08 Who is the Holy Spirit?

Krisan Marotta: You're listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast, and I'm glad you are. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. Today we're gonna study Romans chapter 5, verses 1 through 5, and this is the eighth talk in my series called Who's the Holy Spirit? The lecture notes for today's talk are on the link below the podcast, and you can also find them by going to my website. Just go to wednesdayintheword.com slash Holy Spirit 8. Thanks so much for listening. Well, I'm very excited to get to Romans today because I feel like in many ways this is the talk to which this series has been building, and that we're finally going to see all the pieces of the puzzle start coming together. Just a review, my goal in this series is to understand what Scripture says about the Holy Spirit. And I've argued for a certain framework for how to understand who the Holy Spirit is and what he does. And that is that the Holy Spirit is God's agent of change, and that when we see him in Scripture, He is almost always intervening in creation to bring about God's purposes. And from our perspective, what we most need him to do is save us from ourselves. Generally speaking, I've organized the work of the Holy Spirit into two broad categories the universal and the individual. The universal work of the Spirit is the way that He transforms the hearts of all believers such that we now embrace and believe the gospel and we can say and mean that Jesus is Lord. The individual works of the Spirit are the ways that He works in one person's life but not another. So these are what we commonly think of as spiritual gifts. These are the roles or the opportunities that individuals are given to serve the kingdom of God. For some people, these may be miraculous works, what we would call signs and wonders, but for most of us, these are what we think of as spiritual gifts, the various different ways each of us is given to serve the body of Christ. And these are unique. What the Spirit does is say in the Apostle Paul's life is not going to be the same thing that he does in my life and so forth. We spent three podcasts looking at the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament. And what we found there is that in the Old Testament, most often we see the Holy Spirit empowering the leaders of Israel. The Holy Spirit gives the king or the judge wisdom, military might or strength, whatever that leader needs in order to accomplish God's purposes in order to bless the people. So we looked at Moses, some of the judges, and King Saul and King David. We also saw that the Holy Spirit gives prophets revelation such that they can then speak the word of the Lord to the people. Through his Spirit, God reveals to the prophet or his chosen messenger, his purpose, his plan for the future, and then that prophet or messenger speaks to the rest of us. And finally, we looked at the universal work of the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament, and I argued that both testaments understand the nature of spiritual renewal in the same way, and that is that God transforms believers through the work of the Holy Spirit to give us faith. In the last podcast, we went back to the New Testament and we looked at Ephesians 1 and we started talking about the Holy Spirit as a seal and a pledge. And we're going to continue that discussion today. The Holy Spirit is the down payment on our inheritance in the kingdom of God. So he is like the earnest money or the pledge that ensures that God intends to give us our full inheritance. And he is also the mark or the seal that marks us as belonging to God. How do we know we're believers? How do we know we stand to inherit the promises of God? We begin to see changes in who we are, what we value, what we think, and how we love God and our neighbors. And these changes are the results of the Holy Spirit at work to change us from the inside out. They are the seal that we belong to God. One day we will fully belong to God, and one day God will fully give us our inheritance, and we can have confidence that that day is coming because we see the changes the Holy Spirit is bringing about now. Today I want to look at Romans 5 verses 1 through 5. Romans 5 is one of my all-time favorite passages, and I love teaching it every chance I get. Let me set the stage for us. Paul is writing to the church at Rome, and this is a church he had never visited in person when he wrote this letter. In this letter, Paul gives an unusual presentation of the gospel from the ground up. That's one of the things that makes Romans such a wonderful book. Paul doesn't assume that we his readers know as much as he normally assumes because he had never taught this group in person before. In Romans, the first four chapters, Paul lays out his case for the fact that we are saved by faith and not by keeping the law. Then in chapter five, he basically answers the question so what? What difference does it make that we are saved by faith rather than by law keeping? And Paul tells us three things that result from being justified, and by justified or justification, I mean being right with God, being in a situation where our debt to justice has been paid and we are no longer under God's wrath. And Paul says because we are saved by faith, because we are now justified, we have three things. We have peace with God, we rejoice in our sufferings, and we rejoice in our reconciliation. Now we're only going to look at the first part of this in the podcast. I have a series on Romans and I have a talk in that series that goes into a lot more detail in this chapter, but we're only going to look at the first five verses here. I'll read them for us. This is Romans chapter five verses one through five. Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we hope in the glory of God. Not only that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Now that last verse is the reason I wanted to bring this passage into our discussion of the Holy Spirit. But to understand what he's saying, we're going to work through this verse by verse first. Paul says that our justification, the fact that we're right with God, gives us a reason to rejoice, and we rejoice in three things. He lists these three things with one long parenthesis in the middle. So we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God in five two. Our sufferings, he says that in five three, and he gives an extended discussion of that. And then in five eleven he says we rejoice in being reconciled to God. Now he uses this word rejoice three times, and almost all translations translate that word a bit differently. The King James Version has glory, both the NIV and the ESV have rejoice, and the New American Standard has exalt. And whenever you see a word translated differently in the English translations, you know you're dealing with a concept that's hard to express in English, and you might want to take some time to study that word. This word rejoice has more than the sense of being happy, although it is that, it does include that element. When this word is used in a negative context, it's usually translated boast, and boast has the negative connotation of thinking too highly of yourself. But this negative aspect is not what's in view in Romans 5, but the self-esteem aspect of boasting is, only this is a positive connotation. Boasting or rejoicing is an important concept in the New Testament. Paul talks about this in several of his letters. But his idea of boasting, I'm going to use that word, is not the modern American idea of thinking I'm better than you or that I'm lying or exaggerating in order to put myself above someone else. Rather, the contrast is between the things about which I am ashamed and the things about which I boast. So there's all this stuff about me that I wish you wouldn't see, and I try to hide it and keep it under lock and key and excuse or deny that it's even there because it makes me look bad and I'm ashamed of it. But then there's all this other stuff that I'm not ashamed of, and those are the things I would like to put forward about myself. I would like for you to remember those when you think of me. These are the things I boast in. These are the things I rejoice in. I can display them openly with joy and confidence. For example, it's a good thing to want to be an honorable person with integrity. And I would like to boast about being an honorable person. I'd like for you to see me as an honorable person, and I'm ashamed about the times that I am dishonorable and wish that you would just overlook those. That's the kind of the idea of boasting, the things that I want to put forward, the times that I'm acting honorably, those I want to boast in, as opposed to the times when I'm not. We associate the concept of boasting with lying because we tend to exaggerate good things about ourselves beyond what they really are. Or sometimes we use them as a lever to pull ourselves up and pull someone else down. So I boast about something to say I'm better than someone else, and I often have to exaggerate and stretch the truth to get there. And the reality is that our boasting is usually a lie because if you stop and think about it, what do we have that God has not given us? What do we have that we earned apart from God? Nothing. In our boasting, we ignore God's place in the picture and we make something of ourselves that we're not. Because the reality is everything we think of as our own accomplishments are really a gift of God. The way that God saves his people highlights the fact that no one can boast in their own accomplishments. Our boasting is kind of ironic. Suppose I owe a million dollars in student loan debts, and the government decides to forgive the debt. I can go around boasting in the fact that I am now debt free, but I didn't really do anything to earn it. It is a good thing that is now true about me, but it's not based on my own accomplishment. God's way of saving us is like the government forgiving my debt. It does give me a reason to boast. I can legitimately say, look, I am saved, or I am now debt free, but the reason I am saved, or to use my analogy, debt free, is not because of my own accomplishment. Any natural gifts I have, intelligence, success, worldly power, none of that means anything when it comes to salvation. All the things I have that I think have given me a place in this world and given me a leg up are not enough to make me right with God. As Paul has said in the first four chapters of Romans, God did not choose me because I had any of these accomplishments. God didn't measure any of these human accomplishments to see if I was worthy of salvation. My accomplishments do not earn God's favor. Therefore I have no reason to boast about myself because I did nothing to influence God to make him choose me to be saved, and my accomplishments didn't help me learn to choose God either. I have nothing to boast about except what God has done for me in Christ. By nature, even the best of us, as we measure best, reject God. By nature, even the most gifted among us ignores God. There's nothing we can do left to ourselves to figure this out on our own or to earn our salvation or to work our way into God's graces. So we're not saved by our own doing, we are saved by what God has done through Christ. Now in His mercy, God has saved some of us. He gives us the eyes to see and the ears to hear and the humility to repent such that we now have godly wisdom and redemption. By an act of God's grace, we see and recognize the message that Christ crucified is true wisdom, and that comes about by the Holy Spirit changing us. So our only reason to boast is to boast in what God has done for us and not be ashamed of the gospel. So Paul tells us that because we are saved by faith, we boast or we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. We have reason to rejoice, we have reason to boast because God has chosen to make us holy. So now that we are justified, we have a reason to boast, we have a reason to enjoy significance and value because we have been singled out by God to be made holy. That makes us different and that sets us apart. Our hope, our future destiny is that we will be the type of people that command attention. We will become the kind of people by the grace of God through the work of his Holy Spirit that we would look at with awe because we will be full of life and goodness, spreading love and nurture and comfort and healing and leaving people better for our relationship with them. That's our destiny. That's the hope of the glory of God. We will share in his glory in the sense that we will share his holy character. And we can have a confident, eager expectation that that is going to happen. We are starting the long, slow process of becoming holy now, but we're not there yet. But we can have confidence that it is going to come about. So we have hope of sharing in the glory of God, and hope is not wishful thinking. I might say, I hope it doesn't rain Saturday, and that's just wishful thinking. I would like for that to be the case, but I have no idea what's really going to happen. That is not the biblical concept of hope. Hope is a confident, eager expectation that something good will happen. God has made promises to us. We believe that God will keep his promises, and we wait with confidence for the fulfillment of those promises. Although we don't have what has been promised yet, we live in hope. We wait with eager confidence and joy. So we've talked about rejoice and hope and boast. Let's talk about glory because Paul says in 5.2, through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand and we rejoice, we've talked about that, in the hope of the glory of God. We've talked about hope. Let's talk a little bit more about glory. Glory is the quality something has when it's praiseworthy, radiant, and beautiful. Now God has glory for many reasons. He has glory in his holiness, in his wisdom, in his being the source of life and goodness, in his justice, in his mercy, and we could go on and on. Right now in this sinful fallen life, we his children do not share his glory. We do not have his righteous holy character. We are not wise like we should be wise. We are not merciful or generous or forgiving as we should be. We are not praiseworthy, radiant and morally beautiful because we are flawed by sin and death. The ultimate goal of the gospel is that God will make us glorious. Paul calls this glorification in another place. Earlier in Romans Paul said that we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. Now he says here that we have a hope that one day we will no longer fall short of the glory of God. Rather, we will share in God's glory. All that is ugly and shameful and evil about us will be replaced by God's holiness, righteousness, and moral perfection. So we will share that aspect of God's glory and become worthy, praiseworthy creatures. Having God fill our beings with His glory is the one real lasting solution to our deepest problem, and there is no other solution. This priceless glory is our hope, our confident, eager expectation that God has promised to give us and we are confidently waiting for. That brings us to our second boast. Let's read Romans 5, 3 through 5 again. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Paul says we rejoice or we boast in our sufferings. Sufferings are hard circumstances. Your translation might have tribulations, and these are just the kind of thing you would expect. The hardships we face, the crises, the traumatic events, emotionally difficult trials, temptations, anything in life that puts pressure on us and makes us wonder if God is really with us. Our temptation is to think that when we encounter trials or sufferings, it means that God is angry with us, that He's abandoned us or left us behind. We've done something wrong and we've gotten ourselves on his bad side, and now we're suffering. That is not a biblical perspective. Paul is saying that we can point with satisfaction to the fact that we go through suffering. Not that we enjoy it, but as will become clear, Paul is talking about the trials that test and mature our faith, the circumstances we face that rock our spiritual world and make us question do I really trust God? Do I really believe the promises of the gospel? Do I really believe that God will get me through this situation? Sufferings are the kinds of circumstances we face that make us question whether God is good and I should trust Him. These sufferings are trials test our faith, and that process of having our faith tested is something to boast about or rejoice in. Why? Paul tells us. Endurance is simply perseverance. We point to the trials that rock our spiritual world with satisfaction because it leads to perseverance, what the reformers called perseverance of the saints. The crisis comes, it rocks my world. I must squarely face into the question, do I really trust God? Do I really trust him enough to follow him through this, whatever this is? And I do. My faith perseveres, it endures. I say, yes, I do want to follow him no matter what. Jesus has the words of life. There's no place else I will go, I will trust him through this. The trial then tested the quality and maturity of my faith, and my faith persevered. It remained, it lasted. So perseverance is the reality of having my faith tested and it endures. The fact that my faith is of such quality that when it's tested in a crisis, it survives. I come out the other side of the crisis with my faith intact. So we boast or rejoice in our suffering because the end result of suffering is perseverance of our faith. And then Paul goes on, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope. The New American Standard translates that proven character. I like that word better. You could call this something like attestedness. Attestedness is the characteristic of having been tested and shown by the test to be worthy. So what's being tested here is the genuineness and the reality of my faith. That's the question on the table. The believer has a hope of the glory of God, but am I a believer? How do I know? I have to have faith. Well, how do I know if my faith is genuine? That's the critical personal question all of us faith. How do I know that I am really a believer? How do I know I'm not fooling myself and that one day I'm going to throw in the towel and give all this up? And Paul is saying, you know your faith is genuine. If it's been tested, you've been given an opportunity to throw in the towel and you didn't. So if your faith has been tested and shown by the test to be the real deal, then you yourself have objective, tangible evidence that your faith is genuine. You are in fact a believer and you have a hope of an inheritance in the kingdom of God. So what is the test? How do you know if you've passed? It's perseverance. Pseudo faith or hypocritical faith falls away under pressure. You've probably known someone who seemed to be a follower of Jesus and then life threw them a curve and they said, wait, if following God means I have to do that or give that up or not do this, then I don't want any part of it, and they walk away. That's the kind of situation Paul's talking about. He's looking at the kind of tribulation that puts pressure on my faith, and it has the potential to destroy my faith. But I pass through that trial and come out the other side with my faith intact. And if I've done that, then my faith is the genuine thing that God gave me as a gift and it is evidence of true belief. If my faith has been tested and survived the test, then I know I have genuine saving faith and therefore I have hope. Now, think about this. Who is the testing for? It's not for God. He already knows who is who and what is what. It's not for other people because it's not really their business whether I'm a believer or not. This testing, this attestedness or perseverance is for me. It's for my sake. It gives me visible, tangible, reliable evidence that I have genuine saving faith and I am in fact a child of God. And that gives me confidence in my hope. Now let me be clear. What's being tested here is not perfection. What is being tested here is not how good I am or how worthy I am left to myself. That test is over and every last one of us failed. What's being tested here is not am I a sinner? I am. What's being tested is do I have a heart that is open to God or not? Will I follow Him even when life is hard? Will I trust Him when I don't get what I want or life doesn't go my way or life just gets downright hard? Being tested brings about hope, my personal hope, because I can personally see I went through that and my faith persevered, my faith survived. I now know that the believer's hope is my hope because I see evidence that God is truly at work in my life. These promises are not just for the elect, whoever they may be, they're for me personally because I have tangible evidence that I am among them. Alright, now we finally get to five five in the Holy Spirit. Paul says, and hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. The New American Standard translates this hope does not disappoint. And that's the basic idea of not being put to shame. The idea is that hope is not going to let us down. A hope that puts you to shame is a hope that doesn't come to pass. I'm counting on something and then it never happens. It fails me. There would be nothing worse than investing your life in this one great hope and then it doesn't come to pass. The day comes and you're ashamed. You're disappointed because that hope let you down and it didn't happen. What Paul is saying is that for the believer who has gone through this process of facing some kind of suffering or trial that put pressure on your faith and tested your faith and proved that your faith survived and endured through that trial, your hope is not going to disappoint you. If you've gone through this process of facing trials that rock your world and make you question your faith, and you clung to your faith and stood firm in it, your hope is certain. It is not going to fail you. Now let's think about what kind of hope he's talking about here. There are various ways that I might fear that my hope will fail. Perhaps I fear that I am mistaken in thinking that God exists and I have put my hope in a God who isn't even there. Perhaps I'm mistaken in my belief that Jesus is the Son of God and that he has the power to forgive my sin. Perhaps Buddha or Plato was right instead. Perhaps I fear that I'm mistaken in thinking that this hope is all that worthwhile, that it comes and I may find out, you know, it's not that big a deal after all. Those are not the sort of issues that Paul is talking about here in Romans 5. We would have to go to other passages to look at how to answer those kinds of issues. And there are other passages, I think, that address those fears. But that's not the question Paul is about to address. The fear that Paul is addressing here is I am afraid that my hope will fail me because I myself do not have what it takes to get there. What if I'm fooling myself and I'm just a big hypocrite? Or I passed one test of faith, but you know, that next big trial could be the one that shatters my faith into irretrievable pieces. That next big event in my life, that one could be my undoing. Even though I've made it this far, maybe I don't have what it takes to ultimately cross the finish line. That could be what keeps my hope from coming true. And that's the fear that Paul is addressing. Why is it that my hope will not disappoint me? That my hope will not put me to shame? Why is it that I need not fear that my own sin is gonna cause me to stumble and fall short? Paul tells us because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Now, we do have the interpretive issue of does this phrase love of God mean my love for God or does it mean God's love for me? And in this case, that choice makes a very big difference how you understand the point that Paul is making. If we were to go on and look at verses six through ten, which we won't in this podcast, but I do have another podcast that goes into them, it would become clear that Paul has God's love for us in mind. Paul is talking about the love that God has for us, which he has already clearly demonstrated through Christ's death on the cross. It is that love, God's love for us, that will make sure that we cross the finish line. Paul goes on to argue in the next few verses that if God loved us enough to die for us while we were his enemies, of course he loves us enough to fulfill our hope now that we're his children. And again, I have another podcast that goes more into this, but his basic point in the next section is what takes more love? Love your enemy whom you hate or love your child? Well, it takes more love to love your enemy, and God has already done that. He already demonstrated how much he loved us by dying for us on the cross while we hated him. So if he loved us that much, now that we're his beloved children adopted into his family, don't you think he loves us enough to get us the rest of the way? So why is it that our hope will not fail us? Well, Paul's answer is because God loves you, and it is God's love for you that will ultimately make sure that you arrive at the fullness of salvation and receive your inheritance and the glory of God. Now that's an interesting thing to say because he just talked about this testing process where my faith is proven to be genuine through trials, and he's just talked about my perseverance and the issue of whether I will persevere through trials, whether I will run the race all the way to the finish line. How does God's love guarantee that I am gonna make it to the finish line? Now we are finally ready to see what Paul says about the Holy Spirit and why it is so important. Paul says hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. God's love takes a very active form in our lives. When our faith is tested, we're not going through that test alone. The Spirit of God is at work inside us. And we will continue, we will persevere, we will continue to grow in faith and cling to our hope because God loved us enough to give us His Spirit, and His Spirit is transforming our hearts such that we have genuine saving faith and we're going to make it. We can count on God's love and we can count on His Spirit to finish the work that He started. Of course I don't have the strength on my own to run the race to the finish line. Of course I'm gonna crumble like a house of cards when trials come my way. That's why from my perspective, these are earth-shattering, world rocking trials. But the Spirit of God has the strength. The Spirit of God is the anchor in the storm. The Spirit of God is working to strengthen and mature my faith such that I am going to make it to the finish line. We won't fail. Our hope as believers will not disappoint us because God loves us enough to give us his spirit, and his spirit is going to change us into the kind of people who are going to persevere. God in his love actively intervenes in our lives through his spirit to give us the faith and the perseverance we need. This is why the Holy Spirit is our down payment. This is why the Holy Spirit is God's seal on our lives and marks us as gods. As believers, we are called to persevere until the end. And the Holy Spirit is doing a work in our hearts to make sure that we do in fact persevere to the end. When we see evidence that He is at work, that gives us confidence to know we are gods, and God's Spirit is going to finish what he started. So my perseverance is the evidence that God is at work through his spirit, and his spirit is going to get me to the finish line. That is the good news of the gospel. Let me paraphrase this passage to try to hopefully make it more clear. Because we are not relying on our law keeping to make us right with God, but on our faith in Christ, we are in a genuinely good place. We are at peace with God. We stand in His grace and we can make a boast that is true. We can say with joy and satisfaction that we have an eager, confident expectation that one day God will impart His glorious character to us. We have great confidence that God will change this life of futility and sin into a life of righteousness and beauty. And because of this hope, there is another boast we can make. We can find joy and satisfaction in our sufferings, not because we enjoy suffering, but we welcome the opportunity to persevere under trial. Perseverance reveals that our faith is genuine and this gives us a chance to see the reality of our own personal faith. In this way, God gives us evidence that we are in fact His and that strengthens our personal hope. We can have confidence that we ourselves will inherit the promises of God. And we can have great confidence when we see the evidence that God has begun this work in us because then we know God has given us His Spirit. God gives us His Spirit because He loves us and His Spirit is the guarantee that He will bring this work to completion and we will not fail to arrive at our promised inheritance and glory. When I first became a Christian, I understood the Spirit to be something like the force in Star Wars. So in my immaturity I thought that the Holy Spirit was some kind of power that I had to plug into if I wanted to succeed. Kind of like Yoda saying to Luke, use the force, use the force. I would pray, I would meditate, I would recite verses, anything I could think of that seemed like a way to access the power of the Holy Spirit. My young immature picture was that God was at the finish line of the race cheering me on, but I had to run the race. But thankfully I didn't have to run it alone. I could call on this great inner force, which is the Holy Spirit, and that would get me there. But if I stopped calling on the power of the Holy Spirit, then I might fail and not finish the race. And it was dependent on me to avail myself of the help available to me through the Spirit. God was there to give me a boost, but I had to choose to accept it. I held a kind of God helps those who helps themselves philosophy. Well, I hope you can see from Romans 5 that that could not possibly be Paul's understanding. Because Paul says, My hope will not disappoint me because God loves me enough to give me his spirit to get me through. It's not up to me to choose the spirit. It's not up to me to access the spirit or yield to him or plug myself into his power. If it was up to me to access or accept the spirit, then it's irrelevant how much God loves me. God could love me to the moon and back, but I'd still have this problem of accessing the force of the spirit. Paul's argument is you can have utter confidence in your hope because your sanctification, to use the theological world, your perseverance, your achieving your hope is not resting on your shoulders. It's on God. And he loves you enough to get you there, and he loves you enough to give you the Holy Spirit to change you. The Holy Spirit is not optional help along the way that I must choose to use like Luke in Star Wars uses the force. Let me repeat that. The Holy Spirit is not an optional help along the way that I have to choose to access. People are always asking, what do I do to walk by the Spirit? What do I do to make sure that I access the Spirit and I let Him change me? That's the wrong question. That is like standing in front of a tsunami and saying, What must I do to let this water carry me away? You know, should I spread my arms out like this? Should I kick my feet? It doesn't matter. It's a tsunami. You're gonna go wherever that water takes you. It's going to sweep you away no matter what you do, and you can have confidence in that fact. Be grateful, trust and believe. The Holy Spirit is the active love of God intervening in my inner spirit to accomplish God's plan and make me the kind of person who is going to persevere and cross the finish line. The Holy Spirit is the agent of change in our lives. He makes us the kind of people who cling to faith. He makes us the kind of people who hunger and thirst for the righteousness of God. He makes us the kind of people who recognize the depths of our sins and repent of it. And when I see good works in my life like that, my response should not be, whoo, hey God, look at me. Look at how good I am, don't I deserve your blessing? My response should be thank you, Father, for changing me through the gift of your spirit. I would not be this kind of person without his intervention in my life. So ultimately, yes, I do have to persevere. But why will I persevere? Because God in his love put his Holy Spirit in my heart to make me the kind of person who will persevere. Ultimately, I am not counting on myself to get me to the finish line of faith. I am counting on the love of God and the active intervention of his spirit in my life, and all this comes about because of the blood of Jesus Christ. Now we can begin to understand why Jesus and Paul thought it was such a big deal that God gives us his spirit, as I went through in the first podcast. I think this passage tells us something very important about the nature of salvation, and that is ultimately my salvation depends on God keeping his promises, not me. But this passage also tells us something very important about God's love. We are so inclined to think that the way we can tell if God loves us or not is that He makes our life smooth, He removes the trials, He removes the hardship, and that's how we know He loves us. So in my short-sightedness, I tend to think that the way I recognize God's love for me is that He makes my life easy and comfortable. And we're inclined to think that because that's how we love each other. We want to make our children's lives easier. We want to remove the troubles from our friends' paths. We want to help our family and bear their burdens so that their lives are easier. But Paul has a different picture of God's love, and so does James and Peter, and this theme comes up a lot in Scripture, and that is that God deliberately, on purpose, puts us through difficult times that test our faith. It's not an accident, it's part of the plan, and he does it because he loves us. He does this to the people he plans to get across the finish line of faith and give an inheritance in the kingdom of God. He roughs up believers through trials on purpose. And he does this out of love, because God knows, even though we have a very difficult time of remembering it, God knows that the thing we most need is to remain faithful to Him. Nothing in this life is more important than that. Our biggest problem is our tendency to walk away from Him, and that is one of the big lessons of the Old Testament. God uses troubles and trials and sufferings to get our attention, to focus our attention and turn us back to Him and to the big issues of life. We remember again that yes, we really do want what God promises, and we cling to Him and we discover that our faith is real. There's no Nothing more valuable in this life than having faith. It is a great gift to learn that we have genuine saving faith, even if we have to go through great suffering and trials and difficulties to learn it. It is an act of God's love that shows He loves us and He is producing faith in our life. And God's love runs even deeper than that. How can we have confidence that this faith we discover in ourselves will see us through to the end? I have no confidence in my own abilities to muster it up. So how can I have confidence? Because God in his love has imparted his spirit to us. The Spirit is doing in me what I cannot do for myself. The Spirit is making sure I don't destroy my life by walking away from God. This passage, I think, gives us great perspective on how we should look at our daily lives. Our lives now are an opportunity to repent and find God. There is nothing more important than that. That is what this life is about. The big issue before us is are we going to embrace life and find God or not? If you have faith in the blood of Jesus Christ, then you have everything worth having. And if you don't have faith, you have nothing. That's what's at stake. That's why I find this teaching on the Holy Spirit so encouraging. This life is about whether or not I have saving faith, and the Holy Spirit is God intervening in this world in my life to give me the very faith I need. He is the pledge and the seal and the down payment of my inheritance. How is it I most need God to intervene in my life? It's not to resolve whatever trouble is sitting outside my door right now. I need God to give me faith. I need him to make me the kind of person who will not walk away from God. And I need him to turn my hard heart toward him so that I find life. Anything else, any other burden or need or wish is secondary. Whether you acknowledge it right now or not, that's just the plain and simple truth. And thankfully, giving me faith, giving each believer faith is exactly what the Spirit of God does for us. You've been listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. My mission is to explain not only what a passage means, but how we figure it out. Please subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, wherever you get your podcast. You can also find hundreds of past episodes on my website, wednesdayintheword.com. And if you've enjoyed and been blessed by this podcast, please leave a positive review on your favorite podcast platform. It really does help others find the podcast. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates of Heartfeltmusic.org. I encourage you to check out his other music. You'll be glad you did. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I hope I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.