Recovering Faithful Participation in a Therapeutic Age – Series Page
Phase 5 – What We Can Say About the Spirit
In the previous reflection, we left Nicodemus standing in the dark night air. We stand with him wondering, “What can we say about the Spirit we meet in Scripture?”
As we noted, his story didn’t end that night. As John’s narrative unfolds, we catch glimpses of a gradual shift in Nicodemus way of thinking. First when he cautiously urges his colleagues on the Sanhedrin to give Jesus a fair hearing (John 7:50–51), and finally, when he steps into the daylight alongside Joseph of Arimathea to care for Jesus’ crucified body (John 19:38–42).
Whatever Nicodemus was or wasn’t playing at during that initial night visit, he clearly resisted the core premise Jesus laid before him:
A lifetime of career achievements, religious prestige, and administrative mastery can’t validate one’s place in God’s Kingdom.
Nicodemus understood human life and effort. What he struggled to to get hold of was what Jesus meant by being generated from an above-source (anōthen) through water and Spirit.
“What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of Spirit is spirit.” —John 3:6
The issue wasn’t that human effort or flesh is inherently bad or sinful. The issue was that human capability; no matter how refined, educated, or institutionalized, can only ever reproduce more of the same. A wind tunnel can recirculate air, but it can’t create wind.
A Life From Above
There’s a subtle linguistic detail in John 3 that we can easily miss in translation.
When Jesus speaks of being born anōthen, the word carries a deliberate double meaning. it can mean “again” (chronologically), but primarily, it means “from above” (origin/source).
Jesus was speaking about the source of a new kind of life. Nicodemus, however, only heard the repetition of an old kind of life:
“How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” – John 3:4
I can’t say if Nicodemus employs a rhetorical deflection or if he was genuinely confused by a category he couldn’t control. Whatever was on his mind, he tried to flatten Jesus’ vertical claim about the divine origin of a new kind of life into a horizontal box of human biology.
That’s why Jesus responds with sharp irony:
“You are Israel’s teacher and you don’t understand these things?” (John 3:10).
Jesus didn’t introduce a foreign concept. He pointed to a reality already promised throughout Israel’s Scriptures.
The Hebrew Map: Stony Mind vs. Fleshy Mind
Our modern Western Christian culture amplifies centuries of romanticism and revivalist hymnody. We tend to map the Holy Spirit almost exclusively onto emotions. I recall my years as a young boy through to adulthood at Waterloo Pentecostal Assembly, where our song leader Ken Norris often led us in Alfred Ackley’s classic hymn, “He Lives!” We tracked the Spirit’s presence by the temperature of our feelings. Sometimes a sudden wave of peace, an emotional release at an altar, or a warm sense of God’s nearness.
We may very well have emotional responses to the Spirit’s presence. One person’s emotional experience may differ from another’s. However, reading John 3 through that sentimental lens can lead us to assume Nicodemus was spiritually cold or unfeeling. He wasn’t.
In ancient Hebrew anthropology, internal human functions map out quite differently than our modern sentimentality suggests:
- The Kidneys and Gut (Kilyōṯ / Mē‘îm): The true seat of inner emotion, instinct, and raw feeling (Jeremiah 12:2; Lamentations 2:11). If an ancient Israelite wanted to describe overwhelming emotional distress or affection, they spoke of their kidneys aching or their internal organs churning. Yeah that doesn’t make for great Hallmark cards for Valentine’s Day.
- The Heart (Lēḇ): The absolute cognitive control center. It was the seat of intellect, conscious reasoning, calculation, logic, and decision-making (Proverbs 16:9).
When Jesus spoke of “water and the Spirit,” He strummed familiar chords from Ezekiel 36. Now that doesn’t mean we can simply say, “John 3 equals Ezekiel 36,” and close the commentary. However, I point to it because the language belongs to the prophetic world Nicodemus was paid to teach.
In my hard-copy translation of Ezekiel, I like the way Old Testament scholar John Goldingay renders God’s promise Ezekiel 36:26 with vivid clarity:
“I will remove the stony mind from your flesh and give you a fleshy mind.”
STONY MIND (Lēḇ Qāšeh)
- Rigid, hardened thinking
- Impenetrable to divine truth
- Locked in institutional pride
FLESHY MIND (Lēḇ Bāśār)
- Living, soft, responsive tissue
- Elastic, teachable
- Capable to better see reality from God’s perspective
Jesus didn’t ask Nicodemus to embrace some strange, spiritual substance. He called him to recognize what God has always promised; a washing away of institutional self-sufficiency, and a softened, responsive mind (lēḇ bāśār). I don’t think a softened mind gives us greater knowledge; I could hurt myself on that stretch. I think it’s more about plasticity. We’re more capable of moving beyond our rigid structures and categories.
The Agency of the Spirit: “It Seemed Good to Us”
As the story moves into the Book of Acts, Luke doesn’t present the Spirit as a vague religious atmosphere, nor as a mechanical force we can watch from over God’s shoulder.
As much as we may like to, we can’t stand in God’s control room to watch how the Spirit operates within the relationship between the Father and the Son. Neither, frustratingly, can we see how that agency intersects with human decision-making. Our knowledge will always be limited but we experience God’s Spirit by being drawn into the Spirit’s work.
I think there’s a practical application of this in Acts 15 where the Jerusalem Council faces an unprecedented crisis. Can Gentiles belong to God’s covenant people without adopting Jewish cultural markers. The problem was, they didn’t have a step-by-step manual to follow.
So they remember Scripture (Acts 15:15–18), listen to testimonies of what God was already doing on the ground (Acts 15:12), debate, and deliberate together. Then they wrote a phrase that should slow us down:
“It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us…” —Acts 15:28
Notice what they didn’t say. They didn’t claim, “The Spirit overruled our human capacities but let us put things into our own words using a supernatural voiceover.” Nor did they say, “Well we voted, so lets hope God approves.”
I see a sense of confidence in their statement, but also deep humility. The Spirit’s agency didn’t eliminate their human internal functions; the need to think, listen, and deliberate. Instead, the Spirit enabled them to discern together in humility. That “humility” part is critical.
Participation, Not Just Improvement
This brings us to a critical distinction that Apostle Paul expands throughout his letters.
We can’t reduce the Spirit’s work to making Christians behave slightly better than everyone else. Human beings across all cultures can live remarkably good lives. We can love, sacrifice, forgive, care for neighbours, and seek justice without being Christians.
Jesus didn’t send the Holy Spirit to merely manufacture moral improvement, but rather, and I think this is most important, the Spirit enables participation in the life of Christ. As Paul writes, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20), and “all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” (Romans 8:14).
The point of this Return to a Future series is to invite readers to receive fresh perceptions. This view of the Holy Spirit shifts our basic orientation from “How can I become a better, more polished version of myself?” to “How am I being drawn into the living reality of Jesus?”
The Spirit doesn’t lead us away from being human. The Spirit leads us deeper into the soft, responsive humanity God created us to embody.
Posture, Directionality, and the Road Ahead
Which brings us back to the Hebrew anthropology we explored in my Story of Desire series.
If the Spirit enables real participation in the life of Christ, what actually changes within the actual person who participates daily in real life? What happens to the part of us that desires, chooses, remembers, loves, and reaches toward something?
The ancient biblical writers had a word for that whole, living, desiring self: Nephesh (Genesis 2:7; Psalm 42:1–2).
If this life Jesus came to give is real, and I firmly believe that it is, eventually it has to reach the ground we actually walk on. Participation in the life of Christ isn’t merely a matter of mental agreement or static belief; it’s a matter of posture, directionality, and orientation. It must reach what we desire, what we pay attention to, and who we are becoming in daily life.
That’s where we’ll go next as we draw this exploration to an end.
Not in the clouds.
On the ground.