[Summary from Part 1: When it comes to our relationship with God, I think we sometimes create a wobbly stool. We embrace the truth of the Trinity of God. We pray to Father God, and we talk with Jesus, but we don’t always know what we should be doing with the Holy Spirit.]
In the Apostle Paul’s benediction, found in 2 Corinthians 13:14, we read, “May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.“
When we received Jesus as our Savior, we received the Holy Spirit. However, through the grace of Jesus Christ, we can go deeper. For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk “but in power.” – 1 Corinthians 4:20
The best way to show that a stick is crooked is not to argue about it or to spend time denouncing it, but to lay a straight stick alongside it. – DL Moody
God wants you to be that straight stick and for people to see you alongside the crooked ones, not to fellowship with them but to provide a reference for the people in the world of what Godliness looks like.
That’s a high calling and one that is not easily attained. If what the world sees and hears is only doctrine and history then few people will respond to God’s call. What people want is to be touched by God, to experience God, so they know the difference between the stimulants of this world and the power of God.
We can’t fake the power of God. For most of us, our salvation experience included someone witnessing to us. A Christian told us about their personal salvation experience and the power of the Holy Spirit’s work in their salvation. When we received Jesus, we experienced that power of the Holy Spirit’s conviction. When we prayed the sinner’s prayer, we KNEW we were unholy and utterly lost. And then we were made clean and reborn and knew the Holy Spirit was inside us.
This truth is confirmed by what the Holy Spirit inspired the Apostle Paul to write: For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. – 1 Corinthians 12:12-13
From this passage of Scripture, we know that every believer has received the Holy Spirit. God lives in each of us. And through us, God touches the lives of others. How wonderful is that! But there’s more. We’ll look at the “more” tomorrow in part three of “A Wobbly Stool.”
Photo credit: neil cummings on Visualhunt.com / CC BY-SA
You may like:
https://rockexcavationservice.org/2020/01/13/point-me-to-jesus/