In Step?

I wonder if Jesus became easy to overlook after a while. Maybe that's why He spent so much time in the gospels trying to help his disciples get at least a little clue.

To cut to the chase, I suspect I overlook him. Not in a larger cosmic sense, so much. My belief in Christ is pretty settled and I've arranged a lot of my life's furniture around Him being in the house. But sometimes I wonder how much I still miss.

For this week's sermon I've been thinking about Galatians 5:25: "since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit." That comes at the end of the passage listing the whole cornucopia known as the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, and a number of other traits I'd like to see more of. Ever since Jesus returned to the Father, he deputized the Spirit to be His presence. And it sounds like that Presence is planning on being present every step of the way, like He's planning on walking me through the various experiences each day brings.

As much as I'd like folks to think that I live in constant communion with my Savior, I have to admit that His interventions still tend to catch me by surprise. You know, since I'm periodically straightened out by the Spirit, maybe I should try to periodically stay straight with Him.

So...makes me wonder how much more easily all this love-joy-peace etc. might come if I were to check in every step or so. I'd probably stumble a lot less.

Should God Be Reasonable?

Should God make sense?

This week I've been thinking about some of the less-conventional aspects of the Holy Spirit's work: at least as seen from my Midwest-America, western-European sort of perspective. You know--the whole idea that He might lead people to speak in tongues, break out in prophecies or produce some flat-out miracles.

The God I grew up with was fairly predictable. That was nice, you could count on Him to be reasonable. Later on some friends introduced me to a God who couldn't always be figured out. That sort of stuff always bothers me.

A big wild card in this, of course, is the fact that we human beings ourselves have a tendency to distort things...and that's not God's fault. Just because some wacky things can end up happening in Jesus' name doesn't mean that Jesus is necessarily signing off on every spectacle.

And yet...well, "Aslan is not a tame lion", as the story goes (if you've read the Chronicles of Narnia). I wonder how often I accidentally limit some amazing things God would love to do, just because of the narrowness of my expectations. Actually, push-come-to-shove, I'd rather expect too much from God rather than too little. I'm adjusting.

To be honest, though, Mr Beaver's little grin makes me nervous ("No, he's not safe...but he's good, I tell you.")

Nervous, but I'm intrigued.

The Spooky Side of God

In the Christian sub-culture I come from we never really talked much about the Holy Spirit. As someone once said, our Trinity involved the Father, Son and the Holy Scriptures. Sure, we read about the Spirit in the Bible, but the sense I picked up was that the Holy Spirit was like a volcano that had largely gone dormant, except for an intermittent trail of smoke to serve as a reminder of another time. Fire and brimstone may have flowed freely during the early years of the church, but most of that lava had long since cooled, I was assured. Things were stable now.

Over time I met other believers who seemed to talk about the Spirit all the time. These Christians prayed for anointing, they spoke in tongues, they told of prophecies and healings and other wonders unheard of in my childhood world. Basically, they freaked me out. While their sense of expectancy jarred my assumptions about the Spirit’s dormancy, I sometimes got the sense that they had somehow found a magic lamp that could produce a miraculous genie when rubbed in a certain manner.

I’ve now pendulum-swung in my relationship with God enough that I’m familiar with—and also uneasy with—both sides of this contrast. And in both of them I see a common, often unacknowledged struggle: we don’t know what to make of a God who promises to be incarnate among us. Each Christmas we sing about Immanuel God-with-us but we’re not quite sure what to make of it when God actually shows up.

The disciples had the opposite problem. They were scared to death that their Immanuel would leave them. Whenever He would hint of his return to the Father a deep panic would rise up within them. How could He could leave them. That’s when Jesus began to get very specific about the arrival of the Holy Spirit. Without bothering to get into the Trinitarian complexities of it all He simply assured them that He would be with them always, to the very end of the age. He would come in the person of the Paraclete: the come-alongside-to-help-and-guide-you person in the Trinity. (You’ll notice that most New Testaments translations struggle to translate that word, and with good reason.)

So…here we are, with Jesus Christ alive and well and still bringing his changes in our world. Still bothering all the right people and soothing all the wrong ones, just as he did back then. He’s still here, through His Spirit.

I wonder how He reacts to some of the troubles we have with His Spirit? Does he grieve when we pronounce Him dormant, no longer needed for spiritual warfare today like He was in the New Testament? Does He bristle when we start creating instruction manuals spelling out techniques for getting Him to do certain tricks and wonders? (“Rub the lamp with this kind of motion and then genie will come out—just watch!”)

All this makes me more and more grateful for the scriptures. I can turn to the scriptures to find out who the Spirit is, what He has done, and from there I can get some important guidance for what He may be up to. With the scriptures I can test the spirits, finding out which voices speak with the dialect of Christ. Unpredictable? Yes. Unfamiliar? No.

I’m so glad the Holy Spirit isn’t a new development—a recent upgrade available only for those who register. He’s guiding, if we’re willing to keep in step.