Thursday, Oct. 27

For an audio version of this, click here.

Thursday

When I was a boy, my parents’ would occasionally have important guests come over to our house to visit.  I vividly recall how my mother would put us all to work cleaning the house from top to bottom in preparation for our guests.  I never really understood why my mother felt the need to dust out of the way places that nobody ever saw, but then again, 12 year old boys aren’t much into dusting at all.  Once the house was clean, my mother would remind us kids that we were to be on our “best behavior” when our guests arrived.  I can admit that as a child I really did not get what all of the fuss was about.  However, now that I am an adult, I understand that it was the significance of the one who was coming over that caused us to want to clean things up inside and out. 

I realize that this is not a perfect analogy, but it is not unlike what the Apostle Paul means when he says in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.

Paul is saying that as Christians we have a divine resident, a permanent house-guest in our lives, the Holy Spirit.  Most people do not live as if we are not our own, most people live as if they are their own, and they are in charge of their lives.  This is a basic Christian truth.  This is something every one of us ought to remember every day of our lives.  You have no final right to yourself.  God has ordered things so that we should have decisions that we have to make, and only we can make them. He does not take away our right of choice. He does not turn us unto robots or automatons, but, he says, finally we will have to give an account for the decisions we make. 

God always reserves the right, because he has bought us, he owns us, we are his by right of creation and of purchase at the Cross, to send us where he wants us to go.  He reserves the right to take away from our life whatever he sees is harmful to us.  It is the role of the Holy Spirit to impress this truth upon us, to bring us to the point that we can acknowledge that God can give us both blessing and trouble alike as he sees that we need each, and to guide us as a loving Father to the place where we recognize that he owns us, we belong to him.

If we really understood the significance of this, we would want to live differently.  If we truly grasped the power of the one who lives in our hearts, just His presence alone would motivate us to pursue Godliness in every area of our lives.  The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives should be a powerful motivator us, but we have to be careful here not to make the mistake of thinking that the Holy Spirit is just a divine audience before whom we must perform well. 

I have a good friend who is also a pastor and he says that many Christians are guilty of what he calls the “Santaclausification of God”.  Too many Christians think of God like Santa-Claus; he sees you when you’re sleping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake! 

This is one of the most wonderful things about the Holy Spirit, He is not just watching to see if we are “good enough”.  He does not wait for us to get our spiritual lives “cleaned up” before He comes in.  No, He comes in the moment we trust Christ and He is the one who enables us to begin to clean things up inside and out!

Jeff Frazier