This post is the second and final essay (for the moment) on the Holy Spirit. The prior post has a brief preface explaining the origins of these essays.

Introduction

A person without God’s Spirit is not a Christian. The New Testament is clear on this point, particularly the apostle Paul. “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (Rom 8:9). In his rebuke of the Christians in Galatia, he used the expression “received the Spirit” to mean “became a Christian.” “Did you receive the Spirit by doing the works of the law or by believing what you heard?” (Gal 3:2). Paul (1 Cor 12:13) agrees with Peter (Acts 2:38) that believers receive the divine Spirit at baptism. When Paul encountered a dozen disciples in Ephesus, he asked them about their experience of the Spirit. When he learned that they didn’t have the Spirit, he knew something had gone wrong; it turned out that these people had not even been baptized into Christ (Acts 19:1–7).

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A follower of Jesus must be one who honors and cultivates—does not quench (1 Thess 5:19) or grieve (Eph 4:30)—the Spirit’s work in his or her life. After all, that’s what Jesus did. The Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism (Mark 1:10), and Jesus began his ministry by proclaiming himself anointed by God’s Spirit (Luke 4:16–20; cf. 4:1). It was the Spirit of God that empowered Jesus’ ministry of exorcism (Matt 12:28). Jesus rejoiced in the Spirit (Luke 10:21). The Spirit was involved in the resurrection of Jesus (Rom 1:4), just as he will be in ours (8:11). Jesus had no comforting words for someone who would blaspheme the divine Spirit (Mark 3:29).

Jesus told his disciples that they would be better off once he was no longer physically present among them. Can you imagine that? If we didn’t know that Jesus himself said it, we would declare such an idea undiluted hogwash. But Jesus said that his departure would be accompanied by the outpouring of the Spirit. “I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Paraclete will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7).

Going Deeper

The Holy Spirit makes intermittent appearances in the Old Testament. The particular term “Holy Spirit,” in fact, shows up in only two passages (Psalm 51:11; Isaiah 63:10–11), but God’s Spirit is mentioned several dozen times. Not only is the divine Spirit mentioned relatively infrequently in the Old Testament (compared with the New Testament), but there are indications that only select individuals benefited from the Spirit’s presence, not the people of God generally. In one particularly telling passage, Moses expresses the wish that “all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit on them” (Num 11:29). As the scholar Mark Boda has written, “The dominant feature of OT pneumatology is that the Spirit of God appears to be restricted to covenantal leaders, whether leader (Deut. 34:9), elder (Num. 11:25), judge (Judg. 3:10), king (1 Sam. 10:6), or prophet (Zech. 7:12), but does not appear to indwell the community as a whole (Num. 11:29).”

The Hebrew prophets—particularly Joel 2:28–32—envision a future moment when this would all change, when God would “pour out my Spirit on all flesh.” John the Baptist told the crowds of a coming one who would perform baptism in the Holy Spirit (Mark 1:8). In Acts 2, the apostle Peter announced that the promised outpouring of the divine Spirit had finally come to pass (Acts 2:16). And on the same day, he assured every baptized believer of the gift of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38).

As you know, dear reader, there are different ways of understanding these biblical statements about the Spirit. I think the easiest, most obvious interpretation is that every believer—every follower of Christ—from the time of Peter’s proclamation and forever after—enjoys the presence of God in their lives through the Spirit that indwells them. Christians are God’s temple (e.g., 1 Cor 3:16; 6:19), inhabited by God’s Spirit. Are we talking about the personal presence of God’s Spirit within the believer’s body? That does seem to me the simplest understanding. If you think it best to understand these promises in a different way, fine—as long as we all affirm that “anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (Rom 8:9).

Application

How do you know that a believer has the Spirit of Christ? One way of answering the question is to say simply, “The Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it.” I like that answer, because I trust Scripture. But perhaps we can say more about the Spirit’s work in our lives.

Here we encounter disagreements. The promise in Joel that we quoted earlier entails that “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions” (Joel 2:28). Indeed, we find something close to this in the New Testament descriptions of the spiritual gifts distributed to believers. To be sure, there are visions and prophetic dreams described in the New Testament (e.g., Acts 9:10; 10:3; 16:9; 18:9), but these are not listed among the spiritual gifts enjoyed generally by believers (cf. 1 Cor 12:4–10). Instead, other gifts are mentioned: wisdom, knowledge, faith, healing, tongues, and more. In fact, Acts 2:17 is the only verse in the New Testament containing the word “dream” (ἐνύπνιον, enypnion). My point is that we should not press the language of Joel 2:28 too far; even in the earliest days of the church, when it was obvious that Joel’s vision had—at least, partially—come to fulfillment, the details of that vision did not strictly apply. The Spirit was at work in a new way, just as Joel had promised, and the Spirit’s activities exceeded Joel’s imaginings.

What about supernatural gifts? A first-century Christian could say that they knew they had the Spirit of Christ, in part, because of the spiritual gifts they enjoyed. In Galatians 3:5, Paul essentially equated the reception of the Spirit with the working of miracles. And today the fastest growing segment of Christianity is charismatic, claiming to have received the empowering from God’s Spirit to perform the same spiritual gifts that we read about in the New Testament. (The Greek word for “gifts” in 1 Cor 12:4 is χαρίσματα, charismata, whence the description “charismatic.”) Some of these groups declare that the gift of tongues is the initial sign that one has been accepted by God.

I myself have not experienced these gifts, and neither have most of the Christians I know. Are we missing something? We should remember that when it comes to the spiritual gifts, it is the Spirit “who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses” (1 Cor 12:11). According to Paul’s primary account of the spiritual gifts, not everyone receives the same gift (1 Cor 12:4–10, 27–31), and no particular charismatic gift is the sine qua non of the Spirit-filled Christian.

In the same context, Paul does name a sine qua non of the Spirit-filled Christian. “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” (1 Cor 13:1). Without love, I am nothing (v. 2) and I gain nothing (v. 3). Love of God and of neighbor are the greatest commandments (Matt 22:34–40), the fulfillment of the law (Rom 13:9–10), and the first of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal 5:22).

Let me point out that the fruit of the Spirit is unlike the charismata (the spiritual gifts). The fruit of the Spirit are not “allotted to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.” The fruit are not gifts given to different believers. While Christians sometimes wonder about which gifts the Spirit has given them, and sometimes they take a spiritual gifts inventory, there is no need to wonder which fruit the Spirit is developing in me. The answer is: all of them. It’s not that my fruit is peace and yours is self-control. No! When the Spirit indwells someone, the Spirit of Christ cultivates the fruit of the Spirit—the character of Christ—in that person. The Spirit cultivates love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control in that individual believer.

This is the primary, the fundamental, sign of the Spirit’s presence. How do you know you have the Spirit of Christ? Spiritual growth, that’s how. You become like Christ, which is the whole point of Christianity (Rom 8:29; Eph 4:15). The Spirit’s work in you—always, for everyone—is the development of the Spirit’s fruit. Are you more loving today than when you were baptized, or than a few years ago? Joyful? Patient? If not, you are quenching the Spirit, grieving him. It’s time to dedicate yourself to prayer and meditating on Scripture and service to others and corporate worship and other spiritual disciplines by which you can develop the soil of your heart (cf. Mark 4:1–9). The Spirit, an excellent gardener, can grow his fruit in a prepared heart.

Conclusion

Without Christ’s Spirit, you do not belong to Christ. Without the Spirit of adoption, you are not God’s child (Rom 8:15–16). The primary work of the Spirit in the life of the believer is to accomplish the primary goal of the Christian: to become like Christ. This entails exhibiting love (just like Jesus), and joy (just like Jesus), and peace (just like Jesus), and patience (just like Jesus), and all the other fruit of the Spirit (just like Jesus). Your job is to open yourself to the Spirit’s work by engaging in the spiritual disciplines of, among others, prayer and meditation on Scripture and Christian community. In this way, the One Spirit indwelling Christians binds us to Christ and to each other. This is how we “keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:3).

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