The Gift of the Holy Spirit Today (Chapter 7)
Yielding makes for total availability—one thereby becoming an instrument wholly devoted to the Master’s service. It is not only to know Jesus as Savior but also as Lord; it is to be “sold out” to Him. Yielding is not sanctification but servanthood33 wherein the whole of life is placed at the disposal of Christ. Thereby the Spirit of the Lord possesses a person in totality—body, mind, spirit—and all of life becomes a “living sacrifice”34 to God.
Such yielding means no longer one’s own will but the will of God—“not my will, but thine be done.” It is to have “the mind of Christ,” which means to humble oneself and become obedient unto death.35 It means to surrender the tongue, which is “an unrighteous world among our members, staining the whole body … set on fire by hell. … With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse men,”36 so it may become attuned only to the praise of God!
Yielding may also signify not only submission to God but also submission to other persons. In four of the Acts accounts relating to the gift of the Holy Spirit it is apparent that persons receiving this gift did so through the ministry of others. It was through the ministry of Peter and John that the Samaritans received, through the ministry of Ananias that Saul of Tarsus was filled with the Spirit, through the ministry of Peter that the Caesareans were blessed, through the ministry of Paul that the Ephesians received the gift. In three of these instances the Holy Spirit was given through the imposition of hands of a fellow Christian. The very willingness to have hands laid on one’s head signified an act of submission, a readiness to receive from other brethren what God had to give. This submitting to the ministry of others, it should be added, is frequently the best antidote to a kind of religious pride that desires to deal only with God directly (as in private prayer). However, the Lord often makes use of human—and sometimes quite humble—vessels for His blessing. It is not always easy for a prominent Saul to submit to an unknown Ananias, but such may be the Lord’s way of working.
One of the things that has been learned in the contemporary movement of the Holy Spirit is the importance of this ministry of fellow Christians. Though in many cases God sovereignly pours out His Spirit without human mediation, most often people receive God’s gift through the laying on of hands. And the hands may be those of a cleric or layman (as in the book of Acts), whomever God chooses. This calls for submission, and a kind of yielding that may not hitherto have been experienced.37
It would be difficult to overemphasize this whole matter of yielding. It is at the heart of receiving the gift of God’s Holy Spirit. For it is only when a person lays himself totally at the disposal of God, holding back nothing, that the Spirit moves in to take full possession. There are no shortcuts, no simplistic formulas, no outward manifestations that can bring this about. The Spirit is given only to those who let everything go, who are empty before the Lord, who thereby may be filled with His fullness. This yielding may mean the willingness to give up earthly reputation, security and ambition—that God may be glorified. It is absolute and irrevocable surrender.38
Yielding is an act of faith. It is not something beyond faith but is faith in its profoundest expression. Whether such yielding occurs at the inception of faith, or somewhere along the way of faith, it represents that total surrender wherein the Spirit of the living God comes to have complete sway.
PR
Chapter Eight, Part 1, “Effects,” continues in the Spring 2004 issue.
Notes
1 The verb is sumplērousthai—“to be fulfilled.” According to the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament this means (in Acts 2:1) “fulfilled according to God’s plan … the verb itself points to the fulfillment of God’s saving will in the event which takes place” (Vol. VI, p. 308). The KJV is closer than RSV (and many other versions) in translating sumplērousthai as “was fully come.”
2 I have sought to delineate some of these movements in my book, The Pentecostal Reality, chapter 3, “A New Era in History.”
3 In a booklet entitled Theological and Pastoral Orientations an the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (Notre Dame: Word of Life, 1974) prepared at Malines, Belgium, by an international team of Catholic theologians and lay leaders, there is a section entitled “The Spirit is Sovereign and Free.” It includes these words: “Alongside the declaration that subjective dispositions affect what one gives and receives [the section before had dealt with such ‘dispositions’] is a companion declaration that in no ultimate sense is the Spirit of God radically dependent on the subjective dispositions of communities or individuals. . . . The Spirit is sovereign and free. He blows when, where, and how he wills. . . . The Spirit has and retains the initiative at every moment of the community’s life” (p. 19). Ralph Martin, one of the lay leaders at Malines, powerfully set forth God’s action in his book, Fire on the Earth (Ann Arbor, MI: Word of Life, 1975), subtitled “What God is Doing in the World Today.” He writes: “God is moving now, today, to rekindle that fire and fan it to the mighty blaze he desires to see. He is acting now, across the world, to turn the hearts of people back to him, to heal the wounds of division, to baptize with the Spirit and with fire. He intends to restore the full vitality of his people and resurrect the full power of the body of Christ. He is casting down his fire anew” (pp. 5-6).
Category: Pneuma Review, Spirit, Winter 2004
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