Ballooned to capacity, ready to burst

A popular motivational quotes makes the point, "Life is like a balloon. If you never let yourself go, you’ll never know how far you can rise.”

“If you take a balloon and blow it up, you fill it with air; you inflate it by blowing into it,” says Jordan in a tape-recorded study I came across the other day. “What you’re doing is making it larger. When you are ‘strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love,' He’s coming in. You’re able to comprehend what God’s doing. You come to a deepening, expanded capacity to appreciate who God really is.

“Now the idea of being filled in the Bible is the idea of being controlled by something. When something FILLS you . . . it has to do with when you fill something up, you take it over completely.

“Acts 2:1-2 says, [1] And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.
[2] And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

“It says when that sound FILLED all the house, in other words, it was in every heart in the house. There’s none of the house that it didn’t occupy. When you fill something, it’s complete in every way. It’s there all over.

“Acts 5:28 says, [28] Saying, Did not we straitly command you that ye should not teach in this name? and, behold, ye have filled Jerusalem with your doctrine, and intend to bring this man's blood upon us.

“So you can fill a room with sound; you can fill a city with doctrine! What does that mean? Everywhere in the whole city people got this. So you can fill inanimate things and it’s the idea of, ‘It’s completely everywhere.’

“But when it’s used about people, it isn’t just that it occupies everything in you; it means that it takes over and controls everything about you. It begins to dominate your life.

*****

“John 16:6-7 says, [6] But because I have said these things unto you, sorrow hath filled your heart.
[7] Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.

“Have you ever had sorrow grip you to the place where it just controlled everything about you? Brother Nick’s dad just went to be with the Lord and I told him, ‘I remember when my dad went to be with the Lord.’

“I remember the horrifying experience, one of two or three of the most devastating things that I’d ever been through. I knew he was in heaven, I knew where he was, we watched him die slowly. But the afternoon when we went to the funeral home and went in, and there his body was lying in the casket that my brother and I picked out . . .  I understood he was in heaven but there’s the part of him that had been him; the tangible touch.

“I walked over to that coffin and I looked at my dad and it was like somebody took a fist and hit me right in the gut. The wind went out of me, my jaws locked and I couldn’t speak. I went over and sat on a couch in the funeral parlor and thought, ‘What’s going on, Rick?’ I literally was 

overcome with grief. You been there?

“I sat there for probably 20 minutes like that and a dear friend came in and sat down next to me and he just began to quote to me I Thessalonians 4, beginning in verse 13: ‘But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.’

“He starts quoting me that and my mind’s thinking, ‘What are you doing dude? I forgot more about that passage then you know,’ because I probably did. But he just kept quoting the passage to me and got down to the end of it where it says, ‘Wherefore comfort one another with these words.’

“You could have knocked me right off that couch, because for the first time in my life I really understood what that verse meant.

“You see, when sorrow grips you that thoroughly, trauma blanks your mind out. And while that verse says, ‘comfort one another with these words,’ just that reminding . . . I knew all about the Rapture; I could expound on that passage--just here alone I spent 16 weeks going through that passage when we studied I Thessalonians.

“But in that moment it wasn’t in my mind because sorrow does that. It comes and it squeezes out everything; it grips you and controls you. It holds you in its dominion.

“Repeating those words pushed the sorrow away and brought comfort. That’s how powerful God’s Word is.”

(to be continued tomorrow)