Mark 1:7-8 - Filling Your Tank
Word of the Week: The Holy Spirit
And this was his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
— Mark 1:7-8
Mini-Message
Sin and the Holy Spirit are like oil and water—they don’t mix.
Be careful what you choose to fill yourself with, because one will push the other out.
Repentance isn’t just about letting go of harmful thoughts and actions.
It’s also about filling yourself with the Holy Spirit.
The Five-Minute Version
Let’s talk some more about the idea of repentance. As I wrote previously, repentance is one action with two steps: to let go of the old assumptions about the way the world works, and to take on a new understanding about God.
Some think of repentance exclusively as abandoning old, sinful attitudes and behaviors. But that’s just part of it.
If you’ve got a virus in your computer, and all you do is restart, you’ll soon just be right back to where you were before, because you didn’t remove what’s causing the problem. To make a computer work properly again, you need to restore the original software.
Jesus later tells a story about driving out a demon from a house, and the trouble with leaving it empty: seven demons come back and take possession again. You can’t just remove sin and stop. You’ll end up worse off than before. The purpose of repentance isn’t just letting go of old destructive thoughts and behaviors, but filling ourselves up with the Holy Spirit. You must fill up with God.
Think of it as displacement.
Long before Jesus, King David wrote Psalm 51 as a call to repentance for himself. He was praying from personal experience. It offers a nice model for how to practice repentance in our daily lives:
1. Acknowledge that God is in charge, not us. We have a critical role: we must choose Jesus. But we cannot do the job ourselves. Only God is capable of restoring us.
2. Ask God to remove that which is sinful from our hearts and lives. Jesus later describes it as pruning and notes that sometimes good things get pruned, as well.
This is a dangerous thing to pray, by the way. If we are serious, some things may change—and perhaps not just the things we’re thinking about. God may remove things from your life that surprise you.
3. Recognize that God desires us to live His way. David uses two Hebrew verbs to describe such a way of living: emeth and chokmah. The first means a consistency and loyalty to what is true, and the second a wisdom and prudence to know and act on it. Together, they make up a divine standard. We live in an age in which people favor empathy over veracity, but true compassion comes from understanding and living God’s way. We can’t repent without admitting we’ve lost the plot.
To use Jesus’ metaphor of pruning again, that which is not connected to God’s way bears no fruit. At some point, living apart from God will result in a withered life. Living like Jesus brings fruitfulness.
4. Ask God to give back to us the purity of heart we have thrown away, and the joy and gladness that comes with being in God’s presence. This is almost presumptuous—imagine throwing away a gift someone gave you, then later asking to have it again. But God is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.
5. Ask the Holy Spirit to continue to abide with you. It is possible to be so egregious in our sin that God removes his Holy Spirit, extracting our safety net and turning us over to the evil we seek and the consequences that are to come. Pray that we do not make such a tragic mistake.
6. Promise to share the story of God’s forgiveness with others. Repentance is communal, not just private. It’s such a big deal, we cannot help but share what God has done. Along with this, ask God to forgive the community and the nation, to do the same for others as us.
Think of the idea of repentance as displacement, and sin and the Holy Spirit as oil and water, which cannot mix. If we fill ourselves up with one, the other cannot mix in. The more sin we seek, the less room we allow for the Spirit. This is the serious part—the wages of sin are death. It’s a serious issue. What we want is for God to replace our stubborn, selfish spirit with a restored, holy Spirit.
Pray
Lord, fill me up with your Holy Spirit. Wash out any and all of the impurities of my heart, and give me a restored heart that is entirely full of your love. Amen.
Live It
What are you seeking in your life today?