Recovering Faithful Participation in a Therapeutic Age – Series Page
Phase 5 – What We Can Say About the Spirit
Returning to Nicodemus’ Question: “How Can This Be?”
When we left Nicodemus in our last article, Jesus had introduced him to a category of life that just didn’t track with his understanding of the world. Being born from above wasn’t another religious practice or a new level of spiritual achievement. It was life made possible through the Spirit of God.
Our journey through Israel’s Scriptures reminds us that the Spirit wasn’t a new character introduced at Pentecost. The Spirit was already present in the story of creation, the life of Israel, and in the promises of the prophets. While the New Testament gives us a fuller picture of the Spirit’s work, it doesn’t satisfy our curiousity as to how that work happens.
So where does that leave us?
We’re not going to; nor will we try to solve the mystery of the Spirit in this article. Instead, my emphasis is to consider what it means to live within the life we’ve received.
Before We Do Anything — The Witness of the Spirit
Romans 8:14–17 gives us a way in. Paul moves from being led by the Spirit, to adoption as God’s children, to the cry of Abba, Father, to the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we belong. Then he speaks of being heirs with Christ, sharing in both suffering and glory.
The sequence matters. The Spirit’s witness isn’t a performance audit declaring that we’ve behaved well enough to qualify as God’s children. As a kid, I never looked forward to report card time. As a senior, I’m not a fan of a spiritual report card either.
Our behavior matters, but it doesn’t create our identity in Christ. The relationship comes first. Paul makes a related point in Romans 3. He turns up the ground on which we might boast about our standing before God. We don’t establish our righteousness through our own achievements. We receive the grace God gives through faith.
Jesus said the same thing to Nicodemus. He didn’t offer another program to add to a lifetime of religious achievements; He spoke about a life Nicodemus couldn’t produce for himself.
The Hebrew View of Nephesh
This brings us back to the Hebrew understanding of nephesh we explored in The Story of Desire series. Nephesh represents the living, embodied you. You’ve probably heard people refer to others as “living souls.” That’s an accurate association to nephesh but not in our modern view.
In our western view, we have a soul. In other words, we’re disembodied souls locked in a spiritual box waiting for divine data. However, in the Hebrew view, we’re living souls. We’re whole, desiring, choosing, remembering human beings.
I review this view of you to help us better understand the forensic courtroom language in Romans 8:16 to describe this interaction between the Holy Spirit and our spirit. Here Paul invites us to consider belonging as something lived within our relationship with God, rather than as information delivered to some hidden spiritual part of ourselves.
Call Your Witness to the Stand
Imagine you’re sitting in a courtroom dock, giving testimony of your faith. Meanwhile, the prosecutor – often our own worst inner critic, stands up to object: “Look at their stumbles. Look at their doubts. They don’t really belong here.”
You stammer, struggling for words, and all you can do is look to the Father and cry out, “Abba! Father!” It’s a real cry of trust, but on its own, it feels fragile against your flaws.
At that exact moment, the Holy Spirit steps into the box right beside you. He doesn’t silence you or push you aside. He stands with you, providing corroborating testimony – a joint witness (symmartureī) confirming: “Yes. They belong. They are a child of the King.”
However, what happens when that belonging becomes difficult to believe?
When Belonging Is Challenged
In our Sovereign Restraint series, we explored how the accuser in Job questions whether Job’s devotion is genuine apart from the protection and benefits he receives. Is the relationship real, or is it transactional?
A similar question can trouble our own faith.
- If I really belonged to God, would I still be struggling with this?
- If God really loved me, wouldn’t my life look different?
- If the Spirit were at work in me, wouldn’t I be further along by now?
Questions like these don’t necessarily lead us to reject God. But they can make us doubt whether we truly belong to Him.
This is where a therapeutic understanding of faith can become an annoying burden. If we’ve come to expect that God’s goodness means our lives should work out as we think, disappointment can start looking like evidence against the relationship. But Paul doesn’t offer our circumstances as proof of belonging. In Romans 8, he speaks of being heirs with Christ and Paul includes suffering within that shared life. The Spirit’s witness isn’t that our circumstances prove we’re God’s children. The Spirit’s witness is that we belong to Christ even in our circumstance.
I think it’s important to understand that not every doubt we experience is an accusation against us. Grief, shame, poor teaching, our own choices, and ordinary uncertainty can all complicate our sense of belonging. But since belonging is received rather than earned, neither success nor suffering gets the final word on our identity in Christ.
Belonging, however, isn’t the end of the story. It’s the beginning of a life we’re invited to inhabit.
Living Within What We Have Received
Since believers belong to Christ, what does it mean to live within that belonging?
The Holy Spirit is God’s active presence, drawing us into the life of Christ. Yet this drawing doesn’t mean that everything plays out according to a plan. The Spirit doesn’t coerce us into participation or make our decisions for us.
Our identity is received through the Spirit’s initiative. But identity and motivation aren’t the same thing.
Desire is part of what makes us living, embodied people. We want, love, choose, and reach for things. Desire provides much of the motivation behind our actions, but it doesn’t guarantee that our actions will take us in a direction consistent with the life of Christ. We can want something good and still pursue it in ways that don’t line up with the life we’ve received.
So the question isn’t simply whether we have the right desires. More importantly, it’s how our desires are directed.
We belong to Christ, but we still have to learn to live within that belonging. We exercise our will, make choices, respond, resist, and sometimes get things wrong. Part of that involves what we pay attention to and what we choose to ignore. Our agency doesn’t operate independently of God’s grace, as if we have to put ourselves in order before God can work in us. We’re already within the relationship the Spirit has initiated. But whether we participate in that life or not, is our responsibility.
Confusing Being Led with Being Told
I wonder if sometimes we’ve confused being led by the Spirit with being told what to do by the Spirit. We listen to and sing songs asking the Spirit to come, fill us, change us, or have His way in us. Those prayers aren’t wrong prayers. They express a genuine longing for God’s presence and work. Yet, we can start to imagine ourselves mostly as recipients of something the Holy Spirit does to us. Maybe we wait for a recognizable event, a sign or a clear direction before we act.
However, there’s a difference between being open to the Spirit and expecting the Spirit to make our decisions for us. Again, there’s that therapeutic expectation of what we think God’s faithfulness should look like. That’s a tricky tension to hold but I think Luke gives us some insight.
One Way Scripture Might Speak to Us Today
We’ve already looked at the picture Acts 15 offers. When the early church faced a serious disagreement about Gentile believers, the community listened to testimony, considered Scripture, remembered what God had done, debated, and reached an evaluation together. Their conclusion was expressed in the words, “It seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.”
That “seemed” matters. This group of believers expressed a shared conviction without claiming perfect knowledge. Of course our personal decisions aren’t the same as the decisions of a gathered church community, and I’m not saying this passage is a prescription for private guidance. However, the posture is worth noticing.
Luke’s description shows discernment involves prayer, Scripture, listening, careful thought, counsel, and a willingness to act while being open to correction. We may reach a point where we can honestly say, “I’ve prayed, reflected on Scripture, thought, listened, and considered the people involved. To me this seems a faithful response. But I could be wrong LOL!”
I’ve lived long enough to know that I can’t ever claim to know how the Holy Spirit exactly works in our decision-making. But I think this picture is a way of showing us how to exercise due diligence, take responsibility while remaining receptive to God’s direction. We’ll always experience a level of uncertainty in our decisions but the Holy Spirit enables us to live faithfully within that uncertainty.
The Life We Live
A big part of this series is exploring our expectations of God. This may be a good place to consider what expectations we place upon what we think a Christian life should look like on the ground.
Throughout our lifetime, we learn to receive rather than control, listen rather than react, repent rather than defend, and forgive without pretending the harm never happened. We remain present when we can’t explain life. We make room for others, tell the truth, endure, and learn to love without keeping a record of what we’re owed.
These are ordinary human actions. But they aren’t exclusive to Christians. And they don’t provide a reliable way of determining who belongs to Christ. Yet they matter. How we live affects the people around us. Our choices can bring help or harm, inspire trust or tear it down. The life of Christ gives us a direction in which to grow, even when we don’t always live up to it.
The Credibility of a Lived Life
I’ve spent much of my life around the church, listening to people explain what they believe and what a Christian life should look like. I’ve also watched people live their faith without drawing attention to themselves and sometimes without having much to say about it. Over time, I’ve come to value the credibility of a lived life.
Words matter. Theology matters. What we believe about God and the Cross matters. But explaining love isn’t the same as loving someone. We can speak about grace while being ungenerous, defend forgiveness while refusing to forgive, or describe the work of the Holy Spirit without knowing precisely what the Spirit is doing within us. Our explanations may be true but an explanation isn’t the life of Christ.
I wonder, maybe we don’t need to work so hard at establishing and explaining how Christians are different. That difference isn’t ours to manufacture or market. Can’t we take the work of Christ seriously without turning our lives into evidence for a claim we want to prove?
Living From Belonging
However, I’m not saying that the way we live doesn’t matter. If we belong to Christ, the life we’ve received matters for how we treat our neighbours, respond to suffering, handle our failures, and make our choices. We remain responsible for the lives we live. Our belonging grounds our behaviour.
But there’s a difference between trying to show and tell our belonging and learning to live from it.
We’re not flawless. Sometimes we have mixed motives. We won’t always understand our desires, how to discern the way forward, or make the right choice. Sometimes we’ll need to repent, make things right, and start again.
Thanks to God’s grace, we don’t have to establish our right standing before God every morning before we begin the day. Instead, every morning we begin from the relationship we’ve received. Throughout the day we continue to learn; slowly and imperfectly, how to live within it.
On the Ground
Nicodemus asked, “How can this be?”
The mystery of the Spirit’s work resists being explained away. Even so, Scripture gives language to describe the Spirit’s movement, offering a lens for the life you live. Still, every explanation has its limits.
A script from God isn’t required for every decision. Nor does God need to manage your circumstances so that life unfolds according to plan. Thankfully, we don’t need a series of action steps to prove we belong to God’s covenant community.
You’ve received a life. You belong to Christ. The Spirit bears witness to that very reality.
From there, you step back out into the open air and return to ordinary life. You choose, love, stumble, learn, repent, and begin again. You participate in the life you’ve been given without needing to figure out every internal mechanism while you live it.
There’s no map handed to you at the edge of the field. There’s simply the horizon, the work in front of you, and life on the ground. And you don’t have to explain the wind before you can walk in it.
I remain,
Your Pastor From the Pasture.