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Living a Life In Tune with the Spirit

by Petey Crowder, Executive Pastor
April 30, 2020

In his aptly titled book on the Holy Spirit, The Forgotten God, author Francis Chan says “God is not just one thing we add to the mix called life. He wants an invitation from us to permeate everything and every part of us.” Many of us may resonate with such a statement, yet in the next breath be tempted to dismiss it as idyllic and unrealistic. Though we desire such a connection, the impossibility of it may cause us to simply throw our hands in the air.

As you consider what it means to live a life fully in tune with God and His desires for your life, I want you to consider the following four statements:

  • There is no relationship with Jesus without the Holy Spirit.
  • There is no power to live the Christian life without the Holy Spirit.
  • There is no lasting comfort for believers without the Holy Spirit.
  • There is no mission for the Church without the Holy Spirit.

Christians throughout the centuries would affirm each of the above statements as biblical and true—yet we often talk about those four aspects of Christian life with barely a mention (if at all!) of the Holy Spirit.

It is also true that Christians have regularly struggled to know how to talk about the Holy Spirit. Christian theology affirms the Holy Spirit is an equal member of the Trinity, co-existing with God the Father and Jesus the Son, and yet we tragically tend to neglect the Spirit as we try to relate to God and Jesus!

Scripture talks about God the Holy Spirit in many ways in the Old and New Testaments, but simply put, we experience the Holy Spirit as the presence and power of God. After Jesus’ resurrection, the Holy Spirit is “God with us.” Everything we experience in our faith comes through the work of the Holy Spirit—in us, through us, and with us!

How would you live differently if at any moment you knew you could engage with God’s Spirit? Our hope is that together we discover that not only is this possible, but it is what God made us for! The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the “master sculptor,” chiseling and chipping away everything in our lives that doesn’t look like Jesus. The Spirit is the engine of power and transformation for the Christian life.

In this season, we want to wrestle with what it means to align our lives to Scripture and to follow God. Yet we are not left alone to figure this out, nor are we to do this by our own strength. Instead, we are given the Holy Spirit, the very presence of God with us. As we search for a way forward to be the faithful body of Christ in the midst of an unknown future, together we will seek to root ourselves in the love of the Father, the grace of Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit.