Quick thought for you: I’ve been studying the gospels in
depth for a teaching I’m doing this Friday and one thing is exploding off the
page for me as never before. So put this proposition in your pipe and smoke it
for a while.
Everything Jesus did with his disciples (outside his primary
mission to fulfill scripture in become an atoning sacrifice for sin) was driven
by a single overarching lesson in discipleship: walk by Spirit, not by the
flesh. This to Jesus was the juice of the Christian life. It was THE thing that
would turn a group of fishermen and tax collectors in an unstoppable global
movement. That message about walking by the Spirit was:
1. Modeled (the Spirit led Him to the wilderness, the Spirit
affirmed his election of disciples, the Spirit empowered the miracles, the
Spirit gave him special knowledge).
2. Taught (“I say only what I hear my father saying”,
conversation with Nicodemus about being “born of the Spirit”, “The Spirit is
willing, the flesh is weak”, “The spirit will teach you all things”, the Sermon
on the Mount which I think is normative of the Christian life but only through
the Spirit).
3. Empowered (by the temporary gift of the Spirit given the
disciples on their first missionary journey and by the indwelling of the Spirit
in Acts.)
So if my premise is true, then everything in the Christian
life relies not on the Christian’s ability to try harder in the flesh (a
miserable Romans 7 reality... doing what you don’t want to do) but on their
ability to walk according to the Spirit (a beautiful Romans 8 reality... having
the mind of the Spirit).
We can nod in agreement with all this but then muddy the
power of this reality by our own Holy Spirit agnosticism. After all the work of
the Spirit seems a strange, amorphous blur to us sometimes. And the truth is,
we don’t always care for the folks who ARE talking about the Spirit. Shouldn’t
we just stick with Jesus and the Bible and leave the Spirit to theologians and
missionaries? Or worse... confined to the pages of history?
So painful is our Spirit agnosticism that we sometimes assume
walking by the spirit feels a lot like walking by the flesh but with a more
accurately “biblical” set of beliefs. We might even assert that person may not
“feel different” walking by the Spirit but should simply “check the fruit”
(which for many Christians come down to nothing more than growth toward a
basically moral life and agreement with Christian doctrines). By the way, I’m
all for checking the fruit. But I’d say the “Fruits of the Spirit” (Gal 5) have
been so profoundly domesticated as to be confused with humanistic niceness or
basic mental health. But looking at the way the Spirit both radically
regenerated and empowered people in the bible, I’d say that’s a pretty low view
of the Spirit’s work. Wouldn’t you?
If then the role of the Spirit is not an optional add-on for
mystical types but the foundational “juice” for the Christian life... if being “filled
with the Spirit” is both radical and imperative, then how can we begin to understand
and experience the dynamic of His work in our lives in a way that actually
makes us “holy” (read: opposite of common)? For many of us, that’s not our
daily experience, but it is our deep longing. Maybe the question isn’t so much
“what does it look like” as it is, “do you want to enter the rabbit hole and
find out”?
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