Here’s today’s Installment of “The Power and Presence of the Holy Spirit“:
What, then, should we do in order to experience the presence and power of the Spirit on mission today? We must be born again! From there, we should give ourselves to the Bible, that the Spirit might strengthen us in the inner man, that Christ might dwell in our hearts by faith. If we are born again, Jesus loving, Bible reading obedient disciples, we will obey the command of Jesus to make disciples (Matt 28:18–20). This means we indiscriminately proclaim the gospel, that faith might come by hearing (Rom 10:17) as the Spirit gives life to those who hear the gospel (John 6:63). These new believers will be baptized in obedience to the command of Jesus (Matt 28:19). Baptism makes the disciple a member of a local expression of the body of Christ—a local church. And disciples are then given to the formative (teaching from the Bible; cf. Rom 6:17) and corrective (reproof, rebuke, calls to repentance, and if necessary exclusion, Matt 18:15–18) discipline of the church, that the church might be obedient to the commands of Jesus and experience the fullness of God’s presence among them by his Spirit. The church is the program that God has given through Jesus in the power of the Spirit for the making of disciples.
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To see all the posts in this series, go to the category “The Power and Presence of the Holy Spirit.”