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by
Tyler Staton
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July 16 - September 8, 2025
I’d argue spiritual health is a lot like that. Spiritual health is closing the gap between biblical rumor and 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.
‘Here’s a man filled with the Holy Spirit who has no idea how to live in the power of the Holy Spirit. Show him,’ So I did.”
Saint Augustine is credited with praying, “Lord, you have put salt on our lips that we may thirst for you.” That’s what this book is—salt on your lips that you may thirst for living water.
When it comes to the Holy Spirit, in my pastoral experience I’ve encountered three categories of people: the thirsty, the suspicious, and the uninformed.
it is not only possible but tragically common to have the right desire without a biblical foundation for that desire. To the thirsty, I want to dig you a biblical well to satisfy that thirst. I hope that in these pages you might taste and see.
To the suspicious, I want to (re)introduce you to the Holy Spirit as a person to know and be known by, not a power to wield or an experience to force.
To the uninformed, the pages that follow are an invitation to wrap yourself in the biblical story until you find it has come off the page and into the daily grind of ordinary life.
put language to your desire, converting desire into prayer and prayer into life—the Spirit-empowered kind of life here and now in a fallen world.
nearly two-thirds of American Christians believe the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, is a force to be wielded, not a person to know and be known by. A familiar stranger.
wild
Genesis often uses the phrase “the breath of life” to describe living creatures.7 We only have life because God breathes life into us.
the Day of Atonement, or what is commonly referred to today as Yom Kippur.
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
Jesus frequently gave people an experience of God first, then explained that experience second.
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?
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.
God’s speech and God’s action are inseparable; he says, “Let there be light,”7 and instantly there’s light. Jesus’ speech had that same authority.
The gift of the Spirit isn’t for spiritual elites. It’s for everybody!
A. W. Tozer, in The Knowledge of the Holy, argues that we all know God “explicitly” and “implicitly.” We all hold explicit beliefs about God, which we come to logically and can explain to others. But we also hold implicit beliefs, the relational patterns that live beneath our logic in our gut and define the way we relate to God.
Our explicit knowledge is the way we know God intellectually. Our implicit knowledge is the way we know God 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.”18 The Spirit assures us of our belovedness, and that assurance then frees us to uncover the sacredness in others.
How often might you or I withhold redemptive power, forfeiting our blessed role as God’s co-creative image bearers for the sake of saving face? How often are we held back by discomfort? How much redemption is hanging in the balance of my willingness to take God seriously enough to risk?
We have all been rescued by a God of perfect love, and the plotlines of our redemption stories are breathtaking. But we all have unfinished storylines where pain is more apparent than renewal and suffering is more profound than rescue.
In the ancient Near Eastern world that Genesis emerged from, “the waters” did not evoke the image of a peaceful stream on a summer morning. “The waters” were feared, symbolic of chaos.2 As the Old Testament moves forward, the sea continues to serve as imagery for chaos and disorder.3
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.
The apostle John’s vision of heaven is not a distant utopia in the sky but heaven and earth reunited as one.
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.
a humble and honest read of today’s church must conclude that we study the history but we don’t expect the experience. We’ve been swimming in the Dead Sea far too long, so our hope for life—the kind Ezekiel dreamed of, the kind Jesus promised, the kind rumored of in the church’s first thirty years—has been filtered through years of big theory and underwhelming experience. It’s not that we don’t believe God could do it. It’s not even that we don’t believe God wants to do it. It’s that it takes an experience to awaken hope in those who have only ever swum in chaos.
instead of storming this river like kids on the first hot day of summer, we do our best to manage the chaos of our lives on our own, constantly reorganizing our circumstances, forever convinced that we can plan and life-hack our way to peace. We’re managing from the riverbank instead of wading in. But we haven’t been invited to observe the river; we’re invited to swim.
A worldview can get you by on the ordinary days, but it can’t heal you when chaos floods. Only the one who spoke order into the primordial chaos at creation can speak order into your chaos. That chaos is real, but the Spirit can create order from it and even make it a place teeming with everlasting life.
The Holy Spirit brings personal peace, but peace isn’t available to spectators. It’s the reward of participation.
The Spirit also makes you and me part of the current of peace flowing through our chaotic world.
The scandal of the Holy Spirit isn’t power. If there’s a Creator to be known, power has to be part of the equation. The scandal is the power of God dwelling in and operating through wounded, ordinary people. 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.
“Anyone God uses significantly is always deeply wounded,” writes Brennan Manning. “We are, each and every one of us, insignificant people whom God has called and graced to use in a significant way. On the last day, Jesus will look us over not for medals, diplomas, or honors, but for scars.”
By Jesus’ wounds we are healed.20 And by our wounds we join in the healing of the world. The Holy Spirit’s healing presence means that the addicted can become a safe harbor for others to find freedom. The depressed can be filled with incomprehensible joy and then give it away. The insecure can become courageous, inviting people into the very life they previously hid. The quick-tempered can be flooded with self-control, so that their transformation heals those they’ve wronged. The chronically anxious can become a non-anxious presence in their high-strung workplace, pouring living water into the
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Our deepest wounds, healed and redeemed by the Holy Spirit, become the sources of living water flowing with teeming life into the broken places in our world.
I could physically feel myself stand up straighter, my pitiful source of identity easily inflated (and deflated) by the perception of another.
As I rounded the corner, right there on the sidewalk, God stopped me in my tracks with a gentle whisper. “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.” As my pace slowed a little bit and I processed the unexpected, gentle deflation of my puffed-up false self, the kind whisper of the Lord went on. “Tyler, great content, but there was no power.”
The Anointed One is who God’s Spirit rests on—not for a particular time for a particular purpose, but permanently.
Along with these changes came new ways of imagining the “natural” and the “supernatural,” with natural now referring to the realm “governed by the laws of science” and supernatural referring to that which “transcended the laws of science”—which in turn introduced a seeming rift between faith and science.
A response, equally new, began to emerge from the Christian church: “Wait, you can’t remove the miraculous from Scripture. The miracle stories are proof that Jesus is God.” So in the late eighteenth century, a new idea blossomed in popularity: Jesus was able to do what he did because he was the Son of God.
all sorts of people do miracles in the Bible, not just Jesus:
The belief that Jesus did miracles as proof of his identity is not the historic view of the Christian church and certainly not the view of the earliest Christian communities. It’s a reactionary position born out of a defense against Deism, and it’s only been around for about three hundred years.
The historic belief of the church and the clear biblical evidence is that the supernatural power of Jesus came through the Holy Spirit. Before his baptism, where the Holy Spirit descended on him “like a dove,” Jesus lived thirty years, and as far as we know he didn’t utter a word of teaching, work a miracle, or recruit a disciple. After his baptism, Jesus was constantly teaching, working miracles, and calling disciples. His baptism was the inciting incident that started it all.
The remainder of the book of Acts is essentially the record of ordinary people, filled with the Spirit of Jesus, doing the stuff Jesus did. Acts covers the first thirty years of church history, and it looks eerily similar to the ministry of Jesus.
One biblical word for “power” is the Greek term dunamis, from which we get the English “dynamite.” Dynamite can be used for good or bad, for building up or for tearing down.
To entrust extraordinary power to ordinary people is a risk. God takes empowerment risks on us, entrusting his name to a bunch of fumbling messes with egos and mixed motives.
