The reason why it is important to think about the activity of the Holy Spirit in a fully Trinitarian way is because the Spirit does not draw attention to itself but is largely invisible in its own personal existence. We know there is a Spirit and that this Spirit is personally distinct from the Father and the Son but we cannot come up with sharp distinctions between them (with the exception of the Son, who took on flesh). This cannot surprise us, though, because, after all, we are dealing with three Persons who are indeed only one God. How can we sharply divide the Spirit from the Father and Son and still be speaking of the one God of Israel? We can’t, so we must remain faithful to both the “threeness” and the “oneness” of God as portrayed in the Bible.
The reason to emphasize this again at this point is because there has been a tendency within certain Christian groups to separate the Spirit out from the rest of the Trinity and treat it differently. This either takes the form of ignoring the Spirit, living as if God has acted in the past, throughout Israel’s long history and in Christ and even during the days of the apostles, but that God does not do amazing things today. What often takes place, though, is that the Holy Spirit is separated from the Father and Son and treated as if, in the Spirit, God is doing something totally different than what God has done in Christ. This, perhaps most often, takes the form, “The work of Christ is to forgive us, the work of the Spirit is to regenerate us.” The problem with this is that it implies that the Spirit has no role in our forgiveness and that Christ has no role in our regeneration or sanctification.
However, this cannot be the case. We have seen above that it is only in and through the Spirit that we can even come to saving faith in Jesus Christ, so we cannot imagine that the Son and the Son alone is responsible for our forgiveness. As we will see, our being made holy is not something that is utterly separate from Christ, but is intimately bound up with his vicarious humanity, which we discussed in the chapter on Christ. Whatever the Spirit does, it cannot be thought as being separate from Christ. People have often cautioned against allowing a so-called reliance on the Spirit to degenerate into mere self-will by saying, “The Spirit will never say or do anything that contradicts the Bible.” This is good as far as it goes, but I think that it would be better and more accurate to say, “The Spirit will never say or do anything that contradicts what God has done in Christ.” This way, we appropriately bind the work of God, not to a book, but to God himself. We no longer judge what the living God can or cannot do by a text, but by what God has actually done (though the text does indeed bear witness to this.)
I want to spend the rest of this chapter discussing the work of the Spirit by exploring what it means to be united to Christ by the Spirit. Paul constantly speaks of believers as being “in Christ,” and speaks of this as being something that is brought about by the Holy Spirit. Perhaps the most marvelous description of believers being united to Christ is in the famous image of the vine and branches in John 15. “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.” Jesus is speaking here of such a close and intimate relationship between him and his disciples that they are sharing in his life, allowing the life of Christ to flow through them, to have his blood pumping through their veins, so to speak. The question remains, “How does this actually play itself out in the Christian life?” We will explore this idea by using two major passages where Paul speaks of the work of the Spirit.
The Fruit of the Spirit
In Galatians 5:22-24, Paul speaks of what he calls “fruit of the Spirit.” “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.” Many sermon series’ have been preached and many books written about how these fruit are to manifest themselves in the life of a believer, so it will not be our purpose to explore each of them in detail. Indeed, the main concern here is to speak of the fruit of the Spirit in a way that is consistent with the actual work of the Spirit. That is, the goal is to think out the fruit of the Spirit in light of God’s revelation in Christ.
Too often, the fruit of the Spirit are attempted to be lived out as if there were no real standard by which to understand them. It is assumed that the words that are used to describe the fruit of the Spirit are easy to understand and are self-evident. The problem with this is that, when we do not carefully allow God’s revelation to define our terms (as we discovered in the last chapter) we tend to incorporate all kinds of baggage into them that are not necessarily compatible with the Gospel. So, if we want to understand the fruit of the Spirit in a way that our terms will be redefined in light of who God is, we must think them out in terms of Christ.
When we speak of love, to use one as an example for all, we are not, again, speaking of simple human love that is judged in light of contemporary society, but of the very love of God as revealed in Christ. If, in Christ, we see the very love of God worked out in and through our humanity, what else can we expect the love that the Spirit works in us to be? The only conclusion that we can possibly draw is that the Spirit takes the love that is in Christ and grows it in us. It is not something that we work really hard for and achieve on our own. We see that the love that empowers us to lay ourselves down for others, even those who hate us, is utterly beyond us. If we ever come to love in that way, it is not because of our ability to love, but because of God’s ability to manifest the love of Christ in our lives.
When we look at the nine fruit of the Spirit and we hold them up next to the life of Christ as portrayed in the Gospel accounts, we find that Paul is not just choosing some random adjectives, but is saying that, when the Spirit dwells inside of us, its fruit will be the very life of Christ being lived in us and through us. The same can be said for every one of the nine fruit. This has the effect of amplifying the significance of each of them beyond what we might otherwise think. For some of them (I am thinking at this point particularly of self-control) to think them out in light of the actual life of Christ makes them perhaps more than a little frightening (because we realize how different than our normal way of living it is) and yet exciting (because we realize that God can and will grow these fruit in our lives).
Another way to think of this way of being united to Christ is Galatians 2:20. “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me.” Paul is saying that, because he has been united to Christ by the Spirit, the life that he is living is no longer his own, but Christ’s life being lived in and through him. This does not mean that Paul is completely set aside as if he has been taken over and is now nothing more than a machine. No; Paul is indeed not factored out. Christ is living in him but he is still the one in whom that life is being lived. We should think of our regeneration or sanctification, not in terms of us getting better, which will almost certainly lead to pride (if we think we have been advancing quickly) or depression (if we think we have advanced quickly enough), but rather in terms of us participating in Christ through the Spirit, through whom we are united to Christ. When we think of it this way, as Christ living in and through us in the Spirit, we will be more prepared to let God work, we will be expecting God to do amazing things in and through us, and we will be less likely to think about the work of the Spirit as something separate from the work of Christ.
When we think of our Christian life primarily in terms of active participation in the life of God through Christ and in the Spirit, we do not so much think about our growth in grace as something “extra” to add on after we have been forgiven, but rather the main point of our relationship with God. We think about our response to God’s grace less in terms of specific vices we avoid and specific virtues we cultivate and more in terms of our whole lives being impacted at every level. Additionally, we cement the fact in our minds that it is truly not our righteousness or sanctification, but Christ’s being worked out, not just within humanity in general as it was in Christ, but in our humanity and that we really do become partakers of the righteousness of Christ.
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