In 1 John 3:24, “we know that Jesus lives in us by the Spirit he gave us.” It’s the Spirit’s job, then, to help us know for real that Jesus is living in us – so how does the Spirit go about doing that?
According to Paul in Romans 8:13, it’s “by the Spirit that we put to death the misdeeds of the body” – because, Titus 2:13-14, this is what “Jesus gave his life for, to free us from our messed up lives, to clean us up and become his kind of people, totally committed to doing good.”
The Spirit, therefore, is like a house keeper, cleaning house, getting rid of the dirt, and doing whatever needs to be done to mature us into Christ’s likeness (Ephesians 4:13). Which fits Jesus’ own analogy in John 14:23, when he told his disciples, if “you obey my teaching” then “My Father will love you, and we’ll come to you and make our home with you.” The author of Hebrews says “we are his house” too (Hebrews 3:6), so the Spirit being the house keeper gives us a practical picture of what he’s been given to do, that in the doing makes Jesus living in us real.
Imagine ourselves, therefore, being a house where the Father and Jesus wish to reside. To begin with it’s a mess, left that way by the previous owner who filled the house with “gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts” (Ephesians 2:2-3). In every room there’s garbage that needs to be taken out and worthless trash destroyed. All those unhealthy appetites and desires on every shelf to be thrown in the bin. And in all the hidden corners, under the stairs, inside the closets, and all the places where cobwebs have grown on bad habits left unswept, the Spirit misses nothing. He works his way into every nook and cranny, wherever we’ve been “foolish, disobedient, deceived and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures, sucked in by malice and envy, hating and being hated,” Titus 3:3.
God, therefore, has given us a Spirit who is so practical in making Jesus real to us, because we know it when another room gets cleared out. He makes us aware of another layer of grime in us that needs a good scrubbing, or as Titus put it, there’s some obvious “washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit” going on (3:5), so that we know for real we’re “being transformed into Jesus’ likeness with ever-increasing glory,” 2 Corinthians 3:18.
Thanks to the Spirit, then, we’ll know “There’s a switch going on”….(next blog)
Buck To Basics 