The Promise of The Father

This article is from Issue 7, Called to be Filled With The Holy Spirit

By Andrew Murray

In the words of God’s promise, “I will pour out My Spirit,” (Acts 2: 17-18) and of His command, “Be ye filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5: 18), we have the measure of what God is ready to give and what we may obtain.

Jesus spoke of the Spirit as “the promise of the Father” (Luke 24:49). The best gift a good and wise father can bestow on a child is his own spirit, to reproduce in his child his own disposition and character. Was not this the glory of Jesus as a Son upon earth, that the Spirit of the Father was in Him?

At His baptism in Jordan the Spirit descended upon Him, and the apostle says of us, “Because ye are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying Abba, Father” (Gal. 4:6). A king seeks in the whole education of his son to call forth in him a kingly spirit. Our Father in heaven desires to educate us as His children for the holy, heavenly life in which He dwells, and for this gives us, from the depths of His heart, His own Spirit.

This was the whole aim of Jesus when, having made atonement with His own blood, He entered for us into God’s presence, that He might obtain for us and send to dwell in us, the Holy Spirit (Acts 2: 32-33).

As the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, the whole life and love of the Father and the Son are in Him. Coming down into us, He lifts us up into their fellowship. As Spirit of the Father, He sheds abroad the Father’s love with which He loved the Son, in our hearts (Romans 5: 5), and teaches us to live in it.

As Spirit of the Son, He breathes in us the childlike liberty and devotion and obedience in which the Son lived upon earth. The Father can bestow no higher or more wonderful gift than this: His own Holy Spirit, the Spirit of sonship (John 1: 12-13).

Have you received the Holy Spirit since you believed? (see Acts 19:1-2). Let every reader submit himself to this heart-searching question. To be filled with the Holy Spirit of God, to have the full enjoyment of the Pentecostal blessing, is the will of God concerning us. Let us judge our life and our work before the Lord in the light of this question, and return the answer to God.

BEFORE AND AFTER PENTECOST

“They were all filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:4).

When we speak of being filled with the Holy Spirit, and seek to know what it precisely is, our thoughts always turn back to the day of Pentecost. There we see the glorious blessing that is brought from heaven by the Holy Spirit with which He can fill the hearts of men.

There is one fact which makes the great event of the day of Pentecost doubly instructive. We have learned to know the disciples who were then filled with the Spirit, by their fellowship for three years with the Lord Jesus. Their infirmities and defects, their sins and perversities, all stand open to our view.

But the blessing of Pentecost wrought a complete transformation. They became entirely new men, so that one might say of them with truth: “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Cor. 5: 17). And this is the principal thing, how mighty and complete the revolution is that is brought to pass when the Holy Spirit is received in His fullness.

The indwelling presence of the Lord Jesus.

In the course of our Lord’s dealings with His disciples on earth He spared no pains to teach and train them, to renew and sanctify them. In most respects, however, they remained just what they were. The reason was that up to this point He was nothing more than an external Christ who stood outside of them and from without sought to work upon them by His word and personal influence. Pentecost changed this condition entirely.

In the Holy Spirit He came down as the inward, indwelling Christ, to become in the innermost recesses of their being the life of their life. This is what He Himself had promised…… “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you…. At that day ye shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me, and I in you” (John 14:18, 20).

This was the source of all the other blessings that came with Pentecost. Jesus Christ, the crucified, the glorified, the Lord from heaven, came in spiritual power, by the Spirit, to impart to them that ever-abiding presence of their Lord that had been promised to them.

And that was done in a way that was most intimate, all-powerful, and wholly divine: by the indwelling which makes Him in truth their life. Him whom they had had in the flesh, living with them on earth, they now received by the Spirit in His heavenly glory within them! Instead of an outward Jesus near them, they now obtained the inward Jesus within them.

The Spirit of Jesus in humility

Often the Lord had to rebuke them for their pride and exhort them to humility. It was all of no avail. Even on the last night of His earthly life, at the table of the Holy Supper, there was a strife amongst them as to which of them should be the greatest (Luke 22:24).

The teaching of Christ was not sufficient to redeem them from the power of indwelling sin. This could be achieved only by the indwelling Christ. Only when Jesus descended into them by the Holy Spirit did they undergo a complete change.

They received Him in His heavenly humility and subjection to the Father, and in His self-sacrifice for others, as their life. Henceforth all was changed. From that moment onwards they were animated by the Spirit of the meek and lowly Jesus.

This in very truth is still the only way to a real sanctification, to a life that actually overcomes sin. Many preachers and many Christians keep their minds occupied only with the external Christ on the Cross or in heaven, and wait for the blessing of His teaching and His working without understanding that the blessing of Pentecost brings Him into us, to work Himself in us. Because of this, they make little progress in sanctification. Christ Himself is of God made unto us sanctification: and that in no other way than by our living in Him, because He lives and abides in our heart and works all there (1 Cor. 1:30).

The Spirit of Jesus in love

Next to pride, lack of love – or as we may put it in one word, lovelessness – was the sin for which the Lord had so often to rebuke His disciples. These two sins have in truth one and the same root: the self-seeking I, the desire for self-pleasing. The new commandment that He gave them, the token whereby all men should know that they were His disciples, was love to one another (John 13:35).

It manifested on the day of Pentecost that the Spirit of the Lord shed abroad His love in the hearts of His own. The multitude of them that believed were as one heart, one soul. All things they possessed were held in common. No one said that anything of that which he had was his own. The kingdom of heaven with its life of love had come down to them. The Spirit, the disposition, the wonderful love of Jesus, filled them, because He Himself had come into them.

The might of the Spirit and the indwelling love of the Lord Jesus go together. Paul prays for the Ephesians that they might be strengthened with power by the Spirit, in order that Christ might dwell in their hearts. Then he makes this addition: “that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend…the love of Christ which passeth knowledge” (Eph. 3:17-19).

Taken from Life On The Altar Publication
Issue 7 Winter 2022/2023