What does it actually look like to be filled with the Spirit? The answer might surprise you.

In this message from the Rooted and Grounded series through Ephesians, Paul contrasts getting drunk with being filled with the Spirit, and the comparison isn't random. Both alter how you relate to the world around you. The difference is direction. One turns inward and takes. The other turns outward and gives. The evidence of being Spirit-filled isn't a particular spiritual experience, it's singing together, giving thanks, and the one that makes everyone uncomfortable: submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

That word, submit, carries a lot of baggage. But what Paul is describing is mutual, and it's radical in every direction. Husbands loving their wives with self-sacrificing agape, not eros. Fathers not exasperating their children. Bosses treating employees as if they were Jesus himself. Henri Nouwen, who taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard, spent his final years bathing and feeding a profoundly disabled young man named Adam, and credited that daily act of submission with teaching him more about Christ than any professor or institution ever had. That's what being filled with the Spirit looks like when it goes all the way.