The Path to Power and Usefulness

A powerful sermon by A.W. Tozer where he addresses such topics as:

• What it means to be filled with the Spirit?
• What is spirit possession?
• What are "self" sins?
• What is true joy?
• The purpose of despair and loneliness in a Spirit-filled believer
• How to be filled with the Spirit
  

Excerpts from the sermon include:

"The Holy Spirit who inspired the Scriptures will also expect obedience to the Scriptures. If we do not obey the Scriptures, we quench Him."

"Everybody is as full as he wants to be. Everybody has as much of God as he desires to have."

"The desire to be filled must become all absorbing in your life. If there is anything bigger in your life than your desire to be a Spirit-filled Christian, then you will never be a Spirit-filled Christian til that is cured...never!"

"When you reach that place of despair,
when there is nobody can help you,
when you have gone to the last person,
you've written the last editor,
followed the last evangelist around,
hunted up the last fellow to counsel with him,
when nobody can help you anymore and you are in a state of inward despair,
that's when you should never despair because you are near the kingdom.

That's getting close. You are getting near the place where God can do something for you. But there comes that despair with self, that emptying out of you. That inner loneliness.
It is part of my belief, and I think it is from the Scriptures, that God wants to get us to a place where if we only had Him we would still be happy. We don't need God and something else. It's God plus something else that's the trouble with us. But when we get God and satisfied so as we can have God and nothing else, then God gives us Himself and let's us have other things too."

"The Holy Spirit is a gift. He is a gift from the Father to His children. He's a gift from the wounded side of Jesus to His children. You can't pay down one red penny for Him. You can't turn your finger over. He's a gift 100%. But what this does for you is not to earn the Spirit but breaks up your fallow ground. It empties the vessel."