Show Notes
In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland explores the empowering work of the Holy Spirit and its relationship to spiritual transformation. The Spirit transforms our being and empowers our doing so that our lives can increasingly reflect the integrity of Jesus. These two works belong together. We need the Spirit to form our character, and we need the Spirit to empower us to live out that character in the world.
Derek explores Jesus’ promise of “power from on high” in Luke 24 and the promise of power in Acts 1:8. The Greek word dunamis can refer to power, strength, ability, or capacity. Derek focuses on dunamis as a Spirit-given capacity to act, particularly the ability to bear faithful witness to Jesus. He then considers Aristotle’s use of dunamis as potentiality and explores the interesting connection between potentiality and action in Aristotle and Luke.
The episode concludes by challenging the limitations of self-help and willpower. We have practices for the body and soul, but we cannot recover from hypocrisy through human strength alone. The life of integrity requires our participation with the Holy Spirit. Jesus not only teaches us to love God and our neighbors. He gives us the Spirit who transforms us with God’s love and empowers us to live it out.
Key Takeaways
The Holy Spirit transforms our being and empowers our doing.
Spiritual maturity requires both holiness and Spirit-empowered action.
Jesus promised his disciples “power from on high” before sending them into the world.
Dunamis can describe power, ability, capability, or capacity.
The Spirit gives us a capacity to act faithfully as witnesses to Jesus.
Aristotle’s concept of dunamis offers an interesting philosophical comparison with Luke’s use of the word.
The Spirit’s power becomes visible through faithful action.
Recovering from hypocrisy requires more than self-help or willpower.
The practices of spiritual formation require the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit.
The life of integrity is a willingness to open ourselves to the Spirit’s power.
The Spirit both transforms us into people who love and empowers us to live out that love.
Books Mentioned
Pentecostal Theology and the Christian Spiritual Tradition — Simon Chan
Scriptures Mentioned
Luke 24:46–49
Acts 1:1–8
Matthew 16:24–26
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Transcript
Derek Vreeland: Welcome back to another Episode of Peaceable and Kind. I am your host, Derek Vreeland. Glad that you are with me for this episode. And if you are new to Peaceable and Kind, would you leave a rate? Or a review and subscribe wherever you’re listening to this podcast. On this episode, I want to talk to you about the Holy Spirit. Now, the Holy Spirit tends to be one of the forgotten members of the Trinity. Often we think of God the Father and God the Son, but we forget that the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, is the Lord and the giver of life.
And along with the Father and the Son, the Spirit is to be glorified. And so on this episode, I want to talk specifically about the empowering work of the spirit. In a previous episode, I talked about spiritual transformation. That is the transforming work of the spirit. And I want to counterbalance that with the empowering work of the spirit. As you know, I’m in the midst of writing a brand new book, Recovering Hypocrites. It comes out next year. And so a lot of these podcast episodes are just growing out. of what I’m currently writing these days, what I’m reading, what I’m researching.
And I see the virtue tradition as the answer, as the anecdote to what we need to recover from our hypocrisy, because At the core of the virtue tradition is this harmony of being and doing. So in the book I’m writing, I’m talking about virtues that shape our being, but then I also talk about practices for our doing. So In previous episodes, we’ve looked at practices for the body, practices for the soul. But as we think about ourselves as body and soul, doing and being, I want us also to be aware of what God, the Holy Spirit is doing in and among us.
And so I see the Holy Spirit primarily as shaping our interior life changing us on the inside, forming our being, our soul, that we might look more like Jesus. But not only is the Spirit transforming us, The Spirit is also empowering us so that we can live a life free of hypocrisy, so that we can live as people of integrity. And for me, these two works of the Holy Spirit, this work of transformation, this work of empowerment. They are intertwined, they overlap, they share in a lot of the very operations of the Holy Spirit. But I think that there is a distinctiveness in the empowerment and a distinctiveness in the transformative work of the spirit.
But we we need them both. And I’d like to emphasize how the Spirit transforms us Because there’s already enough attention on how the Spirit empowers us, right? Everybody wants to talk about the power of the Spirit. So in Pentecostal circles, they talk about the power of the Holy Ghost. Now I believe that that power is good and necessary, and we’re going to explore that in this episode. But don’t bifurcate the power we receive from the Spirit to do things from the power of the Spirit or the work of the Spirit. to form our inner character.
Simon Chan is a Pentecostal scholar in Singapore, and he is a Pentecostal theologian I have read for years and years and years His book, Spiritual Theology, was very important to me. And he wrote a book, Pentecostal Theology and the Christian Spiritual Tradition. that I think is is noteworthy. By the way, one of the reasons I love Chan so much is that he is very aware of the liturgical wing of the church. He understands contemplative practices, liturgical practices. He’s deeply Trinitarian, very ecumenical. But in Pentecostal theology and the Christian spiritual tradition, Chan writes, power can easily become corrupting.
When it’s divorced from holiness, more so when it is confused with spiritual maturity Now that’s true. Just because a person is energized, enabled by the power of the Holy Spirit To serve the body of Christ in a variety of capacities, let alone leadership and speaking and teaching, just because a person demonstrates spiritual power Chan says, do not confuse that with spiritual maturity. Because charisma Right, in personality and even charisma as a giftedness from the Holy Spirit. A person can have charisma, but charisma does not equal character. We need both. So that transforming work of the Spirit, Chan is talking about it in terms of like Wesleyan sanctification or holiness, which I think is a great way to express it.
So, we’ve looked in the past in a previous episode at how the spirit is transforming us. On this episode, I want to talk about how the spirit empowers us. And I believe in the power of the Holy Spirit because I have experienced the power of the Holy Spirit. Let me share a story with you that I don’t share often. I believe I’ve only shared it maybe one time, maybe twice. I think I did it once in a sermon, once in a small group, and you know, privately in conversation. I’ll share it with with close friends.
But this was a spiritual experience, an experience of the Holy Spirit that I had as a teenager that I still haven’t recovered from. You know, I believe in the necessity of experiencing God. God, after all, is not a giant brain in the sky Now, you know me. I want to pursue and love God with all of my mind. We have nothing to gain by being Ignorant. I wanted to use a stronger word, but we’ll go with ignorant, right? There’s nothing we have to gain from a lack of knowledge. So I think knowledge is good. I think education is good.
I think you should read books, listen to podcasts that stimulate your thinking. Very important. But we also need to have an open heart to encounter and experience God. And our experience of God is an experience of God, the Holy Spirit You know, I’m a big fan of St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas ‘s Summa Theologiae is still a massive theological work that I’ve just dipped my toes in. And did you know that Aquinas never finished it? After celebrating the Mass on a certain occasion, Aquinas returned to his room unable to speak He had a mystical encounter. He had an experience of the Holy Spirit.
And he would later go on to say that he couldn’t write anymore. Because everything he had written, which by the way, is sophisticated, it shows his brilliance, it it shaped Western Christian theological thought. So the Summa Theologia is extremely important in the history of Christian theology. But for Aquinas, his encounter with God through the mystery of holy communion did something to him, and it was hard to express. He never wrote about it. People really don’t know what happened. Some would describe it, and this is Catholic language, as he had an experience of the beatific vision.
That is, he saw God as God is So when I go to describe this spiritual experience, I do I do struggle with with ways to communicate it. So I use metaphors and stuff because I think a true encounter with God, a true Mystical experience, an experience of the power of the spirit, is just very, very hard to describe. But this is what happened to me. So I was baptized as a child, drifted from the church for a while, and then as a sophomore in high school, 15 years old. I had this resurgence of my faith.
I threw myself in the life of the church. And so by summertime. After my sophomore year, I mean, that summer between my sophomore and junior year of high school when I was turning 16 That was just such a pivotal moment. I changed. I left school the end of my spring semester. of sophomore year, one kind of person. And I went back to school fall semester, junior year, and I was different. I was changed. God was doing such a work in my heart, in my mind, I couldn’t stop Reading and talking to Christians about the Christian faith.
I was in church every time the doors were open And our youth group on Monday nights would do visitation and Bible study. So what we would do is go visit. families that were new to our church that had teenagers or just teenagers that were new to our youth group. We just load up a bunch of us in the church van and we drive over there and say hello. And then after that visit, we’d go to a barbecue joint here in St. Joe and in one of the side rooms we’d do a Bible study. And we would often invite whoever You know, we were visiting, hey, we’re gonna go to a Bible study at the barbecue place, you wanna go?
I don’t remember the barbecue, by the way. I remember the curly fries. Those curly fries hit. They were really, really good. So on an August Monday, this would have been in the summer of 1990, I’m in this Bible study, and the youth pastor is talking about love. The love of God and the different Greek words for love. In the New Testament, we see the Greek word phileo and the Greek word agape, two different Greek words for the word love. And he described uh Phileo as the kind of love shared between brothers. Uh it’s a it’s a it’s a friendship kind of love, uh brotherly affection kind of love, which is good But then there’s also agape.
And agape is love in a higher sense. It is the love of God. It is the love which is the divine nature of God. God, and it is the love by which God loves us. The love demonstrated by Jesus on the cross, the love of the Father poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. So I left the barbecue place thinking about that and went to uh bed that night and I’m laying there trying to fall asleep and all I can do is think about love. I’m like I don’t know if I really love God with that agape kind of love.
Now, you know, I’m 16 years old. Like, I’m just figuring out my faith. But I wanted to be a whole-hearted follower of Jesus. And so I wanted to tell God that I loved him more than anything else. So I kicked the covers off and swung my legs around, put my feet on the floor, and I sat on the edge of my bed well past midnight in the dark. And I began to whisper out a prayer. And I was just expressing to God the great gratitude that I was feeling because I knew I was changing. I mean I was aware.
We’re not always aware of what God’s doing within us, but I was aware that I was changing. I was becoming a different person. Thanking God for that. And then I paused, and then I said right out loud, and it wasn’t loud, it was in in whispered tones. But I said right out loud, God, I love you with agape love. I love you more than anything. And after I said that, the only way I can think to describe it is it felt like There were people around me with five gallon buckets of water, and they were all dumping that water on me at the same time.
I instinctively, um, without thinking, um slumped down off the bed, onto the floor, on my knees, and I put my face in the carpet. And it did feel in that moment that I did not have strength in my body. I’m sure I did, but it didn’t feel like it. And in my mind, I almost felt like my mind was swirling. Like I wasn’t locked in on any one thing. This is my mystical experience. So in that moment, as I’m laying there on my knees, facing the carpet, in the dark, in my bedroom, I I would say I heard, but I think if you were with me in in that bedroom, you would not have heard it.
I think it was something God was speaking on the inside of me, but it it seemed to me that I heard God say one word and that was ministry. I paused. I just pondered. My mind was still not focused on anything, just this one word, ministry. And because I was coming to faith in an evangelical Southern Baptist context, I had my Bible close to me. And so I I I said, Lord, if this experience is from you, can you show me in your word where this is? Now again, I’m a couple months into this thing.
I hardly knew the Bible, but when I prayed that, then I kinda uh then my mind was more focused and and I felt like I had strength again, so I I stood up, sat on the bed, turned on the lamp, grabbed my Bible that was right there. And I began flipping through the pages. Which, by the way, flipping through pages in your Bible, hoping God will lead you to the perfect verse, the perfect time, only works one time in your life. So I don’t I don’t encourage this as a way of doing Bible study and communicating with God.
But in that moment as a 16-year-old that hardly knew the Bible, I was flipping through the pages hoping. that something would happen. And it did. My eyes fell on one verse. It was Acts chapter 1, verse 8. Where I read, and you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses And I remember closing my Bible and sitting there with just such satisfaction in my heart. And I thought, well. I think what I experienced was the power of the Spirit, and I I think God’s calling me to be like his full-time witness in ministry.
I think this is a confirmation. And so I said in prayer, I was like, Lord, if you are calling me into full-time ministry, I say yes. Man, that was a long time ago. That was 36 years ago. But that experience of the power of the Holy Spirit. uh it changed me and it’s still with me. I still feel that draw and calling from Jesus to serve the church, to serve God’s people, as a pastor. And so I became a pastor, not because I had sat down with a piece of paper or spiral notebook and just made two columns, Pros and Cons.
Should it be a pastor? What are the pros? What are the cons? It wasn’t like that at all. I decided at 16 years old that I wanted to be a pastor. And went on to college and seminary and now have been serving as a pastor over 25 years because I had an encounter with the power of the Holy Spirit Hey friends, I want to pause this episode for just a moment to let you know that Resurrection, eight lessons on how God restores us, the third and final book in the God in the Neighborhood Bible study.
study series is out now. Go to the show notes for ordering information. So let me take you into the scriptures. That’s that’s really what I want to do. Let me take you into the scriptures and show you what leads up to Acts chapter 1, verse 8, because we have to start in Luke’s gospel. As you know, Luke is the human author of both the gospel that bears his name and the book we call the Acts of the Apostles or the Book of Acts. The fifth book in the New Testament. So you got Matthew, Mark, Luke, right, who wrote that gospel, John, and then Acts, also written by Luke.
So Luke Acts goes together. So to back up to give you the context of Acts 1. 8, I want to start at the very end of Luke’s gospel. Luke 24 , and we’ll start at verse 46. Luke 24, 46 through 49. This is after the walk to Emmaus, where Jesus encounters those two disciples and then reveals himself in the breaking of bread, and then he He goes back to meet with his disciples and he’s explaining to them how the scriptures, the law, the prophets, the psalms, they’re all speaking of Jesus. So he’s had that conversation with his disciples.
And then Jesus said, and this is Luke 24, 46, yes, it was written long ago that the Messiah would suffer and die and rise from the dead on the third day. It was also written that this message would be proclaimed in the authority of his name to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem. There is forgiveness of sins for all who repent. You are my witnesses of all these things, and now I will send the Holy Spirit Just as my father promised. But stay here in the city until the Holy Spirit comes and fills you with power from heaven.
This is the New Living translation. Power from Heaven is really better translated, power from on high. The Holy Spirit will come, Jesus said to his disciples, and fill you with power The Greek word that’s translated power in English is the word dunamis. Now, I don’t think you have to know all the Greek words in the New Testament, and typically I try to avoid you know, talking about Greek words, but this is one, if we’re going to explore how the spirit is empowering us, I think we need to to look a little bit with some depth at the Greek word used for power, dunamis.
I remember back in the day hearing preachers say say, Dunamis, that’s the dynamite power of the Holy Spirit. And that’s not at all what dunamis means, right? Dun Dunamis is not about dynamite, it’s not the power to destroy. Rather, dunamis is the power to build, the power to do the work set before us And this is a very, very common Greek word. And so dunymus means power or might or strength or force, like power in a physical sense. In some contexts, it could mean ability or capability. I mean, nearly every English translation, and I look before recording this podcast, nearly Every English translation uses the word power or empowering, um, but they all use the word power, almost all, for dunamis, when it appears in Luke’s gospel.
And again, this this reference to receiving power from on high. This is Luke 24, 49 So almost all English translations use the English word power for dunymus. And so I think it’s fine as far as it goes. I just think power has a lot of baggage to it. I mean the word power. I think when you hear the word power, I’m betting that you’re first thinking of power in its negative connotation. I say power, and you’re thinking of like the corrupting nature of power, right? The very famous quote, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
I don’t think power is necessarily or inherently corrupted, but certainly in in modern life, we have seen far too often how economic power how social power, how political power has just been corrupted. So I’d prefer to think of dunamis as ability rather than might or strength. I really think that’s how Luke is using that word here in his gospel. I mean, dunamis The way I am reading it in its context is much closer to a spirit-given capacity to act. rather than raw and potentially coercive power. So when you think dunamis, I want you to think ability So as we’re exploring here and go into Acts, when that word dunamis comes up, yes, it means power, but power in terms of capability, ability.
Strength, but not physical strength, inner strength, strength of heart, strength of character. Now, that same word shows up in part two of Luke’s story in the book of Acts So let’s go and see what Luke says in Acts. So we’ll just start Acts 1-1 So Acts chapter 1, verse 1 and verse 2. Luke opens up what is part two with, in my first book I told you, Theophilus. About everything Jesus began to do and teach until the day he was taken up to heaven after giving his chosen apostles further instructions through the Holy Spirit So we know that Acts is the second volume to the Gospel of Luke because it’s addressed to the same person, Theophilus.
We don’t know who this is. Theophilus is a Greek name, it means lover of God, it’s presumably some type of noble person, but Luke wanted to give a very clear eyewitness account. of Jesus, his life, his ministry, his calling of the apostles, his death, resurrection, ascension, and then What Jesus began to do through his life continued on through the life of his people, his church, through the Holy Spirit And so in Acts chapter 1, uh chapter 1, it says that Jesus spent 40 days with his disciples. And during that time, he was giving them evidence and proof after proof that Jesus is really alive, a really live human being And Jesus also talked about the kingdom of God because this was the sole subject of the preaching ministry of Jesus.
He was always proclaiming the kingdom of God, teaching about the kingdom of God. So before his ascension, this is the last thing he’s talking to his disciples about, and that is the kingdom of God. And so all that kingdom talk. Got the disciples wondering, when are you going to restore the kingdom to Israel Again, all of his disciples were Jewish. When they heard kingdom language, they thought kingdom in the sense of a kingdom like King David. Where we kill all the bad guys and we establish the glory of Yahweh, the God of Israel, in Jerusalem and throughout Israel.
So this is what they were thinking about when he said kingdom. They were thinking about a real civic social kingdom. Now pause. Jesus did come to bring a kingdom. A real social physical kingdom But it would be a kingdom that would be coming through his multicultural church, the renewed people of God who are both Jew and Gentile. They didn’t understand that. It took some time. Actually in the book of Acts, it It chronicles their wrestling with that. You can read about the Council of Jerusalem. That’s Acts 15, I believe, or Acts 16. where they’re wrestling with this idea, do Gentiles need to be circumcised according to the law of Moses?
And at the end they’re like, no, everybody comes to faith. Like the same way. Everyone enters into God’s covenant community after Jesus the same way. And that’s through faith in Jesus. So, but in the first chapter of Acts, his Jewish disciples are like, okay, we love this kingdom talk. Now When is it going to happen? When are we going to see this kingdom restored to Israel? And here’s what Jesus said, Acts 1, verses 7 and 8. Jesus replied, The Father alone has the authority to set those dates and times, and they are not for you to know.
But You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses. Telling people about me everywhere, in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth So Jesus didn’t correct them, neither did he answer their question, because he was sending them on a mission. A mission to tell everybody. About this kingdom of God movement through Jesus. Now, I want to look at the word power So in Acts 1. 7, Jesus says, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses That word power is the same Greek word dunamis.
So remember, Luke in his gospel uses this word dunamis Again, think about that as ability more than power. He uses it in his gospel, and now he’s using it In his account of the mighty acts of the apostles. And Jesus In Acts chapter 1 is revealing the action for which Dunamis was given Because again, I’m thinking about dunamis as ability, as the spirit-empowered capability to act And what is that act? Well, the action here in Acts chapter 1 is that the disciples, the apostles, would go out and bear witness to Jesus. Now, I want to pause just for a second because I want to do even a deeper dive on this word dunymus.
It’s interesting to me that dunamis, used twice by Luke here to talk about the dunamis of the Spirit, the power of the Spirit. That word dunamis. is an important concept in Greek philosophy. So let’s go back to Aristotle Some 400 years before Luke penned his gospel, Aristotle used that common everyday Greek word dunamis in a very technical philosophical sense. For Aristotle Dunamis played an important role in how he understood the nature of being itself. All right, so we’re talking about being. The technical terms for this is ontology or metaphysics, but hang with me because we’re gonna we’re gonna connect what Aristotle is thinking and doing with what Luke is writing about the words of Jesus.
So, Aristotle. He said reality could be understood in terms of potentiality and actuality. Now the two words he used was dunymus and energia. I’m not gonna talk about energia. I’ve given you one Greek word for this episode. That’s all you need. But for Aristotle, dunamis was a concept which is best translated potentiality. So, when Aristotle was studying the nature of things, he realized that that nature itself had a combination of potentiality, what a thing might become, and actuality, what a thing actually was Now, these two concepts were connected and interrelated. Now, I know it’s somewhat ethereal, so let me give you like a practical sort of example.
Think about an acorn. Right outside my house to the east is a giant, massive oak tree. I mean it’s huge. It’s probably 60 to 80 years old And it drops acorns. And it seems like it’s been dropping a lot of acorns. It typically is dropping them in the fall. So think about an acorn that falls from a mighty oak tree An acorn itself is not an oak tree, but in that little seed, in that little Acorn, it possesses the potential or the capacity to become a mighty oak tree Now, how that happens, I’ll let people smarter than me explain that.
But within that acorn, there is the potential to be a mighty oak. So as it is planted and it sprouts from the ground Over decades and decades, that little acorn actually becomes an oak tree with bark and massive branches and leaves. So you can see that an acorn has potential that is realized when it actually becomes an oak tree So , potentiality, dunamis for Aristotle, potentiality is the capacity with anything That points it, that it’s it’s oriented towards actuality. Okay, if you haven’t stopped this episode yet, let me take it back to Luke Because I don’t think Luke was using the Greek word dunymus in the philosophical sense that Aristotle was, but I see this very interesting connection.
So Luke’s dunamis in Luke, the Gospel, and Acts is the ability to act given Through the Holy Spirit, right? So Jesus tells his disciples that they will receive dunamis ability or power when the Holy Spirit comes on them and that ability immediately takes the form of action So I don’t think Luke’s dunamis and Aristotle’s dunamis is exactly the same. But what’s similar about how they use that word is it is something that is oriented towards action. Now in Luke, and of course then we see it in Acts The Spirit’s dunamis is made visible through the disciples’ witness as they carry forth the gospel from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth.
Right? So the Spirit provides ability. Strength, power, for faithful witness. But that witness is not Actualized until they head out from Jerusalem and start preaching the gospel So for both Luke and Aristotle, dunymus points towards some form of doing. The dunamis of the spirit empowers our doing, just as the transformation of the spirit empowers our being. And we need both. We are given by grace this spiritual, spirit-given ability to do what we are becoming in the spirit In this regard, if we put this back in the context of recovering from hypocrisy, which is, again, where my brain is these days.
We see the perfect harmony of being and doing. See, we don’t have to do it all on our own When we recognize that we have fallen into a trap, like the trap of hypocrisy, there are certainly things that we need to do to get out of that trap. But it’s not all up to us. We need more than just self-help books and more willpower. I love Eugene Peterson’s message translation when it comes to to Jesus in in Matthew 16. He has this line in the message that self-help is no help at all. This is where Jesus is describing that if you want to be his disciples, you have to deny yourself, take up your cross and follow him.
Here’s how it is rendered in the message translation. This is Matthew 16, 24 through 26 Jesus says, anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You’re not in the driver’s seat. I am. Don’t run from suffering. Embrace it Follow me and I’ll show you how. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to find yourself, your true self. What kind of deal is it to get everything you want but lose yourself? I just love that. Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice. is the way. That’s the way to save our lives or to find our true selves.
So if we want to Recover and stay recovered and resist hypocrisy. We have these practices for our soul and our body that we need to do, but we don’t have to depend on our own strength I mean, the life of authentic Christian discipleship, the life of integrity is not a matter of willpower, but a willingness to open up to the spirits. dunamis, the Spirit’s ability. And to me, this work of the Holy Spirit demonstrates the uniqueness of Jesus. Let me explain why. All major world religions have religious leaders who will offer you commands, principles, steps.
uh things that you have to do to reach some version of the good life or salvation or heaven or enlightenment, whatever it would be. Now They’re gonna disagree. Different religions disagree on what that end goal actually looks like, right? So, like Christianity and Buddhism, gonna have different views of what the end game is. But All religions are going to give you the steps on how we should get there. Now Jesus does have commands, right? Jesus is really, really clear. Jesus is not like, hey guys You’re good. Do whatever you want. I’ll die for your sins.
Take you to heaven. Live any way you want. Oh, no, no, no, no. Jesus Christ Jesus, King Jesus, has a kingdom and he’s got rules for that kingdom. He’s got things for us to do. He sums it up in two: love God and love neighbor. Everything gets summed up. If you want to walk faithfully in the footsteps of Jesus in obedience, you love God, you love neighbor. But here Is where we see something unique. Jesus offers what no other religious leader offers. Jesus gives commands like every other religious leader, but Jesus also offered the promise of the Father, that is, the Holy Spirit Who would both transform and empower our hearts with the love of God?
So Jesus not only has commands, but he gives the power to obey those commands. So I want you to follow Jesus into the promised land, into the good life, whatever that looks like for you. Part of that is becoming your true self. I want you to experience all that God has for you. And so there are things that you have to do. Just remember. You don’t have to do it all in your own strength. Self-help is no help at all. Willpower will only get you so far. Open up to the Spirit’s power. Receive on a daily basis.
I pray in morning prayers. For the Holy Spirit to come. I pray, Lord, fill me with the Holy Spirit. Because I want my life fueled not by willpower because my willpower is not that strong. I’m getting better with my diet, but I still tend to eat like a teenager. But I am growing in self-control, which is a virtue, by the way. Growing in self-control because I’m depending upon God, the Holy Spirit. To give me ability to do what’s in front of me. Well, that’s all that we have for this episode. Thank you for joining me.
Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.