The more I study the letters of the apostle Paul and commit sections to memory, the more convinced I become that we (at least in my tradition) have woefully underestimated and undervalued the Holy Spirit. I think this error explains much of our lovelessness & disunity. Because...
the truth is, we are fully capable of loving people who are very different from us. My guess is, we do it all the time. We have generous margin for loving people who do not know Christ. The peculiar irony is that we tolerate little difference in one another in the family of God.
If we are in different camps of Christianity, one another’s mistakes are permanent. On record. We save screenshots & time them for reposting “gotchas.” Apologies aren’t enough. We’re all deeply flawed. How will we ever grow if there is no safety to make mistakes & get past them?
Anyway, I was just thinking about this because I’m on a walk going over some Scripture memory and pondering how differently this would go if we were teeming with the life of the Holy Spirit. We’d literally have a divine capacity for “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness...”
This climate concerns me for young leaders. Back in the day, people had to be serious enough about their complaint to go to the trouble to write a letter, find the address, get a stamp & mail it. Pause was built into the process. There is no pause now. We think it, we say it.
The Holy Spirit would be our pause. David said to the Lord, “Before a word is on my tongue, You already know it.” For those in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, we have a built in voice of conviction. “You sure you wanna say that?”Just thinking out loud there’s gotta be a better way.
