The Job of the Spirit

"The job of the Holy Spirit is to convince us that Jesus really does love us."

Good word from a former student (thanks, Dacker) who was quoting a YWAM (or some other para-church) guy.

Rice-A-Roni, Googolplex to Pluto, and the Gift of the Holy Spirit

Our children have an obsession with "googolplex." Something about it being the largest number we can say just makes it extremely handy. They are also fascinated with space, but a little fuzzy about what's in it.

So Emma Kate (age 3) and I have a sort of call-and-response liturgy. She'll say to me, "I love you from here to Pluto googolplex times, Daddy!" And I'll say back to her, "Oh, man, that's a lot! I love you from here to the nearest black hole googolplex times, Emma Kate!"

It makes for a whole lot of love around the Kirk house--on our good days, at least.

It seems to me that for many of us who didn't grow up in a more charismatic Christian tradition don't have any idea what to do with the Holy Spirit.

For those of us in more evangelical circles, we'd rather have Jesus. The Holy Spirit is like the consolation prize on a bad game show: a year supply of Rice-A-Roni and the Holy Spirit.

But the Holy Spirit is the love and power that occur between the Father and the Son. It's like they're going back and forth, telling each other how much they love each other--even more than from here to Pluto googolplex times---and it's so fierce it gives rise to this third member of the Godhead, the Spirit.

Ever visited a family that just loves each other so much you can feel it? Ever been to a family reunion or a a home that's centered, rich, joyful, loving, gracious? It's authentic, peaceful, enveloping. It makes you feel right at home.

This is the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God is the Spirit that invites us into the presence of a perfect and holy and loving God and empowers us to feel right at home--even when we have no business being there. The Holy Spirit is the power and peace of God, extended to us as we join his family.

Hopefully Emma Kate and I will continue to grow in our love for each other. We might even get a better concept of what "googolplex" really means.

But a far greater gift to us both would be to embrace this gift of the Holy Spirit offered to us by the Father and the Son. A "welcome home" gift that frees us from worry, fear, anxiety, doubt, sin. The Spirit that embraces us as sons and daughters of God.

Googling Piebald, 7-Eleven Employee Turnover, & Conscience and the Holy Spirit

So, embedded in this here blog is a stat counter that lets me know how many people visit and how they got there.

One way people find me is Googling a topic or issue that I've posted on. And the topic that has most regularly re-appeared over the past two years has to do with this question: what's the difference between our conscience and the Holy Spirit?

Given that my weeks last week and this are ridiculously full and further given that blog readership turns over more regularly than employees at your local 7-Eleven, I thought I'd spare myself (and you, good reader!) the pain of trying to gin something up and re-post this.

Enjoy!

Last week I was meeting with a student and a book we were reading prompted this great question: what's the difference between our conscience and the Holy Spirit?

After some delay tactics followed up by some verbal processing, I came to something of a conclusion. Our consciences are just like our wills, imaginations, minds or emotions. Everyone has one. All of them are fallen or broken to some extent. Some people feel guilty about stuff they shouldn't feel guilty about (the over-active conscience) and some people don't feel guilty at all about stuff they should feel guilty about.

So the work of the Holy Spirit is to redeem our conscience so that it partners with the work of the God to bring true conviction where needed. The Spirit works to heal the broken conscience so that we ultimately might judge ourselves rightly.

I think practically speaking this means that we should pray for the healing work of the Spirit to touch our conscience and to align it with the formative work of Christ in making us whole people. Not every pang of guilt is from God. But a peaceful night's sleep isn't necessarily reflective of our true standing before God, either. Our basic temperament and upbringings are the factors that shape our conscience as we have them in our natural state.

Fortunately, neither one of those factors has to have the last word on any part of us. That's part and parcel of the good news of the healing and transformational work of Christ.

The Problem of Getting God's Spirit

So one of the things that Jesus promised and that Christians have always said about what it means to be a "Christian" is that God's Spirit lives in us. This, of course, sounds like a wonderful thing. Only it's often the most disappointing.

It's disappointing for Christians because we often don't feel very different from anyone else. And perhaps it's disappointing for those of you who know us for much the same reason. "God Save Me From Your Followers" is a fun bumper-sticker illustrating this situation. If these are the people who have God's Spirit, who needs that?

In the book of Acts, we get the story of what happens with Jesus' disciples right after he leaves them. And the first thing that happens is that they have this tremendous experience of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit comes down and they are all able to speak in different languages.

The cool part about that: it happened at Pentecost, which is an international Jewish holy day. People from all over the Mediterranean were there to celebrate.

So this gift of the Holy Spirit was given for this specific time, to these specific people, with this specific point: the disciples had a mission, they had work to do (to explain about Jesus to an extremely diverse audience in town for Pentecost), and the Spirit was given to them to accomplish this work.

Ask most Christians about our own experience of the Holy Spirit, we equate it with warm-fuzzies. Look at how the disciples experienced the Holy Spirit, and it had nothing at all to do with warm-fuzzies and everything everything everything to do with God's mission on this earth.

Perhaps the reason that most of us Christians have such a shallow experience with the Holy Spirit is that we do not understand that it's not given to us primarily to help us to not cheat on our taxes/exam/spouse/boyfriend. It's not primarily given to us to navigate an important decision.

We do, indeed, get those things along the way. But that's not the primary function of the Spirit according to Jesus and the rest of the New Testament.

The Holy Spirit is given to us to be a part of God's mission--serving the sick, caring for the poor, leading a Bible study, bringing up kids in the faith, fighting for justice, and even (with apologies to all who find this distasteful) sharing our faith.

If we miss that mission, we miss out on experiencing the Holy Spirit. And sometimes, perhaps even more tragically, we engage with that mission and don't even realize that the Spirit is right there alongside with us, empowering us, and longing to do so even more.

Either way, most folks in my little corner of Christendom have a long way to go in entering into this incredible reality of God's Spirit living in us...including and especially me.

Marking the Spirit

In the midst of a brawl over whether or not newly converted Christians had to be circumcised in the book of Galatians, the apostle Paul plays an interesting card: "I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard?"

I find this interesting because I don't think that most evangelical Christians have any idea when or if they've received the Holy Spirit at all. Paul assumes and knows that these believers have an experiential data-point that they (and he) can point to that involved an experience of receiving the Holy Spirit.

I think that most of us who are not in Pentecostal/Charismatic circles don't have a clue as to what to do about the Holy Spirit...and some of us frankly aren't sure that it matters all that much.

Jesus had a very different approach. He said that it was better for him to leave so that his followers could receive the Holy Spirit. If we've got a gift that good coming to us, we better take it.

So what to do about our lack of experience with the Holy Spirit? A professor I took last summer argued that the current evangelical church had steam-rolled over symbols and icons and markers that were important in a believer's life.

Certainly baptism, for example, is not in and of itself what "saves" you. But it is not something to be blown off or taken lightly. Jesus both did it and commanded it. Why would we dismiss something so quickly that our Lord took so seriously? He argued that a person who was unwilling to undergo the ritual of baptism was somewhat akin to someone who gets married and then is unwilling to wear a wedding ring.

He also argued for a separate ceremony after the baptism for the reception of the Holy Spirit. Laying on of hands, prayer, perhaps anointing with oil if your comfortable with cooking accessories being used as part of worship. He argued that most of us have no way of identifying with Paul's argument in Galatians because we've grown up in churches that did not afford opportunity to mark the reception of the Holy Spirit.

Again, this is not the actual event of receiving the Spirit. But it acts as a sign, a marker. And so I was most appreciative this past Sunday as my church confirmed two children who had gone through the process of confirmation. The first portion of the ceremony marked their belief in the Lord Jesus. The second part of the ceremony marked their reception of the Holy Spirit.

Plenty of people get confirmed or baptized or have some sort of experience with God and it never develops beyond that. Jesus told the parable of the seed and the sower to help us to understand that phenomenon and not be shocked. But it seems to me that incorporating a ceremony marking the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in a believer's life (what a tremendous gift! what power to transform and be a transforming agent!) would be a step in the right direction for many of us.