A Christ-Centered, Spirit Led Life

A Teaching in Need of Recovery

In Keep in Step with the Spirit: Finding Fullness in Our Walk with God [affiliate link], J. I. Packer argued “the New Testament’s Christ-centered view of the ministry of the Holy Spirit needs to be recovered.”

What would result?

Packer states:

It would bring fellowship with Christ right to the center of our worship and devotion. It would make that fellowship the key factor in any definitions we offered of our Christian identity. It would give new substance to the time-honored description of a Christian as one who “loves the Lord,” and the description would then fit us in a way that just at present it hardly does. Recovery at this point would set us seeking a deeper experiential realization of the love of Christ, according to Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3:14-19, so bringing us back into line with saints of former days. Also it would stop us mistaking Christian Pharisaism, legalistically preoccupied with moral standards and stopping there, for the holiness of those who walk with their Savior and grow like him. It would stop us from ascribing to the Spirit any of the current forms of supernaturalist superstition that while offering themselves as religion, leads minds and hearts away from Christ rather than toward him. It would stop us from glibly claiming that the Spirit prompts programs, in or outside the church, in which the unique glory of Christ the Redeemer is obscured instead of being exalted and celebrated. And it would help us realize that the sin that in this era of the gospel should be seen as most scandalous of all is unbelief concerning our crucified and now vindicated Savior (see John 16:8-11). It would give us a jealousy for Christ’s honor that would change our whole way of thinking about both the church and the world. Would these changes be for the better? I think so, and I hope you agree.

Packer wrote these words in 1984.

I do agree, for I believe that the Christian life is more than knowledge of the Bible or the ability to articulate certain doctrinal formulations accurately or even a commitment to a certain ethic. The Christian life is certainly not less than these things, but it is much more. I believe the Christian life is a life devoted to Jesus, one in which a person walks with God as a friend and companion, keeping in step with the Spirit. It is a life of relationship between persons, human and divine.

Book Notes

Still reading Ron Chernow’s Washington. It’s a big book.

I began another big book, Matthew Continetti’s The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. It’s a history. It’s very clearly written. It’s about so much more than Ronald Reagan. It shows that current trends in American politics are not new. It shows that the history of American conservatism is weird and diverse. Just like today! There have been kooks and quackery all along—just like on the American left. There have been solid intellectual ideas, too. I prefer the conservative set of ideas over the alternative. I think they comport more fully with human nature, and reality.

I’ve found The Right helpful, even good.

I finished James Bryan Smith’s latest book in The Apprentice Series, The Good and Beautiful You and reviewed it for the Baptist Standard.

I finished Jason Baxter’s The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis. It was insightful, but not for everyone. If I hadn’t requested it as a review copy, I may have put it down about a third of the way through. There is one essay in this book, on the influence of Dante, which is divine.

I finished a volume in the Crossway Short Classics series, B. B. Warfield’s The Emotional Life of Our Lord.

I also finished reading Douglas Murray’s The War on the West. Last newsletter I said that the self-loathing really needs to stop. If it is allowed to continue, we’ll throw the baby out with the bathwater. That won’t be an improvement.

I’m about 60% of the way through What is My Calling? A Biblical and Theological Exploration of Christian Identity by William W. Klein and Daniel J. Steiner. This book offers an important recalibration: our discourse on calling needs to be brought more closely into alignment with what the Scriptures say about calling, which is the universal and general call to holiness in Christ Jesus. But it does have a weakness. In an effort to restrict call language to the totality of our life with God (in the ultimate sense), the authors seem to lose the ability to talk about the discernment of God’s will and heeding to God’s direction, or, “walking by the Spirit.”

I’ve just begun Michelle Ule’s Mrs. Oswald Chambers: The Woman Behind the World’s Bestselling Devotional.

Sights and Sounds

No new movies this past week. No television, either. My daughter is watching Dude Perfect on YouTube and man, I wish those guys could go more than two minutes without yelling.

That’s right: “Get off my lawn.”

My music selections have included Wilco’s Cruel Country, Pharis and Jason Romero’s Tell’em You Were Gold, and Fortunate Ones’ That Was You and Me (still).

Last Words

On the blog: I wrote a review of a new issue of Spurgeon and the Psalms, shared a joke that I found funny, reflected on calling (in relation to the book mentioned above), and relayed a quote about the humanity of Jesus.

Before I go, standard copy.

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Be well this week. Bless others.

Best,

BAS

P.S. - Was this a good capital investment?