Open to the Spirit: God in Us, God with Us, God Transforming Us

by Scot McKnight

A sticking point when it comes to our understanding of the Holy Spirit is that humans are not open to the invasive, transcending, and transforming presence of the Holy Spirit. There are, of course, reasons why we are not open. Two that come immediately to mind are (1) we don’t want transcending power, and (2) we don’t want the transforming presence of God because we’d rather stay the way we are.

The surefire test to know the Spirit is at work in your life is observable change as you grow toward Christlikeness. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, and it doesn’t have to be giant leaps from selfishness into selflessness. Rather, what we look for is visible change, shifts, movements, and growth.

Such a conclusion denies the truth of how Spirit-prompted people live. They are joined together in the metaphorical Body of Christ, the church, which physically is the fellowship and community of those who follow Jesus. A Spirit-prompted Christian life is about learning to live in fellowship with other Spirit-prompted people. In that community we learn to live the gospel at the deepest levels. Kevin Vanhoozer, an evangelical theologian, once observed that “it is the life of the church, not the commentary [our explanations of the faith], that is our most important form of biblical interpretation.”5 The Spirit drives Spirit-filled people to the Body of Christ. When we are open to the Spirit who creates the church, we will be open to God’s community, the church.

When we all exercise our Spirit-prompted gifts, we are drawn out of ourselves and toward one another. Are you open to the new orientation the Spirit has for you? Are you open to the Spirit’s gifts in others to edify you? For the Spirit-prompted gifts to work well, we need the Spirit-prompted fruit as well. They are mates lost without each other—which is why the fruit of the Spirit is the focus of the next chapter.

“A saint,” Schmemann wrote, “is thirsty not for ‘decency,’ not for cleanliness, and not for absence of sin, but for unity with God.”6 Such a thirst for union with God, for worship of God, for the ecstatic joy of loving God, is the Spirit’s work that gives us victory over sin. Back to the meaning of sin. If sin is self-reliance and self-centeredness, then the Spirit’s fruit will be loving, holy, and Christlike living. Never lose sight of these words from Paul: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.*9 To achieve victory over sin involves first becoming people who are shaped by love, which is a virtue that orients life toward others. Victory over sin and the flesh produces an inner sense of well-being and contentedness (joy and peace and forbearance) and becomes thoughtful toward others (kindness, goodness, and gentleness) as well as faithful in our relationships with others (family, friends, church, community). Finally, the inner self is no longer out of control but is marked by “self-control,” which means Spirit-controlled.