The Spirit-Filled Life

Restoring a Biblical Understanding and Experience of the Holy Spirit

John MacNeil

• Publisher: Aneko Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781622455416
• eBook ISBN:
  9781622455423
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

I wish to urge all Christians, especially ministers of the gospel, to give The Spirit-Filled Life a prayerful reading. I feel confident it will bring them help and blessing. It will deepen the conviction of the great need and absolute duty of being filled with the Spirit. It will point out the hindrances and open up the way. It will stir up faith and hope. And I trust it will bring many people to feel that it is at the footstool of the throne – in the absolute surrender of a new consecration – that the blessing is to be received from God himself.May this book stir up all its readers, not only to seek this blessing for themselves, but also to pray earnestly that God may give the Holy Spirit in power throughout His whole church. It is when the tide comes in that every pool is filled and all the separate little pools are lost in the great ocean. As all believers who know or seek this blessing begin to pray as intensely for each other and all their brethren as for themselves, this is when the power of the Spirit will be fully known. With the prayer that this Spirit-filled book may be greatly blessed of God, I commend it to the study of His children. - Andrew Murray

Chapter 10

Cleansing

In the same way that there are required conditions in order to obtain salvation (before someone can be justified) – for example, conviction of sin, repentance, and faith – there are also conditions for full salvation, for being filled with the Holy Spirit.

Conviction of our need is one; conviction of the existence of the blessing is another. But these have already been dealt with. Cleansing is another; before anyone can be filled with the Holy Spirit, their heart must be cleansed. And God, who knows the heart, testified to them giving them the Holy Spirit, just as He also did to us; and He made no distinction between us and them, cleansing their hearts by faith (Acts 15:8-9). God first cleansed their hearts, and then he gave them the Holy Spirit.

How can we be filled with the Holy Spirit if we are filled with something else? The heart must first be emptied and cleansed. The milkman has called on his morning round, and the housewife hears his call. There is a jug standing beside her on the table; it is her own that she purchased only last week. She picks it up and looks into it to see if it is clean; she finds it is not. Now she would never think of taking that dirty jug for the milk, but she empties it and rinses and cleanses it, and then, having wiped it dry to her satisfaction, she takes it out for the morning portion.

If she brought the container out to the milkman dirty, he would positively refuse to put his sweet new milk into it. So a heart may belong to God, that is, it may be the heart of a Christian man, and yet not be a clean heart; until it is cleansed, God will refuse to put into it the precious deposit of the water of life, clear as crystal.

A “New Heart” Is Not Necessarily a Clean Heart

But someone objects, “I thought that when one became a Christian and was made a partaker of the divine nature, he had a clean heart.”

Not necessarily. Many are born again, are pardoned and justified, and yet do not have a clean heart. Forgiveness is one thing and cleansing is another; someone may possess the former without possessing the latter. For instance, take the case of David in Psalms. He was one of God’s people, a restored backslider, when he wrote that psalm asking for a clean heart. The LORD also has taken away your sin (2 Samuel 12:13), Nathan said to him. But forgiveness, as great and sweet as that gift was, was not enough for Israel’s now so deeply taught and penitent king.

Create in me a clean heart, O God, David cries (Psalm 51:10). This is something over and above being born again, over and above and beyond, and deeper even, than forgiveness (compare Psalm 51:2 and Jeremiah 33:8). See also the New Testament teaching on this point in 1 John 1:7, which says the blood of Jesus His Son cleanses us from all sin, and in 1 John 1:9 where we see He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Is the cleansing of verse 7 the same as the cleansing of verse 9? Most certainly not.

The cleansing of verse 7 has to do with the guilt of sin, with sin after it has been committed. This is the only sense in which the blood of Jesus cleanses; it washes white as snow from the guilt and stain of actual transgression, and that cleansing is retrospective.

Now, this cleansing of verse 7 is the forgiving of verse 9; both of these words relate to a sinner’s justification. But the cleansing from all unrighteousness of verse 9 is something different from, something over and above, the forgiving of verse 9 or the cleansing of verse 7. Otherwise, if they mean the same thing, wouldn’t the author be guilty of redundancy?

The cleansing in verse 9 is prospective and refers to holiness of life, to our being saved from sin and from sinning. And you will notice that it is not the blood of Jesus that does this, but Jesus himself by the exercise of his almighty power. There is a great deal of confusion on this point in many minds, a confusion fostered, if not produced, by some of our hymns. Powers are sometimes attributed to the blood of Jesus – and to the death of Christ – that belong to Jesus himself, to the living Christ.

We are saved from sin’s condemnation by the blood, cleansed from the guilt of all sin, forgiven on the grounds of the blood, and in this connection we cannot possibly make too much of the blood or too much of the death of the Son of God. But we are saved from sin’s power by Jesus himself. And you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins (Matthew 1:21). For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life (Romans 5:10). If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9).

Preventative Cleansing

The blood cleanses in the sense of washing the sin away after it has actually been committed; he cleanses in the sense of preventing and restraining from sin. He keeps us back from sinning. He makes us more than conquerors over sin (Romans 8:37 JUB); in this blessed sense, prevention is better than a cure. How often does a mother say to her child when putting on a clean, snow-white dress in the morning, “Now, my darling, do keep it clean!”

“Yes, mother,” and she intends to do so, but unfortunately, despite her intentions, at dinnertime she comes home with her pinafore about as dirty as she can make it.

Now, the mother can wash it and make it clean again, as white as ever, but this everlasting washing is weary, wearing work. So the bloo...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Editor’s Foreword
• Introduction by Andrew Murray and H. B. Macartney Jr.
• Author’s Preface
• The Starting Point
• Every Believer’s Birthright
• A Command to Be Obeyed
• Something Different from the New Birth
• Everybody’s Need
• Preventing Backsliding
• The Time between Regenerating and Filling
• Other Words for Being Filled with the Spirit
• How Is the Fullness Obtained?
• Cleansing
• Consecration
• Claiming
• How the Filling Comes
• The Effects of Fullness
• How Do We Know We Are Filled?
• May I Say I Am Filled?
• Does Anyone Lose the Blessing?
• Biography of John MacNeil
• Similar Updated Classics