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Scripture of the Day: Galatians 5:16-17

So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.

For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that you do not do what you want. (NIV)

Being God’s future in the present can appear impercitable at times.

NT Wright said:  First, the obvious retort. ‘It doesn’t look like that to me!’ Most of us, thinking even of those Christians to whom we look up as examples, find it difficult to imagine that this person really is a walking Temple, a place where heaven and earth meet. Most of us have even more difficulty thinking of ourselves in that way. We certainly find it hard, looking at all the tragic nonsense that has marred the history of Christianity, to see the church as a whole in this light. But the counter-retort is equally obvious to anyone who knows the writings of St Paul. He could see the failings of the church, and of individual Christians, just as much as we can. And it is in one of the letters where those failings are most embarrassingly obvious – the first letter to Corinth – where he makes the claim. You corporately, he says to the whole church, are God’s Temple, and God’s Spirit dwells within you (3.16). That’s why the unity of the church matters so much. Your bodies, he says to them one by one, are Temples of the Holy Spirit within you (6.19). That’s why bodily holiness, not least sexual holiness, matters so much. Could it be that we need to recapture Paul’s bracing teaching about our vocation to be Temples of the Holy Spirit?

That helps to explain why too often we are reflection of our own society rather than the age to come. We by default, just like the disciples, in the habits we have acquired respond like everyone else.

I hope it is clear by now that what is on offer through the gift of God’s own Spirit is nothing less than the anticipation of new creation, the time when heaven and earth will be one, when the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. This is at the heart of all Christian mission in the world and all Christian living. We summarize it as “Living and sharing the gospel.”

Message for the Day Holy Spirit

Scripture of the Day: 2 Corinthians 5:17

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come. (NIV)

So what does it mean to say that this future has begun to arrive in the present? What Paul means is that those who follow Jesus, those who find themselves believing that he is the world’s true Lord, that he rose from the dead – these people are given the Spirit as a foretaste of what that new world will be like.

Jesus, whom we share with the disciples , is a revelation of what the future is like.

Remember: The Spirit is given so that we, ordinary mortals that we are, can ourselves be, in a measure, what Jesus himself was:

part of God’s future arriving in the present; (Kingdom is amongst you)

a place where heaven and earth meet; (The Temple of God)

the means of God’s kingdom going forwards.

The Spirit is given, in fact, so that the church can share in the life and continuing work of Jesus himself, now that he has gone into God’s dimension, i.e. heaven.

If anyone is ‘in the Messiah’, what they have and are is a new creation!

Your own human self, your personality, your body, is being reclaimed, so that instead of being simply part of the old creation, a place of sorrow and injustice and ultimately the shame of death itself, you can be both part of the new creation in advance and someone through whom it begins to happen here and now.

Message for the Day Holy Spirit

Scripture of the Day: Ephesians 1:14

who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory (NIV)

That is why Paul, our earliest Christian writer, speaks of the Spirit as the guarantee or the down-payment of what is to come. The Greek word he uses is arrabon, which in modern Greek means an engagement-ring, a sign in the present of what is to come in the future.

Paul speaks of the Spirit as the guarantee of our ‘inheritance’

The major biblical theme upon which Paul is drawing when he speaks of the ‘inheritance’ to come, of which the Spirit is given as a first installment, is the Exodus story, in which Israel is rescued from Egypt and goes off to the promised land. Canaan, the land we now call the Holy Land, was their promised ‘inheritance’, the place where they would live as God’s people, where – provided they maintained their side of the covenantal agreement – God would live with them and they with God.

As both the foretaste of that promise, and the means by which they were led to inherit it, God went with them in the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, the strange holy Presence which guided and directed their wanderings and grieved over their rebellions on the way.

So when Paul speaks of the Spirit in the present as the ‘guarantee of our inheritance’, he is evoking, as Jesus himself had done in the transfiguration, this whole Exodus tradition, the story which began with Passover, the tabernacling in the wilderness and ended with the Promised Land, in order to say: You are now the people of the true Exodus. You are now on your way to your inheritance. But that inheritance isn’t simply one small country among others.

The whole world is now God’s holy land. At the moment it appears as a place of suffering and sorrow as well as of power and beauty. But God is reclaiming it. That is what Jesus’ death and resurrection were all about. And you are called to be part of that reclaiming.

One day all creation will be rescued from slavery, from the corruption, decay and death which deface its beauty, destroy its relationships, remove the sense of God’s presence from it, and make it a place of injustice, violence and brutality. That rescue, that transformation, is the message at the heart of one of the greatest chapters Paul ever wrote, the eighth chapter of the Letter to the Romans.

Message for the Day Holy Spirit