A Spirit Filled Life

A Spirit Filled Life


How does one be filled with the Holy Spirit? Through Understanding, Submission and Walking in Faith. How can we apply what we know to our lives? Firstly let’s try to understand that God has given us His Holy Spirit and He dwells within us. God commands us to be filled with the Holy Spirit. He wants us to live our lives controlled and guided by the Holy Spirit.

What then keeps us from being filled with the Holy Spirit? The very word SIN. We as human beings must deal honestly with every known sin in our lives. Sin acts as a deterrent from allowing Christ into our lives. What then is SIN to us? This can come in the form of jealously, pride, bitterness, backstabbing, unkindness, impatience or even an uncontrolled temper. Unclean thoughts may need to be brought to God for cleansing. The issue of laziness or gluttony may need to be looked into. The way we use our time, money, our life style or our misuse of gifts that the Lord has blessed us with or even our cold and indifferent treatment of someone close to us can be in the form of sin. Every sin that we can identify, we should bring to God for confession.

Cleansing our sins is to be aware of our sins. We must not know about our sins but must repent of them. When we accept Christ into our lives – The Holy Spirit dwells in us. The old sinful nature wants us to live for self and the new spiritual nature wants us to live for God. There will always be a spiritual struggle that we face daily. Sometimes the greatest sin we make is our failure to let Christ rule our lives. How easy it is for us to set our own goals, to do things by our own motives and to seek our desire without ever asking God for his will above all else. Sin will always be a continuing problem-our lives will always be marked by setbacks and discouragement as long as we try to keep “self” at the centre of our lives. The Lord says: “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me.” (Luke 9:23)

Through submission we renounce our ways and seek above all else to submit to God and be ruled by Him in every area of our lives. This includes submitting our abilities, our gifts, our possessions, our families, our minds, wills and emotions to HIM. Begin each day by silently committing the day into God’s hands. We thank Him that we belong to Him and we thank Him that He knows what the day holds for us. We ask Him to take our lives that day and use it for His glory. We ask Him to cleanse us from anything that would hinder His work in our lives.

Lastly we walk in Faith with the Lord and act on the truth and live with full assurance that God has already filled us and we are under his control. Whatever the circumstances just have faith. In Luke (17:6) it says only a small amount of faith is needed. Jesus said to his disciples that even if your faith is as small as a mustard seed, you could say to the mulberry tree ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea’ and it will obey you. In Hebrews 11: 1 it says that faith is the confidence of the assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet to see.

To be filled with the Holy Spirit is not a one time event. It is a continuous reality every day of our lives – it is a process that we must choose to surrender ourselves daily to Him. There may be times we face exceptional pressures, share this with your close friends and may they come together to pray in union with you.

Each day may we seek to understand more from God’s Word. May we pray that God will help us to see our sin daily. Each day may we confess and repent. And each day may we submit our will to His Will. May we walk in faith that He is continually filling us as we submit to Him. Each day may we walk in obedience to His Word. May you be blessed with a Spirit Filled Life!