Truth Revealed in a Garage
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
“If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” (Luke 11:13)
I guess the Lord is having fun with me.
In my last piece, I wrote about how a simple walk through a cemetery revealed a profound truth about living for Jesus. In short, if we’re willing to honor the dead by visiting their remains, it would be a higher goal to live as they would expect us to in honor of their lives. (My father was an Air Force Captain and an honorable man.)
For those of us who follow Jesus, this extends even further. If we’re motivated to live in honor of a person who lived a good, even righteous life, how much more should we live in honor of Jesus, who lived the “goodest” life, who died and now lives forever? And especially since His life was the epitome of righteousness, and the way He wants us to live is to emulate Him as much as we can with the Holy Spirit’s help.
That was an encouraging insight from the Holy Spirit.
Well, I had another one of those Spirit-inspired insights recently. Jeanne and I have a friend who rents a room in our home. Because he drives the least, he gets the blessing of parking in the garage because we’re all too lazy to jockey cars around. Since he’s working on retiring, he doesn’t currently have a job, and I usually schlep us all around. His Toyota Prius has been sitting idle in the garage for a while.
Okay… for a long time.
Our friend went to drive his car the other day and realized he had left the vehicle’s dome light on. Surprise! Absolutely no battery power. Kaput. And to add insult to injury, his car had been sitting so long that all of the tires were in dire need of inflation. In short, his Toyota Prius was a brick with four flats.
When I walked through the garage to take out the trash, there he was, trying to resurrect the battery with a charger whilst simultaneously raising four tires from the dead with my ever-handy 120-volt Husky inflator.
Yeah, it took a while, but success was his.
As I was pondering his situation, the Spirit poked me and said very gently,
(paraphrased) “This is why many congregations are ineffective and have so little impact in their communities. They are not filled with Me, and they lack My power.”
For you readers who are a bit dim biblically, the Holy Spirit was referring to His presence (air in the tires) and His power (fully charged battery), both of which produce the fruit of the Spirit (Jesus’ character, Galatians 5:22-23), and the gifts of the Spirit (Jesus’ power, 1 Corinthians 12:4-11). The fruit and the gifts are essential for a Christian to live the Normal Christian Life.
Without the fruit of the Spirit shaping our character to reflect Jesus’ character, we look and act just like the fallen world in which we live. Without the gifts of the Spirit, we are no more impactful upon our communities than the unsaved person drifting through life.
The fruit of the Spirit makes us stand out from the world because we’re exhibiting love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, hopefully in increasing measure. If we take the antitheses of the fruit of the Spirit, we get a great description of how the world works—indifference, depression, discord, agitation, meanness, corruption, treachery, hardness, and overindulgence. I believe that right now, many Christians should take a breather for a season, stop the frantic church activities that can falsely show how “Christian” we are, and ask the Holy Spirit to teach us about Jesus’ character and then how we cooperate in character redevelopment.
The gifts of the Spirit make us stand out from the world because we’re moving in spiritual power that transcends human strength and all of our clever machinations. The word Paul used for the gifts in 1 Corinthians 12:7 is phanerosis (manifestation). This Greek word means “to make…visible or known what has been hidden or unknown, to manifest, whether by words, or deeds, or in any other way.” I like to say it this way: “A legitimate spiritual gift is a flash of the supernatural within our natural world.”
Sadly, Western Christians excuse their powerlessness when the Bible clearly expects Jesus’ followers to exhibit “flashes of the supernatural for the common good.” Because many Christians don’t know how to move in the Spirit’s gifts or refuse to believe God’s word that they are today, too many pastors and teachers try to explain them away. “Oh, that was just for the first century to kick off Jesus’ movement,” or “They were only needed to confirm the Apostles’ teachings until the Bible was finalized.”
“Bull sparkle!” as a friend of mine would say.
Nowhere in the Bible does it say that. I’m convinced those assertions are the theological chicken’s way to avoid actually stepping out in faith, trusting that God is still at work today and can work through them. Those Christians who say such things are obviously content with doing Christianity on their own terms and in their own strength or, in my humble opinion, ignorant. Either way, they remain powerless and immovable.
You know, kind of like a bricked car with flat tires.
No air. No spark. No movement.
But there’s hope.
Many revivals and moves of God’s Spirit have followed faithful prayer, personal and corporate, along with dedicated disciples asking the Father to fill them with His Spirit. Yes, I know we get His Holy Spirit at salvation. We can only be regenerated spiritually by the Holy Spirit’s power. That’s part of His job after all (John 3:3; Titus 3:5). His work continues as He shapes us to look like Jesus (air, 2 Corinthians 3:18) and act like Jesus (spark, Acts 1:8, 2:4, 10:38; Hebrews 2:4).
But scripture clearly shows that the Holy Spirit fills us to the brim, tops us off, or moves through us more fully, however you want to say it, as we continually seek and ask for His presence and power (Acts 4:29-32 – now that’s a community with divine air and spark!). And being filled happens repeatedly. In fact, Paul’s charge to “be filled by the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18) is actually a command to do something on an ongoing basis as a way of life.
Yes, that’s right. Being filled with the Holy Spirit is not optional. Neither are the fruit and gifts something we can split as if we live in a theological cafeteria. The fruit and gifts of the Spirit are inseparable. Period.
So, let’s ask the Father for a full Holy Spirit re-inflation and a battery charge!
Just a little truth revealed in a garage.
Yup. The Lord decided to have some fun with me.
If you’re interested in learning more about the Fruit and Gifts of the Spirit, I’ll be producing a class video series on both through HighBeamMinistry.com in the near future. They’ll be great for individuals, group study, and even Christian Ed classes. Keep checking the website for more information.
A special note to you, dear reader: I want to know what you think of the Frothy Thoughts Blog. If you will, please send a quick email to HighBeamMinistry@gmail.com with your comment about this blog, or just to let me know you read it. Your response can be a sentence or a page. Don’t worry. High Beam Ministry won’t use your email for spam. For notifications about new material, please use the subscribe button on the website. Thanks so much for reading and replying!
Shining the Light of God’s Truth on the Road Ahead
Pastor Jay Christianson
The Truth Barista, Frothy Thoughts