Running On Empty 

👤 Geoff

We seem to spend a large proportion of our lives recharging things these days. Phones, games consoles,  ipads, toothbrushes, and now even cars - everything needs to be plugged in and charged up. Even my wonderful Kindle needs to be recharged now and then. There are trailing cables everywhere in our house waiting for the next charge. And why is it that everything needs a different charger?

When our children were younger many things had removable rechargeable batteries, and I had the hardest job keeping on top of all of it all.  I was forever being asked by my children for more batteries. I had two very useful battery chargers, but there was a problem: it was very hard to tell the difference between a charged and uncharged battery from the outside, and I was always muddling them up. Yes, there were some pretty straightforward ways of testing them and sorting out which was which, but when you were drowning in batteries and needed a couple quickly it could be very frustrating.

At Pentecost Jesus' followers learnt a new way in which God could work in their lives giving them the power to do things the like of which they had never dreamt. They learnt how to let God change them and work in their lives. Jesus had told them to wait for 'power from on high', and this was it! The Holy Spirit was poured out on all of them. Fully charged, they went on to transform the known world as they spread the Good News of Jesus.

The Bible says we should all be filled with the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 5:18) and Wayne Grudem offers this definition:

'Be filled with the Spirit' means to be filled with the immediate presence of God to the extent that you are feeling what God Himself feels, desiring what God desires, doing what God wants, speaking by God’s power, praying and ministering in God’s strength, and knowing with the knowledge that God Himself gives.

Is that true of me? Is that true of you? It occurred to me that, like my batteries, it's impossible to tell at first sight whether we're charged up or not, whether we are full of God's Holy Spirit. It's only when we test the batteries out, get them to do some work, that we discover whether or not there's any power there.

We know that the battery with little or no charge left struggles to generate anything useful. So why do we try to serve the Lord in our own strength? Is it not obvious that we will see little happening if we don't connect to the source of our power? If we insist on 'running on empty' we'll never be living the life God created us for.

The first followers of Jesus experienced it, but what is our experience of being filled with the Holy Spirit? Jesus said we should ask for the Spirit, and that's one thing we can all do: ask to be filled with his Holy Spirit. And let's not forget to go on asking for it, because we have a habit of leaking. I've decided that every time I need to charge up my phone (or something or other), I'm going to ask God to recharge me with his Holy Spirit.