Copyright
© 2019 Michael A. Brown
THERE were many occasions in the Old Testament when
the Holy Spirit came upon individual people and used them powerfully in the
purposes of God in their generation, and the book of Judges in particular
furnishes us with several examples of this.
We are told that when the Spirit of the Lord came upon Othniel, he
overpowered the king of Aram who had brought the Israelites into subjection
(3:9-10). Likewise, when the Spirit of
the Lord came upon Gideon, he defeated the Midianites and other eastern peoples
who had invaded the land and impoverished the Israelites (6:34f). Similarly, Jephthah defeated the Ammonites
when the Spirit of the Lord came upon him (11:29). When the Spirit of the Lord came in power upon
Samson he received supernatural physical strength to overcome and break the power
of the Philistines (chs.13-16).
Examples
such as these make clear the fact that God
fills people with the Holy Spirit with the purpose of then using them in his
purposes in their generation. As I
said in chapter 5, the Holy Spirit is a Person, and he is not given to us
merely so that we can enjoy some kind of self-centred subjective pleasure
deriving from his presence with us.
Neither is it God’s intention that we live a life which is essentially
self-oriented, in which we live simply for the comforts and security of human
life, for financial and material gain, for the carnal appetites of our body, or
for the love of life in this world, while at the same time saying that we want
the fullness of God’s blessing and purposes for our life.
In
sending the Holy Spirit to abide with us forever, it is God’s intention that we
learn to live out of the inner spiritual union that is created with him by the
Holy Spirit’s presence within us. He can
then fulfil his purposes through us as empowered channels of his life and
grace. The Holy Spirit possesses us
for purpose, to empower us and then use us effectively and fruitfully as living
witnesses in the work of God’s kingdom. This is highlighted by
the phrase ‘the Spirit came upon’ which is used in the examples above from the
book of Judges and which literally means ‘to clothe oneself with,’ or ‘to put
on like a glove.’ In coming into inner
union with us and filling us within, the Holy Spirit clothes himself with us or
puts us on like a glove, and then uses us and works through us.
It
should be obvious that, in order for us to live out of this dynamic inner
union, and for the Holy Spirit to have his way with us, we need to live a
surrendered life. It is only then that
we can truly follow God in submission and willing obedience as he leads us. As we live a surrendered life, the Holy
Spirit is able and free within us to take us up, and to mould us, prepare us
and use us in God’s purposes,
and, as a consequence, we will then bring forth much fruit in the kingdom of God. So we
need to consecrate and surrender ourselves to God in the same way that
believers in the Bible did:
‘Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s
mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God –
this is your spiritual act of worship.
Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be
transformed according to the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to approve what God’s
will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.’ (Rom.
12:1-2)
‘…you will receive power when the Holy Spirit
comes upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and
Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.’
(Acts 1:8)
Developing a life of intimacy with God in prayer
The Holy
Spirit lives in unbroken and constant fellowship with the Father and the Son,
so it isn’t rocket science for us to understand that his primary desire is to
draw us too into a life of close and consistent intimacy with God (1 John 1:3,
John 14:23). As we learn to walk with
the Holy Spirit and live out of our inner union with him, we will feel his
yearning growing within ourselves to spend time with God and to read his
word. We are drawn inwardly by him to the quiet place of prayer. His desire is to develop and establish in our
lives a regular and consistent habit of spending quality time in intimacy with
God of the kind which is described in chapter 4.
A life
lived in organic union with God is a life through which God can move and work,
and it is a life grounded in regular intimacy with him. Union
with God means intimacy with him. It
is a life of prayer, a life of worship, a life of praise, a life which is built
around the dynamic hub of being regularly in his presence and which is
therefore permeated and energised by habitual, free, warm-hearted prayer.
The
difficulty that most, if not all, believers face is developing consistency in
prayer. Our tendency so often is to be
too busy to spend time with God, even when we are involved in God’s work. This is probably the number one issue that
believers struggle with, and it is right at the heart of their spiritual
life. It was underlined by J. Pengwern
Jones in the following words:
‘Our difficulty is to keep the prayer balance of
our work, to keep duties in their right relation, to put first things first. We have
been told over and over again, and we have often told ourselves this, though we
may not have said so openly, that duties are so pressing that we have not time
to give to prayer as we ought to give.
We all acknowledge the importance of prayer, but we excuse ourselves for
not giving more time to intercession by saying that duties have been given to
us and we must attend to them, and if
we give some hours to prayer it would mean the neglect of those duties… Do we put prayer first? Should we not adjust our lives so that we can
give more time to prayer?... But what we
wish to emphasize is the fact that prayer
must come first, that whatever duty has to be set aside for a time, prayer
cannot be.’[1]
The
record of the early Church in the book of Acts is one of powerful and fruitful
ministry grounded in and permeated by a regular and consistent prayer
life. We see this over and over again
both in the narrative of Acts and in the biographies of the lives of men and
women who have been used fruitfully by God in history. Perhaps we may not develop the depth of
prayer life that some of the great figures in church and mission history did,
but we can certainly all develop consistency in prayer and know what it is to
have a regular prayer life which is freely empowered by the Holy Spirit’s
dynamic presence working within and through us.
This is the desire of God for all of us.
The
apostles were men of prayer themselves and they encouraged, exhorted and
insisted that young believers everywhere should get hold of these two powerful
truths: that building a life of intimacy with God in prayer is our primary call
as believers, and that this is at the heart of all success in church life and
ministry. Without it there can be no
victory or progress in the work of God.
God cannot work his purposes out through us if we do not develop
consistency in prayer, because this is the foundation upon which the outworking
of his purposes is built. It is always
at the very heart of this. If we are to be used by God, then the Holy
Spirit must first develop and ingrain within us a habit of regular and
consistent intimacy with God in prayer:
‘And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and
requests. With this in mind, be alert
and always keep on praying for all the saints.’ (Eph.
6:18)
‘Devote
yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful…’
(Col. 4:2)
‘Pray continually.’ (1 Thess. 5:17)
Vision: inwardly compelled by the Spirit
It is in
the place of intimacy and prayer that the Holy Spirit speaks, where vision is
conceived within us and God’s purpose for us is unveiled (cf. Amos 3:7). God
speaks to people of prayer. After he
was filled with the Holy Spirit, we are told that Jesus was sent by the Holy
Spirit into the desert for forty days.
He became aware of a new, inward constraint within himself through the
presence of the Holy Spirit, and this constraint moved him to follow and obey
what the Holy Spirit was leading him to do:
‘Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by
the Spirit in the desert…’ (Luke 4:1)
‘...the
Spirit sent him out into the desert.’ (Mark 1:12)
The
Greek verb ekballein, rendered in Mark 1:12 as ‘to send out,’ has the
various meanings of ‘to cast out,’ ‘to drive,’ ‘to expel,’ ‘to pluck,’ ‘to
pull,’ or ‘to thrust,’ and derives from the verb ballein which means ‘to
throw’ or ‘to hurl.’ So it suggests the
strength of a dominating, inward compulsion leading to outward action, much as
we would say for example, ‘I felt inwardly compelled to do it.’
This
inward compulsion or constraint of the Holy Spirit is therefore intrinsically
connected to the vision and purpose that God desires to work out through us. That we need God-given vision in order for
his work and purposes to go forward is clear from the words of Proverbs 29:18, ‘Where there is no vision, the people
perish...’ (AV). Without vision, we stay pretty much in our status
quo, little or nothing moves or changes, we stagnate and the work of God
does not go forward. However, it is also
true that vision that comes from God is never simply a ‘good human idea,’
something that we have decided and worked out in our own human thinking that
might be good to do in God’s work. There
is all the difference in the world between good, human ideas which lack the
power and blessing of God and so are ultimately fruitless, and God-given vision
in which we are empowered by his Spirit to move in his purpose and which God
blesses with much fruit.
Another
example of how the Holy Spirit speaks to believers, constraining and moving
them into God’s purpose, is found in the experience of the elders of the church
in Antioch. As they sought God together
with fasting and prayer, they became sensitive to the fact that the Holy Spirit
was speaking to them:
‘While
they were worshipping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart
for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” So after they had fasted and prayed, they
placed their hands on them and sent them off.
The two of them, sent on their way by the Holy Spirit, went down to
Seleucia...’ (Acts 13:2-4)
As they
prayerfully embraced what the Holy Spirit was saying to them, and acted in
obedience and faith to this new inward constraint that they had become aware
of, these elders took a step forward in God’s work and released Barnabas and
Saul/Paul into a new vision in the work of God, as apostolic missionaries going
out to preach the gospel of Christ far and wide among both Jews and the Gentile
peoples of Cyprus and what is now Turkey.
Barnabas and Saul were sent out not simply by the other elders, but by
the Holy Spirit himself. These elders
affirmed this new call and vision, and embraced it in obedience and faith, no
doubt supporting Barnabas and Saul regularly in prayer thereafter. God stamped his seal of approval openly on
this new vision and purpose by working powerfully through these two men
wherever they went, as the narrative shows.
The Holy
Spirit speaks to us in various different ways.
He speaks to us through the word of God; he gives us inner promptings;
we hear his still, small whisper within; he can speak to us through dreams and
visions, and so on. However, it is this
inner witness, this inward, settled conviction, this inward constraint and
compulsion that is at the heart of the moving of the Holy Spirit in and through
us. He speaks to us and moves us from
within.
For
example, Philip was aware that the Holy Spirit was speaking to him and inwardly
constraining him to act in a particular way as he guided him (Acts 8:29). God spoke to Ananias in a vision about the
conversion of Saul, and he obeyed what he was inwardly moved to do (Acts
9:10-19). Peter fell into a trance
vision in which God spoke to him about the conversion of the Gentiles. He then became aware that the Holy Spirit was
speaking to him about the visitors who were coming, and he obeyed what the
Spirit constrained him to do (Acts 10:9-23f).
Similarly,
at one point during his second missionary journey, the apostle Paul and his
companions were repeatedly aware that the Holy Spirit was restraining them from
preaching in the provinces of Asia and Bithynia. Paul then had a night vision in which God
revealed his purpose for them to go to Macedonia and Greece and preach there
instead (Acts 16:6-10). Later on, when
he bade farewell to the Ephesian elders, he referred to how he was feeling
compelled by the Holy Spirit within him to go to Jerusalem:
‘And now, compelled by the Spirit, I am going to
Jerusalem…’
(Acts 20:22)
Again,
at the council of Jerusalem, the apostles and elders were prayerfully
discussing the issue of the relation of the gospel to the demands of the Mosaic
Law among the new Gentile believers, and they reached an understanding of the
mind of the Lord in this matter as they found agreement on the inner witness
which the Holy Spirit was giving to each of them: ‘It seemed good to the
Holy Spirit and to us...’ (Acts 15:28).
Their decision seemed right to them and they had peace in their hearts
together about it before God, so they then acted on this consensus as being the
will of God in the matter.
Burden: God’s heart of love and concern
Living
in intimate and prayerful union with the Holy Spirit within us means that we
begin to enter into knowing God’s heart.
In the conceiving of vision, he is sharing his heart with us, so we
begin to experience something of the burden of his heart concerning the people
who are the object of this vision.
The
Hebrew word massa was often used of
occasions when the Old Testament prophets received a prophetic word from God
that they were then to declare to his people.
It means ‘burden’ and was used in daily life to describe the work of
carrying a load for someone else, for example carrying their luggage. So in a figurative sense it refers to the
inward burden of heart which accompanied the message or vision that the prophet
received (see Nah. 1:1; Zech. 9:1, 12:1; Mal. 1:1). The prophets carried something of God’s heart
within them towards his people. As they
took his message to the people, their message conveyed not simply words but the
burden of his heart to them. So when
they preached, they preached with passion and conviction. They prayed for the people day and night, and
they wept over their sins (cf. Jer. 9:1).
God
loves people and yearns for them to come to know him through Jesus, so when we
walk in God’s vision for people we walk in his love and yearning for them. This becomes embedded internally within us;
we bear it within ourselves and carry it in our heart. A
heart with a vision is a burdened heart.
So we begin to feel towards people as God feels, to have compassion on
them as he has compassion on them, and to love them as he loves them. God’s vision becomes our vision, and it
becomes the focus of our life. The
burden of his heart becomes the burden of our heart, and we carry this within
ourselves day and night. We are inwardly
gripped and consumed by it, so it drives us forward and we run with it. We embody the purpose of God’s vision and, in
this sense, it owns us and we own it. We
begin to live and work for its fulfilment with sometimes costly and sacrificial
obedience, and its purpose is then worked out through us.
If God
burdens our heart to reach out to another people group, for example, then we
joyfully obey him and go. Through his
grace working in us, we can overcome our natural prejudices and begin to love
them as he loves them (cf. 1 Cor. 9:19-23).
If we feel the inward call to become a pastor, then we care for and love
the flock of believers that God entrusts to us.
If we are called to do the work of evangelism, then our hearts are
burdened to regularly reach out to non-believers around. If we are called to work among drug addicts,
trafficked people, or locally among those who sleep on the streets, then we
feel God’s heart of love and compassion within us towards their brokenness and
we are moved to go out and minister to them.
And so on...
We can
see such vision and burden of heart in the apostle Paul. He was moved and compelled by Christ’s love
within him to preach to the Gentiles, and he also describes his deep, inward
concern and care for the people who had become believers through his ministry:
‘For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died
for all…’ (2 Cor. 5:14)
‘God can testify how I long for all of you with the affection of Christ
Jesus.’ (Phil. 1:8)
‘…we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little
children.’ (1 Thess. 2:7)
‘For you
know that we dealt with each of you as a father deals with his own children,
encouraging, comforting and urging you to live lives worthy of God, who calls
you into his kingdom and glory.’ (1 Thess. 2:11-12)
Prayer: yearning, groaning and crying out to God
Furthermore,
as we experience God’s yearning heart of love and compassion for people, then
we naturally begin to express this burden back to God in prayer. We begin to pray, cry out and intercede
before God for him to move, work and fulfil this vision. True
vision always leads us into prayer and intercession:
‘When he
saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and
helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the
workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest,
therefore, to send out labourers into his harvest field.”’
(Matt. 9:36-38, cf. Luke
10:2, John 4:35)
‘Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for the Israelites is
that they might be saved.’ (Rom 10:1)
Anyone
who carries within him/herself a God-given vision for his work in some way
inevitably becomes an intercessor before God for this vision. The Holy Spirit within them wants to use them
as channels to bring about the fulfilment of this vision, and so he groans,
yearns and intercedes through them to this end:
‘In the
same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness.
We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself
intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind
of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accordance with
God’s will.’ (Rom. 8:26-27)
All true
servants of God become intercessors for the vision that God has given them,
because they carry the burden of this work in their heart. As they work outwardly in ministry, they also
yearn and cry out in prayer to God behind the scenes (often day and night, and
with regular fasting) for breakthrough, provision and fulfilment of the
vision. They have to regularly feed and
strengthen their faith on/through the word of God and its promises, to overcome
doubt, discouragement and the inevitable spiritual attacks which come against
them. It is through such burdened prayer and faith that the Holy Spirit
within them overcomes and breaks the power of the enemy. Intercessory prayer is essentially a daily
abiding in the concern for which we are praying. We pray for it continually, until breakthrough
comes and God answers. The burden in our
hearts is then lifted and we are empowered to minister and preach the word of
God with real spiritual authority.[2]
So the
person (or people) praying carries this burden through to its fulfilment and
sees breakthrough as God works through them, much as a pregnant woman carries
the newly-conceived life within her for a period of time and then finally gives
birth to it. It is in the place of intercession and prayer behind the scenes that we
gain the spiritual victory over the forces of darkness that brings actual
breakthrough in outward ministry.
The apostle Paul’s ministry was grounded in such a life of deep prayer
and intimacy with God. He used the concept
of labour pains to describe the depth of inward burden and yearning that he
experienced in prayer in his own ministry:
‘God… is my witness how constantly I remember you in my prayers at all
times.’ (Rom. 1:9)
‘I thank God… with a clear conscience, as night and day I constantly
remember you in my prayers.’ (2 Tim. 1:3)
‘My dear children, for whom I am again in the pains of childbirth until
Christ is formed in you…’ (Gal. 4:19)
Effective ministry: breakthrough and fruitfulness
It is these elements – vision; heart burden; love,
care and compassion; the inward yearning of prayer and intercession; and
spiritual authority and empowerment – that are at the heart of every successful
and fruitful ministry. Ministry, to be
effective and life-changing, has to be conceived in and ignited by vision. It has to flow through a burdened heart, be
birthed in and bathed in prayer, and be empowered by the Holy Spirit. Without these, ministry is ineffective; it
does not get anywhere. Ministry that has
no vision (or that has for whatever reason lost its vision), that is not
conceived in intimacy with God and carried in prayer, has no incisive
thrust. It does not move or change
anything. Ministry that does not flow
through a burdened heart is cold and prayerless. It gives birth to nothing and is
fruitless. The absence of spiritual
authority and empowerment yields no breakthrough, whereas ministry that is
anointed and empowered by the Holy Spirit always overcomes and sees
breakthrough happen.
What God is looking for, and what he really
needs, are people who are willing to become channels through whom he can reach
others (whether non-believers who are lost without him, or believers who need
to be cared for, built up and discipled) with the life-changing power of his
word and grace. But to do this, he
needs believers who are surrendered, willing, prepared and able to carry the
vision and burdens of his heart.
In
addition to the apostle Paul, one such person was Epaphras. Epaphras had vision and was a man of
faith. He was the person under God who
was primarily responsible for taking the gospel to the city of Colosse and
seeing the church planted there. He was
gifted as a pioneer evangelist and saw much fruit in his ministry. Paul commended him for his work (Col. 1:7-8). We can see that, behind the scenes, Epaphras was
a man of prayer, and he evidently carried in his heart an inward God-given
burden which drove him forward in this ministry. Paul said of him that:
‘He is always wrestling in prayer for you, that you may stand firm in
all the will of God, mature and fully assured.
I vouch for him that he is working hard for you and for those at
Laodicea and Hierapolis…’ (Col. 4:12-13)
The
Greek word translated here as ‘wrestling’ literally means ‘to agonize,’ and can
also be rendered as ‘to struggle,’ ‘to compete for,’ ‘to contend with,’ ‘to
endeavour to accomplish something,’ ‘to fight for,’ or ‘to strive or labour
fervently.’ These words describe the
depth of prayer and intercession that Epaphras was engaged in behind the scenes
to break through in the spiritual realm and overcome the powers of darkness
which stood against the progress of the gospel and establishing believers in
the faith. As I said above, such
wrestling in prayer behind the scenes is the key to overcoming the power of our
spiritual enemy and seeing breakthrough happen overtly in people’s lives as we
minister. As Epaphras bore this burden
in prayer behind the scenes and persevered faithfully in his evangelistic work,
he saw God working, giving him breakthrough, victory and much fruit.
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