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Dear Disciple,
After some interesting feedback from my last post on Colossians 3:5, “Put to death all the is earthly in you,” I thought that I would further explain what I might call the “geography of the Spirit,” that is, my thinking about the process of Christian sanctification which will guide further reflections from Colossians 3. I hope that this longer than usual post will prove edifying to you. In it I am trying to explain the relationship between the self and the Spirit in the process of Christian growth.
If I am raised with Christ, God the Spirit dwells within, which means that He has chosen to have a very close communion with me and with my spirit. But God is everywhere. All of God is everywhere. God the Spirit is everywhere. God is everywhere upholding all atoms and molecules. But I am not a rock. I am a person. I have a will. I relate to others. I make choices. I live and act out my choices. I have dispositions and predilections.
I have been made by God to commune with Him. I have been made to “be” a certain way as a person. I have been made by God to love Him, and to love others. I have been made to delight in that which is consistent with God’s nature and character. I am made to trust God, to find my significance in Him, to be fulfilled by Him, to be at rest in Him, to walk in joy before Him.
In my fallenness and brokenness and separation from God I will not and cannot be what I have been made to be. I am like a piece of pottery which because of the constitution of its clay cannot be worked by the potter. It must either be thrown away or the clay must be changed and transformed by the potter. The potter decides which to do with the clay. He owns the clay and the pot he is making from the clay, but of course the analogy breaks down because it is not the potter that makes the clay bad or fails to find good clay. The clay itself makes itself bad. What will the potter do?
I am a person with mind and will and emotion. I act, I choose, I “am” a certain way. In myself, apart from God, in my alienation from Him, this way is counter to my purpose for being and counter to my good.
Even though God is everywhere (which means that even before I “know” him He is surrounding me and within me upholding the atoms in my body) He doesn’t necessarily choose to act actively upon me to remake me. Nor does He choose necessarily to commune with me. He can choose to or not choose to. Because He is omnipresent He can even be in the atoms in my body, and yet not in spiritual communion with me. This is a mystery.
How God can uphold my atoms, how he can providentially govern and guide me and at the same time give to me freedom to do and say and feel what I choose to, or what I am disposed to, well, I can never understand this interplay. But it is real. He can providentially govern and uphold the life even of a person (as I was) running away from Him, not liking His ways, not wanting to bow before Him, rejecting His rule, seeking relational fulfillment elsewhere, having objects of desire and affection apart from Him.
But He has chosen to break into my free will “space.” He has chosen to relate to me in a new way. He has chosen to be close to me in a way He wasn’t before, even though He was all around me and even inside of me upholding my atoms and sustaining my breath of life all along. In effect, He has made a decision to act upon me and my nature in a way that would make me a different person than before, a new person, and He has committed Himself to a process of a growing communion and closeness to me. He has chosen to have His glory be connected with me, to tabernacle with me, to live in personal communion with me. This is all to say that He dwells within me now in a radically new way.
He is present to me via God the Holy Spirit, who brings to me the full presence of God the Father and God the Son. To have the Holy Spirit dwell within is to have the full presence of the triune God here and available, working to change me, to commune with me, to reclaim me, to rework me, to fulfill me, to bring me into the full joy of being His creature. The indwelling Holy Spirit is simply God in all His fullness here, committed to me, committed to communing with me, using me, transforming me.
In order to do any of this He had to change me. In order to have relationship with me, in order to make me capable of having relationship with Him, he had to change me. He doesn’t need relationship with me. He is perfectly content within Himself. God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit has no need of any other. But He has made me to share in His love and glory both for my own joy and good and for His glory. But I cannot do this unless he changes me, because the me without change doesn’t even want this.
So God does this something to me to change me, and out of the changed me comes faith, repentance, and a growing healing and wholeness. Faith is a condition of salvation, but it is also a gift. It is a gift in that it flows out of a nature that God has changed. It is still my faith (it is not God believing in Himself), but it is faith I wouldn’t have unless God had worked in me. Repentance is a condition of salvation, but it like faith is also a gift. It is a gift in that it flows out of a nature that God has changed and is ever changing. Both my faith and my repentance are the work of this triune God who is fully present and committed to working in, upon, and through me by the Holy Spirit.
Even though I am now God’s very own special workmanship, a new creation in Christ, I am, while in this present body and in this present time, a mixed bag as it were. Much about me must change, must be healed, must be reclaimed for God. Here I sit. I think. I will. I feel. I act. My body and spirit are interlinked. They act mutually upon the other. It’s just me here. But somehow in me, near me, amongst me, is God as a person to know, love, obey, or for that matter, ignore, dislike, and disobey. How is it that He relates to me? How is it we commune one with the other? How do I hear Him? How do I come to submit to Him and thus really obey Him? What is the relation between my spirit and my body in all of this?
Life and death swirl around outside of me. There is activity everywhere. I have plans, things to do, places to go, mouths to feed, a body to exercise, sleep to get, schedules to follow, ideas to implement, worries, fears, longings, ambitions, cravings--all this stuff going on inside--good stuff, bad stuff. Somewhere down there in me working out through me is a new life, a new core of my being. And upon me at every level God like the potter is remaking this clay into good and beautiful stuff. God is like a vine to whom I as a branch, a gnarled and sick branch, but a true branch nonetheless, am connected. The life of the vine flows into the branch and gives it life, and fruit is borne.
His working and my working go together. There is a beautifully mysterious relationship between my efforts and His working. Paradoxically, I must actively work to be passive before Him. I must exert effort, I must plan, I must concentrate, in order to still myself, to quiet my heart, to be open before Him, to listen to Him, to come to know Him as this soul’s God, to read His word, to meditate upon Him and His nature and will. There are so many other noises and other voices, within and without, and I struggle to lay down all I am up to (and think so important), to turn off the mental and emotional noise inside of me, so that I can hear His voice.
Similarly I must be open and receptive and passive even as I work very hard to love and obey God, to love another person when it would be easier to ignore him or her, even as I consciously try to be of good cheer. I try hard to be patient. I exert effort to resist sin, to fight temptation, to stop bad habits, to deal with unhealthy emotional patterns. Growing in grace can be hard work indeed! Yet even as I appropriately work hard to grow, I must always be receptive to Him, to His leading, to His love, to His encouraging. I must be open and quiet internally before Him even as I am in the midst of activity. I commune with Him even as I am actively doing things He wants me to do. So really I must be active and passive at the same time. I must actively engage all my faculties of mind and body, emotion and will, in the race of faith, while at the same time fostering an inner quietness that hears the voice of the Spirit, who sometimes even as I am moving along with obedience in mind says turn right instead of left. Activity and passivity, doing and being, work and prayer, always go hand in hand. Receptive and listening prayer, communion friendship with God, these come first, and work flows out from these. This work engages all my faculties, yet even in the midst of it I am, ideally, quiet inside, at rest, at peace, confident in Him, in love with God, not frantic, even if the work is hard, even if the work is the work of fighting temptation and sin, even if the work demands every bit of my effort and concentration! God is always at hand.
Sometimes I find to my surprise that I love or give or resist -- whatever-- almost effortlessly. Wow. That’s when progress seems real! But all the time, while I am trying (and I really must try very hard), God the Holy Spirit is the One doing the work in me to make the change and progress possible. Every good thing in me is due to His work in me, which I may not always feel or sense. The Holy Spirit is said to be like a wind that blows where it will. Even the wonderful blessing of hearing Him, of knowing and relating to Him, even that is the fruit of His work in me.
How do we put our spiritual longings into words? Our words seem to not quite get it right. We long that our spirit and His Spirit would know uninterrupted communion. We want all the “stuff” in us -- the wrong affections, the laziness, the busy distractedness, the emotional paralysis -- we long that all this stuff would go away and get out of the way! We desire that God would so change us that our being and doing would be as His being and doing through us. We long to feed upon the Bread of Life. We long to drink of the Living Water. We long that the new creation life would arise out of us and take over us completely. We long that he life of the Spirit would flow or break out of us as it were. We long that as branches we would draw life from the vine.
I am one person, a body/soul. I have one nature. Even though there is still dwelling in me a sin which seems in Paul’s words in Romans seven to have a life of its own, even though there is this “old man” I am to put away and this “earthy nature” I am to crucify, there is still just me here. I have one nature. I am like that lump of clay. Just one lump, one lump not as pure as it needs to be, a lump that God, instead of throwing away, is committed to making into real and pure clay. I am like a loaf of bread. Just one loaf inside of which the yeast is growing until it leavens the whole loaf. I am one person. The bad and good in me are inextricably mixed, like an alloy of metals. But a miracle is happening. Although I may be an alloy of gold and tin, God has made me in my innermost person into gold, and gradually the alloy is changing into purer and purer gold.
I am one person. I have one will. It vacillates, it is affected by all kinds of inner urgings, inner hurts, inner inertia, as well as by outer forces, temptations, voices. But it’s still just my will. This will at its core has been made new by God. But like the gold alloy it is becoming pure over time. I have one mind, one brain. It too is mixed up. I may not be “of one mind,” but I have one mind, one brain. Connected to these in some way is my “heart” my spirit. I have one of these too, and yes, it too is a mixed bag, and it too is becoming more of God. But it is still just me here in my one spirit that prays and seeks to commune with my God. I have one body.
Beside me, inside me, underneath me, all around me, pressing upon me is God’s Holy Spirit. God is committed to me, committed to being my God and me His child. I am now His in and through the work of His Son. He communes with me. He speaks to me. He influences me. He actually miraculously changes me from the inside out (even, as I have noted, as I ‘work hard’ to listen, commune, obey, discern truth, resist sin, etc.). The me He influences, the me with whom He communes, is just me. I am not Him. We are separate “persons.” The me that “works hard” is still me working hard, all the while He is willing and working in me for His good pleasure. When I obey Him it is me that obeys Him, not Him that obeys Him. Yet it is only by His power and grace that I can and will obey. He gets all the glory, all the credit, and all the praise. Amen. |
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