The Good God - Spirit
Readings for this week August 19 - 23
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Day 1 – The Holy Spirit
Silence, Stillness and Centering before God (2 minutes)
Scripture Reading – John 14:1-14
Jesus. Emmanuel. God with us. God becoming one of us, fully taking on human life and all the ups and downs, high and lows, and joy and pain that comes with it. Not only did God make us and give us life, but through the incarnation of the Son, God fully shared in our human existence. We have a Lord and God and friend who knows intimately what human life is like from both the inside and the outside, who knows our happiness and our suffering, because through Jesus the incarnate Son, God has taken on a human life for himself to be with us. But the Ascension was not the end. Jesus bestowed a promised parting gift on his people before he ascended to the right hand of the Father. He gave us his Spirit to be with us and in us.
When Jesus gave us his Spirit, he gave us the ability to enjoy the Holy Spirit’s personal presence in us – always. Not temporarily, not only for special occasions or ‘mighty’ moments, but for each and every minute and hour and day of our lives. Through the indwelling of the Spirit, we can enjoy the Spirit’s own intimate communion with the Father and the Son. The gift that the Spirit gives us is to know Christ and, through Christ, to know the Father. And the more we come to know Christ the more we are transformed to be like him. This is what the personal gift of the Spirit gives us: the ability to be moulded and shaped into the likeness of the one who gives life.
Questions to Consider
How does the Spirit make Christ known to us? How has the Spirit deepened your love for Jesus?
Prayer
Holy Lord, thank you for the gift of your Son and for the gift of your Spirit who makes your Son known to us You are a generous, loving God – help us be the same to those we meet. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)
Day 2 – The Spirit of Life
Silence, Stillness and Centering before God (2 minutes)
Scripture Reading – John 14:15-22
It can be very easy to forget (especially when things are going well) that we do not have life in ourselves. We are not the source of our life. As much as we may have a certain level of autonomy, as much as we do have choices and can control much about our lives, life is not of our determining. It does not originate with or from us. We depend wholly and utterly upon God for our life and existence. At all times. Everywhere. It is by God's Spirit that we live and move and have our being. The Spirit hovered over the waters at the beginning, and breathed life into the dust from which we were formed. And the Spirit gives new life too, raising Jesus from the dead, and transforming us into his likeness.
In all things, we rely on the Spirit. Our animating life force originates with God, and however much we may have marred God’s image in us, the redemptive work required to fix this damage also originates from God. We cannot fix ourselves. The coming of Jesus may have rescued us from sin’s harmful grip, but the ongoing work of renewal that we need – new minds, new hearts, new life – is accomplished by the dwelling of the Spirit in us, as he shapes our habits and teaches us how to love and how to live. We cannot create ourselves; neither can we recreate ourselves in the image of Jesus. That requires the Holy Spirit in us and our submission to his transforming power.
Questions to Consider
How would you describe the role of the Holy Spirit in your life? What words would you use to someone who was not a follower of Jesus?
Prayer
Heavenly Father, I cannot change myself. I cannot make myself pure and holy and become the person you long for me to be. Only you, by your Spirit, can do this. Make me humble and obedient so that your Spirit can mould me and transform me the way you want. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)
Day 3 – Learning to Desire God
Silence, Stillness and Centering before God (2 minutes)
Scripture Reading – John 14:23-24
That we even desire in the first place – whatever it is that we might desire – is because God has planted within each of us the capacity to desire. Desire stems from God, the one who desired to make us and the one who desires for us to know him. As we have already seen we are all motivated to love but far too often we love in the wrong direction. Similarly, we all are capable of desire, we all desire things, experiences, ideas, people, but too often we desire the wrong things, desire in the wrong way, or we let our desires dictate our decisions, abandoning our God-given autonomy for the sake of the feeling, the moment, the image, the desire.
One of the most important things the Spirit of God does is repair and grow our capacity to desire, primarily by growing in us the desire for God. The Spirit unbinds, repairs and transforms our hearts so that more and more we may come to desire God. More and more God becomes what we want. After all, knowing the one who gave us life because of a desire to share his love with us should be the one thing above all others that we long for. The desire for God should be the central, primary desire that shapes all other desires, the motivating force that drives our thoughts and actions, the spur that inspires us to love others. But we cannot cultivate this desire in ourselves by ourselves. It is by the gracious indwelling of God’s Spirit in us that our heart’s desire can be realigned towards God and grown to want him more than we could ever manage on our own.
Questions to Consider
What does true desire for God look like? What stops us from desiring God? How do we stop other desires from getting in the way?
Prayer
Gracious God, I need to desire you more. Show me how to get out of my own way and love you with a depth and vulnerability I have not known before. Increase my capacity to desire you. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)
Day 4 – The Fellowship of the Spirit
Silence, Stillness and Centering before God (2 minutes)
Scripture Reading – John 14:25-27
The Trinity is a fellowship of Father, Son and Spirit, an eternal dance in which the three persons of the Triune God give, receive and share love with each other. But as we have seen this love is not static, self-contained or selfish. It flows out from the Triune heart of God and is expressed through God’s act of creation and the making of creatures to receive and experience his love. God is always giving us himself so that we can partake of the divine fellowship of love and know him and share in him, the way the three persons of the Trinity love and know themselves.
And just as God is a fellowship, and just as we are made in the image of God, so too are we made for fellowship. The inner love at the heart of God is shared outwards in the movement of creation. The love the Father has for the Son in the Spirit flows outwards to us so that in the Spirit we too can share in the Father’s love for the Son and the Son’s love for the Father. This is what we are made for. We are made for fellowship with God, but also with one another. Under the guidance of the Spirit’s transforming love, we become the community of those who now also desire to know God, to know him more and to know him deeper than before. We have been reconciled with God. The Spirit of love that comes to dwell in us also means we are reconciled to each other. We can become a true, loving fellowship of people in fellowship with God.
Questions to Consider
How does the Holy Spirit indwell individual believers? How does the Holy Spirit dwell in the body of the church? How are the two related?
Prayer
Almighty God, thank you for the gift of your Spirit to all your people, to the corporate body of your church. Bind us together as one people that loves the world the way you do. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)
Day 5 – A Missional Love
Silence, Stillness and Centering before God (2 minutes)
Scripture Reading – John 14:28-31
As Jesus said earlier in this chapter, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.” Earlier in the gospel, at John 5:19, we read that “whatever the Father does the Son also does.” And what the Father does is love the Son, pouring out his Spirit upon him. We see this action echoed in what Jesus does for the disciples when he breathes upon them and bestows the gift of his Spirit upon them. From the Father to the Son to us through the Spirit – there is a movement, a flow of love that always seeks to share with others, and bring them to God so they may know him.
God is missional. The Father sends the Son who gives the Spirit. The movement of love is always outwards to others. Creation’s rescue was accomplished by God himself getting involved, sending the Son to save and redeem us. The same Spirit that descended on Jesus, he has now gifted to us to continue the same redemptive, missional work. When we reach out in mission, we are modelling something very profound about who God is. When Jesus invites us to share in the mission of God, we are actually sharing in the loving, generous, missional shape of God’s own life. The Father so loved the Son that he wanted that love to be in others, to be shared with others, to be shared by others. The nature of God is missional, is love, is love seeking to include others in its embrace. This is what true, God-given love look like.
Questions to Consider
Why is it so fundamentally in God’s nature to be missional? What does this tell us and show us about how we are to live and what being made in his image means?
Prayer
Father God, our mission to the world is not our mission, it is simply your heart of love in action. Your people must love the world because that is fundamentally who you are. We can do nothing less. Amen.
Conclude with Silence (2 minutes)