The last booklet to finish in the Precious Promises series is about the Holy Spirit. I started it over 4 years ago and am ready to finish it now. Why has it taken this long to get back to it? The sense of having it sufficiently mulled over in my mind until it’s ready to be commited to words hasn’t been there. It was more than just the subject being hard to figure out, though claiming to understand God in the personality of his Spirit verges on foolish. I’ve been aware all along that there are boundaries of what is possible to write, that the limit is what is actually revealed in the Bible. It’s important not to err either by understating what we can know from God’s revealed word or by going beyond what is written. That is especially daunting in light of Jesus’ own words in John 3:8 that just like the wind, we “cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” Working my way through the Bible and writing about what we can know has been interesting, but so far it’s been a relatively safe and historical overview of how the Holy Spirit has worked through the patriarchal and old covenant ages, through the days of Jesus’ ministry, and then the arrival of the new covenant and the apostolic foundations of Jesus’ church being laid in the book of Acts. That’s how far I’ve gotten, and it’s fascinating but it doesn’t directly touch on what we’re supposed to understand in our lives now.
I’m almost to the point of moving out of Acts and into the epistles, and though discerning the context of what applies only to those times and what is true for all time is still important, I know that focusing on the personality and role of the Holy Spirit in the life of every Christian will be life-changing, and I want so badly to be accurate as well as affected personally by the truth revealed by God about his Spirit. So I think my procrastination about finishing the booklet is rooted in my own struggles with living with a conscious focus on spiritual truth.
Also, I have a constant struggle to balance faith and knowledge. While it’s important to gain knowledge of truth about God and about his will for our lives that he’s revealed in the Bible, that knowledge must move from the head to the heart in order to do us any good. It’s the difference between believing and believing IN. The apostles are a good example of that. When they were with Jesus during his lifetime, they believed him to the extent that whatever he said (that they could make sense of), they believed. But it wasn’t until his resurrection that they truly believed IN him, that what he had said when with them was understood and his wisdom appreciated. The difference was that there was a change from Jesus being WITH them to him being IN them, through the Holy Spirit being breathed into them by Jesus himself before he went back to heaven (John 20:22), and then through the miraculous power they received when they were baptized with the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost (Luke 24:49, Acts 1:5,8, 2:1-4).
What has had to be sorted out is what is true and applicable to the life of every Christian for all time, first from a knowledge basis and then how that knowledge will impact daily life. We need to know what we can know, and then we need to know how that truth will set us free from the bondage of human wisdom and from the slavery to sin that we all experience in the world.
The need to sort through each of the topics of the booklets has come from having a nagging sense that I’m not “getting it” and that I suspect that most other people don’t “get it” either. I think almost everyone accepts the reality that “church” now is very different from what the first century Christians experienced. But most people don’t seem to question what should be the same and what changes are acceptable. The overall fellowship that I’m part of refers to itself as the Restoration Movement and prides itself for not being a denomination because each congregation is autonomous under the oversight of elders, which is the biblical pattern after the apostles died. Historically, this movement to restore biblical patterns by going directly to the Bible rather than merely reforming existing denominations was a good idea and made a good start. Yet “the way we do church” in other ways has, to me, glaring differences of focus and experience in all the areas of these booklets compared to what the Bible teaches and exemplifies.
This topic of the Holy Spirit has been especially lacking both in focus and experience in my 35-year history in many different congregations within the Restoration heritage. Even when the subject is broached, there is disagreement over how the Spirit works in the lives of Christians today. The human element of overreaction to what are understood to be errors in the teaching of different denominations comes into play, too. The pendulum swings back and forth, and it’s hard to have confidence that there actually is understandable teaching in the Bible on the subject.
Whenever a subject is confusing because there are so many different beliefs about it in different kinds of churches, my yearning to understand kicks in and my pondering temperament compels me to try to sort it out. And from experience, I’ve learned to pay attention to those nagging questions and to bring them to consciousness rather than pushing them down like I used to. In each subject of the previous booklets, researching and writing has resulted in discovering that the Bible does have clear answers and guidance that ought to be appreciated as one of God’s precious promises. These precious promises need to be focused on by every Christian and every church, because they are foundations upon which growth and transformation are built.
It’s been so helpful to my own life to have focused on each of these promises. I’ve often felt that I and most others go through life as though we’re collecting puzzle pieces but without any organizing principle for putting them together. We go to church functions and pick up a new piece with each sermon or lesson, and we experience things in our lives and perhaps search the Bible for a principle that applies, or we read our Bibles in personal devotionals and skip around picking up a piece here and a piece there. So I’ve felt the need to have a clear idea of what the big picture is so I’ll know where to plug in the pieces. The promises covered in these booklets are the big parts of the picture.
When I put together a jigsaw puzzle, I look at the picture on the cover of the box and look for sections to work on, one at a time. First I find and put together the edge pieces, so I have a framework for the whole thing. Then I sort the pieces into the ones that seem to belong to the different sections. Each piece more easily becomes discernable as part of the whole. If I didn’t do that, I’d never see how the pieces fit together. Once the puzzle is done, the whole is so much more than the sum of the parts. Each piece is almost meaningless on its own, but so important when plugged into the right place.
This puzzle analogy is so true of the Bible. It’s thrilling to see the big picture and then to be able to see how separate pieces fit into it. One of the clear proofs that the Bible is from God and not from man is the way all the parts fit together and how one part makes another part clear. Further proof is in the completeness of the way the Bible gives us answers for how to deal with every aspect of life, whether in attitude or action or both. By command, example, and necessary inference we can discern principles that apply to any situation. Even in the things left out, it becomes obvious that God intended to not answer some questions until we finish living by faith in this life and go to be with him forever, when all will be clear.
So here I am, preparing to tackle trying to understand what God has made understandable about his Holy Spirit in my life. The fact that I’m 55 and have sought God for over 35 years is a sad commentary on how teaching about him is neglected in churches today. I feel a yearning to understand how amazing it is that we are promised that we can “participate in the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). We are also promised in 1 Corinthians 2:12, “We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us.” How enticing! I think I’m ready to dig in now.
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Precious Promises 