In the two wondrous gifts of His Son and His Spirit, God has made perfect provision for a life of true spirituality. God’s twofold gift to us was not a partial gift. When He gave Christ, He gave all of Christ; when He gave the Holy Spirit, He gave all of the Holy Spirit. He withheld nothing from us. Love not only gave its best but its all. When God gave Christ to us, He gave Him in all the fullness of His perfect life and His perfected work. When God gave the Holy Spirit, He gave Him to indwell, to infill, and to empower. God is not a stingy, grudging giver. In the glorified Christ, through the fullness of the Holy Spirit, He has given all that He has to give to make us spiritual. This is the perfection of grace, the acme even of divine giving.

God has made the provision, but you must make the decision whether you will be Spirit-filled or not. There is a place in God’s dealings with men beyond which He cannot go. He Himself set this boundary line in man’s right to will. He sets the feast before you, but He cannot compel you to eat. He opens the door into the abundant life, but He cannot coerce you to enter. He places a deposit in the bank of God that makes you a spiritual multimillionaire, but He cannot write your checks. God has done His part; now you must do yours.

The responsibility for fullness or lack of fullness is now in your hands. He will be limited in giving the fullness of His Spirit by only one thing — the room given to Him to fill. “You may have all the fullness you will make room for.” To be Spirit-filled requires your active, hearty cooperation with God. You have a clearly defined role in becoming spiritual. 

YIELDING — THE BELIEVER’S PART IN BECOMING SPIRIT-FILLED

The basic principle in a spiritual life lies in its control. The life of the natural man is wholly in the control of “the old man”; the life of the carnal Christian is partially in the control of self. If one determines to become a Spirit-filled Christian, the right to reign must be taken altogether from “the old man” and given into the hands of the Lord Jesus. What the Holy Spirit wishes the believer to do, and what He works to bring him to do, is to cooperate with Him in this matter by deliberately refusing the further reign of self and by voluntarily choosing the sovereignty of Christ over his life, yielding to Him as Lord and Master.

Romans 6:16

“Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness?”

Romans 6:19

“I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh: for as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity; even so now yield your members servants to righteousness unto holiness.”

To yield one’s life unto God is the first step in a continuous walk in the Spirit. This step takes us, by our own choice, out of the realm of self-will and into the realm of God’s will. It takes us back to our God-intended, God-provided center. It gives us a base for all future growth in spiritual things. It furnishes us with new headquarters from which all our future life will be directed. In yielding to Christ, we align ourselves with the perfect will of God and choose it as the rule of our lives in all things, forever afterward. We adopt the language of Christ, which, whether in the great crises of life, such as those in the wilderness, in Gethsemane, or on Calvary, or in the ordinary walk and work of daily life in the carpenter shop and the home, was invariably “Thy will be done.” In yielding to the sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ, we deliberately choose from that time on to do His will instead of our own in all things and for all time. 

Source: “Life on the Highest Plane” by Ruth Paxson

Oh Lord, what a sobering reality. Our future is in our own hands. You will not violate our self-will. You will not force us to be filled with the Spirit, to walk by the Spirit, or to be led into Your Kingdom by the Spirit. Neither will You prevent us from spending eternity in hell because we refused Your gifts by not willingly surrendering our “will” to You. The choice is ours. Lord, have mercy on us.