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Back to my life story…

After high school I went to a Christian college and I had a bit of a pendulum swing at this time – great college, great people, loved the Lord, loved the Spirit, taught me about following the Spirit and so forth – but somewhere during my four years of college, I lost that sense of enchantment regarding the Spirit. I could say I learned to be more discerning, or I began to think more critically about the Spirit, to put it positively. If I were to put it in more negative terms, you could say I became too skeptical of things to do with the Spirit. And it really wasn’t because of anything specific my professors taught me. It was probably more so an over-reaction to the revivals that were taking place in the late nineties in Toronto and Florida. Some of my friends who had traveled there told me that some Christians there were barking like dogs as some sort of spiritual experience, while others lay on the floor groaning as though they were giving birth to a child. I balked at these behaviors, which just seemed weird to me and didn’t seem to have anything to do with the Holy Spirit, and so I became less comfortable and moved away from any spiritual experiences that were associated with those sorts of revivals. This even included some things I had previously engaged in like praying in tongues or simply raising my hands in worship. I certainly wasn’t as quick to respond to altar calls.

This isn’t to say I abandoned my faith or anything, but I wasn’t as open or as eager to engage with the Spirit because of this skepticism. And I know many other people who have had similar experiences to mine. You know, maybe they had intense experiences with the Spirit, they were open to the Spirit, but then they were turned off by some strange people that they witnessed in a worship service or maybe had strange experiences themselves. Or maybe they watched Christian leaders try to manipulate people under the guise of “being under the anointing of the Spirit.” Or maybe they’d seen people fake experiences of the Spirit or seen male leaders, supposedly anointed by the Spirit, have these terrible moral failures. All of these experiences can sometimes make people say, “I don’t want to have anything to do with the Holy Spirit if that’s what it looks like. We can have this pendulum swing away from experiencing the Spirit.

Now there are other people for whom it’s not a pendulum swing – they were just never encouraged to engage with the Spirit in the first place. Maybe they came from a tradition where the Spirit was seldom discussed, or if the Spirit was mentioned, it was usually in a negative way. Like, “Don’t talk about the Spirit too much” or they were warned, “Be careful of people who talk too much about the Holy Spirit,” as though the Spirit were like poison or a hot stove. “Don’t touch! Don’t get too close, you might hurt yourself.”

What I needed to realize in my own life is that the Holy Spirit is integral to our relationship with God. It’s not that you can’t have any relationship with God if you’re not open to the Spirit, but it’s almost like you’re missing out on so much. Now I’m not saying that the Spirit is part of God – please, that would be heresy. The Holy Spirit is God.

If we look at Acts chapter 10, look at how it describes Jesus in relationship to the Holy Spirit. It says,

So it describes Jesus as having the Holy Spirit upon him; he’s anointed by the Holy Spirit which means that God was with him. So the Holy Spirit is not just an experience or some sort of force. This is God with him. Theologically we’d say that the Spirit is a divine person, fully God, and that the Spirit is personal. We can have a relationship with the Spirit. In a slightly different text, Paul is writing to the Corinthians and he’s actually talking about disunity in the church. He
says, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.” And so we hear that Paul is equating the Spirit with God. He is saying that you are God’s temple because you, the church, are where the Spirit dwells, and not the building – the people!

The Spirit dwells within the church in a special way. So if you want to have a relationship with God, you have to be open to experiencing the Spirit.

Now sometimes, people will affirm that yes, in my head, cognitively, I realize that the Spirit is divine, is a person of the Trinity – God is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit – but we don’t really get the reality of what that means for our relationship with God.

I’ll explain the Trinity this way. In short, as one theologian describes it, God the Father reaching out from heaven with his two hands – the Son and the Holy Spirit – reconciling the world to himself so that we can have a relationship with God. It’s not this mathematical puzzle; it’s about God’s relationship with us and this is how God connects with us. I think of John 3:16, which most of you probably have memorized: “For God [the Father] so loved the world that he
gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

And how does this happen? Go back a few verses in chapter 3, verses 3 and 6, Jesus says,

How does this happen? “You must be born of the Spirit… Spirit gives birth to spirit,” he says in verse 6. So God the Father, out of love, sends his son so that we can be born again of the Spirit and have this relationship with God to have eternal life. If it weren’t for the Holy Spirit, we might think of God as far out there or distant in the past and Jesus Christ doing miracles. You know… the Bible describes God as being in heaven, the earth is his footstool, the Son has ascended to the right hand of the Father and is not with us now. But in the Holy Spirit, God is with us now. In 1 John 3, it says, “…this is how we know that he [God] lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.”

So I needed to realize in my skepticism, and other people need to realize in their not being open to the Spirit, that the Spirit is fully God and personal, and that if we want to have a relationship with God, we need to be open to the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The Spirit is not some optional “add-on.” We cannot ignore the Spirit in our walk with God. It is integral to our relationship with God.

Now if you’re wondering how my story ends… I did recover from my skepticism as you can probably guess from my message so far. I went on to continue studying and I pastored at a church in Ontario for a number of years, and over time I became more open again to the work of the Holy Spirit in my life. I started praying in tongues more, listening for the Spirit’s voice and this sort of thing, and my hope is that if others have stories similar to mine, that you will become more open to experiencing the Spirit in your life as well.

The Spirit is the touch of God – this is how God reaches out to us. We can say, oh yes, “I know I have the Spirit in me because the Spirit dwells in us, I am the temple of the Spirit, the church is the temple of the Spirit,” but there is more to it than that. The Spirit does work in those quiet and hidden ways. I want you to experience the Spirit as a reality, more than just idly dwelling within you. As Jesus describes in John, I hope that you would sense the Spirit like “a spring of water welling up” within you.

As a final reminder, I just want to restate that the Spirit’s work can be quiet and undramatic. We need to be open to those ways of the Spirit working as well. The Spirit can accompany us in our pain and in our suffering and the Spirit is integral to our relationship with God.

So my prayer is that you’ll continue to be open to the Spirit working in your life in quiet ways and in more dramatic ways, that you’ll recognize how the Spirit is working in ways that maybe you didn’t see before, maybe in the midst of your suffering and not just in your joy and your happiness and your feelings of spiritual high, and that you’ll be open to all the Spirit has for you because the Spirit is integral to your relationship with God.

To close I want to pray…

Thank you God that you sent the Holy Spirit to live with us, to guide us, to be our comforter, to shape us to have the character of Christ, to empower us to continue to share the gospel. I pray that you would open the eyes of each person to the many ways that the Spirit works in our lives. Open the eyes of each person to how the Spirit is already at work in their church and also to how the Spirit might want to work in new ways through the church. Lord, I pray that you would mold every heart, that they would be open to both the dramatic work of the Spirit to those who have been hesitant to that, and also to see and be open to the Spirit’s work in less dramatic ways. Soften each person’s heart to your work, and Lord, my prayer is that you would spur these people on to keep in step with the Spirit each day.

While I have no doubt that the Spirit was forming me in positive ways during my teenage years, you might say that I became a bit of a Spirit-experience junkie. At that point in my life there were two important things I didn’t yet appreciate. The first being that the Spirit’s work can be quiet and undramatic, and the second being that:

What I mean by this is that in the early stage of my spiritual development, I basically thought that experiencing the Spirit was always happy, joy, wahoo! And it was about getting this spiritual psychedelic “God high” or something.

Even when I think about some teachings that I hear on Christian TV or radio stations – what’s sometimes known as “prosperity theology” or the “health and wealth gospel” – it’s kind of like if you’re experiencing the Spirit it should be all victory and joy and everything’s going good, but that just doesn’t line up with what I see in the scripture. In fact, the Spirit can and does accompany us in pain and in sorrow.

Now, we have to have balance here, so on the one hand, I do want to affirm that the scripture does often associate the Spirit with joy, so I look at Jesus. Luke 10:21 says, “At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth…'” Or if we go forward to Romans, the apostle Paul writes, “For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit…” And I even read just a couple of minutes ago from Galatians chapter 5 that one of the fruits of the Spirit is joy.

So certainly the Spirit does give joy, but it also associates the Spirit with hardship. What I mean by that is when things aren’t going great, it doesn’t mean that the Spirit is gone or the Spirit isn’t involved in our life. The Spirit can be very much there. Another passage from the Apostle Paul says:

Now I included this passage because it acknowledges both sides of things. Here is Paul talking about Christians who are experiencing the joy of the Holy Spirit and yet they are in the midst of severe suffering because of their faith and sharing the gospel. Another good example of this is in Acts chapter 6: Stephen is described at the beginning of the chapter as “a man full of God’s grace and power” who performed “great wonders and signs among the people.” And in the same chapter, it describes him as “full of the Holy Spirit.” Now as we continue on through chapter 6, there are some Jewish leaders who start to oppose Stephen.

As you know, just as some of the Jewish leaders opposed Jesus, they also opposed some of the early Christians. So they opposed Stephen’s message and preaching about Jesus and they brought some people together to bear false witness against him, that he was committing blasphemy against the Old Testament and Moses and God. In chapter 7, Peter responds and he starts to preach about how the people had rejected the prophets over the years in the Old Testament, and now just like the prophets of old, they had rejected Jesus who came and was full of the Holy Spirit, and just like the prophets had preached anointed by the Spirit, so did Jesus, and now they had killed him. But God raised him from the dead.

And now, go back to Acts chapter 2 – what happens? Peter preaches and it says at the end of the chapter, thousands of people were added to their number that day. All these people were saved, so we come to the end of Acts chapter 7 and we might go, “Wow! Stephen has done all these signs and wonders, he’s full of the Holy Spirit, and now thousands more people will be saved, but when you actually read it, it says the people stoned him. They killed him. And yet within these same few verses it says, “Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.”

So we see here that sometimes the greatest display of God’s power is not in the absence of pain or in the presence of a miracle, but sometimes it is in our faithful endurance and obedience to God and our faithful proclamation of the gospel in the midst of adversity.

Even today, certainly we know that there are Christians around the world who are martyred and suffer for their faith on a regular basis because they are faithfully witnessing for Christ under the empowerment of the Spirit. In Canada, thankfully, I don’t think many are killed for their faith, but sometimes we do suffer a loss of privilege or status in our community or workplace or in society. And aside from suffering for the gospel, we live in a fallen world. We live in what Romans 8 calls “a creation that is waiting to be liberated from its bondage to decay.

This a fallen world because of sin. In Romans chapter 8, Paul says that “not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies” and verse 26, “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans.”

I think of people who are suffering these days with COVID, people who are suffering with diseases, cancer – they groan and just because they aren’t healed, doesn’t mean the Spirit isn’t there and isn’t active in their life. In fact, maybe the Spirit is giving them the gift of faith so that they can keep confessing Jesus as Lord and praise the Lord through their pain and suffering. And the Spirit too groans with us and helps us to pray. The Spirit is helping us in our weakness, not abandoning us.

And so we have to realize that the Spirit is not only present “in the heights of spiritual rapture,” and the wonderful, joyous experiences, but the Spirit is also with us “in the depths of human inability to cope,”¹ giving us strength, giving us faith, helping us to endure, growing with us, helping us to pray, as Paul says elsewhere, helping us to cry by the Spirit, “Abba Father!”

So this means that if we aren’t experiencing complete victory and happiness in our life, this is not necessarily a sign of a lack of spirituality—in fact, at those times the Spirit might be most active in our lives.

As I said, it took me some time to realize these things, that sometimes the Spirit’s work can be quiet and undramatic and sometimes the Spirit can accompany us in pain and suffering. In short, I didn’t recognize how wide the work of the Spirit is… I thought it was all about feeling good! I was a bit of a Spirit-experience junkie. So let me take you back to my life story…