The Holy Spirit
The early church, and often still today, Holy was defined by not doing certain things. Not dancing, not drinking etc. They missed the mark. You become holy by the renewing of your mind (Romans 12:2), you invite the Holy Spirit to dwell inside of you and the spirit convicts you that you no longer want to do such things. Perhaps during the Enlightenment we were on the right track. They argued against tradition. That left alone with the bible, one’s mind and the Holy Spirit, a Christian could inevitably arrive at the correct interpretation. Jesus tells us “you have no need for anyone to teach you” (1 John 18-27) However, it was taken to the extreme, another example of over-correction. Even today we see remnants of this thought as out bible study leaders often ask the dangerous and erroneous question. “What does this scripture mean to you?”
As stated in Seeking a Lasting City, it can be difficult to discern the Spirit’s will from our own. The role of the Holy Spirit has been in question since the early church, and clearly still is today. We are told the Spirit is like the wind, which “blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do knot know where it comes from or where it goes.” (John 3:8) When we deal only with ethics without the spirit we have legalism. Worship without ethics is formalism. And scripture without spirit is biblicism. We do know that the first Christians trusted the Spirit and knew the importance of testing “the spirits to see if they are from God” (1 John 4:1)
It is my belief that we are missing a Spirit filled church, a body of believers who have a 1:1 intimate relationship with God, with Christ. We do not need to keep reforming the church. We need to teach, mentor, and encourage believers to turn to God, total surrender, total dependence. Turn to a holy people, living differently, not separate, but distinct. We must not use prayer as another opportunity to preach to congregation. But as a dialog, an invitation, to the Holy Spirit to be alive and active in our lives, to rebuke and bind the enemy, and to fill us with the Spirit of God and the fruit of the Spirit.
As we learn from our past we see the attempts made by the mystics to have an intimate relationship with God, but without the facts. We see the scholastics who acknowledge the need for the Spirit to help us understand the facts, the truth. Today, we must acknowledge the facts and be willing to surrender to an intimate and loving God.
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