Yeilding

It's a new week and I am excited to jump back into our study of the Holy Spirit! I've been staring at my notes seeking Him on where to go next and all of it is so fun I'm having a hard time deciding what to do!

Last week we ended with looking back at the fundamental truths concerning the Indwelling. That, while we may know we have the Spirit, we might be tempted to think He comes and goes like the wind. It may feel that way and I have most certainly experienced that feeling. However, our feelings don't always reflect truth. Just because we feel a certain way doesn't mean it's true. We can't necessarily gauge the Spirit's work based on our feelings, thoughts, and emotions.

This was somewhat of a new concept for me. I wanted to really feel Christ, and I do, but that is not the primary indicator of His working in my heart. Again, the Bible says that the Spirit of God expresses spiritual truths in spiritual words and we are only able to discern them...spiritually. (I Corinthians 2).

Here is what Andrew Murray says on this:

When contemplating the promise of the Spirit, Christians want some idea as to how His leading is known in their thoughts; how His quickening affects their feelings; how His sanctifying can be recognized in their will and conduct. They need to be reminded that deeper than mind, feeling, and will, deeper than soul, where these have their seat, in the depths of the spirit that came from God, there the Spirit comes to dwell. This indwelling is to be, first of all, recognized by faith.

What Mr. Murray is saying, is that regardless of how we feel at a given time; regardless of what the outcomes of life are or the going's-on around us, we must believe that the Holy Spirit is doing what He does best: transforming us by revealing to us the resurrected Christ.

It is of faith, first. If we look to how we feel, we are simply relying on our flesh to tell us what is going on (more on the flesh/nature later).

But HOW do we do this?, we all cry to our computer screen!

Humility. Yielding. Waiting.

In the Old Testament, before the Spirit of God could fall down in the Holy of Holies, the deepest room in the Temple, the priests of the Temple had to get out. They couldn't even be in the room where His glory fell. It was His place to rule, and His place alone. When His glory fell, the priests were at His disposal, doing what He wanted and waiting on His guidance.

It's the same with us. When the Holy Spirit takes up residency, we too must leave the Holy of Holies. We must make a cognitive decision in prayer to believe that the Spirit of God has seated Himself in the deepest place in us. We decide to humble ourselves to that power and believe that He will do what He says He will do.

Andrew Murray says this in regard to our humility to the Spirit:

The Holy Spirit is not given to us as a possession of which we have control and can use at our discretion. The Holy Spirit is given to us a our Master, who have control of us. We do not use Him, He uses us.

I know I have had that backwards before. I have lived and believed (even if I didn't say it out loud) that I had control. I have believed that I can just summon Him to do something powerful and God-like in my life without even considering that, um, I'm the one who is alive because of Him, not the other way around. Such thinking kept His power from really breaking forth. I was not yielding. Not humbling myself.

I thought I was, but it was really just me trying to force the Spirit to do His job. I figured out that humility and yielding to the Spirit takes great patience and most certainly I found that it rubbed my flesh nature, my natural self, the wrong way! One of the hardest things for me to do a few years ago was go from my butt to my knees. Some of you may not have that problem, and I'm glad!

It wasn't that I was all so into myself, it was just something I hadn't practiced, hadn't understood. But the Lord says to us things like this:

I will give you treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel who summons you by name. Isaiah 45:3

Wait for the Lord; be strong, and take heart and wait for the Lord. Psalm 27:14

Be still and know that I am God. Psalm 46:10

There is great reward and holiness in waiting before the Lord. It shows a soul determined to believe that the Spirit of Christ is the fullness of God in her. That He has the right to do as He wills and that He hold the deepest place in us and in that, we are changed.

Let me say this and you ponder it and tell me what you think

The degree I am yielded to the Spirit is the degree I am filled with the Spirit.

We who are followers of Christ have His Spirit. Now, are we letting Him have full authority? Do we get out of the Holy of Holies and believe that regardless of what we feel, He is at work?

Be humbled.
Be yielded.
Be filled.