One of the great promises of God is that he will never leave or forsake his blood-bought people. This promise was fulfilled in part by the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and through the indwelling Holy Spirit, God’s presence is in us and with us…always.

The New Testament presents many times over the importance of the Holy Spirit’s ministry in the life of the church. Beginning with regeneration, believers are baptized by the Spirit.^[1] We are command to walk by the Spirit in our pursuit of an obedient life before God.^[2] Believers are called to be filled with the Holy Spirit which is commanded in a tense that communicates a continual being carried along by the Spirit.^[3]  In Galatians 5, the fruit of the spirit is presented by the apostle Paul as the fragrance that should come from the believer’s life as opposed to the deeds of the flesh.^[4]

In addition to these different aspects of the Holy Spirit’s ministry, the apostle Paul spent considerable effort to instruct the church on spiritual gifts.  The New Testament records five instances in which spiritual gifts are listed.^[5]  The lists are varied with nineteen gifts mentioned in all, and sometimes different words are used to describe the same gift as with serving and helping.  We come to one of the lists of spiritual gifts in Romans 12:6-8, the text reads:

Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; ⁷ if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; ⁸ the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

Paul wrote to challenge believers to use their spiritual gifts with urgency and purpose.  Sadly, many are like the disciples in Acts 19 who responded to Paul’s question about the Holy Spirit by saying, “We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”^[6]  Their ignorance was honest as they were experiencing the transition from the old covenant to the new covenant without the aid of the New Testament. They needed to be taught what God had done through Christ and Pentecost. Twenty-one centuries removed we are living at a time, to quote Martin Luther, where “the Spirit and the gifts are ours.” Life on the altar is lived in the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit as we use the gifts and talents God has given to us.  This is an informed spirituality.  God wants us to know how he has gifted us for his kingdom work. The bestowal of spiritual gifts are divine enablements for the task at hand. They are gifts for the journey.

Some of the most comforting promises in the New Testament are those that refer to the Holy Spirit’s ministry in the life of the believer.  My thoughts immediately go to the Upper Room and Jesus’ parting words to the disciples. After the shock and awe of his announced departure, Jesus said to them, “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.”^[1] Jesus pledged that he would not leave his disciples as orphans. With his departure “another Helper” would come who would be like him in supplying everything needed to obey his commission. As we can imagine, this was a difficult teaching for the twelve. How would this happen?

Then came Pentecost, and the Spirit of the living God was given to the church.^[2]  The disciples then began to understand that God did not dwell in a building made with hands, but the living God dwelt within every believer, just as Christ had promised. In Paul’s letters, he would emphasize the seal of the Spirit on the believer’s life and that “anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.”^[3] Through the saving work of Christ, the new covenant established that God’s law would not be written on tablets of stone, but on the heart of the believer.^[4]  The prophet Ezekiel referenced the new covenant with great hope as he declared the word of the Lord: 

“And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.^[5]  

The Spirit’s Power for Altar Living

I’m drawn to this important doctrine because the Holy Spirit’s power is essential to presenting ourselves to God as living sacrifices.  Life on the altar is not empowered by human grit but by the Holy Spirit. I believe we could include the beautiful ministry of the Spirit in Paul’s reference to the “mercies of God” in Romans 12:1.^[6]  

I remember well my first year at the University of Kentucky walking through the free speech area and hearing a woman with a high shrill voice waxing eloquent in open air.  I remember her name was “Sister Cindy,” and she was quite skilled in enumerating the sexual sins of college co-eds. Her voice took me back to a childhood memory of a neighborhood mom who would yell at her son early in the morning to get the trash to curb before the garbage truck passed.

Sister Cindy in the free speech area was a first for me, and certainly she was an aberration. Indeed, there are many gifted women in the Body of Christ who teach with great skill and because of that, coupled with cultural pressures, the last thirty years has seen a steamroller movement in the evangelical community to usher women into the role of pastor.  This month Saddleback Church, one of the largest churches in the Southern Baptist Convention with 53,000 members, ordained three women into pastoral ministry. In many streams of the evangelical community, women are encouraged to pursue such roles, and a number of women hold prominent, global preaching ministries.

As a convention, Southern Baptists have taken a stand on this issue in our statement of faith (Baptist Faith & Message 2000) which reads that “the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” This conviction flows from the biblical text which we believe to be foundational for our faith and practice.

In 2007, I made some interesting discoveries in preparing for our church’s 100th year anniversary celebration. I learned that our local body, the First Baptist Church of Gonzales, Louisiana, was constituted around the same time as the following companies: Harley Davidson, United Parcel Service (UPS), Blue Bell, Walgreens, and Kellogg’s. In thinking about our local congregation of a few hundred compared to these corporate giants, I was taken by both the contrast of size and purpose between us. These corporate giants have massive resources for the communication and sale of their products, while our little congregation operates on a meager budget comparatively. 

However, God’s work is done in this world not by might, nor by political power, but through the empower of the Holy Spirit.^[1] The church is charged with declaring and living the message of grace found in Jesus Christ, and we trace our roots to the gospel movement recorded in the New Testament over two thousand years ago. Jesus’ parting words to the disciples was to go into all the world and proclaim this good news.^[2] Every church is given that honor, and this mission is given with God’s promised success. 

I once read that pride grows in the human heart like lard on a pig. We display pride and its viscous foliage with little effort. In other words, we don’t have to work hard for pride to be manifested in our lives. Even noble and good things can become soured by this pernicious sin. Pride flows freely from our fallen hearts and tracing its roots is not difficult. All we need to do is look back to Eden where Adam and Eve took of the forbidden fruit and catapulted the human family into the misery of this fallen world. Since then, we all contribute to the groaning of this creation, and that in large measure comes from the sin of pride in our lives.

Throughout Scripture, God is on record with what he thinks about pride. In the book of Proverbs, we read that God abominates “haughty eyes,”^[1] and we are warned that “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before stumbling.”^[2] Jesus taught that it was “from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, pride, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.”^[3] The apostle James asserted that “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”^[4]  The word “opposes” describes God’s ongoing hatred and opposition to pride.  The apostle John referenced the “the boastful pride of life”^[5] in his warning to believers against loving this present world system. 

What makes pride so elusive is how easily it flows into everything. Pride is a stealth sin that can fly under the radar and wreak havoc before we identify it.  With such a formidable struggle before each of us, what hope do we have of putting off pride and putting on humility? Thankfully, the counsel of God’s word is not silent on how we can recognize pride.  God has given means of grace, holy habits, that we are to pursue in our lives.