Holy Spirit’s Divine Flow: Receiving A Deeper Outpouring of His Presence
…As a branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing (John 15:4-5 NKJV).
Abide means remain, do not leave, continue to be present.
David says in Psalm 16:8 (NKJV), “I have set the Lord always before me….” The soul can set the Lord before itself. And when Jesus chose to use the word abide, and David used the word cling, they carry an inevitable implication that it is not an impossibility to depart (see Psalm 63:8). It suggests that it is possible to not continue, to not be kept in Him. Abide is a command to remain connected, just as cling is a clinching to remain. The connection has a promised response: the sweet grace of the reception of empowering grace. We remain connected, and He flows inside. If the branch is connected to the vine, then it can receive the sap for life. Even the fruit in Galatians 5 is “the fruit of the Spirit.” It is not ours. It belongs to His power and glory. We cling and sing. As A. B. Simpson, evangelist and founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, recognized after being filled with the Spirit, “I pray less and sing more.”
Remaining connected is absolute dependence upon Him. The whole of the branch’s resolve is to depend wholly upon the flow of life in the vine. As Andrew Murray so perfectly stated, “Remember the one condition; habitual, unceasing, absolute dependence upon Him.”32 Our command from the Lord is not to bear forth fruit or to yield our own increase, but rather to stay connected to Him who is the source of life, for the sap alone carries the nutrients and power for the branch’s fruitfulness. The demand upon your life is nothing more than, “Cling to Me for life.” Often, people want to be instantaneously delivered out of everything because they don’t want to have to be dependent upon God every day. All that is happening to us is bringing us face to face with the truth of whether God is really enough for us.
Many ministers and Christians lack vitality in their lives or ministries simply because they are drawing their life from some defective, imperfect, or uncertain thing; namely, anything outside the living inter- action with the person of Christ Himself. If the branch is not bearing fruit or producing signs of life, it is because its reception is not divine life. It is receiving something else as its source. Often, people are more connected with the ministry they are part of than the Lord Himself. In that time when something goes wrong or they find difficulty in the ministry, their whole relationship with Christ is jarred. Abiding in Him is something different. It is the “in Me” that brings about the “in you” and inevitably produces the “much fruit.” The clinging life is the abiding life and the reproducing life. This is dependent not upon a practice or a minister or a ministry or a friend. It is dependent upon your real, interactive relationship with the person of Christ.
Seeing Christ in All Things
Unto You I life up my eyes, O You who dwell in the heavens (Psalm 123:1 NKJV).
Some people think that because we are busy, our attention to God will suffer in some way, but they fail to realize that the soul was made to do all things through staring at Jesus. The soul was made to perform all actions, no matter how mundane, unto the glory of God. This is possible in our lives, as children of God, only through an internal stillness and unbroken adoration of God that brings an infusion of life from the presence of the Spirit, which causes all acts to flow into the soul from God and flow out of the soul in excellence and thereby manifests the glory of God in everything. This is our individual participation in the Trinitarian fellowship through the blood of Jesus. He has rent the veil that separated man from the presence of God and merged the sacred and the secular (see Matthew 27:51).
The idolatry of placing my affections upon anything other than God will ultimately destroy me. As C. S. Lewis noted in The Weight of Glory, “Idols always break the hearts of their worshippers.” But the utmost joys and pleasures are wrapped up in the setting of our affections upon Him. Once God has the affections of a man, He has that man. As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet concerning the insanity of love, “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the things of this world.” Love makes all other things seem worthless. When our hearts are set on God, only He holds supreme value.
The question quickly arises following the soul’s deep satisfaction with the love of God: Can there be any pleasure without Him? Is it possible to exist any longer without His presence? Charles Spurgeon wrote, “Art thou the Bride of Christ and yet content to live without His presence?” David said, “My soul [affections] clings to You” (Psalm 63:8 NASB). Many times, a man’s emotions begin to overtake his thoughts. Many times, the affections trump the mind. When God has all our affection, He begins to swallow up our existence. He actually consumes all the details of our lives because He has become life to us through gaining of all our heart’s desire. We can say as the lovesick ones, “I cannot enjoy anything apart from Thee.”
For instance, I recently took my children to the park, and as I observed the surroundings, my mind recalled a quote from Irish revolutionary Joseph Mary Plunkett. He wrote in his poem, “His cross is every tree…. His blood is every rose.” As I turned all my affections toward Him, quickly every pavilion became a picture of the refuge of His person. Every rock became His written words. Every leaf became the healing of the nations. The shade became the cool of His presence. Every ray of the sun became the warmth of His love. Every refreshing breeze became the sweet wind of His Spirit. Every bird was His promise to care for me. Every sweet fragrance was the ointment of His name. Every grain of sand became His thoughts toward me. The lake became the still waters from the Shepherd’s psalm. The sound of the children’s lips became praise perfected, and His blood dripped from every rose. Even as I stared at the fish in the pond, I heard His whisper, “I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19 NKJV). My affections were overtaken with the insanity of love. As He woos our souls to Himself, our affectionate love for Him bursts out of our eyes in tears. I heard Leonard Ravenhill pray, “I pray…that we will have to pull the car to the side of the road because we cannot see through our tears.”
The Best Present is Always Presence
But now I come to You, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have My joy fulfilled in themselves (John 17:13 NKJV).
Joy isn’t a mere possession, but a person. God instills happiness in us when He offers us gifts. Don’t ever allow yourself to be condemned for enjoying that which the Lord has provided. Paul said that God “gives us richly all things to enjoy” (1 Timothy 6:17 NKJV). And God has given you His actual person, the greatest riches that we could obtain. When people want something more than what’s already here, they cut off their ability to be happy.
I was once walking with my wife in heavy rain, and I said to her, “Babe, I know where a pavilion is!”
She said to me plainly, “Great. Then take me there.” In other words, the knowledge of the pavilion being there was not the same as running under it (see Proverbs 18:10). She wanted to be removed from under the influence and oppression of the rain.
In the same way, knowing that Jesus is joy is not the same as drinking Him. Knowing that He is drinkable isn’t the same as drinking Him. You can’t hide behind theology or anything else. You must simply approach Him. Without your heart laid at His feet, something will always try to take His seat. Jesus won’t share His throne with a theology or a doctrine. He wants to sit there personally and not just theologically.
When in prayer, I simply cease my thinking and allow my heart to go up to Him in worship. I begin to drink of the Lord. He Himself said, “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink” (John 7:37 NKJV). He isn’t offering something apart from Himself. He Himself is in the cup. We drink of His own person. Folks wonder how to drink of Him in prayer. It’s simple: less thinking, more drinking. What stops us from drinking deep is often thinking deep. We focus so much on what this person says or what that person thinks, and it hinders us from simply drinking of the Lord fully. It’s time to not give a rip about the opinions of those around us, but simply place the chalice of God to our lips and allow Him in. Our minds are what hinder us from receiving in prayer more than we might realize. You can drink of Him in public, in private, on the job, or anywhere else. The surroundings are irrelevant when He shows up.
