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This is an excerpt from Larry Shallenberger's new book Divine Intention: How God's Work in the Early Church Empowers Us Today . Click here to read part one.
Breathing God
When God the Father sent the Holy Spirit to the believers at Pentecost, special effects—gale-force winds and firelike lights—accompanied his arrival. God wasn’t engaging in melodramatic showmanship; he was supplying his people with instructive relational word pictures.
Commentator F. F. Bruce sees the galelike sound that filled the disciples’ house as an allusion to Ezekiel 37.1 Ezekiel’s surreal vision was probably set in Gehenna, a valley outside of Jerusalem that was converted into a garbage dump. The corpses of the criminals and the poor were often discarded at Gehenna. Fires were constantly lit there to burn off the disease and stench. In Ezekiel’s vision God breathed life into a pile of human bones that lay scattered on this heap. The bones sprang to life and regrouped into skeletons. Ezekiel watched in amazement as muscle, sinew, and skin reformed on these once lifeless bones until he saw an army before him.
Ezekiel was comparing sinful Israel to the fire-dried skeletons of Gehenna—Israel’s rebellion against God had drained it of all its life-giving marrow. The nation was without life or hope.
God told Ezekiel: “Prophesy over these bones: ‘Dry bones, listen to the Message of God!’ God, the Master, told the dry bones, ‘Watch this: I’m bringing the breath of life to you and you’ll come to life’” (Ezek. 37:4–5 MSG). Ezekiel spoke to the four winds, and they resuscitated the lifeless corpses and raised them to their feet as a mighty army.
God then turned his attention to lifeless Israel. He promised to revive Israel and fill his people with his breath: “And I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live” (Ezek. 37:14 ESV).
F. F. Bruce is hinting that when the highly Scripture-literate believers in the room experienced the sound of the rushing wind, their minds likely made a connection with Ezekiel’s vision and the way God had breathed life into his people. The rushing wind let the first believers know that “breathing in God” was a key to life in the Spirit. This metaphor helps us understand and express our relationship with the Holy Spirit in the language of dependency. The Holy Spirit offers life; we inhale the Spirit as if our spiritual life depended on it. Leonard Sweet, in his book SoulSalsa, writes,
The word spirituality comes from the Latin spiritus, which means “breath of life.” In Hebrew it is ruah; in Greek, pneuma; in English, wind or breath. The body is God-breathed. It cannot help but breathe with regularity. The soul must will itself to breathe and live. It gasps for air until it finds breath.2
God animated Adam by breathing into him. Since that day, we stay animated by breathing in God.
Imagine a person in a hospital with a respirator forcing air into her lungs. Every life-giving breath is a gift from the life support machine. If the machine were to become unplugged, the woman lying on the table would die in minutes.
This is the type of dependency you and I need to learn in order to experience the abundant life God desires for us.
We breathe in God’s moral nature because our own goodness is not enough to sustain us.
We breathe in God’s wisdom because our own ideas leave us stifled.
We breathe in God’s strength because our muscles have cramped from living an anaerobic life.
Mike, the pastor who works one office down from me, is the best example I know of a person who strives to breathe in God every moment. Mike knows how many times in the book of Acts it says that the Holy Spirit led or guided someone to do something. Mike reminds me to stop trying to do God’s will without stopping to hear from the Holy Spirit. He is convinced that if he stops and listens, God will breathe a whisper into his heart and tell him what to do next.
I could stand to be more like Mike. We all could.
At this point in the chapter it’s tempting for me to lapse into a behavioral modification program and give you “Nine Steps for a Better Relationship with God.” I could remind you to set your alarm for 6:00 a.m. so you have time to read the Word or keep a prayer journal, etc. The problem is that relationships can’t be reduced to mere checklists. It’s possible for me to buy Amy flowers on the first of the month, have a date with her on the second and fourth Thursdays, and take out the trash faithfully every morning. But our relationship can’t be reduced to the sum of those behaviors. The same is true of our relationship with God.
Instead, we must ask ourselves, does our relationship with the Holy Spirit work like breathing does?
A few years ago, I trained in tae kwon do. There’s so much to think about when learning a martial art—how to stand, the body mechanics of kicking, how to position the arms to protect the torso, the proper footwork—that it’s entirely possible to forget to take in deep, regular breaths. Early in my training I found myself winded because I didn’t remember to breathe. I have a similar experience with my spirituality; I can get so consumed with the mechanics of discipleship—that divine to-do list—that I forget to breathe. You see, we can get so caught up with the “doings” of faith that we forget to just take in God.
Don’t scramble to make an action plan. Just hold this breathing metaphor against your relationship with the Holy Spirit, and test it for fit. Does this word picture resonate with your personal experience, or does it just cause dissonance?
If the metaphor doesn’t fit you well, try asking the Holy Spirit some questions: “Now what?” “Where do I go from here?”
Tell the Holy Spirit how you are feeling about your relationship with him. Ask him for help.
Then trust the Holy Spirit to be your live-giving air supply. Trust him to tell you what he thinks about the relationship, how he would like to guide you, and how he would like to direct your prayers. I guarantee that if you listen, if you breathe him in, he will fill you with his answers.
The Burning Bush
New Testament scholar F. F. Bruce sees another allusion to the Old Testament in the Acts account of Pentecost. Luke wrote that a luminous, firelike object hovered over the head of every believer present (Acts 2:3). Bruce sees God placing these lights over the disciples’ heads as a way to get the eyewitnesses of the event, as well as Luke’s first-century readers, to understand their relationship with the Holy Spirit through the metaphor of Moses’ burning bush.
The burning bush is a symbol to help us understand that the Holy Spirit works through our brokenness. For instance, in Exodus chapter 3, God used a burning bush to end the alienation of Moses from himself, his people, and his God.
Moses fled Egypt because he killed a slave master in a misguided attempt to liberate his people. He fled from Pharaoh and his royal destiny to work as a shepherd and live a peaceful life in exile. God watched Moses languish for forty years and then arrested his attention with a burning bush. Moses took notice of the bush because it was covered in flames but wasn’t consumed by them. God’s voice emanated from the middle of this impossible scene.
This scrawny desert scrub coexisting with fire was a living metaphor of what Moses was about to become as God’s spokesman. Moses was the epitome of human brokenness. He had fallen from his lofty position as an Egyptian prince and had reduced himself to the lowly position of a murderer and a fugitive. Moses’ failures had robbed him of his security and confidence. In Acts 7:22, Stephen reports that “Moses was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, and he was mighty in his words and deeds” (ESV). Yet at the burning bush, Moses had no confidence in his ability or skills as an orator.
Moses was arguing with God at the scene of his defining life moment—the burning bush. Moses would be broken, like the sun-baked bush with gnarled roots scratching for rumors of water in the surrounding rocks. God would surround him with the blaze of his power and glory. The division of labor between God and Moses was clear: “Moses, you be weak. I’ll be strong.”
Now, millennia later, on the day of Pentecost, God was offering the same division of labor to the men and women in the upper room. The offer was made to individuals like Peter, a man once filled with self-confidence but now broken by the knowledge that he was capable of serial disloyalty toward God’s Son; to the other disciples who had deserted Jesus and hid for their lives; to a crowded room full of people who were now cut off from worshipping in the temple. The “tongues of fire” over their heads were an invitation to become burning bushes. They would be broken; the Holy Spirit would be strong and glorious. They were frail, weak, and flawed people, yet still capable of burning for the Holy Spirit.
When those disciples exited the upper room, stepped into the streets, and began speaking to the multinational crowd in their own languages, God immediately made good on his “burning bush” offer. And the burning bush metaphor defined their relationship with the Holy Spirit throughout the book of Acts. Throughout Acts, ordinary and imperfect men and women were used by God to accomplish his purposes.
The burning bush metaphor continues to define the relationship between Christ-followers and the Holy Spirit. God offers us the same division of labor he offered Moses, Peter, and the other disciples of the upper room. We get to be weak and broken, and he gets to burn through us without destroying us.
This is hard stuff for someone who grew up defining his self-concept by excelling at religion. I once dominated a popular game in evangelical junior high subculture known as “Bible Quizzing.” Bible quizzing worked like a game show. Every year youth group teams would immerse themselves in a prescribed book of the Bible, preparing for the quiz. Once a month rows of adolescents sat in metal folding chairs with electronic pads on them. The quizmaster would read the beginning of a verse. When a quizzer believed he could finish the verse perfectly, he would jump off his pad, breaking the electronic circuit and turning on the light that identified the quizzer as first. If the quizzer could finish the verse without errors, he or she would be awarded points. I almost always ended every quiz night the high point scorer.
Unfortunately, quizzing was the way I related to God well into my adult life. I tried to earn worth before God with my religious performance, my ability to “finish the verse.” Unconsciously, church life became a competitive event. I felt okay before God if I could collect the most religious points.
It has been a long process for me to realize that God has no interest in being my divine Quizmaster. He’s not interested in my compulsive drive to accumulate points in my self-constructed system of invisible pads and circuits. God wants to have a relationship with the real me—the broken bush.
The Holy Spirit is interested in having an authentic relationship with us. He has no interest in interfacing with our religious pretenses and fictions. The Holy Spirit is waiting to meet Christ-followers who are painfully aware of their limits, quirks, and moral shortfalls, so that he can overcome them. He is actively seeking those who will present all of their brokenness to him and allow him to burn a signal fire over it.
The Temple
The final metaphor in Acts 2 that helps us understand what a relationship with the Holy Spirit is like is “the temple.” This metaphor explains how special and valuable we are in the Holy Spirit’s eyes.
In Judaism, the Jerusalem temple was the geographic center of worship. The temple was lavish and ornate. In fact, when Solomon built the temple, he underestimated the cost of construction and had to give King Hiram of Tyre several cities on the Israeli frontier to cover the construction cost overages. During the dedication ceremony of the original temple, God told Solomon:
I have heard the prayer and plea you have made before me; I have consecrated this temple, which you have built, by putting my Name there forever. My eyes and my heart will always be there. (1 Kings 9:3)
Worship at the temple was the centerpiece of Judaism. And now, during the Feast of Pentecost, Jerusalem swelled as Jewish pilgrims from all over the known world returned to their holy city so they could present their offerings there. The whole nation came to worship at the temple.
However, the roughly 120 believers wedged into the house, waiting for the Holy Spirit, were unwelcome to worship in their beloved temple, just blocks away from their covert gathering. They had been ostracized as a result of following Jesus. They were pariahs, cut off from God’s meeting place of choice, divorced from their religious heritage. The priest viewed them as perverse heretics, not fit for worshipping God at the sacred temple.
The Holy Spirit responded by taking up residence in the believers themselves. Instead of God’s glory lighting the Jerusalem temple, the Holy Spirit claimed the bodies of Jesus’ followers as the place he would fill with his presence. These so-called pariahs were worthy of so much more than outward worship—they were worthy of the inward presence of God. God’s eyes and heart would permanently belong to this band of believers who chose to follow his Son.
Having a relationship with the Holy Spirit is like being a temple, the locus of God’s love, presence, and attention. No longer must we go somewhere or do something to meet God. In the chambers of our thoughts, emotions, and personality—this is where God wants to hear our prayers, dreams, confessions, and worship. If we are Christ-followers, then we are living temples, the recipients of divine attention. We are the objects of God’s focus and people in whom God invests his passions and love. We may have earned other labels over the course of our lives—outcasts, losers, trash—but to God, we are a temple, the place in which he chooses to dwell. It is in us and through us that he intends to make known his presence to the world.
If you’ve spent any time in the church, you’re probably reminded of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. The Corinthians had become tolerant of sexually immoral relationships in their midst, so Paul wrote to remind them that they were God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwelled in them. Paul was appealing to their temple status as the basis to clean up their acts. You may be thinking, Aha, this is where relationship ends, and Christianity as a behavioral modification program begins. Paul had his checklist; faith isn’t about grace after all, but performance.
That isn’t what Paul was driving at. Let me explain. Recently, I noticed that a coworker was making subtle changes to her appearance. She started styling her hair differently and using more makeup. She changed the way she dressed. New sweaters were added to her wardrobe. When I saw her, I could tell something was different, but I couldn’t place it. (I’m not the most perceptive male in the world.) But then it dawned on me; she was in love. There was a man out there somewhere (actually, he worked part-time at the church—I told you, I’m not very perceptive) who began to tell this woman how special and loved she was. And she responded to that message by beginning to treat herself with an increased sense of value.
You see, if we’re truly in love with someone and we know that person loves us, our lives will start to reflect that fact. This is what Paul was driving at. He was reminding the Corinthians that God was crazy about them, that it was within them that he wanted to meet with them and be worshipped by them. Paul sensed that they had forgotten their value in God’s eyes, and he was attempting to help them recapture that realization.
Yes, having a relationship with the Holy Spirit involves moral change. However, that change should stem from knowing how much God values us, not from a lifetime of jumping to the verbal promptings of some religious quizmaster.
Formula or Life?
An Indian mystic once likened spiritual life to a bird. We can examine a bird, count its feathers, and even dissect it in an attempt to understand it. However, this reductionism kills the bird. The same is true of the abundant life. We mistakenly assume that if we can reduce spiritual life to a list of behaviors, or formulas, that somehow we will gain control of it. But all we end up doing is stifling new life—one that is lived in relationship with the Holy Spirit—in favor of enslaving ourselves to our own disciplines.
In Searching for God Knows What, Donald Miller describes this new relationship:
I have this suspicion, however, that if we are going to get to know God, it is going to be a little more like getting to know a person than practicing voodoo. And I suppose that means we are going to have to get over this fear of intimacy, or whatever you want to call it, in order to have an ancient sort of faith, the faith shared by all the dead apostles.3
We don’t need religious voodoo to help us navigate a relationship with the Holy Spirit. We are trying to befriend an invisible, all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent Spirit; and while that seems to be a formidable task, remember that this Spirit is more committed than we are to the relationship. In his commitment to us, he defined our friendship with three markers in Acts 2: dependency, authenticity, and value. Now go forth and live! Strive for that genuine relationship with the Holy Spirit, and all else will fall into place.
Questions for Further Reflection and Discussion
1. Do you feel as though you’ve been missing out on the abundant life that God has in store for you? What do you feel is holding you back? What did you see in this reading that can help you break free from this slump?
2. Acts 2 offers three metaphors for understanding a relationship with the Holy Spirit—breathing, a burning bush, and a temple. Which of these metaphors best describes your relationship with the Holy Spirit? Where could you use some improvement? What do you think can help you attain that? How often do you have conversations with the Holy Spirit?
3. What do you think would happen if you started asking the Holy Spirit, “Now what?” and “Where do I go from here?”
4. The burning bush metaphor seems to imply that we must be honest with God about who we truly are. How easy or hard is that for you? Why?
5. Take some time in prayer to ask God how he thinks you’re doing in your relationship with him. Now simply be silent and listen to God’s response, taking note of the things he brings to mind and heart.
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1. F. F. Bruce, The New International Commentary on the New Testament: The Book of Acts, revised edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1954/1990), 50.
2. Leonard Sweet, SoulSalsa (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 143.
3. Donald Miller, Searching for God Knows What (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 17.
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