What does it mean to be “filled with the Holy Spirit”?

And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit – Luke 1:41

Remember that in Luke 1:15, the angel Gabriel told Zachariah, Elizabeth’s husband, that her baby John would be “filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb.”

So what we have here is John in Elizabeth’s womb and he’s filled with the Holy Spirit, but Elizabeth herself is not. At least not until Mary visited her. And then she is. For a while you had a spirit filled individual inside an individual who was not spirit filled.

John leaping in Elizabeth’s womb illustrates the point of what it means to be filled with the Holy Spirit. John hears Mary’s voice and, presumably, through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, he knows that that means that Jesus is near. Elizabeth tells us that John leapt for joy.

That’s what the Holy Spirit does when he fills people, he leads them to action, he shows them the joy of knowing Jesus.

At that moment, then, Elizabeth is filled with the Spirit and she exclaimed that Mary was blessed and so was the fruit of her womb. Again, the Spirit lead or enabled Elizabeth to do something, to say something, to “exclaim with a loud cry”.

The point is that being filled with the Holy Spirit is not a matter of geography. The Holy Spirit resided within the confines of Elizabeth’s body but he was not filling and enabling her.

Another way to think of it is to recall that God is ubiquitous, or omnipresent, or in simple terms, he’s everywhere. But if I say that God is inside that tree or that mountain, aren’t I approaching animism or spiritism or pantheism or something?

Not really. God was within Elizabeth but he wasn’t filling her in the way he was filling John. God can be “in” a rock but that doesn’t mean that the rock is divine nor that he’s giving life to the rock. He is present but not the same way he is with his people.

So have you been filled with the Holy Spirit? How do you know? What happens to you when people start talking about Jesus? Do you yawn, get angry, or does it bring you joy? A better way to ask might be, does it ever bring you joy since I have yawned, gotten angry, and felt joy while listening to radio ministries.

The bottom line is that the Holy Spirit does something when he fills someone even though he is omnipresent.