The Incoming of the Holy Spirit

Acts 2:38

Peter said to them, "Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit."

How often have you heard it used? This notion of "spirituality" is seen as most positive. One of the highest accolades that can be given to a person is to refer to him or her as living a life marked by "great spirituality."

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But just what does that word mean?

It can mean just about anything, can't it?

This was driven home to me back in January when I was in Washington, D.C. I was engaged in an extremely intense conversation with a woman who prides herself in being one of the most liberal members of the United States Senate. She told how she had been raised in Roman Catholic background and had been taught Roman Catholic theology by Jesuit scholars. Throughout the years, she had noted some needs in her own life and, much to her amazement, had been fascinated by two of her Republican Senate colleagues, with whom she had very little in common ideologically, whose lives conveyed to her a kind of deep "spirituality and serenity" for which she wistfully aspired. She said, "I wondered if they practiced yoga, deep breathing or something like that. I went to each of them and asked about the source of their spirituality, their serenity. Each of them quite frankly shared that it came from their personal, daily relationship with Jesus Christ. They invited me to the Bible study led by then Chaplain of the Senate, Dr. Lloyd Ogilvie. I discovered what the nuns had hinted about in my Catholic childhood and only recently have I come to understand more fully."

The fact of life today is that many people talk about spirituality. Many people yearn for spirituality. But the definition of that concept can range all the way from the historic Christian understanding of what it is to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, that is nurtured in the present tense by the power of the Person of the Holy Spirit in one's life, to some kind of vague Oriental mysticism, some New-Age yoga phenomenon.

Eugene Peterson, who has given us that wonderful paraphrase of the Bible, which we know as The Message, addresses the possibility of an empty spirituality in the March 22, 2003 issue of The Christian Century in an article titled "Missing Ingredient." He writes:

The missing component in today's pervasive spirituality is often one word — Jesus.

Today's concept of spirituality is that of a mostly abstract and often trivialized commodity in which God is reduced to an object, idea, or project useful to man. Without the involvement of Jesus, that spirituality communicates little of the sense of life and breath implicit in God and His Spirit. Jesus gives God-breathed life, muscle, sinews, shape, and form to spirituality because His name means "God saves."