genuinely powerless, and he usually spends his life wondering why other men's prayers are answered.
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Now, how is a man filled? I am going to give you the conditions in order, and none of them is complicated. The difficulty of this is not intellectual, it is moral. First, settle it that the promise is for you. Peter on the day of
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Pentecost, after the thing had happened in front of 3,000 people, for the promise is unto you and to your children and to all that are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call. All that are afar off. That includes a man
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watching this in the middle of the night 2,000 years later. Do not spend another year waiting for permission. Second, settle it that you need it. And this is where the comfortable believer is in the greatest danger, because Laodicea did
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not say we are wretched. Laodicea said, "I am rich and increased with goods and have need of nothing." And the Lord's reply was, "Thou knowest not that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked." A man cannot be filled
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while he is satisfied. The first work of the Spirit in a man is usually to make him thoroughly dissatisfied with himself. And if God has been doing that to you lately, do not resist it. It is not depression, it is preparation.
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Third, present your body. Romans 12, and notice what Paul asks for, because it is not what we would have offered.
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I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. Not your opinions, not your agreement, your body, which is to say your eyes and what they look at,
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your tongue and what it says about people, your hands and what they do when nobody is watching, your feet and where they carry you, and your hours, which are the only currency any of us actually has. The spirit fills what is yielded to
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him and nothing else, and a man who has never got off the fence about his own body is asking God to fill a vessel he has not handed over.
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Fourth, ask. I know that sounds too simple to be a step, and I include it because a great many people reading books about this have never once asked plainly.
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The Lord himself settled the Father's attitude. If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him? How much more? And he prefaces it with a
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thing designed to kill a specific fear. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?
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Or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent?
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I put that in for the cautious believer who has been afraid that if he opened himself up and asked for the spirit, he might get something counterfeit.
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Your Father does not hand out serpents to children who ask for fish. Ask him in plain words and stop guarding yourself against your own God. Fifth, obey.
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And here is the verse that ties the whole thing together from the fifth of Acts. And we are his witnesses of these things, and so is also the Holy Ghost, whom God has given to them that obey him. To them that obey him, not as a
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wage. You cannot earn the Spirit of God, and nothing in this message should be heard that way.
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But obedience is the only climate in which he is at home. And in almost every case I have known, the man who says I have asked and asked and nothing happens turns out, on gentle examination, to have one specific thing he already knows
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about and has not done. A letter unwritten, a debt unpaid, an apology owed for 11 years, a relationship he will not break off.
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He is asking heaven for a general blessing while holding a particular disobedience in his hand. And sixth, receive it by faith and then stop examining your feelings. Paul asks the Galatians one question that demolishes a great deal of our striving. Received you
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the spirit by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith? By faith.
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The same way you received Christ. Not by working up an emotion, not by staying at the altar until something breaks, not by proving your sincerity through exhaustion.
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And I want to say something here that belongs with what we were speaking about recently because it is where more believers are shipwrecked than anywhere else. Do not look for the evidence in your nerves. There are men who have been
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genuinely filled and felt almost nothing at the time and men who have felt a great deal and were merely moved.
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Emotion is not the witness. You may be given deep joy and if God gives it, take it gratefully. But if you ask God in faith, having yielded your body and obeyed what you know, and then get up off your knees feeling exactly as
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flat as you did when you knelt down, you have not failed and God has not refused you.
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You have done the thing by faith, which is the only way it has ever been done, and the evidence will appear where evidence actually appears, which is in your life over the following weeks.
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So, let me tell you where to look instead, because the scripture is specific about the marks. The first and the chief one, from the Lord's own mouth about the spirit, he shall glorify me.
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That is the signature. The Holy Ghost makes Christ large. A man who is filled with the spirit does not talk much about the spirit. He cannot stop talking about Jesus Christ. And wherever you find a work that is chiefly
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occupied with the spirit himself, with phenomena, with sensations and manifestations, you may be respectfully certain that something other than the Holy Ghost is being honored there. The second mark is fruit, not sensation. Love, joy, peace, long-suffering gentleness goodness
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faith meekness temperance. Read that list slowly and notice that every single item is tested in the presence of other people. Long-suffering cannot be verified alone in a room. The fullness of the spirit shows up first in how you treat your wife, your children,
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and the person who irritates you most. The third is a new hunger for the scriptures because he wrote them, and he does not inhabit a man without drawing him to his own book.
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And the fourth is power in witness. Ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you, and ye shall be witnesses unto me. Power for witness, not power for display, and not power to make a man remarkable. And if you want
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to see what that power actually looks like in a man, look at Peter, because God has given us the two photographs side by side, and he meant us to compare them.
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In the courtyard, 6 weeks before Pentecost, warming himself at the enemy's fire, a servant girl asks him a question, and he denies that he ever knew Jesus of Nazareth.
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Three times with oaths and then goes out and weeps. And in the second of Acts, the same man, same temperament, same city, standing up in front of the same crowd that had crucified his Lord and saying to their faces, "Him
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ye have taken and by wicked hands have crucified and slain." Nothing had changed in Peter's circumstances. The danger was greater, not less. What came in between was the fullness of the Holy Ghost. And notice what the power produced. It did not make
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him impressive and it did not make him safe. It made him able to say the true thing in the one place where saying it would cost him. That is the power of Pentecost. And if you have ever stood in
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a room and known exactly what you should have said about Christ and said nothing, that is the lack this fullness is for.
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Now, before I finish, I must name the hindrances because they are nearly always the real issue. You can grieve him and you can quench him and they are not the same.
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Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God. And look at what Paul puts in the sentences on either side of that command. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice and be ye kind
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one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another. He is grieved chiefly by unkindness, not by doctrinal untidiness, by bitterness, by sharp speech, by an unforgiving heart held against a brother. And I will say this plainly, I have known more Christians
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kept out of the fullness of the spirit by an old grudge than by any gross immorality.
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You cannot be filled with the spirit of Christ while nursing something against your brother. You will have to let it go, and you know who it is, and quench not the spirit. That is the other one, and it is about his leading rather than
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your morals. It is the steady, small refusal, the prompting to speak and you did not, the giving you felt and reasoned away, the sin he put his finger on, and you changed the subject.
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Quench a fire often enough and it does not blaze up and rebuke you. It goes quiet.
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And one more, which scripture treats as the gravest of all, wanting this for the wrong reason. A man in the eighth of Acts watched the spirit come and reached for his purse. Give me also this power, and Peter's answer has never been
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softened by any honest translator, "Thy money perish with thee." He did not want God, he wanted what God could do for his standing. And a man may ask for the fullness of the Holy Ghost because he wants his ministry to go better.
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And that man is nearer to Simon than he knows. So, here is the whole of it. And then I am done. The command stands, "Be filled with the spirit." The promise stands, "unto you and to all that are
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afar off." The Father's willingness is settled. How much more? The method is not complicated. Yield the body, ask plainly, obey what you already know, and take him by faith. And the only thing in the universe standing between you and this is whether you will
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have him on his own terms. He is not asking for a room, he is asking for the house. And he will not come in as a guest to be consulted on occasions. He comes in as Lord, or he does not come in
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at all. And every man who ever gave him the whole house has said afterwards that he gave up nothing and received everything. And not one of them has ever asked for his old life back. Go and do it tonight. Not in the general way we
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pray about these things, specifically name the rooms. Name the one you have kept locked. In Jesus' name, go and give him the whole house.
Topics:Holy SpiritA.W. Tozerfilled with the SpiritEphesians 5:18Christian discipleshipspiritual surrenderquenching the Spiritprayer and devotionChristian teachingsermon
