Today I think we should stay a little longer with Pauls’ encouragement to the Ephesians to ‘Sing and make music in your hearts to the Lord, always giving thanks to God for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus’, and to look at it in the context of being continuously filled with the Spirit. I felt the Lord whisper to me this morning that by being filled with His Spirit in a continuous way, we will find ourselves increasingly filled with His love.
It does make perfect sense of course, because the Holy Spirit is not just there to give us His help and power, though we want both of those things, He is also wanting to shed the Fathers’ love into our hearts, and so we are circling round to realise that as we thank Him and get filled up by His Spirit, we are also making a way for our hearts to be totally filled and saturated with His love.
We all know what happens to a sponge when it gets saturated. It starts dripping everywhere, dripping the liquid with which it is soaked. This is such an exciting thought, that as I turn my heart in thanksgiving and seek to sing and make melodies in my heart to the Lord, even more revelation of the Lords love will invade my mind, heart and Spirit. I will end up as Paul prays earlier in his letter ‘filled with all the fullness of God’. Ephesians 3:19.
The Passion Translation of those verses catches something that we can miss when we read them in more familiar words. Verse 19 reads ‘this extravagant love pours into you until you are filled to overflowing with the fullness of God’. As we sing our psalms and hymns and offer our thanks to the Lord we get to be filled to overflowing, knowing Gods’ love for ourselves and then dripping God’s love everywhere we go!!
By faith we can touch other peoples lives, even when we are not consciously saying or doing anything that one would necessarily call ‘loving’. Because the love of God is filling and flowing through us the Holy Spirit, who is such a creative member of the Godhead, can prompt us to do those acts of kindness; sending a gift, giving someone a smile or sending an encouraging text, (both kinds). He may lead us to express our appreciation to someone, or to value someone we have taken for granted, because we are seeing them through His eyes.
We may be led to give or ask for forgiveness, or fast and pray for someone, not from duty but out of love. When we are filled with the Spirit, and hence His love, any number of things could happen. Life can get to be very fruitful and exciting. So, in our thanksgiving to God today, let us allow the Holy Spirit to immerse us in the love of God, making us saturated repositories of His love, and then let the Holy Spirit use us to spread Gods’ love to the people around us, in ways we haven’t yet considered.
Someone recently said that what our world needs more than anything is kindness. So while we are looking for revival, and for signs and wonders and new birth, let us give ourselves to that which we can do. Let us spread His love into our world, out of the overflow from our hearts.
