The big problem we have is believing life is found somewhere apart from God, so how can I be filled with the spirit? Let me give you two or three things that will help get you filled with the spirit - three things. There's probably heaps of things. Here's three things that occurred to me: number one, speaking in tongues is one great way to allow your life to become filled up with God. Why is that? Speaking in tongues - speaking in tongues is a great gift. I pray in tongues every day. I pray for a long time every day. I enjoy praying in tongues. I get energised - see, when you pray in tongues, your spirit is praying, as the Holy Ghost is giving you utterance, so now when you choose to pray in tongues, there's a flow from the spirit of God into your spirit. Your spirit begins to arise, starts to fill up with life, so praying in tongues is one of God's gifts to you, to help, because you can pray in tongues anytime you like. Build up your inner man, and start to come alive in God anytime! Anytime! Anytime! Ooh, [prays in tongues]
I pray in the morning, and if I get up too late and then there's people out I run into when I'm walking. They look... I say it's okay, I'm alright, I'm happy. [Laughter] I'm filled up with the spirit of God. I'm enjoying God. I'm using my language to love on Him. He that speaks in an unknown tongue is speaking to God. This is intimacy - you don't listen in. You know, you're talking with your wife, intimately, you don't want people listening in. You've got a good language, to be able to talk intimately with God, and not have people listen in, see? They just hear the murmur, but that's all, they don't know what's going on. It's between you and God.
Here's a second part of being filled with the spirit. This is perhaps one of the most powerful ways that you can do it, because it addresses where one of the biggest problems is. The biggest problem is what you believe in your heart, so here's the second way you can be filled with the Holy Spirit, is through meditation in the word of God. I cannot overstate how much meditation helps you to shift your believe system, and start to engage with heaven's reality - meditation.
You notice it says: they'll be filled with the spirit, and it says they'll have dreams and visions and so on. It talks about having dreams and visions. Now when God gives dreams and visions, there's nothing to indicate in those passages that those were open visions, or they saw them with their open eye. In fact when you dream, you actually close your eyes; you're asleep, and you have something come to you. Where does it come to you? In your mind and imagination, so clearly when God gives you dreams, then they come into your imagination, and likewise when God gives you visions, for the most part, unless it's a distinctly open vision, which is not quite so common, it comes into your mind and imagination as a mental picture. So we can see from that, that the imagination is a connecting point, between the realm of the spirit, and your soul or your spirit man.
So you can use your imagination creatively, for example, we can take the word of God, and create a picture in our mind, and begin to imagine what that would feel like, and look like, and how we would experience that. You see for many Christians, say for example the truth, that you are the temple of God; for many Christians, it doesn't mean much. It's just head knowledge, because they don't feel it. Many Christians, when we say that God loves you, it doesn't mean much, because they don't experience being loved by God, and experience is important to our being filled with God. One of the things that can help you immensely, is to train your imagination - you can pray in the spirit and get your spirit arising up, but to train your imagination, to meditate on truth, to picture it, as a reality for you.