The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality

by Tyler Staton

But all spiritual power comes only in Jesus’ name, meaning that the power of Jesus must be channeled through the character of Jesus.

For Jesus, living and ministering in the power of the Spirit included public miracles, but his private life was even more supernatural than his public life.

Philip certainly inherited some public spectacle along the way, but like his rabbi, his hidden life was the supernatural core. All that happened in public was simply the overflow of what happened in secret.

Jesus is cutting to the chase: “You’ve built an identity of your own making and done quite well. You’ve climbed the ladder, earned respect, established yourself. And after all that, your heart’s burning for more. Here’s the pathway to more: Humble yourself to the lowest place. Take off those heavy robes you’ve grown so comfortable wearing.”

It’s worth noting that the cadence with which people encounter Jesus in Scripture is typically experience, then explanation.

God created every aspect of us, and he makes his appeal to every aspect of us—our intellect, our emotions, our bodies, and our experiences. If we try to figure every last thing out before opening ourselves to experience, we are a child at the beach trying to get the ocean into a hole in the sand, and we’ll never enter into the life of the Spirit.

But they neglect to seek out the gifts of the Spirit and fail to develop a set of habits and mindsets that can foster openness and availability to the presence, power, and gifting of the Spirit.

If we want today’s churches to look like the ancient churches that set the world on fire, we must practice as those early communities practiced. We do this through setting aside intentional spaces of training in the various gifts and expressions of the Spirit, which are designed to form us into empty channels through which the Spirit’s power flows on earth as in heaven.

To hear and live by God’s voice, it would seem, is one of the most potent and most dangerous aspects of Christian spirituality.

Nothing matters more than learning to discern the voice of God, and yet few things in life are more susceptible to pain, abuse, delusion, and deception.

Like a money changer who became intimately familiar with every aspect of a genuine coin, we must grow so familiar with God’s voice that we can recognize a counterfeit and recognize it quickly.

Thomas Green notes, “The art of discernment is both central to the Christian life today and, at the same time, not very well understood even by prayerful and committed Christians.”2

Discernment is the gift and practice of attuning to God’s voice amid the competing counterfeit noise.

My point is that even on the pages of the Bible, God’s native language is a whisper, and a whisper is hard to hear and easy to ignore.

Pete Greig writes, “If we are ever to feel fully safe and truly loved by the Lord of all the earth, we must eventually—like Elijah on Horeb and that couple on the Emmaus road—learn to listen for his voice in the anticlimax of life’s nonevents.”10

Maybe God whispers because it’s the only way he can get what he wants most, what was lost in Eden: to walk with you and me in familiar intimacy that we might know God as he truly is and discover ourselves as we truly are in his presence.

the process of hearing and keeping in step with the Spirit involves attentiveness to the inner dynamics and movements of the soul.

He is equally content with guiding you to a brothel or to a prayer meeting—so long as the result is to feed and strengthen your ego rather than your soul.

The key to discerning between the Holy Spirit’s whisper and the deceiver’s scheme, then, starts with recognizing what the voice is doing to you as you listen to it. What part of you is being inflamed by this inner voice—your shallow hungers or your deep longings, your ego or your soul? Discernment is, in large part, the spiritual practice of differentiating between the listening ear of your ego and your soul.

But if we haven’t learned the Spirit’s whisper in the day-to-day, discernment in life’s major decisions is mostly just a charade where we’ll follow God’s direction if he puts a billboard on the highway reading, “Marry Casey. She really is the one.”

Jared Patrick Boyd says, “Discernment in community means that we’re doing the work of noticing and nurturing the presence of God’s activity with and for one another.”

This is spiritual friendship—intentionally inviting another person into your sense of the Spirit’s whisper and asking that they refine your attention and response.

Spiritual friendship can be practiced between two friends or as a group. It involves deep, prayerful listening and asking questions more often than offering direction or advice. It demands deep trust and complete vulnerability, and it can only be experienced between people with a shared commitment to (and existing practice of) individual discernment.

Spiritual friendship, spiritual direction, and formal group discernment are not training wheels that I’ll one day take off the bike when I’m really ready to ride. They’re lifelong commitments. And that is not because God is playing it coy. It’s because, to borrow the words of Genesis, “It is not good for a human to be alone.”16 We are meant to know and hear God within the context of community.

It certainly seems to me that God was putting his heart in Elijah before he poured his power through Elijah.

Listening to and living by God’s voice is less a method and more a radical commitment to terrifying obedience and a stubborn willingness to risk foolishness.

Discernment is the school of listening to and living by God’s voice, and as long as we are living in a contested world, there’s no graduating from this school. If we are going to ask God for his fire to fall, we must equally be willing to allow God to train us in perceiving his voice amid all the competing noise.

Discernment is not a maze God puts us in or a puzzle for us to solve. It’s a gift of the Spirit allowing us to be led by the Good Shepherd who knows and loves us.