Keep in Step with the Spirit: Finding Fullness in our Walk With God

by J.I. Packer

some people see the doctrine of the Spirit as essentially about power, in the sense of God-given ability to do what you know you ought to do and indeed want to do, but feel that you lack the strength for.

What we are being told is that supernatural living through supernatural empowering is at the very heart of New Testament Christianity, so that those who, while professing faith, do not experience and show forth this empowering are suspect by New Testament standards. And the empowering is always the work of the Holy Spirit, even when Christ only is named as its source, for Christ is the Spirit giver (John 1:33; 20:22; Acts 2:33).

My argument is that any mind-set which treats the Spirit’s gifts (ability and willingness to run around and do things) as more important than his fruit (Christlike character in personal life) is spiritually wrongheaded and needs correcting.

The truth of the matter is this. The distinctive, constant, basic ministry of the Holy Spirit under the new covenant is so to mediate Christ’s presence to believers—that is, to give them such knowledge of his presence with them as their Savior, Lord, and God—that three things keep happening.

The only reason why the first disciples had to be taken through a two-stage, two-level pattern of experience was that they became believers before Pentecost. But for folk like you and me, who became Christians nearly two thousand years after Pentecost, the revealed program is that fullest enjoyment of the Spirit’s new covenant ministry should be ours from the word “go.”

Do you know the Holy Spirit? We should not be asking that. We should instead be asking: Do you know Jesus Christ? Do you know enough about him? Do you know him well? Those are the questions the Spirit himself desires us to ask. For he is self-effacing, as we saw. His ministry is a floodlight ministry in relation to Jesus, a matter of spotlighting Jesus’s glory before our spiritual eyes and of matchmaking between us and him. He does not call attention to himself or present himself to us for direct fellowship as the Father and the Son do; his role and his joy is to further our fellowship with them both by glorifying the Son as the object for our faith and then witnessing to our adoption through the Son into the Father’s family.

Through the “holiness revival” of the middle and late nineteenth century, to which “Keswick teaching” gave wings, this idea of salvation as two separable salvations, one from sin’s guilt and the other from sin’s power, became standard in all evangelical thinking save that of confessional Lutherans and Calvinists, and in some quarters it still survives.

The historical conclusion is that Wesleyan and Keswick teachings about holiness have been influential mainly because they offer what all Christians long for: fuller deliverance from sin and closer fellowship with Christ than any yet experienced. In situations where Reformed Augustinianism was stressing the Christian’s continuing sinfulness, as part of its testimony against justification by works, a vacuum was felt to exist in relation to hopes of holiness, and these doctrines stepped in to fill it. They were heard, valued, and followed because of what they offered to the heart rather than because they had any special cogency for the mind.

The holiest Christians are not those most concerned about holiness as such, but those whose minds and hearts and goals and purposes and love and hope are most fully focused on our Lord Jesus Christ.

Holiness springs from knowing the love of one’s holy God in Christ. The holy person, gazing at Calvary’s cross, knows that he has been loved mightily and loves his God and his neighbor mightily in response.

The life of holiness is supernatural, not only because of the Spirit’s secret work in our hearts, but also because help from Christ is constantly known in it. In this sense it is a life of constant, conscious, expectant faith.

Against the Pentecostal-charismatic thesis that the reception of the Spirit by the apostles at Pentecost after prayer, with glossolalia, as a second stage of their Christian experience, is presented in Acts as a revealed norm for all subsequent believers, it must therefore be said: (1) This is nowhere stated or implied in Acts itself. (2) It is consistent: If speaking in tongues is part of the universal pattern, why not hearing a roaring wind? (3) In the other recorded instances of the Spirit and tongues being bestowed together (Samaritans probably, 8:18; Cornelius’s group and the Ephesians definitely, 10:46; 19:6) these gifts came through apostles to folk not seeking, praying, or “tarrying” for them. (4) In all four cases the manifestation of the Spirit came to whole groups, not just to seeking individuals within those groups, to the exclusion of nonseekers. (5) Acts 4:8, 31; 6:3, 5; 7:55; 9:17; 11:24; 13:9, 52 speaks of persons being filled with, or full of, the Spirit, with no reference, explicit or implicit, to tongues. But if being Spirit-filled without glossolalia was the lot of some, then, it may be God’s path for some now. (6) From the way he tells the story, Luke seems to have understood his four cases of “Pentecostal” manifestations as God’s testimony to having accepted on equal footing in the new society four classes of folk whose coequality here might otherwise have been doubted—Jews, Samaritans, Gentiles, and disciples of John. Whether any more such manifestat...

since the charismatic deliberately chooses glossolalia as a means of expressing adoration and petition on themes he has in mind, but on which he wants to say more to God than he can find words for, it is not quite true to allege that rational control is wholly absent.

6. The Spirit. Though theologically uneven (and what spiritually significant movement has not been?) the charismatic renewal should commend itself to Christian people as a God-sent corrective of formalism, institutionalism, and intellectualism. It has creatively expressed the gospel by its music and worship style, its praise-permeated spontaneity, and bold ventures in community. Charismatic renewal has forced all Christendom, including those who will not take this from evangelicals as such, to ask: What then does it mean to be a Christian and to believe in the Holy Spirit? Who is Spirit-filled? Are they? Am I? With radical theology inviting the church into the barren wastes of neo-Unitarianism, it is (dare I say) just like God—the God who uses the weak to confound the mighty—to have raised up, not a new Calvin or John Owen or Abraham Kuyper, but a scratch movement, cheerfully improvising, which proclaims the divine personhood and power of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit not by great theological eloquence, originality, or accuracy, but by the power of renewed lives creating a new, simplified, unconventional, and uncomfortably challenging lifestyle. O sancta simplicitas! Yet the charismatic life stream still needs an adequately biblical theology and remains vulnerable while it lacks one.