Come Holy Spirit and Fill My Soul
I wrote a little poem when I was on retreat a few weeks back, I remember I was sitting out in the sun at the Mazenod Ccentre, trying to still my mind and stop thinking.
And in trying to do that, I wrote a poem.
That doesn’t make much sense, but it was a prayer, and it goes like this:
Come Holy Spirit and fill my soul.
Come, Holy Spirit and make me whole.
Your peace to release
Your grace to impart.
Come, Lord, and bring rest to this wandering heart.
So I want to use those five sentences to guide us in our devotions this week.
The first line says, come Holy Spirit and fill my soul.
Being Filled With the Holy Spirit
In Ephesians 5:18, Paul commands us to be filled with the Spirit, and really it’s God’s great desire for us to be filled to the brim.
I like what J. Gregory Mantle said. He said '“it’s one thing to have the Spirit; it’s quite another to be filled with the Spirit. You may be full as the tree in the springtime is full of sap, full in the stem, full in the leaf. You may be full of the Spirit as the white-hot iron is full of fire. You take the iron; it is cold and hard and black. You put it in the fire, and the fire enters into it, and soon the fire changes its colour. The white-hot iron is now possessed and penetrated by the fire within it. Are we thus full?” he asks.
And I believe that many of us aren’t. We may have received the Spirit when we came to God the first time, but we aren’t totally full until we have made a total surrender to Him.
The Role of Surrender in Spiritual Fullness
One of the books that really changed my life was a book called Ablaze for God by Wesley Duewel, and in it he says this:
“Having made the total surrender of self, the complete consecration of ourselves as children of God, we can be filled with the Spirit as we appropriate His fullness by faith.”
In other words, once we totally surrender to God, ask for His filling of the Spirit, and then by faith believe that it has happened to us — believe that the Spirit is within us — we can live with this fullness.
And so maybe this will be your prayer today:
Come Holy Spirit, and fill my heart.
Empty me of myself.
Forgive me for my sins.
I surrender myself to You, Lord, completely.
Take everything, fill me now, Holy Spirit.
And then, whether you feel anything or not, if you have truly surrendered to God, believe that He has poured His Spirit into your heart.
Claim it by faith, walk in it, and I know you will have a new power flowing from your heart if you do.
God’s grace did more for Manasseh than just forgive him. It transformed him. Do you need to start living for God more purposefully, as a forgiven child?