We cannot be aware of the Holy Spirit or grasp the reality of the spiritual realm until we break the slavery of our materialism and self-preoccupation. All around us is the invisible realm which Paul said he saw. The Bible is a book about it. The church is supposed to be the total of those who respond to it.
The spiritual dimension is real. Human beings experience cravings nothing in the material universe can truly satisfy. They make sacrifices too heroic for any material explanation. Many people are transformed in character in ways absolutely inexplicable to science or philosophy. Surely each of us looking back at his or her own past life sees things there which cannot be explained by heredity, environment, personal initiative, or chance.
Remember a door unexpectedly closed and another unexpectedly opened?
Remember a thing you felt compelled to say or a letter you felt compelled to write?
If we meditate on our past lives, we can hardly help noticing that a hidden, directive power, personal and alive, has been working through circumstances and by other means, sometimes in keeping with our own desires and at other times contrary to them, pressing us in a certain direction and molding us to a certain design. Paul tells us that it is God who is at work within us both to will and to do his good pleasure.
Some of us become sensitive to the pressure of this force. Others ignore the evidence of this whole realm of experience because it is hidden and interior, and they are busy responding to obvious and outward stimuli.
But to fail to respond to the pressure of the Holy Spirit is not to be adequately alive. It is to spend life conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do. It is perpetual unrest. It is to be forever craving, clutching, and fussing on the material, political, social, emotional, intellectual, and even religious plane.
To see and respond to the Holy Spirit is to scale our material interests down to size. We do not, of course, lose all interest in this physical life and its affairs. Physical life, material life, rather takes on a new beauty and significance in much the same way as a little shack in the mountains gains beauty and dignity from the background of the hills and the greatness of the sky.
Most men stalk across the cold wastes of a faithless life
and never take the time to know anything of God’s Holy Spirit. They ignore him
because he is not apprehended by the physical senses or the tools of science.
Their subsequent despair is but the stricken child of their ignorance. They
walk by sight, but the Holy Spirit is apprehended by faith. Less than a
thousand years ago the men of
Many scholars and philosophers today are in the same position. They not only reject the Holy Spirit; they even deny the existence of the human spirit because they have seen neither. They believe that man is contained in a fleshly form destined only to be the delight of the worms who hold high revel over the sum total of what he is or is ever likely to be.
Throughout the Bible and shining through the greatest literature of the world is a strange yet persistent notion of a human spirit capable of receiving and housing the Holy Spirit from on high. No doctrine in all the world has such a far-flung intellectual ancestry.
In 1 Corinthians 3:16, Ephesians 3:16, and many other places in Scripture, Paul testifies that the human spirit can be taken over and indwelt by the Holy Spirit of God.
This statement of personal experience made by a spiritual giant must be faced. It is either the babbling of an irresponsible lunatic or it is a message of such import as to upset our present material basis of life.
Paul writes that he succeeded in opening his heart to this power from above and had a new world of being opened to him.
If this interior experience was possible for Paul, it must still be available for us for Paul warns us in Romans 8 that if any man does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.
Not Paul alone but all the New Testament writers testify to the fact that contact with the Holy Spirit brings solutions to life’s most perplexing problems.
It is shocking how much of our theology we have taken from the traditions of the last two hundred years when we should have gone back two thousand.
When modern church members are told that the Holy Spirit still inhabits the heart of the surrendered child of God, many of them are apt to raise their eyebrows.
When they are told that men can still be filled with the invisible Spirit of God and are so commanded in Ephesians 5:18, they pityingly tap their foreheads.
What has happened is that calamity has indeed fallen upon them. They have forgotten who they are.
Modern man traces his lineage to something resembling an ape and diligently seeks evidence to confirm this miserable pedigree, but he cannot seem to remember his relationship with God.
He has been content to allocate vital spiritual experience to a few names in a far off past and call this “faith” while he assigns himself and mankind in general to the muddy depths of flesh.
If ever we can bring ourselves to believe in the invisible Holy Spirit alive and active today we will find our horizons broadened, our experience enriched, and our responsibilities enlarged.