The
Work of the Holy Spirit
Stephen
Terry
Commentary
for the March 25, 2017 Sabbath School Lesson
“I
have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the
Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth. He will not speak
on his own; he will speak only what he hears, and he will tell you what is yet
to come. He will glorify me because it is from me that he will receive what he
will make known to you. All that belongs to the Father is mine. That is why I
said the Spirit will receive from me what he will make known to you.” John
116:12-15, NIV
Have you ever known someone who has participated in a
weight-loss program and lost a significant amount of weight, and when the
subject of weight loss ever came up in a conversation, they were zealous in
promoting the particular program that worked for them? Rather than accept that
different programs might work better for different people, they advocate strenuously
for what worked for them. This type of encounter is not limited to weight loss,
however. It might be someone who found a way to successfully quit smoking, stop
drinking, or even an exercise program they have been able to stick with. We
often tend to become evangelists for what has worked for us.
Usually we start one of these programs as a neophyte,
accepting by blind faith or the testimony of friends that this may be something
that will work. If it does begin to give us some success, we become like
sponges absorbing everything we can to enhance our experience until we get to the
point where very little new information comes our way, and coupled with our
success we become experts. We know all the rules, we have faced the challenges
and overcome, and others are looking to us for answers that we readily supply.
But at any point along this path we are faced with the danger of assuming that
the answers we find are the only answers. In short, we may have been given a
hammer that is very effective at a lot of things, but there is a danger when
you have a hammer that every problem might seem like a nail. We may not
understand that there are other tools that work better for different
situations. A screwdriver, a saw, or a power drill may be more appropriate,
depending on the circumstances. We all may apparently have similar problems,
such as being overweight, but there may be different reasons behind it. Those
reasons may not only require different approaches, but the problem may even be
exacerbated if the wrong direction is followed. This is why often these programs
will advise that a participant may wish to discuss their planned participation
with their doctor first to avoid possible problems.
This pattern of development can become a problem spiritually
as well. We become aware of our spiritual problem, a problem the Bible calls
sin, and we decide to deal with it by accepting the invitation to repent, to
stop walking away from God and begin walking toward Him. We are baptized, and
we receive the Holy Spirit.[i] The Spirit begins to show
us things about our lives that need cleaning up, and helps us to become aware
of guidelines helpful for the Christian walk. This is all well and good as we
begin to receive the blessings of walking in the Spirit and experience joy and
peace that we have not known before. Somewhere along the line as we grow, we
will eventually come to the understanding that Christians bear fruit, not only in
the form of spiritual gifts, but as new individuals giving their hearts to
Christ. It is at this point that things have the potential to go dreadfully
wrong.
Like with the weight-loss program, or the stop-smoking
program where we become an expert in the program and others begin seeking
answers from us, some members, observing our spiritual progression may come to
us seeking answers for their spiritual growth as well. But in this realm, we
are not the expert, and we never will be. Unlike a program where we may one day
become the facilitator, we cannot become God, not the Father, not the Son, and
certainly not the Holy Spirit. The temptation can be great to want to assume a
god-like role and order the lives of others based on what we have learned in
our Christian walk, but when we do this, we can actually hinder the work of the
Holy Spirit. The Spirit may have to spend extra time putting out the fires in
that other person’s life that we have kindled by our inappropriate direction.
This extra effort and time are resources that the Holy Spirit might have better
spent helping them achieve Christian maturity. It is the Holy Spirit that
convicted us of sin, and He does the same work in others. It is not something
He can delegate to us, because we will never have enough information to be able
to make a well-informed judgment call. Our efforts may be damaging to their experience,
and what may have seemed appropriate for us may even be pathetically ridiculous
for them.
For instance, we may have found a change in diet gives
us a more vibrant health experience, and we extrapolate that out to mean a
healthier spiritual experience as well. Then we begin to look around and judge
our brothers and sisters to be missing out on a valuable spiritual experience because
they are following the wrong diet, so we begin to accuse them of perverseness
in diet. In doing something like this, we take over the role of the Holy Spirit
for those people and presume to guide their spiritual experience, even to make
it identical to our own. When we do this, we aren’t really glorifying God. We
are glorifying our experience above everyone else’s. We also may be
demonstrating a lack of faith in God. Because we cannot see the direction the Holy
Spirit is going with that person,[ii] we assume nothing is
happening without our intervention, and the Spirit is not working. But in doing
so, we may be kindling still another fire that will have to be put out by the
Spirit. For example, that person may be offended by the intervention and simply
withdraw from God and the Holy Spirit will try to bring them to the point of
conversion again, but it may be harder, if not impossible, the second time.
Alternatively, they may innocently accept our willingness to be their Holy
Spirit and seek to do everything we tell them. This person may be even harder
for the Holy Spirit to reach, as they are fully convinced everything they are
doing is righteous. As a result, it will be difficult to bring them to a
conviction of their sinfulness. This may especially be true if the one who has
taken over their spiritual experience decides to continually run interference
between that person and the Holy Spirit, making sure nothing to challenge what
they are telling the person is allowed to get through. A person may believe that
they are fully righteous and walking in God’s will, but their work in hindering
the Holy Spirit in this way is evidence they are not. The Pharisees of old were
convinced of their own righteousness as well, and secured followers with the intent
of making them clones of themselves, but all they succeeded in doing was to
make those they assumed spiritual oversight of twice as fit for hell.[iii] Why twice as fit? Perhaps
because the Holy Spirit not only has to deal with attempting to convict the
proselyte but to also deal with the added challenge
of the sheltering mentor as well.
God values our uniqueness. We can see this over and over
again in the natural world He created. It is well known that no two snowflakes
are alike, but this extends to the rest of creation as well. As I look at the
small, potted jungle in my office while I am writing this, it is easily apparent
that no two leaves, even on the same plant are identical. When it comes to
humanity, we are all unique as well. Some may challenge this in the case of
identical twins, since they are products of the same genome but even on that
level they are each unique.[iv] When we layer onto that
uniqueness all the individual experiences that we accumulate through life,
experiences that make us emotionally and mentally as unique as our genetics, we
may readily see the complexity of steering all of that spiritually is a task
well beyond our ability. It requires the ability that only our Creator
possesses. He will guide us within our uniqueness, not in spite of it. We may
do well then to cease trying to control the spiritual experience of others and
stop running interference between them and the Holy Spirit about what they
should and should not do or believe. Rather than having at them with hammer and
chisel, let’s rejoice with them as they grow in the Spirit and find their own
special place in God’s flock, unique from our own.
