1 Corinthians 14:1 Follow the way of love and eagerly desire gifts of the Spirit, especially prophecy. The Good News Translation says, “Set your hearts on spiritual gifts.” The Voice translation says, “Passionately seek the gifts of the spirit.”
Many of you have already experienced God moving in your lives in spiritual gifts. Others might be asking, is there anything I can do to open my life to God working in those kinds of ways in my life?
In our minds we must not separate the manifestations of the Holy Spirit in spiritual gifts from all the other aspects of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. It is by the Holy Spirit that we receive new birth into eternal life. It is the Holy Spirit who brings us the experience of being God’s children and mediates our personal relationship with God which all Christians enjoy. The Holy Spirit is at work in every believer changing us, making us holy and transforming us into the image of Christ. It is the Holy Spirit who helps us to say no to sin and yes to God and at the same time who produces the fruit of the Spirit, the character of Christ in our lives. It is the Holy Spirit who gives us power to be witnesses for Jesus. We all need the Holy Spirit to be working in our lives in all of these areas, just as much as we need the gifts of the Spirit. We can’t expect to experience the gifts of the Holy Spirit if we are resisting the Spirit’s work in other areas of our life.
The Bible tells us that we should each be living a new life through the strength of the Holy Spirit moment by moment!
Galatians 5:16 So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. 17 For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature.
Galatians 5:25 Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit
Live by the Spirit. Keep in step with the Spirit. As Christians we should always keep on growing. Growing in our relationship with God. Growing in knowledge and understanding. Growing in witness and service. Growing into the image of Christ. Growing in deeper fellowship with each other. Growing in victory. Growing in passion for God. We all continually need the help of the Holy Spirit to grow in all these ways.
Galatians 6:8 The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.
Live by the Spirit. Keep in step with the Spirit. Sow to please the Spirit. Paul is talking about our ordinary everyday lives of faith and obedience. Trust and obey. We need to be relying on the Holy Spirit working in our lives all the time.
But if we want to grow in our faith, I believe that we also need to be open to special times of blessing. We should be ready and eager for God to surprise us and take us on and lift us higher. Longing especially for God to draw us closer to himself. The blessings of salvation don’t come to us by themselves. They are gifts which only come as we grow to know the Giver. What we really need to be seeking is God Himself – seeking the Father who loves us, the Son who died for us, and the Holy Spirit who lives inside us to make all the blessings of salvation real to us.
The New Testament tells us about a number of occasions when the Holy Spirit touched people’s lives, sometimes as they were first becoming Christians, or for others after they were already Christians. We find two phrases in particular. “Receiving the Holy Spirit” can refer to the beginning of a new work of the Holy Spirit at any stage of a believer’s life even if that person has already “received the Holy Spirit” previously. The other phrase, “being filled with the Spirit”, describes a sudden inspiring experience from the Holy Spirit.
Michael Green explains “being filled with the Spirit” this way. Being filled with the Spirit “should be the continual state of the Christian, but he can also look for special fillings of the Spirit in special circumstances”. This is picture language, of course. The Spirit is not a liquid and we are not containers which can hold different amounts of Spirit. In “being filled with the Spirit”, we don’t receive more of the Spirit. In some respects it might be better to say that the Spirit receives more of us. As we open our lives to God in obedience and faith, so the Holy Spirit chooses to transform us and use us the more.
We all know that there are times in our Christian lives when we are more obedient and more trusting, when we are walking more closely with our Lord. At those times we reflect better the glory of Christ and we are more open to God’s Holy Spirit working in our lives. Many Christians would also say that they have experienced all kinds of experiences from the Holy Spirit, not just once but many times. These occasions have deepened their relationship with God or empowered them for witness and service. Sometimes such experiences have marked the beginning of them exercising some particular spiritual gift. The Bible phrase, “being filled with the Holy Spirit”, describes all these kinds of uplifting occasions.
In Ephesians 5:18 Paul commands all Christians “Be filled with the Spirit”. The verb in the instruction is a present imperative which means either a continuous action or a repeated action. So the verse is saying, “keep on being filled with the Spirit.” Many of us are far from being “filled with the Spirit” for most of the time. We drift from God and we need to repent and be lifted back to Him. There is no single experience following conversion which will lift us up on to a higher plateau of Christian living from which we can never fall. Time and time again we need to return to God in repentance, to draw closer and closer to Him and let him fill us with the Holy Spirit time and time again.
In addition, there are times when we need special grace and power from God, filling us for a specific situation or filling us as the beginning of a new work of the Spirit in our lives or filling us as the first experience of a new spiritual gift. Sometimes, for some people (especially the first time) such experiences of the Holy Spirit moving in their lives can be very spectacular or emotional.
The preacher and theologian Bob Gordon compared our Christian life to a canal boat journey up a mountainside, through a series of locks. “Many of us know God to one degree or another but we are not unlike a canal boat sitting in an empty lock. It is not that there is no water there but we are just not full. We have enough experience to keep us afloat in the Christian life, but not enough to take us ahead.” We need, he says, “a conscious awareness that we have come as far as we can as we are. There needs to be a closing of the doors behind us …… and an opening up to a fresh infilling of the water of the Holy Spirit.” Such experiences of being filled with the Spirit, not once but many times, should lead to more Christ-like living, greater love in relationships, greater praise and worship and thanksgiving, bolder witnessing and more effective Christian service. These are blessings which God surely wants all believers to enjoy.
1 Corinthians 14: says Eagerly desire spiritual gifts. Christians aren’t just allowed to want the Holy Spirit to work in our lives. We are encouraged to set our hearts on spiritual gifts. To “passionately seek the gifts of the spirit.”
Of course, we need to desire God the Giver and not just His gifts. When we do, then we simply need to ask God. We’ll return to asking in a moment. But there is something else which Christians have done ever since the Early Church to help release the Holy Spirit to work in each other’s lives. I am referring to the practice called “the laying on of hands”.
In Acts 8 Peter and John placed their hands on the first believers in Samaria and they “received the Holy Spirit.” In Acts 9 Ananias placed his hands on Saul. He received his sight and was filled with the Holy Spirit. When Paul met some disciples of John the Baptist in Ephesus in Acts 19 we read, “When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied.”
We see a connection between spiritual gifts and the laying on of hands twice in Paul’s letters to Timothy.
1 Timothy 4:14 Do not neglect your gift, which was given you through a prophetic message when the body of elders laid their hands on you.
2 Timothy 1:6 For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands
The important element in the act of Laying on of Hands is not physical contact. The Holy Spirit is not passed on from person to person. What matters is praying for each other. Laying on of hands is not necessary for God to bless anybody – God can bless in any way he chooses. But laying on of hands helps to encourage faith and expectancy in the person who is seeking God’s blessing. It also reminds us of our dependence on each other in the church, the Body of Christ. So the Laying on of Hands can be the channel of God’s blessing to move us on in exercising Spiritual gifts. It certainly was for me, and it has been for countless people that I have been privileged to pray with over the years. But we also need to WANT to be filled with the Spirit. God does not force His way into our lives.
We need to eagerly desire spiritual gifts. And we need to open ourselves to the Holy Spirit.
2 Tim 1:6 For this reason I remind you to fan into flame the gift of God, which is in you through the laying on of my hands. 7 For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline.
7 For the Spirit that God has given us does not make us afraid; instead, his Spirit fills us with power, love, and self-control. (GNB)
God wants to give us the Holy Spirit who is the Spirit of power. To invite God to work in our lives in spiritual gifts and even in supernatural ways if he chooses. God is able, and indeed longs `to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.’ (Ephesians 3:20). The Holy Spirit is also the Spirit of love. Many people find that when God fills them afresh with the Holy Spirit they have a new experience of just how much God loves them. At the same time the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of SELF-CONTROL. It is the transforming power of the Holy Spirit, the power of Christ who saves from the gutter-most to the uttermost and helps us to become more like Jesus.
Fan into flame THE GIFT OF GOD, says Paul. For some Christians fanning into flame the gift of God will mean opening our lives to the Holy Spirit in spiritual gifts. It may mean opening our mouths to speak God’s messages in the gift of prophecy. It may mean reviving or even exercising for the first time the gift of speaking in tongues as a personal prayer language.
If all this talk of power and holiness and spiritual gifts seems scary, it should not be. As Paul says, we have not received a Spirit of timidity, a Spirit which makes us afraid. We need never be afraid of the Holy Spirit who is Love. We all need the Holy Spirit.
It was the great evangelist Moody who said “I am filled with the spirit, but I leak” – we all need our spiritual batteries recharging sometimes. We all need to be filled afresh with the Spirit of God. We all need to fan the flame of the Spirit in our lives. So how can we open ourselves to taking the Next Step in the Spirit? As I just said, first of all, we have to WANT to move on with God in such ways.
A.W. Tozer said, “Before we can be filled with the Spirit, the desire to be filled must be all-consuming. It must be for the time the biggest thing in the life, so acute, so intrusive as to crowd out everything else. The degree of fullness in any life accords perfectly with the intensity of true desire. We have as much of God as we actually want.”
I reminded you a couple of years ago about the film, Castaway, with Tom Hanks as a kind of modern Robinson Crusoe, stranded alone on a desert island in the middle of the ocean. Fairly early on he makes himself a boat out of trees and tries desperately to paddle out to sea. But the island is surrounded by a coral reef and however hard he tries to row, the waves over the reef push him back, until in the end the boat turns over and he is badly injured on the coral. Many attempts to row out to sea end in disaster.
But then one day a piece of wreckage comes to shore and the castaway sees how he can use it. He changes the design of his boat. He rows out to the reef again but instead of trying to row against the waves he hoists the wreckage as a sail. The wind catches the sail and blows the boat past the waves out to sea and eventual rescue. At the end of the film the castaway is telling his story to a friend. “I was trapped on the island,” he says, “until one day God gave me a sail.”
Many Christians spend all their lives rowing hard trying to go somewhere new with God. But all the time the waves of life push them back. Sometimes they even fall overboard and the coral hurts! But God has given us a sail – or a number of sails. What we need to do is hoist the sails and let the wind of the Holy Spirit carry us where God wants us to go. The God of surprises is longing to surprise us. We need to stop rowing frantically to battle the waves and instead to just hoist the sails – sails of obedience and faith and worship. Above all the sail of prayer.
`He longs to do much more than our faith has yet allowed,
To thrill us and surprise us with His sovereign power.’
May God help us all to live in the Spirit, to keep in step with the Spirit, to sow to please the Spirit, and to fan into flame the gift of God within us. If we want God to fill us afresh with the Holy Spirit, all we need to do is ask. Jesus Himself encourages us to ask God to give us the Holy Spirit. And Jesus promises that we can expect to receive the Holy Spirit, not just once and for all, but time after time!
Luke 11: 9 “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. …
We don’t need to be afraid of what might happen if we open our lives to the Holy Spirit. God loves us with a love which will never let us go.
11 ‘Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12 Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’
Eagerly desire the gifts of the Spirit. Fan into flame the gift of God. Just ask!
How much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!

Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.
Break me, melt me, mould me, fill me.
Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me.