Resolve to obey the call of God and the command of Jesus, and He will fill you with His Spirit. Do it. Never mind thinking He might ask you to do something that chokes you. Declare, "I will die in obedience rather than live in disobedience." Don't say, "I don't think I would like saying or doing that, I don't know the consequences." Resolve to obey Him and never mind the consequences. Do what He tells you. If the disciples had not obeyed and waited and longed to serve their Savior, they would not have been filled with the Spirit.
Never mind the consequences of an obedient faith. God will stand between you and the consequences. If He allows you to suffer, never mind--suffer, but obey the voice of the Spirit. Thousands of souls would have been saved if all those who had the urging of the Holy Spirit obeyed Him. I ask you, from where do benevolent urgings spring? Do they come from your own evil heart? If so, you are better than the apostles. If you are separated from the Holy Spirit, disunited from Christ, you are selfish, devilish. Do benevolent urgings come from the devil? If so, Satan would be divided against himself.
When you are filled with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the living God, you will be urged to go out and seek to save the lost. Will you obey these urgings? Will you give up your rationalizing? Will you give up your likes and dislikes and obey God? If you will, then He will come to you frequently. He will fill you more and more, till, like David, you will feel the interests of His Kingdom to be more important to you than meat or drink, than silver or gold. You will become like Jesus who said, "The zeal of Thine house hath eaten me up."
We are the only people who can save the unconverted. Jesus Christ has no one else to represent Him here but Christians. No one except His real people will work for Him. Only Christians can show the way of mercy to the poor people of the world, who are lost in darkness and ignorance. If we do not go to them in loving earnestness and determination to rescue them from the grasp of the enemy, if we do not by the power of the Holy Spirit bind the strong man and take his goods, who will do it? God calls on us. This is an alarming and awful consideration.
After the Holy Spirit fills you, you will utter a burst of praise for your deliverance from bondage to sin and death. And then you will pray for some other person still in darkness. This is the legitimate fruit of the Holy Spirit. Is not this what we should expect?
After you are truly saved, your soul will go out after the deliverance of someone else--father, mother, child, brother, sister, friend. Like some, you may not go to sleep until you have written a distant relative and poured out your soul in anxious longing for their salvation. The Holy Spirit will urge you to seek for souls. Frequently, the last cry of the Spirit, before the believer's soul leaves the body, is a prayer for some prodigal soul outside the Kingdom of God. He has no thought of self, money or circumstances. When the light of eternity comes streaming upon the soul, it neither hears nor sees anything else. It goes out of time into eternity praying as the Redeemer did, for the souls it is leaving behind. This is the first and last utterance of the Spirit in the believer's soul on earth. If Christians were only true to the prompting of the blessed Spirit, it would be the prevailing impulse, the first desire and effort all the way through life. It is not God's fault that it is not so.
Backsliders in heart frequently confess and bemoan their unfaithfulness to the admonitions of the Holy Spirit with respect to souls. In fact, backsliding begins here in thousands of instances. Satan gets people to yield to considerations of ease, propriety, being out of season, being injudicious, and so on. So, they lose opportunities of dealing with souls, and the Spirit is grieved. Oh! What numbers of people have confessed this to me.
An elderly gentleman said, "When I was a young man, and in my first love, the zeal of the Lord's house so consumed me that I used to neglect my daily business, and could scarcely sleep at night. But alas! That was many years ago." I asked, "Was it not better with you then than now?" The tears came welling up into his eyes. "Oh, Yes!" The Lord says of him, "I remember you, the kindness of your youth, the love of your espousals, when you went after me in the wilderness in a land that was not sown. Israel was holiness unto the Lord, and the first-fruits of His increase."
There are many such today. They have it all to do over. If they are to go into the Kingdom on high, they must repent, do their first-works and come back to be forgiven, washed, and saved. Because they have lacked systematic and resolute obedience to the urging of the Holy Spirit toward their fellow men, all this must be done again.
If people would only be obedient to the urging of the Spirit, they would never lose these urgings.