How does the indwelling of the Spirit make living in God’s presence an experiential reality?
The Spirit reveals God to our worshipping spirits. Since God the Spirit reveals God the Son, his presence within us becomes God’s immediate link of communion with us. Not that the Spirit works apart from his own chosen means of revealing Christ: the rightly-interpreted Word of God. Nevertheless, just as rightly-mixed chemicals can remain inert without a spark or an injection of energy, so rightly-interpreted Scriptures can remain lifeless to the believer unless the Spirit illuminates them. His ministry of granting believers spiritual insight, of making the truth as real as it is true, and of enlightening seeking believers is at the core of communion. He is able to do this at any time, and in any place, because he now interpenetrates our minds and hearts. As he knows God’s mind, as he is the result of the Father’s love for the Son and the Son’s for the Father, so he can reveal all this to the seeking heart.
The ceaseless flow of godly love,
The joy of God and Son:
Thy life is this, O Holy Dove,
The Third of Three-in-One.
Indwelling Spirit! Blessed are we
To host such Heav’nly lays;
No Jewish Temple had such heights:
Where God loves God in praise.
We love him because he first loved us. The Spirit does not only stir up in us love for God, he reveals God’s love for us. He testifies to our sonship. Though our faith may at times better grasp the truths that we are accepted, completed and secure in Christ, the sweet gift of God is that Holy Spirit assures faith-filled believers of our familial relationship with God.
For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, (Romans 8:15-16)
Earlier we said that knowing God is a sovereign act of self-disclosure, where the Spirit reveals the Son, who in turn reveals the Father. Here we see how the indwelling life of Christ makes it possible to know and love God. Through the Spirit’s ministry of illumination, we can see the beauty of God in his Word, works and world. Put simply, the Spirit’s presence and work consecrates the believer’s life as a place of worship, where God is revealed and therefore loved.
The glory of New Covenant living is that the obligation to love God is no longer constrained from the outside, but prompted from within.
Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure. (Philippians 2:12-13, cf. Ezekiel 36:26-27)
We now have a continual inward prompting to desire to know and love God. The Spirit within our spirits communicates the desires of God to our heart, prompting us and inclining us towards himself. Romans 8:1-9 teaches that the secret of a Christian life that overcomes sin and fulfils the Great Commandment is the indwelling Spirit. Rightly responding to the Spirit, which is the posture of the Christian life, will lead to an increased experience of His enabling work. To walk in the Spirit (Gal 5:16-24) leads to the fruitful harvest of loving God and resembling His Son. Henry Scougal said that the Christian life is
“an inward free and self-moving principle; and those who have made progress in it, are not acted only by external motives, driven merely by threatenings, nor bribed by promises, nor constrained by laws, but are powerfully inclined to that which is good, and delight in the performance of it. The love which a pious man bears to God and goodness, is not so much by virtue of a command enjoining him so to do, as by a new nature instructing and prompting him to do it; nor doth he pay his devotions as an unavoidable tribute, only to appease the Divine justice; but those religious exercises are the proper emanations of the Divine life, the natural employments of the new-born soul.”1
For this reason, Isaac Watts wrote,
Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove,
With all Thy quick’ning powers;
Kindle a flame of sacred love
In these cold hearts of ours.
When meditating on this, we should not underestimate how great are his “quickening powers”. His work within us does not only grant us the motives to love God, but the power to follow through on those desires. This is nothing less than resurrection-power.
And what is the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His mighty power which He worked in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come. (Ephesians 1:19-21)
With omnipotence at work within us, ours is to simply respond to his presence with the right posture, so as to see the beauty of God and respond with ultimate love.
Christ in us: truly the hope of glory! God’s love for us is exceedingly abundantly above all we could have asked or thought. Once we are accepted, secured and completed in Christ, God comes to dwell within us, signifying his pleasure with us in Christ. We become a temple where we can worship him at any time, where he reveals himself and his mind to us at any time, creating desires for God, and enabling us to pursue him, all the while assuring the obedient believer that he is, in fact, in Christ.
About David de Bruyn
David de Bruyn pastors New Covenant Baptist Church in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a graduate of Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Minnesota and the University of South Africa (D.Th.). Since 1999, he has presented a weekly radio program that is heard throughout much of central South Africa. He also blogs at Churches Without Chests.
- The Life of God in the Soul of Man, 45. [↩]