Jesus, Continued...: Why the Spirit Inside You Is Better than Jesus Beside You

by J.D. Greear

He had a “relationship with God” in the sense that he prayed about his problems and tried hard to trust that God was working somewhere, somehow, to help him. Yet he lacked any vibrant interaction with that God.

they needed the Spirit’s presence so much that Jesus told them not to so much as a raise a finger toward the Great Commission until that Spirit had arrived.

Is Christianity more of a set of beliefs to which you adhere and a lifestyle to which you conform, or is it a dynamic relationship in which you walk with the Spirit and move in his power?

Brennan began to understand that he needed more than “right beliefs” to subdue these lusts of his flesh. He needed power. Resurrection power. And a constant Companion who would always be there to help.

The Spirit makes the living Word come alive in us. He brings it to our remembrance at the times we need it. He explains it to us. He gives us spiritual eyes to see God’s beauty in it. He empowers us to obey it. He shows us specific ways we are to apply it.

Paul wants us to have a knowledge of the love of God that we experience deep within our soul.

But the Spirit and the Word work inseparably. One without the other leads to a dysfunctional Christianity. Just as a toaster without a plug is useless, biblical knowledge apart from the Spirit is impotent.

The Spirit’s work is to direct you to notice something else.

When the Holy Spirit speaks through someone, you tend to forget about the person speaking. You don’t even really think about the Holy Spirit. You find yourself thinking about Jesus.

So do you want more of the Spirit? If so, then seek greater knowledge of God’s love through the Word of his gospel.

Where the gospel is not cherished, the Spirit will not be experienced. And, on the flip side, where the Spirit is not sought, there will be no deep, experiential knowledge of the gospel. The two always go hand in hand. Jesus said, “The words I have spoken to you — they are full of the Spirit and life” (John 6:63, emphasis mine). Spirit and Word, inseparably united.

there can be no true obedience to the Word apart from the Spirit.

In Romans 8, Paul’s great chapter on how to live the victorious life, he refers to the Spirit twenty-two times. (To put that in perspective, he mentions the Holy Spirit only ten other times throughout the other fifteen chapters of Romans!)

As you pursue God’s mission in your life, do you live with that sense of dependence on the Holy Spirit? Do you really believe that you can do nothing without him?

Now that the Holy Spirit had come, God’s power was not localized in one person in one place. He was in every believer, scattered all over the world with his power.

the Word issues the command and establishes the foundations; the Spirit quickens and makes alive.

The Spirit takes God’s timeless truths and makes them come alive in us. He helps us understand them, shows us how to implement them, and empowers us to accomplish them. He transforms task lists into a relationship.

The Spirit makes God’s Word personal to us. Has Christianity become personal to you? Have the doctrines and declarations turned into relationship? Has the Great Commission been translated into some specific vision for your life?

Do you know your specific role in his kingdom?

Better to spend one hour on your knees pursuing the Holy Spirit through the Bible.

The Holy Spirit speaks at least thirty-six times at various places throughout the book, but we discover no “standard” way in which he does so.

God’s activity in our lives doesn’t always come in the ways we expect or in the same ways it happened with others.

So, seek the Spirit in the Word. His guidance functions something like steering a bicycle: It works only once you’re moving. The Spirit steers as you obey God’s commands. You start pedaling in obedience; he’ll start directing.

Are you obeying what God has revealed in the Bible?

Are you seeking to know his will more through diligent study of his Word?

The apostles understood the church to be a movement birthed by the mighty, rushing wind of the Spirit of God.

The first believers were an assembly called out to engage in mission.

People began to go to church rather than be the church.

I’ve heard the average church in our day described like a football game: twenty-two people in desperate need of rest surrounded by 22,000 in desperate need of exercise.

Movements (by definition) move, and that means if you’re not moving, then you’re not really part of the movement. Where there is no movement, there is no Spirit.

Every believer has become a burning bush.

No longer must men and women come to Jerusalem to be in the presence of “the fire of God”; God is sending his believers to the nations with that presence inside them. “Come and see” has become “go and tell.”

In the Old Testament, the fire of God’s presence produced fear. Those who came into contact with it died. Yet, in Acts 2, when the believers encounter the fire of God’s presence, they do not die; instead, they come alive! The fire of God’s presence was no longer fatal because Jesus has absorbed the fullness of God’s wrath by dying on a cross in our place. Consider the parallel: When the fire of God came down upon Mount Sinai in Exodus 19, three thousand Israelites died because they broke God’s law. But when the fire of the Holy Spirit came in Acts 2, three thousand people came alive. Jesus already had died for our breaking of the law. He absorbed the fire of God’s wrath so that we could receive the fire of his life and power. And now we are sent out, not with the terrifying fire of God’s judgment, but with the cleansing, healing fire of his redemption.

The first time the Spirit preaches the gospel, he does so in all languages simultaneously.

The gospel was not just a “Hebrew” thing; it was an “every people group in the world” thing.

Pentecost. The Holy Spirit was given to harvest what Christ’s death had purchased. Jesus had ransomed for himself a people from all nations, and the Holy Spirit had come to gather the harvest.

These gifts, while diverse, have one, unified objective: to propel Jesus’ gospel to the ends of the earth.

the Spirit of God now fills the mouths of ordinary believers with his Word to proclaim it in power to others.

British pastor and author Tim Chester says that evangelism is “doing normal life with gospel intentionality.”

Of the forty miracles recorded in the book of Acts, thirty-nine of them occur outside of “church.”

Because you know the truth about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection (which John didn’t fully know), and because you have the Spirit of God permanently fused to your soul (which John never experienced on earth).

Who knows what the Holy Spirit is doing through your “normal” obedience?

To look backward when they should have looked forward was not sacred; it was sinful and unbelieving.

He has never commanded us to go save the world for him; he has called us to follow him as he saves the world through us.

God doesn’t call us from a place of need; we call to him. We get the grace; he gets the glory.

the Great Commission was not something they could accomplish for him. It was something he

must do through them.

He leads; we follow. He commands; we obey. He supplies; we steward. He delivers; we worship.

He meets the spiritual needs of the starving world not through the sufficiency of our supply but the strength of his saving power.

God can do more through one simple act of obedience than we can do through our most extravagant plans.