If you haven’t read part 1 from November 2 make sure you do so before continuing …
Here is my specific “fuss”: if a person wants affirmation and acceptance for their condition of fruitlessness there are only one of three ways we can do that. There are only three options that will allow us to unconditionally affirm, be excited about, and wholeheartedly accept fruitlessness in a professing Christians’ life.
First, one possibility is that the Holy Spirit just isn’t able to produce any fruit; the Holy Spirit is not able to make someone holy, that is why there is little to no change. Since it is all about grace, all about faith, all about God’s working, then surely we must place the blame on God and His Spirit, right?
I hope that just reading that last paragraph makes you sick to your stomach. Can you see the offensiveness and disrectfulness torward God in that suggestion? Can you see how little that makes of God’s Spirit, God’s power, and God’s promises? I am unwilling to affirm fruitlessness due to the Spirit’s failure. It is simply unacceptable to propose that the Holy Spirit is unable to bring about fruit in a person’s life. Nowhere do we find incompetence or insufficiency as descriptions of the Spirit in Scripture, in fact, the exhaustive testimony of Scripture is exactly the opposite. So this “possibility” is no real possibility at all.
Or perhaps there is a second possibility, namely that a person is just not submitting to the Holy Spirit. If we acknowledge that the Holy Spirit can make a person more and more holy and if we recognize that God promises in Scripture to make us more and more holy by His Spirit, then any lack of fruit must be our failure to listen and submit to Him. Again, if we affirm His ability then we must confess our responsibility.
Are we to welcome a defense like this? Is willful rebellion to the Spirit to be condoned by the church? No! May it never be! Failure to yeild to and be filled with and walk in the Spirit is … sin. Defiance of the Spirit is disobedience, and disobedience leads to death. So we cannot affirm lack of fruitfulness for this reason.
So if the Holy Spirit is able to produce fruit (and He is) then excusing fruitlessness by faulting Him does does not work. And if Christians are responsible to submit to the Spirit who promises to produce fruit (and we are) then excusing fruitlessness by defending someone’s deliberate disobedience does not work.
That brings us to the final possibility, that the person doesn’t have the Spirit in the first place. They may not yet be believers. They may still be a “natural man,” not yet baptized by the Spirit. If there is no fruit of the Spirit, perhaps that is because the peron has not been born of the Spirit.
But I cannot get excited about this either! I do not want to unconditionally affirm a person by passing over their greatest need. I am not interested in accepting a person that Christ has not accepted. We should not treat non-Christians like there are no risks for their unrighteousness.
If the ultimate goal of this ministry is to “present every man complete in Christ” for the sake of His glory then if someone isn’t a Christian we don’t sit back like the work is finished. Instead we commit to praying and preaching the gospel in order that God may deliver than from the domain of darkness, grant them faith and repentance, and begin to bring about the obedience of faith.
The Holy Spirit is able, we need to submit to the Spirit’s work, and if someone isn’t a Christian we want to be responsible instruments of God’s working that they might become Christians.
So affirming people who have no spiritual fruit in their lives is the wrong thing to do. In saying this, I am not condoning that it is alright for us to act in a non-spiritual way. This “non-affirmation” must still be done by us “in the Spirit,” that is, done with love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, longsuffering, etc.
People who profess to have the Holy Spirit while at the same time have none of the Spirit’s fruit mock God. But God will not be mocked.
By the way, there isn’t a “get out of the Spirit” pass for teenagers. I realize that young adults are growing and maturing both physically and spiritually, but a person who professes Christ as Savior and who professes to possess the Holy Spirit should walk by the Spirit no matter their age. There is no biblical instruction (let alone implication) that the Holy Spirit saves but does not start producing fruit in teenagers. The same biblical expectations for spiritual living apply regardless of a person’s age.
OK, enough of that for now.
I assume some of you have probably recognized the title for these past two blogs as the title of another Steven Curtis Chapman song by the same name. It seemed appropriate to give those lyrics here:
Well I got myself a t shirt that says what I believe I got letters on my bracelet to serve as my id I got the necklace and the key chain And almost everything a good christian needs yeah I got the little Bible magnets on my refrigerator door And a welcome mat to bless you before you walk across my floor I got a jesus bumper sticker And the outline of a fish stuck on my car And even though this stuff’s all well and good yeah I cannot help but ask myself (chorus) What about the change What about the difference What about the grace What about forgiveness What about a life that’s showing I’m undergoing the change yeah I’m undergoing the change Well I’ve got this way of thinking that comes so naturally Where I believe the whole world is revolving around me And I got this way of living that I have to die to every single day ’cause if God’s spirit lives inside of me yeah I’m gonna live life differently I’m gonna have the change I’m gonna have the difference I’m gonna have the grace I’m gonna have forgiveness I’m gonna live a life that’s showing I’m undergoing the change (chorus)