Dual Purpose

Had a great comment from Monday's post about the function or purpose of the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit functions to make our character like Christ's and through our character we become better equipped to witness of the reality of Jesus.  There are power encounters that deepen and strengthen our confidence to go and make disciples as Jesus commanded us.  Those encounters are for us, but also for others.  There is always a dual purpose, because our lives are not one-dimensional.  If Jesus said the kingdom rests on loving God and loving others, as we love ourselves, then our experiences in the Spirit are for us to be loved/blessed/transformed, in order that we may love/bless/transform others. 

Sunday we begin a 3-week portion of the Dehydrated series on the nine dimensions of the character of the Spirit, often called the fruit of the Spirit.  We will be taking a deeper look at Galatians 5 and study how our lives are to be lived in Christ. Too many times on studies on the Holy Spirit people want to focus first on power and gifts, but gifts without character, power without love, Paul says is WORTHLESS.  So we are starting with the foundation of who we are, our being, so that out of who we are can flow the doing part of our life - our gifting. When we do this, we find a balance to our existence.  Dehydration means your body is out of balance - not enough coming into the body in relationship to what is going out; same is true for the Church - we are out of balance because we often highlight one over the other, gifts over fruit or fruit over gifts and miss wholeness which the Holy Spirit came to bring as our Counselor and Comforter.  It is not an either-or, but a both-and reality.  You have to have both functioning in your life to reach your full potential in Christ. 

I am going old school Sunday and pulling out the ole whiteboard and will TEACH not preach...yeah right, I will get a little loud somewhere along the way!  See you Sunday @ 929 or 1101 for week 2 of Dehydrated - invite, invite, invite! Know Christ; Make Him known!

bmh

Comments

[Tiffany]

Thank you for the two posts you've made. They were helpful in explaining what you taught this past Sunday and they led me into what will be taught tomorrow. I am looking forward to it.