More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tyler Staton
Read between
July 5 - October 8, 2025
Even though the apostles faced plenty of persecution, trials, and conflicts, they seemed to carry the burden of leading the early church lightly. But I felt I was carrying the weight of the world. They seemed like they were having the adventure of a lifetime. I was stressed and exhausted. They were stewarding teeming life. I was stewarding finances and attendance figures.
Psychological health, according to Jung, is narrowing the gap between my perceived self and my actual self as much as possible.2
actual life as narrowly as possible. Spiritual maturity is narrowing the gap between Kingdom promise and daily grind; between what I believe in my head and what I know in my heart, my emotions, and my bones; between the core beliefs I recite in creeds and sing in worship anthems and the core beliefs I live day in and day out. Spiritual health means that inevitable gap between the story on the page and the story of my life narrows and narrows like a door creaking shut on a dark room until there’s barely a blade of light left.
Holy Spirit is the experiential agent of the Trinitarian God, narrowing the gap between biblical promise and everyday experience and leading to greater spiritual health and maturity.
Thompson goes on to name the characteristics of this tsunami wave of change hitting the church: It is profoundly Spirit-centered, seeking discernment from deep listening. It is more concerned with right practice than with right belief. It is comfortable with questions and leery of answers. It embraces tension and paradox over the dualistic absolutes of right and wrong. It rejects hierarchical structure, welcoming shared leadership and democratic decision-making.
Most listen to experience before expertise these days, so when it comes to faith, what used to be “convince me” has now become “show me.”
The Spirit was present at creation, named in the Bible’s opening lines. In Hebrew, the original language of Genesis, we read, “And the ruakh of God was hovering over the waters.” The Hebrew ruakh, like its Greek counterpart pneuma, can be translated into English as either “spirit” or “breath.”5
A tabernacle meant Yahweh was strikingly personal—God walking with his people, staying with his people, among his people in their sleeping and waking, coming and going, grieving and celebrating.
The English “made his dwelling” is from the Greek skenoo, which literally translates “to set up a tabernacle.” The most direct translation is, “The Word became flesh and tabernacled among us.”
It means people should experience the forgiveness of God through God’s people who carry his presence.
Just as Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, acted as a living temple, so now he commissions his disciples to be filled with the Spirit and act in this world as living temples—indwelled with the presence of God.
The rest of the Bible is essentially a bunch of ordinary people “tabernacling.” Ordinary people filled with the Holy Spirit and carrying the ministry of Jesus forward.
The power of God has been shared with whoever will receive it.
Eugene Peterson writes, “It is the lived conviction that everything, absolutely everything, in the scriptures is livable. Not just true, but livable . . . This is the supernatural core, a lived resurrection and Holy Spirit core, of the Christian life.”19
It must break the heart of Jesus that the very Spirit he was so eager to give has become unknown, feared, and divisive.
In his book More, Oxford scholar Simon Ponsonby emphasizes experience as essential for real transformation: “I purposefully emphasize the word ‘experience,’ and will seek to show from the Scripture the importance of experience. A nonexperiential religion is suspect, for it fails to deal with the totality of our being.”22
maybe more—by honest, holy discontent. Clinical psychiatrist Curt Thompson writes, “Despite the interest in spirituality in much of the West, and North America in particular, our overall experience of God’s power and life-giving vitality is often limited. We often see life in Jesus as being more about survival than about grace, adventure, and genuine, concrete, life-giving change.”23
The Kingdom of God is not an either/or kind of kingdom but a both/and kind of kingdom. The Bible and the Holy Spirit. Thinking and feeling. Teaching and experiencing. Contemplative and charismatic. Biblical exegesis and words of prophecy. Preaching the gospel and signs and wonders.
God has never cared much for the qualified, but he’s shaped history through the available. This isn’t about being qualified. It’s not about being skilled, practiced, or trained. Are you available?
As noted earlier, the Spirit was present at creation. “The Spirit of God was hovering over the waters” could equally be translated, “The breath of God was hovering over the waters.” Or, with a little imagination, “God was breathing on the unformed chaos.”
Eugene Peterson writes, “‘Create’ is not confined to what the Spirit did, it is what the Spirit does.”3 From horrific devastation emerges a hopeful promise: The Creator is the Re-Creator.
Following his baptism Jesus began teaching, and the response was telling. “The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law.”6 The English word “authority” is the Greek exousia, meaning “the power or ability to act.” So when this Jewish audience noted that Jesus spoke with authority, they meant that his speech seemed linked to the action of God.
In Acts the world was reborn when the breath (Spirit) of the creative God refilled the empty lungs of people, and they came alive to go on creating.
Supernatural power in ordinary vessels: the most costly treasure in jars of clay.11
According to Jesus, the Holy Spirit is a particular kind of teacher: one who helps you remember. To put it plainly, the Holy Spirit has no original content. The ministry of the Holy Spirit is entirely about translating the teachings and promises of Jesus in a way that forms us at the deepest level—rewriting our neural pathways and enabling us to embody our redemption. The Holy Spirit pushes the teachings of Jesus from the head, where they can be understood, down into the heart, where they can heal our emotions and become a new foundation for us to live from.
The Holy Spirit, according to Jesus, is not a consolation after Jesus’ bodily departure. Quite to the contrary, the Holy Spirit is an intensification of his presence and a deepening of his love, even from what his closest followers experienced in knowing him face-to-face.
In the Hebrew imagination, something wasn’t known until it was understood relationally and experientially.
Brennan Manning beautifully wrote, “If I am not in touch with my own belovedness, then I cannot touch the sacredness of others.”
How much redemption is hanging in the balance of my willingness to take God seriously enough to risk?
The New Testament is unflinchingly honest about both the power of God and the suffering of this world.
When the biblical authors use the metaphor of water to introduce us to the person of the Holy Spirit, they draw together what we are ever-tempted to separate: unflinching honesty about the suffering of this world and unwavering hope in a Redeemer who gets his work done in the darkest places.
With that context in mind, we might read the Bible’s opening line like this: “In the beginning the Holy Spirit is hovering, waiting, and when the Father gives the word, the Spirit touches the chaos . . . and suddenly there is order.”
From the Bible’s first scene, we gather that the Holy Spirit doesn’t just get rid of disorder. The Spirit makes the very place of darkness and fear an oasis teeming with full, free life.
Into the very place of fear, confusion, darkness, and disorder, there’s a promise: I’ll pour out my Spirit, and it will be like an unstoppable current of life and peace.
Before he even sees where the river is going, Ezekiel is invited into the waters, wading in deeper and deeper until he’s swimming.
actually comes from a rich history of understanding the Christian life as swimming in the waters of the Spirit.
And as the story unfolds in the pages that follow, everything the river was in the vision, the church became in the world. They fed the hungry, healed the sick, and proclaimed the good news. They weren’t a holy huddle in a sacred building. They were a river flowing east—overwhelming dead places with unstoppable life.
Why would God dry up the Pacific when his Kingdom comes in full? Unless, of course, this isn’t promising the drying up of the ocean but the drying up of chaos—the end of suffering, pain, and disorder.
The Spirit’s life is not for observation but participation.
It seems to me that the Christian life without experience of and reliance on the Holy Spirit works just fine—until it suddenly doesn’t. Without participation, “come and drink” is just a worldview. It’s the best and fullest of philosophies, but it’s still just a worldview.
This same Spirit who speaks peace over your internal chaos also sends you out as a peacemaker into the city.
The scandal of Jesus wasn’t his power. It was his wounds and his apparent ordinariness. He held together the supernatural, loving power of God and the mundane suffering of this world.
It’s not your gifting that makes you an excellent candidate to be a river of life flowing into the dead places; it’s your wounds. It’s not the gifting or qualifications of today’s church that makes us excellent candidates to reshape history and rewrite the stories of our cities through love; it’s our wounds and our ordinariness.
“Tyler, no one was impressed by the ‘content Peter curated’ for the Day of Pentecost. In fact, no one noticed Peter at all. They were too busy responding to me.”
This understanding of the Holy Spirit as the empowering agent of Jesus’ ministry is so essential, because what started with Jesus didn’t stop with Jesus.
Oxford theologian Simon Ponsonby pointedly asked, “If we have what the first Christians had, why do we not do what they did? We must conclude that either God gave them more than He has given us, or we have failed to avail ourselves of what He has given us.”21
The Church . . . can be in the way of God, but it never will cease to be also the way to God. HENRI NOUWEN
Author and therapist Resmaa Menakem defined trauma as “a wordless story our body tells itself about what is safe and what is a threat.”
In some very real sense, we all are shaped by what we pay attention to. Fill your mind with violence, and you’ll become more violent. Fill your mind with pornography, and you’ll become more lustful and objectifying. Fill your mind with cynicism, and you’ll narrow your eyes in suspicion and skepticism. And what holds true for negative thoughts and behaviors is equally true for positive thoughts and behaviors. Like poet Mary Oliver said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”8
The Holy Spirit is the divine creative force graciously restoring our place as God’s image-bearing co-creators.
