Practicing the Holy Spirit

This is where the rubber meets the road! I’m excited, scared and a few emotions in between to be writing about the Holy Spirit. I’m excited because of the three persons of the Trinity this is the one I know the least well. It’s easy to study Jesus through Christian community and God the Father through the Word, but encountering the Holy Spirit! Mmm, there’s just something new and fresh that makes me want to write J

Before we look at practicing the Holy Spirit, I want to take a look at what the Holy Spirit is. I say what, because the Holy Spirit isn’t really a who like God the Father and God the Son. The Holy Spirit isn’t a ghost. The Holy Spirit is the presence of God. Brother Lawrence, an eighteenth century French monk was famous for practicing the presence of God, which is the name of a book put together after his death. Brother Lawrence was more famous for washing dishes than writing. He is famous for the way he did menial chores; he did them with love. That’s what the Holy Spirit is, the love of God. When I first heard someone outright say this, I thought, “What?” and had to kick the idea around before I could embrace it. The Holy Spirit is the love of God.

I heard three current theologian/pastors talking about this idea, that the Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son. It literally blew my mind. No one has ever explained the Holy Spirit that way to me. I’ve always thought of the Holy Spirit as this slightly mystical miracle working thing I don’t really understand but am supposed to have a connection with. For a long time I’ve wondered how I’m practically supposed to work that out. Does my life have to take on strange ‘spirit-filled’ practices? What does ‘spirit-filled’ even mean? The idea that the Holy Spirit is the love of God, and therefore to be ‘spirit-filled’ means to be full of the love of God puts me at great ease. It makes sense. Shouldn’t all people who call themselves Christians be overflowing with the practicable love of God? Wouldn’t that make being spirit-filled so much easier? Not a strange mystical sign as some Christians make it out to be, but a simple statement of guiding truth? I think so. And I believe Paul would agree with me.

Paul struggled with a ‘spirit-filled’ church in Corinth. This church put spiritual practices ahead of the practical ones; they loved their spiritualism more than loving each other. Paul wrote to them to correct this problem. He didn’t squash their spiritualism as much as put it in it’s proper place, behind loving people. I think that’s what scares us so much about the spiritual side of the Holy Spirit, we’re afraid of the creepy weird things people do out of good intentions because we haven’t experienced the power of the Holy Spirit being worked out in love. I believe if we had more people working out their spiritual gifts in love we would be much more open to the Holy Spirit, and that’s where I want to take this piece of writing: to the love of God working out through our gifts.

What are our ‘spiritual’ gifts? What makes them any different from our ‘normal’ ones? Let me start by examining the word spiritual. In Koine Greek, the language of the New Testament, the word we translate as spirit is pneuma. If you’ve ever had pneumonia, you’ve had problems breathing. If you’ve ever worked a pneumatic drill it functions on air. Pneuma means breath or wind, and in the case of spiritual gifts I would simply say this: it’s that thing that if you stopped doing it would cause you to stop breathing/wanting to live. For me it’s writing. For my cousin it’s painting. For runners it’s running. There is some “thing” we love to do with all our heart and soul, and that thing is our gift. For the chef it’s cooking. Isn’t it wonderful to sample the food of a master chef? It’s complex, robust, refined, elegant yet simple and a natural extension of who they are. That’s what a spiritual gift is, a natural extension of who we are wrapped in love. Spiritual gifts take discipline and time to master, just like any skill or trade, but when gifts are at work we are all blessed, not just the audience, but the gifted as well. I am absolutely implying that the gifts God has given us should be worked out in community, which is where we will go next week, but right now we need to dig into our gifts and the Holy Spirit and crack the surface of our hidden treasures.

One of the best ways of connecting with God is prayer. I’ll never forget a praying while running down a mountain. The sheer exhilaration of running just a few steps under control brought an enviable closeness with God I don’t often feel. I’d never felt so alive or so close to God. That’s what I think prayer should feel like, it should aliven us, wake us up and make us feel closer to God. Sadly, I think many of us miss out on this kind of prayer. We make prayer a dry and dusty place, or a desperate plea for something, when all along God has wanted us to connect with Him in his love. We don’t have to run down mountains at top speed to feel close to God, but if there’s no connection between God and the word’s we’re saying we might just need a prayer lift. I don’t know what works well for you, but physical activity and writing works for me. There’s just something really sweet about feeling God with me when I do something I enjoy. It helps me recognize those places where the love has run dry, those places where I need to reconnect to God in my life. For prayer is more than getting on our knees and saying a few words; it’s a lifestyle. Too often at work I’ll find myself going through the motions and not really connecting with the work before me or the people around me: this is heresy. God wants me to be connected to him through all things at all times! The challenge of living a prayerful life is connecting to the love of God at all times.

When we learn to pray through our days, it transforms ordinary activities into opportunities to be connected with a Holy God. Before becoming the patron saint of Ireland, St. Patrick was a bored Christian. As a youth he went to church and did churchy stuff, but could not have cared less. He was just being a good Briton. But when he was captured in an Irish raid and sold as a slave he found his faith in God. It wasn’t through church services. It wasn’t through reading the word. It wasn’t though engaging with other Christians. He was alone watching sheep in a cave by himself. For six years St. Patrick learned to pray by making prayer a part of his daily life. He remembered what he had learned from his upbringing and made it part of his life, taking it farther and making it a part of himself, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. That’s the secret power of prayer. It’s not a must, it’s a burning unquenchable desire for God to be made real by experiencing and living in His love. It was this kind of prayer and internal desire to see God made real and manifest that brought St. Patrick back to Ireland after he escaped, it’s this same kind of Christianity that transformed a pirating backwater island into the driving force of Christianity for over four-hundred years! Talk about transformation! The love of God changes us when we live by it!

I would love to stop here, and just keep this writing to the love of God as practically worked out by us, but that’s not the full power or practice of the Holy Spirit. The full power of the Love of God works itself out through miracles. I don’t know how miracles happen, but I know they do happen. The age of God working in our lives through the unexplainable is not over, it is still now. I honestly believe one of the greatest miracles is coming to know God and living out that love, but God can do more than wrap his arms around us in love: He can heal. I mean this in the very practical sense of broken families and broken lives, but I also mean it in the physical sense. God can heal broken bodies just as God can heal broken spirits. If it weren’t true He wouldn’t tell us He could; He wouldn’t lie to us about His power; He wouldn’t tell us something that isn’t true; He wouldn’t send his Son to heal people of disease of if He didn’t want us to do that as well. I’m not saying I know how to work miracles, I’m saying I know a God who works them. I know His miracles involve His love and His Spirit. I know I serve a God who can make things right beyond our capacity to explain how or why. That’s the power of the Love of God. I can’t explain that Love, all I can do is marvel at it, and work that out through my daily life and my gifts. I think that’s what God has called Christians to do: to work out and practice his love. Not just for ourselves, but for other people too.

That’s what I believe practicing the Holy Spirit means. Simply what I would say to you is this: dance, run, sing, lift, build, write, play, engineer, coach, speak and work out the love of God in your heart and your life. Live in prayer, not the dry and dusty kind, but the kind that makes breathing easy, wonderful, and full of life. And maybe, just maybe, you’ll see God work miracles ;)