Where has the Spirit Gone? Alive@5St Mark’s27.5.18 Romans 1:16-20; 8:1-11
https: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdYYTl5Ht4o
Part 1: Introducing the Problem
Read Roman 8:1-11 “But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” (Rom 8:10)
A Problem Observed
In my lifetime a great gift has been lost from Western Christianity. On line with the key text of Romans 8:10 let’s call this the Spirit’s gift of liveliness. The classical Pentecostal movement restored to the Church, especially via the Charismatic movement, something of this New Testament dynamic; “When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or tan interpretation. Let all things be done for building up….be filled with the Spirit, 19 addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart….Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom” (1 Cor 14:26; Eph 5:18; Col 3:16). The multiplicity of spiritual manifestations in Christian gatherings has always been a sure sign of the presence of the Spirit. ). Early Christian assemblies surged with life in the Spirit; Romans 8:1-11 refers to “the Spirit of life” (v.2); “to set the mind on the Spirit is life” (v.6); God will “give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit”. (v.11 cf. John 6:63; 2 Cor 3:6). During the period of persecution Christians scratched on the wall of a catacomb under Rome the Latin “Vita, Vita, Vita.” “Life, life, life.” This spiritual liveliness of the whole body participation is the gift that has been lost; passivity reigns across the churches.
The absence of congregation wide Spirit-inspired personal contributions has always been an issue in liturgical churches, but having stripped out the space given to the open exercise of spiritual gifts and filled it in with singing Pentecostal and Evangelical congregations are looking more and more like each other[1]. Even in many small groups there’s little evidence of the move of the Spirit in tongues, prophecy, healing and so on. At one level these tendencies are imitating cultural trends to defer to professionals, in this case the pastor/worship leader up the front, and to be pragmatic, if high quality “worship” draws a crowd let’s do it. As well the busy modern lifestyle disables many contemporary churchgoers from spending time in prayer during the week seeking God for a scripture or a prophecy to share on a Sunday. Church services across nearly all denominations have become so formatted that there’s no space for unplanned operations of the Spirit.
A Heart Problem
Intentionally opening time/space in meetings for the acts of the Spirit is useful, but something much deeper is at issue here. Paul exhorts the Church to “earnestly desire the spiritual gifts” (1 Cor 14:1cf. 12:31), but since the desires God answers are the desire of the heart i.e. our deepest innermost being from which life springs, something must happen to our hearts to bring about a welling up of expressions of the Spirit (Ps 37:4; Prov 4:23; John 4:14; 7:38; Rom 10:1). The widespread absence of zeal for this to happen is a sure sign we are grieving the Holy Spirit, yet the Body of Christ has become so desensitised to the Spirit that few seem to recognise how deeply we are hurting God (Eph 4:30; 1 Thess 5:19). Self examination is useless however without the illumination of the scriptures about what is the “normal” life of the Church.
One outstanding feature of the book of Acts is the spontaneous ministry of the Holy Spirit. All the apostles did to be filled with the Spirit at Pentecost was to pray and wait. Even more striking is how in Acts 10 the Spirit was outpoured on the Gentiles even as Peter was preaching; “While Peter was still saying these things, the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word….46 For they were…speaking in tongues and extolling God.” (vv.44, 46). Something similar is recorded in Acts 19:5-6, “On hearing this [about Jesus], they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. 6 And when Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they began speaking in tongues and prophesying.”
Pointers to what happening inside these believers comes from examining the “heart language” used in Acts. In 2:37 the hearers of the gospel were “cut to the heart”, in describing the response in Acts 10 Peter says that “God cleansed their hearts by faith” (15:9), and in explaining Lydia’s conversion in Acts 16 Luke comments, “The Lord opened her heart” (16:14). The letters of the New Testament make it clear that the presence and power of the Spirit is not primarily a mental or emotional encounter but an impact on the heart. “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” (Rom 5:5). “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”” (Gal 4:6). Minds can be informed and emotions can be manipulated but only God can transform the heart (2 Chron 6:30; Ezek 36:26). And he does this through the preaching of the gospel (Acts 2:29-36; 10:40). Paul gives a sort of summary of how to be saved in Roman 10:9; “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” As I will seek to expound over the next few weeks, it’s particularly the revelation of what happened in the resurrection of Jesus that transforms our hearts and opens them to the life-giving power of the Spirit (John 7:39; Heb 4:12). The gospel word reveals “the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” (Heb 4:12) and shows the powers in us which oppose the power through which the Spirit raised Jesus from the dead (Eph 1:19-20; Col 2:12).
The Opposing Spirit
In the New Testament framework when the Spirit works on those hearing the gospel he creates a tremendous tension in the heart to do with one’s state of guilt or righteousness before God (cf. Ps 51:10). Jesus prophesied concerning the Spirit, ““when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment”” (John 16:8). Paul more or less says the same things at the start of Romans 8 as he expounds how the Spirit opposes the power of law, sin, sinful nature and death as they work together to oppose the will of God; “the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death. 3 For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do…. to set the mind on the Spirit is life….(but) the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God it does not submit to God’s law; …it cannot….” (Rom 8:2-3, 7 cf. 1 Cor 15:56). The powers of evil at work inside lost humanity are totally alien to the life of the Spirit and have to be put to death if spiritual liveliness is to course through our lives. (Which is what the cross does e.g. Gal 2:20) To put this in a slightly different way, but in a way which we will see directly relates to the Spirit’s power in raising Jesus from the dead, it is unrighteousness which stops the Spirit imparting life to us (Rom 8:9; Jude 19).
Romans 1 is especially helpful in explaining the spiritual dynamics of what the Spirit is encountering when he preaches the resurrection of Jesus. Paul testifies that whilst all humanity has seen God’s “eternal power” which is “clearly perceived in the things that have been made” i.e. nature, this revelation is always actively suppressed “in unrighteousness” (Rom 1:18-20). In his preaching the apostle openly challenged his pagan hearers about how they had transformed the general revelation of God’s goodness in the order of the world into idolatry (Acts 14:15-17; 17:24-29; Rom 1:22). Resistance to the presence of God in the world is pervasive and aggressive (Rom 1:30; Col 1:21). When the Spirit spoke to people through the apostolic preaching about their suppression of God’s revelation and idolatry, in the face of God’s raising Christ from the dead they were convicted of their personal and social unrighteousness and they knew they could not stand before the judgement seat of God (Rom 14:10; 2 Cor 5:10). This was an overwhelming burden on their hearts and consciences that had to be relieved by coming to Christ for salvation. The absence of such intense awareness’s both inside and outside of the Church today is related to why we are rarely seeing the powerful manifestations of the Spirit in building up the people of God and in conversions.
Our Problem Situation
Righteousness is not a popular word, even amongst Christians, but in Paul’s outline of the gospel in Romans his first step is to speak of the gospel as a power to righteousness; “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.”” (1:16-17). Then he runs straight into saying this power of righteousness is needed because, “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” (Rom 1:18). What is particularly important for us to note in terms of our culture is that in going on to list a multitude of sins he highlights one particular unrighteousness as a “mature” form of idolatrous rebellion against the power and presence of the Creator; the image shifting represented in homosexuality (Rom 1:18-32).
Paul isn’t anxious, despairing or exasperated about the avalanche of unrighteousness all around him because knew that the power of God’s righteousness in the gospel was greater than the evil powers in the world. As a converted orthodox Jew he understood that the substance of righteousness wasn’t about keeping rules but the power of God (Rom 14:17). Jesus had already counselled his disciples to “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness” (Matt 6:33), because every time he healed a sick person, brought a sinner to repentance, fed the hungry or cast out a demon (cf. Luke 7:22) the kingdom of his Father’s powerful rule was being exercised in the way of justice And when he said, “if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.” (Matt 12:28) he made it plain that the power of God’s righteous kingdom was in the Holy Spirit.
How about us? Are we “earnestly desiring the spiritual gifts” (1 Cor 14:1cf. 12:31) and the surge of spiritual liveliness we see in the New Testament? Whatever our answer, I will seek to explain in the next couple of weeks how Romans 8:10 is a key to the Spirit’s release of resurrection liveliness amongst us, “But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” (Rom 8:10). In the meantime the passivity of the churches is robbing God of his glory. The glory of which Romans 6:4 so clearly testifies; “We were buried therefore with him (Jesus) by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”