Since that bright summer day almost two decades ago when I invited the Holy Spirit to live in me, it has developed a unique texture, a feeling I recognize and pursue. The Spirit eagerly reveals truth, all love. Sometimes a whispering, sometimes a rushing wind or a glowing fire, but always there. An ember in my heart that will never go out.
In developing my relationship with the Trinity, I let the Spirit move through me, and together, we have created a new thing. Beauty in goodness that ripples out from my heart into actions that spread outward to make of our Earth something more wonderful than I could ever imagine. The Holy Spirit has led me to a secret garden in my soul, where the purpose of God and the agency of humanity are forever intertwining in a dance of worship and grace.
In the extreme, the Holy Spirit has shown me aspects of God to bring depth to God’s love. He who is Love is also to be feared in all His trembling mighty power. An awesomeness the mind can only begin to grasp before being completely overwhelmed by the infinity of all creation and trembling before it.
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”
Proverbs 1:7(KJV)
“Fear” truly means “fear”; just ask the people who encountered God in the Bible. There is more depth to what the fear of God means than that, though.
The Scottish theologian John Murray says: “The fear of God in which godliness consists is the fear which constrains [compels or powerfully produces] adoration and love. It is the fear which consists in awe, reverence, honor, and worship, and all of these on the highest level of exercise. It is the reflex in our consciousness of the transcendent majesty and holiness of God.”
In The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis says, God’s love is not “a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, nor the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests.” Instead, it is “the consuming Fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.”
Let’s not begin to think that Lewis or Murray holds the ability to even scratch the surface of God’s glory, but they do their best. Like the disciples before them, they have passed the pursuit of an ever deeper relationship with God on to us.
Spending the rest of my life being informed by the Holy Spirit in the secrets of the Kingdom and multiplying that light into the world is my joy.
“But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it.”
Matthew 13:16 (ESV)
Reality Changing Observations:
1. What one word describes the Holy Spirit for you?
2. When did you recognize the Spirit as living inside of you?
3. How can we practice recognizing the presence of God in our daily lives?
