ONLINE ARTICLE (OF FALSE) ADVICE
You can express your desire to follow the Holy Spirit’s control through prayer. Here is a prayer that has often been helpful to me:
“Dear Father, I need You. I acknowledge that I have been directing my own life and that, as a result, I have sinned against You. I thank You that You have forgiven my sins through Christ’s death on the cross for me. I now invite Christ to again take His place on the throne of my life. Fill me with the Holy Spirit as You commanded me to be filled, and as You promised in Your Word that You would do if I asked in faith. I pray this in the name of Jesus. As an expression of my faith, I now thank You for directing my life and for filling me with the Holy Spirit.”1
If you prayed that prayer, desiring the Spirit’s control, then the Holy Spirit fills you now—even if you don’t feel like it. It is a decision of faith: a response to what God says in His Word, His desire to fill you with His Spirit.
SCRIPTURAL ANSWER:
There is absolutely no biblical grounding in the above answer. It is all based on feelings and emotions. What little scriptural value is in the advice, it is based on the Pentecostal experience in Acts 2, which is the program that belongs to Israel and prophecy. God is not working in this way today and has dispensed a wholly different doctrine to us through Paul. In our doctrine, we are filled with God's Spirit by getting His written Word within us through study and reading and hearing it.
There is only one way for us to be filled with the Spirit, and that is to have excess in the Word of God. To be filled with the Word. To hear it, read it, sing it, study it, memorize it, meditate on it, pray it, do it.
Friends, it is as simple as this! To walk by faith, to be filled with the Spirit, to walk by the Spirit, are all phrases that simply instruct you to fill your entire being with the written Word of God. The more Word you have inside you; the more Spirit you have inside you. Is not the written Word of God the very Spirit of God?
John 6:63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.
The modern Christian today gets so carried away by the emotions. They go looking for the Spirit of God in the hype of 'feel-good' activities. They wave their hands and get all carried away trying to find the Spirit of God by the church alter and through the dancing and the atmosphere. God is not in these things. God is not in feelings that you stir up. God is not found at the alter in front of the church platform. God is not in the emotions and the hype. No. God is found in His Word. Magnify the Word and you magnify God. God's Spirit is found in those psalms and hymns based on his Word. God's Spirit is found in your thanksgiving for the things He has done. God's Spirit is found in teaching and admonition by the Word. When your activities and your thoughts are focused on God’s written Word, then you are walking by faith and walking in the Spirit, then you are drinking of that one Spirit and being filled with all the fulness of God, Eph.3:19.
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