Objectively speaking

Paul is not talking about getting MORE of the Spirit of God when he advises to “be filled with the Spirit.” It’s to be filled by His instrumentality.

Jordan explains, “God the Holy Spirit is going to be used by the Father to put some things into you that ought to be there. It isn’t about putting more of the Spirit of God in you; it’s rather by the instrumentality of the Spirit of God--by the working of Holy Spirit --that some things are going to begin to be produced in your life.

“What it is is to have God’s Word—the Spirit of God never works apart from His Word. It’s to have God’s Spirit; take His Word and fill your heart, your understanding, and renew your mind with an understanding of what it is God’s doing. It’s an objective, measurable operation of the Holy Spirit. It’s something that can be measured by words on a page in the Bible and be identified in your life in specific ways.

“To be filled with anything is to be saturated by that thing to the point that it completely dominates and controls your life. For example, Luke 5:25. That’s saying these people were so astonished and afraid that fear just took control of them and the emotion of fear just completely consumed them to the place they were incapable of doing anything because it controlled them.

“Luke 6:10. They were just completely controlled by their rage at the wonderful thing Christ had done and it gripped them and carried them along and they couldn’t get shed of it.

“John 16:6. The emotion just came in and grabbed them and wrenched them to the place that they couldn’t get out from under the control of it.

“We could go on and on with passages like that. To ‘be filled with the Spirit’ simply means to be under the complete, total dominion and domination of the Holy Spirit. It has to do with surrender. Boy, we don’t like that word. It’s the total surrender of your life and your thinking to the control of the Holy Spirit so that He carries you along through life.

“Being filled with the Holy Spirit is you lost, you can’t, you give up and He does. Paul said ‘I’m crucified.’ If your Christian life is going to be what God produces, it won’t be you. It requires the DEATH of selfishness and the DEATH of self-will in your life. It isn’t my thinking, my way. It’s His way. We got this whole thing, ‘My way or the highway.’ It isn’t that.

“I was in the bookstore specifically looking for books telling you how to be filled with the Holy Spirit and didn’t find one that had less than 6 steps to get there and the first two had to do with confessing your sins and all that kind of bunk.

“How do you get there? To be filled with the Spirit is easy to understand; it means ‘I surrender to His control. He controls me moment by moment, day by day.’ My life is to be lived in an attitude of complete, total surrender to the spirit of Almighty God. How in the world do I do that?

“It’s always fascinated me why there’s so much confusion about what it is that produces; what the means of producing this filling of the Spirit is.

“Like I said, it’s not simply a subjective feeling you get inside, that your emotions point you to. It’s an objective work of God the Holy Spirit in a non-experiential realm in your life, and you can measure it and identify it objectively.

“The Book of Ephesians and the Book of Colossians are companion epistles; often called sister epistles, which means they’re related.

“Ephesians is a book of doctrine. Colossians is the book of correction about mistakes being made regarding the doctrine in Ephesians. Ephesians focuses on the Body of Christ over which Christ is the head. In Colossians the focus is on Christ who is the head of the Body.

“I was 18 years old when I went out one day onto a hayfield and laid a palette down and spent all day reading the Book of Ephesians. I read it 20 some times that day, and all of a sudden the book just transformed itself right in front of my mind. You get it in your mind like that.

“I made a list of over 30 things Paul will say in Ephesians that he repeats in Colossians. Look at Colossians 3:18. Watch the same instructions in Ephesians 5:22.

“If you let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, you’re going to get the exactly the same results in the wives, the husbands, the children, the fathers, the servants and the masters. If you get the same results from being filled with the Spirit that you get from being filled with the Word of God, what does that tell you?!

“Listen, if you get exactly the same results, doesn’t that tell you that being filled with the Spirit is equal to being filled with the Word of God? Sure it does.

“You know what it is? Being filled with the Spirit of God is equivalent to saying, ‘Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.’ It’s the Holy Spirit working through the Word of God to fill your life with the qualities of spiritual maturity. It’s taking the Word of Christ and letting it infuse every part of our being.

“Eph. 5:13. Now that’s an objective standard. You can measure yourself. If you are unskillful in the word of righteousness than you’re a baby spiritually. I didn’t say that; God said that! Measure your own status on that!”