“Any man who thinks he is a Christian and that he has accepted Christ for justification, when he did not at the same time accept Him for sanctification, is miserably deluded in that very experience.” (A.A. Hodge)
Jesus said that we must “receive the kingdom of God” as little children (Mark 10:15). What is received? The Church? Heaven? What is received is God’s rule. In order to enter the future realm of the Kingdom, one must submit himself in perfect trust to God’s rule here and now. We must also “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (Matt. 6: 33). What is the object of our quest? The Church? Heaven? No; we are to seek God’s righteousness—His sway, His rule, His reign in our lives.
(George Eldon Ladd, Gospel of the Kingdom: Scriptural Studies in the Kingdom of God)
The Difficult Journey
In the last chapter, we took a fresh look at the doctrine of salvation through the lens of the gospel of the Kingdom of God. The illustration we chose was Christ’s discourse with Nicodemus and it’s parallel in Ezekiel 36. Among the parallel threads between these two discourses regarding the birth from above were: 1.) receiving cleansing, 2.) receiving God’s own Spirit, and 3.) believing and obeying the will of God. We addressed in the last chapter the topic of cleansing through our justification and new birth through the blood of Jesus. Subsequently, here we will take a closer look at what Scripture means by receiving God’s own Spirit (John 3:5–6; cf. Ez. 36:27).
I began to touch on the root of this idea a little in the last chapter as we discussed what it means to deny ourselves, to lay down our lives in exchange for God’s life (John 17:22–23; Col. 1:27; Gal. 2:20). In effect, with the birth from above we cease to live in the world we were born into and live above it. The unseen infuses and transforms our seen existence as a matter of course, the way a body transforms and matures with the introduction of certain hormones and proper nutrition—in our case, the body and blood of Jesus (John 6:54–58). But, just like Jesus’ own illustration of bread was not completely adequate to the reality of feeding on Him for eternal life, so the illustration of growing-up does not perfectly match the experience of this new life.
Such great Christians as Augustine, Benedict, Bunyan, and Milton, along with the ancient Christian discipline of pilgrimage, saw greater reality of this growing process in the illustration of the Christian’s “spiritual journey”. Like an actual journey, with costs, challenges, dangers, and discomforts, the spiritual journey of the Christian is fraught with trials. It has a starting point and a final destination, but in between there is the long and difficult road. The difficulty of the road lies within ourselves—we’ve never lived in the Kingdom before, it’s landscape and atmosphere are completely new to our senses and although it is an altogether good home, we have to adapt to it. We’re like a salt-water fish adapting to fresh-water—we will adapt but it takes time and perseverance.
Paul illustrates the difficulty of this growth-process or journey as the war between the “flesh” and the “Spirit” (Rom. 8:1–39; Gal. 5:16–24). It bears saying, before going further into this topic, that Paul’s meaning in this illustration between flesh and Spirit is not a war between physical and spiritual realities, as in Platonic Dualism. Although Paul was well read in the Greek philosophy of his time, His first allegiance was to the Yahwism of Israel, which, as we’ve explored previously in Old Testament Creation theology, has a very high regard for the physical goodness of creation as established by YHWH. Although Paul’s choice of words may have a taste of dualism about them, He is drawing from a Hebrew well of meaning, especially in Galatians.
In Galatians 5, Paul addresses a group of young Chritians struggling to get their feet under them, failing to abide in the reality of the Kingdom over the reality of the world (flesh). To add to this, they’re caught up in religious bickering and legalisms, but Paul quickly sees through this smoke screen to the core issue, that of not walking by the Spirit.
But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do (Gal. 5:16–17).
In Paul’s thinking, the flesh is all of the human being, with all it’s habits, attitudes, and thought-patterns, still bent in submission to the rule and reign of sin. The justified, regenerate spirit of a person abiding in Christ is, by nature, in submission to the rule and reign of God in the Kingdom of God. But note, Paul is not imploring Christians to vaguely live spiritually, whatever that could mean. He is telling them to give up their present-day lifestyle in exchange for one in conformity with the desires of the Holy Spirit (v. 17). You can almost hear the words of Jesus ringing in Paul’s wording: “It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all.” (John 6:63). Paul is speaking in sync with Jesus in this case, that in order to come to the life of the Kingdom of God, the follower must deny themselves, take up their cross, “And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal. 5:24). To walk by the Spirit necessitates being dead to the flesh, our natural human tendencies and habits trained by sin—but is that realistically possible?
“Paralyzed by Grace”
This theme of crucifying the flesh in the Scriptures used to be one of the most painful for me to read over. I would come to texts like Galatians 3 or Romans 8 and be totally frustrated by the seeming unclear resolution. Do I still have to crucify my flesh after being saved, or is it already done and I’m good to go? I would tend to attach vague spiritual generalities to what Jesus or Paul meant by walking by the Spirit because, practically, it never felt like they gave me enough to go on. I subscribed to the common evangelical ruling of my time, basically, once you’re saved you’re going to continue to have a sin nature (flesh) warring inside you until you’re perfected when you die and go to heaven—we just have to persevere and make-due until we time out. Afterall, I’m justified by the blood of Jesus, so really everything after that is just additional seasoning—“bonus points” as I’ve heard it called.
In our systematics, this spiritual growth is known as our sanctification, which Grudem describes as: “a progressive work of God and man that makes us more and more free from sin and like Christ in our actual lives.” He goes on to say, “Once we have been born again we cannot continue to sin as a habit or a pattern of life (1 John 3:9), because the power of new spiritual life within us keeps us from yielding to a life of sin.” (Wayne Grudem Systematic Theology ch. 38 pp. 746–747). Of all the systematic theologies in circulation, I am grateful to God that Grudem’s has the vast influence it does, his responsible handling of the Scripture keeping him head and shoulders above the rest. However, every systematic theology has the characteristic handicap of drawing many lines more starkly than they are in reality. Even in Paul’s meticulous and logical reasoning in Scripture, there are softer gradients surrounding such themes as regeneration, justification, and sanctification, simply because Christ did not write out a mathematical algorithm or checklist to follow in order to be saved. The principal error which results in an overly systematic view of salvation is a view of salvation which sees an afterlife in heaven as the final goal. There is no goal in salvation which looks beyond our restored relationship with God in Christ—and no relationship can be realistically boiled-down to a systematic checklist.
This systematic algorithm comforted me into an uneasy spiritual sleep for most of my early years as a Christian, content to live in spiritual mediocrity. “I’m just a sinner saved by grace” was a common cute understatement I heard and applied to myself many times, as if God’s grace were never strong enough to lift me above mere sinner status. I will warn you, this kind of justification gospel thinking makes Scripture reading nearly unbearable.
Reading the Bible for myself, I couldn’t get it out of my head that, from the way the Apostles spoke, what I called my salvation had intimately to do with my being saved from my sin—actually being liberated from my sin nature this side of the grave (Matt. 1:21; Rom. 6:1–23; 1 Pet. 2:24). I knew I had “died to sin” when I accepted Jesus, but then when I would sin, doubt for my salvation would crash over me like a freezing wave, and why shouldn’t it? If I were really regenerated, shouldn’t my sin-habits begin to evaporate through the Holy Spirit’s activity in me? Shouldn’t thwarting my sin be as easy as swatting mosquitoes with the amount of divine power I was supposed to receive from the Holy Spirit when I was born again? My contemporary systematic model of salvation, although pretty to hold and look at, was a thing of bright glass which could not hold up to either my experience of the spiritual journey nor what I read in Scripture.
The fact was, the theology I had subscribed to was a system, a machine built to run on the Spirit independent of my own human life. If I could let all the constituent parts of my redemption: my effective calling, my regeneration, my conversion, my justification, my adoption, etc. all work for me and function properly like a well-oiled theological machine, I’d be set! The issue was, my theology was not a separate entity from me. My theology was in me, and wasn’t always what I affirmed. Though I wouldn’t say it out loud, there was an assumption in me, and I believe is in many contemporary Christians, that if I just affirmed the right doctrines the Spirit would then fill me with divine power to conquer my sin because I’d passed the exam, so to speak. The simple fact was I had to get my hands dirty. My profession of faith was no substitute for the real thing, I had to actually live by faith and walk by the Spirit in order for there to be any change (Hab. 2:4; Gal. 5:16). The reason my sin was far from being removed from me was because I was unwilling to venture on Christ’s promise that He in fact was the way and the life, and that if I were to deny myself and carry my cross, He would meet me on the other side. It would not happen all at once necessarily, but it had to start somewhere. I had to start intentionally making decisions to ditch my way of thinking which permitted sin to be a possibility or “necessary evil” and choose instead to venture on the Kingdom, to walk in step with the Spirit. My theology was not meant to run on the Spirit, I was.
Although I do not hold this is true of every evangelical Christian’s experience, spiritual resignation was the natural conclusion of my thinking. I was what Dallas Willard has coined as being paralyzed by grace: “[It] is what happens when Christians develop a theology that renders them passive. Anyone who really gets a hold of God’s grace will be set on fire!” (Dallas Willard). I cannot give a full account of how this condition can be overcome without giving a little from my own testimony. In the abstract, the action which must occur is what I have already described, turning your back on the world and the flesh and taking as your own person hope and desire the hopes and desires of God’s Spirit.
Spiritual Resuscitation
This shift came about during my first year at college. It had been the most miserable two years of my life, pockmarked with guilt, grief, shock, pain, and repeated disappointments. I had given up my life in Texas to join a Bible school in Chicago, one of many acts of spiritual desperation I made during those years. My misery only increased during my first semester at college and for spring break I flew back home to volunteer at a missionary base I had been at the year before. For two weeks I worked on the grounds-crew and spent most all my other time praying. My spirit was running full-speed to Christ in spiritual starvation and desperation while my flesh was charging wildly the other direction. I remember the little prayer room where I would sit and weep for hours, desiring God more than anything while pushing Him back at the same time. From boyhood I had been building a little kingdom of my own, lining up all the pieces and making my dreams happen as best I could, and for the last two years I had watched as everything I built turned to sand.
My desire was that God would fix it, make my dead kingdom come back to life. His desire was what it always had been, that His Kingdom would come on earth as it is in heaven. For all my good intentions and seeking after God, I had never actually desired this. Sure, I wanted to go to heaven, but that was hopefully a long ways off. Until then, I wanted the good life I had imagined since I was a boy. I didn’t really believe for a moment that God’s life could be more good than anything I could imagine, and it was the realization of this disbelief that changed everything. For the first time, my prayers turned to my own broken desires. If God is good, and He was not gratifying my desires, then my desires could not be as good as God’s. I like to say I died in that little prayer room—I allowed my flesh to be crucified—and the result took my breath away. I had never felt a stronger joy, a more powerful sense of innocent well-being and contentment. The gnawing hunger which had hounded me for two years was satisfied in an instant. I understand this experience will not be the same for everyone, but I can only offer what I have seen and felt.
For days and weeks afterwards, my inner transformation was all I could talk about. I was well beyond “Jesus saves”—Jesus satisfies was the revelation on my lips. The life that has followed after that sudden break-through is something I can only owe to God. The point of this testimony, and in more than a few ways the reason for me writing this book, is to convey just how much better it is to believe on Christ, to enter into His true reality, to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God and to uproot everything which remains in the world—i.e. the flesh. Only when you have done this—only when you have learned to crucify the flesh—can you, as Paul said, walk by the Spirit. Only then can you truly say with him, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).
When we walk by the Spirit, we share the desires of the Spirit. His desires rightfully eclipse our’s because they are more good—ending truthfully in a better good for us than any we could plan in our own little kingdoms of sand. The paradigm shift is to have genuine confidence that Christ’s way is better than your way in every instance, and to train yourself in habits of body and thought to routinely choose Christ’s way. When we actually seek His Kingdom, and not only His power to build or restore our broken kingdoms, we will by nature of living in His Kingdom have better clarity of understanding and experience with the dynamic living character of Christ through His Spirit living and moving in us.
Hopefully, it is clear at this point that being “filled with the Holy Spirit” is not the same thing as a pit being filled in with concrete. Scripture sees it as a dynamic and organic movement, like blood pumping in and out of a heart, or more accurately the action of drinking water. In Jesus’ teaching, being filled with the Spirit is predicated on abiding in Him, on “coming to Him”:
If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified (John 7:37–39).
Abiding with Jesus and consequently walking by the Spirit being—filled with the Spirit—is not a matter of just remembering what Jesus did, teaching what He said, or even reading His word, although all these things are good and edifying. It is really living with His life progressively working with the Spirit to transform our seen forms into the regenerate unseen—to become like Jesus. The end objective of our salvation is to know Jesus and be known by Him. There is no conclusion in all of the Christian’s spiritual journey which does not end with unity and restored relationship with our Father in heaven.
Spiritual Formation
So, our salvation is not an all-expenses paid retirement plan in heaven, it is new life in Christ which begins at our rebirth and continues into eternity. It’s about restored relationship with God in the unity of the Father, Son, and Spirit in perfect triune love. It is abiding in the vine (John 15). But what does it practically look like? Does this mean salvation is only for the spiritual elite who can understand all this mystical Jesus-talk? Remember what I said before, the kind of salvation Jesus offers is a whole salvation—for the whole person and for every person, “Jew and gentile” (Rom. 10:12). There is nothing more natural for a person freed from sin to be filled with the Spirit of God and enter into the Kingdom of God. We were designed to do exactly that, we were not made to live in sin.
Of course, sin is not easily eradicated and as we’ve already discussed, even the regenerate Christian must learn to habitually deny him/herself and the world with the help of the Spirit in order to grow spiritually. I’m pleased to say, for practical help in this area of the Christian journey there are vast oceans of resources available, ancient and modern: The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis, The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law, Renovation of the Heart by Dallas Willard, and the beautiful Christian fables like the Pilgrim’s Progress, Hind’s Feet On High Places, and C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorse are all excellent places to start for the Christian interested in learning more about spiritual growth. I offer these recommendations as prized and cherished supplements to be taken with a great deal of Scripture. But of course, walking by the Spirit does not all come from book-knowledge—the Aboriginal child as well as the Oxford scholar have equal opportunity to live in the Kingdom of God. The deciding factor being, will they deny their life in the world and the flesh in order to find it in Christ? Once we find our life in Christ, then the road really begins, as we have said, and we walk it by the Spirit.
It is a recent phenomena in contemporary Christianity that the practical side of our sanctification, our growth into Christ-likeness (what is elsewhere known as our spiritual formation) has taken a side-line. Vast emphasis in modern evangelicalism is placed on preaching the gospel and planting churches. These are both good things of course, provided your gospel is in fact the gospel of Jesus, i.e. the gospel of the Kingdom of God, and that your goal in planting churches is to make disciples who really intend to deny themselves and feed on Christ, i.e. walk by the Spirit. A gospel of forgiveness of sins paired with a vague hope for the hereafter is not satisfactory enough for the parched human soul. The soul must grow or die, and sadly the latter is proving the case among the hemorrhaging evangelical churches of the west. What is needed is a return to the fountainhead, from which “whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.” (John 4:14).
The practical side of our spiritual formation is practical in the sense that it adheres to the reality of the Kingdom and draws ordinary life up into its routines and patterns. Much like the created order, the way of the Kingdom is ordered and cyclical—repetitive in an upward direction. As we walk by the Spirit, ordinary everyday experiences become sanctified as we live them through Christ. Everything from interactions with family, business relationships, future decisions, even how we eat and sleep all take on a new form as we allow ourselves to fall instep with the desires of the Spirit and consequently allow the Kingdom of God to infect our own little kingdoms, i.e. our spheres of influence. Indeed, over time our “kingdom”, the place where our will is being done, will in fact become God’s Kingdom because our will is conformed to His. There is little talk of begrudging obedience to the sovereign Lord here—we actually genuinely want to do His will and see it be done.
Of course, as I said before, this inner transformation working outwards is not all our doing and it is not all the Spirit’s doing. As Grudem says, it is “a progressive work of God and man that makes us more and more free from sin and like Christ in our actual lives.” We cannot ignore the fact that we are still flesh, meaning that we have a body and brain composed of chemicals and neurons trained and poised to react to the sinful world with sinful actions. This body and brain is actually part of us—we are not supposed to leave it to waste away or live in despair of it’s sinful nature—the Spirit is already desiring it to change and empowering us to conform to Christ, all we have to do is meet the Spirit half way.
One of the most liberating things for me in my spiritual journey in this regard was to realize that the amount of distance I thought I’d have to cover in crucifying my flesh was halved by the work of the Spirit in me, and that I could actually improve! I’d always been taught I was a depraved and miserable sinner, never to experience the joy of holiness except whatever was legally imbued to me by Christ on the cross. But Jesus does expect holiness from us, and made us to experience life joyfully through holiness! As my desires began to change the more effort I put into my spiritual formation, the more my faith grew because I knew this work could not be a work of my own only. God was at work in my innermost self, rearranging and remodeling my soul as I abided in Him, which brings me to my last point.
Earlier we discussed the birth from above as referenced in John 3 and Ezekiel 36. We took away three points of cohesion between these two passages (generously three passages, with the inclusion of the parallel passage in Jer. 31:31–34): 1.) receiving cleansing, 2.) receiving God’s own Spirit, 3.) and lastly believing and obeying the will of God. This is what comes of our birth from above into the Kingdom of God, we believe and obey. This almost comes as an anticlimax after all that we’ve discussed here, but it is in fact the conclusion Jesus brings us to. If you’re like me, your immediate impulse is to Jesus’ commands in the Bible, write them down check-list style, and the just do them as best you can. But remember, the belief and obedience comes as a consequence of having been cleansed and receiving God’s Spirit. A surface-level reading will not convey the message that is trying to come through.
As I mentioned before in this book, to believe something is to live as though it were true. We profess a lot of things that we don’t actually believe. We believe something with our whole self: mind, body, and heart. The disciples thought they believed when they said they would not desert Jesus, but when the armed mob came looking for Him their belief was revealed by their running feet. As Jesus had said just before, their spirits were willing but their flesh was weak. A believing spirit and a believing flesh would be a force to be reckoned with, and it was evidenced by Christ’s willingness to go to the cross.
This view of belief as something lived on (believed on as some translations render it) is evidenced clearly in the birth from above as illustrated in Ezekiel 36:27. God says, “I will put my Spirit within you;” The syntax of the Hebrew in the next part is awkward here, but it’s wording is purposeful. It literally reads: “and I will do that which in my statutes you will walk.” Our english Bibles don’t quite capture the meaning here. There is an intentional mixture of who is doing what. Simply put, the one who has the Spirit within them is, as Paul said, walking in step with the Spirit (Gal. 5:25). God’s statutes, His divine commands and Laws, are being done through you as a matter of course because the Spirit is at work in you “both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” (Phil. 2:13). But that does not change the fact that you are the one performing the actions as you act on unseen realities within your seen sphere of influence.
In Jesus’ teaching belief functions in a similar way. At the core of His message, repeatedly, is the call to believe in Jesus for eternal life (Mrk. 16:15–16; John 3:16, 8:24; Acts 16:31). This was not only to profess Jesus or to intellectually agree with Jesus, and it was not only to obey His commands the way the pharisees obeyed the Law of Moses. To believe in Jesus is to believe on Jesus, to set His life, His way, His authority, His rule and reign as the new grounds for your own life. When we believe on Jesus, we actually live as though everything He said were true, and this is something we cannot do unless His Spirit is living in us. All these things, our cleansing, our receiving of His Spirit, and our believing on Him have this effect: that we are no longer our own but live with a life that comes from the never-ending well of life. We live in His Kingdom now, in the flesh, as we grow in holiness and we look forward to the perfection of His coming reign when He returns (Lev. 19:2; Gal. 2:20; Rev. 11:15).
To close this chapter, it may be helpful to return to our old metaphor from chapter 4. You’ll remember how you were standing in a flat wasteland witnessing the strange, hovering, upside-down pyramid with Jesus at the point where it met the earth. Now imagine you’ve lived your whole life in the wasteland, laboriously tilling the hard soil and keeping out of the sun as much as you could. You know how much your body can handle and what your breaking point is. It’s a miserable existence but you’ve learned to rely on yourself and to know your limits—the two cardinal virtues of the wasteland.
When you took your first step toward the light at the bottom point of the pyramid, you were immediately familiar with that searing heat, like the sun on the hottest day of summer, the kind of hot sun you would do your best to keep out of. But still, you know Jesus is there at the bottom, amid the blinding light, and He’s calling you to Him. With your second step you are blatantly disregarding what your body was telling you. This will hurt you and possibly maim you. But you make a calculated decision based on hope, hope in something that, if true, would absolutely eclipse any pain or remorse that may come from continuing. With your third step, you become aware that you actually cannot do this—it’s no longer a matter of whether you will or will not, but if you even can. You’re about to turn back when you catch sight of Jesus’ face for the first time, and by his expression you immediately know He wants you to keep coming nearer. You trust He knows what you can handle and what is best for you, and you determine to keep going. This will kill you, and kill you slowly! your body screams out at you. But at this point another voice is speaking, and it says: You are not doing this alone. Keep walking. You take another step.
Now your clothes are beginning to burn and your hair is searing, and there is undoubtedly a fair amount of pain. The voice of your instinct has ceased to be coherent; it’s all blaring alarms screaming for you to turn back to where it’s safe and familiar. But amid the pain there is a new sensation—a kind of vitality that was not there a minute ago. You feel a strength that’s not your own begin to charge your muscles as you prepare to take another step. With each following step the inner screaming voice dies away while the new vitality swells like warm waves moving through your muscles. You begin to love this new life and begin to despise the idea of ever turning back—and better still, you can see Jesus clearer with every step. Before long the fire that had engulfed you with pain before has become your strength. When you finally arrive at the feet of Jesus, you know you did not come by your own strength or merit, but it was God willing in you all throughout the painful and energizing you to do the work of the journey. With Christ’s warm embrace, you are lifted into His Kingdom where, like Himself, you cannot die but only know the warmth of the new life moving in and through you—just like breathing, you think to yourself.
What is Salvation in the Kingdom of God?