The Dance (Part Two): Keep in Step

If walking in the Spirit is, as CS Lewis put it is, “a kind of dance” it’s important for us to know how to engage … how to participate … how to step onto life’s dance floor and into the dance with the Father, the Son and the Spirit. Each person within the Godhead acknowledges and adores the others. We join in that circle when we crucify our sinful attitudes and appetites and invite the Spirit to work in our daily lives. Unity with God the Father, through the Son and by the Spirit, not only makes us alive (though we were dead), it keeps us alive!
If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.

While there is a degree of divine mystery to the nature of the Holy Spirit, He definitely is not a bundle of warm feelings or good memories. Neither is He a vague cosmic force. The Holy Spirit is a real person who loves and cares for you, and He can make a difference in your life. He is not a vague, ethereal shadow, nor an impersonal force. He is a person equal in every way with the Father and the Son. All the divine attributes ascribed to the Father and the Son are equally ascribed to the Holy Spirit. (Bill Bright)

When we begin to follow Christ Jesus, we “take up our cross” and begin to walk with God by being in step with the Spirit. Francis Chan provides us practical insight:
Taking up my cross has become a euphemism for getting through life’s typical burdens with a semi-good attitude. Yet life’s typical burdens—busy schedules, bills, illness, hard decisions, paying for college tuition, losing jobs, houses not selling, and the family dog dying—are felt by everyone, whether or not they follow the Way of Jesus. When Jesus calls us to take up our cross, He is doing much more than calling us to endure the daily, circumstantial troubles of life. The people in Jesus’ day were very familiar with the cross. Having witnessed crucifixion, they understood it is a call to radical faith. Jesus is calling us to be willing to suffer anything and forsake everything for the sake of the gospel. His call is to love those who have cheated us in business; those who have spread nasty rumors about us; those who would kill us if they could; those who disagree with us politically, practically, and fundamentally. His call is to consider everything a loss for His sake. His call is for total surrender. He calls us to give up all that we have, to give even to the point of offering up our lives as a living sacrifice. The crux of it, I believe, is realizing that being filled with the Spirit is not a one-time act. Being filled with the Spirit is not limited to the day we first meet Christ. Instead, throughout Scripture we read of a relationship that calls us into an active pursuit of the Spirit. Christians can’t ever lose the Spirit, but His filling is something we should constantly pursue. Living by the Spirit implies a habitual, continual, and active interaction with the Holy Spirit.
While this sounds exhausting, it really isn’t because all of this living and action is done in the power of the Spirit. It is not by your own strength…

And here we are again. Reminded that we are to keep in tension the paradox – that in God’s world the “either/or” questions are answered with YES!
Yes, it is God who works in you. And, yes, there is work for you to do. Yes, the Spirit empowers you to do the work. And, yes, you do the work. Like many things in life, there really isn’t a sew-it-all-up solution. And I love that. God is big and mysterious enough that we cannot simply put a label on this process and move on. It requires continual engagement and wrestling and discovering how to live a Spirit-filled life today. Not ten years from now. Not tomorrow. But right now, in the particular time and place He has put us. … as we “work out our salvation” and as “God works in us.”
Let us keep in step.

(Taken from Forgotten God, Chan)

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s