Surprised by the Spirit, Part II

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…