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A faithful presence of love in the absences of our city.

Filled with the Spirit

blog of Pentecost Sunday

The late, great Christian apologist and evangelist Ravi Zacharias once shared that perhaps the most difficult question that he ever encountered came from a close Hindu friend who inquired, “If the Christian claims to be supernaturally changed, supernaturally converted, why don’t more Christians act like it?”

What a question! I could try to do my best to answer it, or to try to push the question away, pointing to the great acts of charity and giving and sacrifice of Christians. I could try to point to the historical record of Christianity to bring change and transformation to cultures, civilizations, and even great men and women’s hearts. But ultimately, none of these answers quite suffice to take away the bitter pang of the question as I consider this world in which we live. Perhaps, the simple answer is that we don’t want to be that changed.

Perhaps it is just too easy to live a life that doesn’t look too different from the world; perhaps it is just too comfortable to enjoy the success, the fortune, the security that we have earned; perhaps it is just too simple to keep living life in our little bubbles, keeping our distance from the discomfort and pain that could so easily intrude in upon us; perhaps we just don’t want to be supernaturally changed.

The truth is, my friends, that we have been promised the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God Himself, who comes to dwell in and among us, not so that we can enjoy comfortable, happy, prosperous lives (though sometimes that is certainly the blessing of the Lord!), but that we can be filled with the power of God for the salvation of the whole world (Acts 1:8)! As Christians, we are promised to be supernaturally transformed from dead people to living people (Ephesians 2:1-3, Titus 3:5). And with this transformation, with this new indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we are able to love like no one else has ever loved, for “the love of God has been poured into our hearts though the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5). We are able to know and speak truth like no other, for “When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13). We are promised to be filled with the Spirit, and yet our actions can “quench the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19) and “grieve the Spirit” (Ephesians 4:30). And into all these promises, Pastor Justin asked us: “If Pentecost is about God coming down into our lives, not with a new policy to be obeyed, not as a theological problem to be solved, but as a person, interacting with you, how do you see His power and His presence in your life?”

The Oxford dictionary word of the year in 2016 (ages ago now, it seems!) was “post-truth”. Post-truth conveys the idea that though objective fact and truth may exist, it is less important and less influential than one’s feelings and beliefs. Whereas the Postmodern era denied that objective truth could exist, the Post-truth era concedes that objective truth may exist, but it is subordinate to one’s feelings. In his incredibly insightful book “Saving Truth”, Abdu Murray suggests two “modes” of post truth: a soft mode where “we may acknowledge that truth exists…but we don’t care about truth if it gets in the way of our personal preferences” (13), and a hard mode, “by which I mean a willingness to propagate blatant falsehoods, knowing they’re false, because doing so serves a higher political or social agenda” (13-14). Each of these definitions help to elucidate this mood that has permeated so much of the world around us: who cares about truth if I don’t like it, or it makes me uncomfortable?

Our wonderful, broken world is filled with emotion right now - feelings of justice and injustice, of rage and anger and vitriol, of apathy and quietness and distancing, of political partisanship, of racial division, of sorrow, of loneliness, of brokenness. Some of these feelings are good and true and right; some of these feelings are sinful and vile and wrong. Most of these feelings are a mix of each. How then, in the midst of this chaos, in the midst of variegated feelings and passions, each of which usurp the place of truth in this post-truth world, how can we possibly expect to find any unity, any peace?

This past Pentecost Sunday, we are reminded of the answer: my friends, we must be filled with the Spirit. When our emotions surge and our passions rise for truth and justice, we must be filled with the Spirit, for the Spirit, unlike our emotions, does not usurp the place of truth, but takes us to the person who is Truth Himself. When we think all the people around us are forsaking truth and wisdom for the sake of their own political and social agendas, we must be filled with the Spirit, for the Spirit leads us to the cross where we cannot help but see our own brokenness. When we are complacent to let others change the world around us while we enjoy the quietness and comfort of our little bubbles, we must be filled with the Spirit, for the Spirit leads us to engage with our broken world, to do justice, and to love kindness and walk humbly with our God. Whether we are filled with anger or apathy, whether we are demonstrating or remonstrating, whether we are vocal or vacant, we must be filled with the Spirit who will lead us into all truth and love.

In this time of heightened passion and feeling, my friends, this is our opportunity to live into and live out our cataclysmically, radically, supernaturally transformed lives. But we can only do this, my brothers and sisters, if we are filled with the Spirit of God. Pray that it be so!

~Josh Spare