The Holy Spirit (Part 1)

THE SERVANT CENTRIC DISCIPLE

The Holy Spirit (Part 1)

Jesus said, “ that the greatest in heaven will be the servant of all.” It is the inherent nature of God’s perfect love to serve. We see this servant love in God the creator who loved us so much that He gave (served) us His son. We see this servant love when we look at Jesus who did not come to be served, but to serve. We see this servant love in the Holy Spirit who convicts, teaches, and comforts in truth so that we too may live in unity with them. This is the God-in-Three who dwell in the unity of perfectly expressed love. This God created us in their image that we too may be in union with them. With this in mind, God did not create us to be outside slaves to His will. He created us so we could love freely in the unity of His will. This great and perfect love is then wholly served and is served wholly by all within this unified body.

We were born to serve. In the book of Romans the Apostle Paul makes that fact clear. We are slaves to our own (sinful) nature or servants to God’s nature, by the Holy Spirit. There is no escape or recourse from this fate. We will either act out of our inherent selfish desires leading to ever increasing separation (sin), or we will serve the Father and draw near. Jesus chose the latter. He successfully conquered sin and death by completely yielding his life to the Holy Spirit. If we too are to escape a life of endless sin (self-absorption), then we have only one choice and that is to follow Jesus’ footsteps and become yielded to the Holy Spirit.

When we become Christians we have ceased yielding to one master and have begun to do the will of a new Master. We have said “no“ to a life of self-serving desire and have said “yes” to serve the desire of the Holy Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit’s goal is no less than to grow us into a place of unity with God, whose purpose is to bring all into the unity of His love. This is the ministry of reconciliation that the Apostle Paul speaks of. While we are here on this earth this ministry is the goal of the Holy Spirit and subsequently our service. If the nature of sin is to grow self, then the nature of the Father ’s love is in contrast to grow a community of “us.” God builds this community by growing relationships (us) in grace with truth. Our service to the Holy Spirit will be to allow Him to transform us by His grace and truth, so that we can learn to serve (participate in) this everlasting community.

There is a problem; our hearts are addicts to sin and primarily serve only in fulfilling self. Our inherent selfish nature makes our service to God futile. When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, they went from the “Eternal Us” (abiding in God) to the “Mortal I” (self). The original internal voice shifted from “What can I do for us” to the singular “What’s in it for me. ” The context of their relational position and thinking shifted from God’s love (it’s about us) to selfish desire (it’s about me). Adam and Eve exercised their gift of freewill to be independent of God. Once freewill is exercised in this manner we have not the power to go back. The same freewill that made it possible for our eternal souls to love freely is now in bondage to self-centric sin. The reference point of our soul is no longer “us,” but stuck and bound to self-referenced self-centered control. This is the “black hole” of sin that draws us ever inward to eternal relational death (hell). So God, because of His great love, did what we could not do. He brought us out of bondage to sin and bound us back to Him. He gave us Jesus Christ’s life and death so that we could become free once more to choose whom we will serve.

We cannot make the transition back to abiding with God without the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit that binds “us” eternally together. He is the link between each of our individual free wills so that we may all be unified in the Spirit of God. As Jesus demonstrated and taught, we too must say “yes” with our hearts to the Holy Spirit’s authority in our lives. In doing so, we receive acknowledgement from God the Father by our “adoption as sons” as the Apostle Paul puts it. As His children we are again “one body.” We have become servants in a family of servants. Once more we are able to go about the Father’s business, the business of tending and being tended in the garden of His perfect love.