The post on Tuesday, April 29 got me to thinking:We know there’s nothing we can do to earn justification from God. He declares us guilt-free as an act of sheer grace, not because he’s obligated to us or because we deserve it.
I have to wonder, though: Once we’re saved, do we revert to do-it-yourself mode? Are we in some sense trying to earn our sanctification? I don’t think it’s intentional. But I do think it’s the natural consequence of our traditionally conflicted attitude toward the Holy Spirit.
We concede the Spirit has a role to play in principle, but let’s face it — in practice, we’ve been at best reluctant recipients of this gift. At worst, we’ve effectively shut Him out altogether, I fear.
Divine mysteries don’t fit so well in the fixed easy-to-follow formulas we crave.
But if the Spirit’s not driving us, a state of arrested spiritual development is the best we can hope for. We can go through the motions, do the overt acts of service which in themselves are good. But if the Spirit isn’t generating them, do they point to real internal transformation?
Don’t we often wonder why we don’t love more, give more, why our assemblies seem perfunctory and joyless, why our numbers are declining, why the truths we hold dear seem increasingly irrelevant to the culture at large, why we search our souls for answers but they elude us — why we demand lockstep allegiance on doctrine and yet so readily ignore the weightier matters when somebody, God help him, disagrees.
Maybe it’s the best a spiritually stunted people can do.
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