INDWELLING HOLY SPIRIT

“Don’t you know that you yourself are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you

1 corith 3:16

Amazing verses. The word you, means a collective you, not the individual, but the communal you. That means you can’t be a believer by yourself. Just as Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, acted as a living temple, so now He commissions his disciples and us to be filled with the Holy Spirit and act in the world as living temples indwelled with the presence of God.

To paraphrase Paul, then – There is still a tabernacle. There's still a place in the world where God's glory dwells. It’s the church, not the building or structure or governance, but the collective lives of Jesus' followers. As a community that all call Jesus Lord are bound together by the Holy spirit.

Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in

1 corith 6:19

Here he is talking about individuals

The Holy Spirit has been given to us and to you.

Many believer’s look at their lives with the sober admission, If this life the one I’m experiencing right now is everything the resurrection made possible I’m underwhelmed” There is a troubling gap between biblical promise and the actual life of the modern disciple People flock in and out of churches ordering their lives around the teaching of Jesus building on the foundation of the Fathers love but totally unaware of how close this triune God has come, how entirely he has given himself to us. Widely respected Billy Graham once said. “Everywhere I go, I find God's people lacking something. They are hungry for something. The Christian experience is not all that they expected, and they often have recurring defeat in their lives. Christians today are hungry for spiritual fulfillment. The desperate need for people and the nation today is men and women who profess Jesus to be filled with the Holy Spirit ( quote from Tyler Station in his book The Familiar Stranger)

So true, the gospel of Luke opens with this phrase All the Jesus

began to do and to teach. The order is crucial to do and teach. Jesus frequently gave people an experience of God first, then explained the experience second. Western culture has reversed that. Teach me everything first, then maybe I'll be open to the experience. We often see our life in Jesus as being more about survival than about grace, adventure, and life-giving change, and preaching the gospel with signs and wonders through the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit.