Monday Morning Rewind: Being a Spirit-Filled Church

As our church celebrates the very real evidences of God's grace and struggles with our flaws, imperfections and lack of love for God and neighbor, we're reminded of God's call to be a people who are filled with his Spirit (Ephesians 5:18).

But what does that mean? While resisting the temptation to reduce the Holy Spirit to a cosmic fuel pump and being reminded that God the Spirit has already come to us in his fullness, what we have is a picture of a people who are growing in wisdom maturity, a people whose life together is marked by a very real and radical declaration and display of God's infinite value because of the presence of the Spirit.

Andreas Kostenberger writes:

True discipleship is a complex and long-term process. Believers are to work out their salvation, knowing that God is working in them to complete his good purposes (Phil 1:6; 2:12). With regard to Spirit-filling, emphasis should again be placed on God who sovereignly filled in answer to believers' prayers or desires, but at any rate for the sake of his glory or by his own choice and initiative. Thus believers should be advised to shed any undue preoccupation with whether they are filled with the Spirit, focusing rather on living obedient Christian lives that are increasingly characterized by the Spirit's presence. At times they may be too involved in ministry even to recognize their need to be filled with the Spirit, but the sovereign God who bestows the Spirit will nevertheless 'fill' them with the Spirit if he deems it necessary.

So for us as a church, being Spirit-filled is not a calling to a new emphasis as much as the hope that what we do emphasize - living as a movement of people who share an identity, life and mission - becomes increasingly evident as time goes on as the Spirit brings everything back to Jesus as our hope and help.

For more reading on the person and work of the Holy Spirit, check out this page over at Monergism - a ton of resources by Spurgeon, Piper, Luther, Owen and many others.