To be full of Jesus means to know emptiness without Him.
We sing a song in our Sunday service that says “I want more of you, Jesus.” Well, we must first experience emptiness or we wouldn’t even know to make such a request.
And what does it take to experience emptiness? The Spirit to show us that we have bricks taking up valuable space in our lives. I grew up in the days before the latest water saving toilet technologies. We’d put bricks in the water tank in order to conserve water. This way the tank would be “full”, even though it wasn’t, in order to shut off the water.
We are just like that toilet bowl tank. We have bricks taking up space where water should be. As finite beings we can only hold so much water; and yet, our drugs of choice/our ways of living take up space making us feel full, when we’re not.
If you want more of Jesus, the living water, it will mean giving the Spirit permission to remove those bricks – your pet sins – so you can experience emptiness in order to start asking for more of Jesus, the only source of true living.
Remember, Jesus didn’t come to add Himself or new behaviors to us. In the tank illustration, it would lead to wasting water as it overflowed the bowl spilling onto the floor. No, Jesus came to replace us, those bricks, with Himself.
More of Jesus and less of you is a sign of a healthy Jesus disciple, one who loves and becomes like Jesus.