God In and Through Us

God In and Through Us

God in and through us
If Christmas means ‘God with us’ and Easter spells out ‘God for us’, then Pentecost must be ‘God in and through us’. Okay, you say, but what does it mean?

First God sent Jesus to die for us and make us right with God. Then he sent the Holy Spirit to live in his children: to guide, to protect, to inspire, to enable, to empower them to be all God wants them to be.

The Holy Spirit really lives and breathes in you. How wonderful is that! But even this is not all.

But if God himself has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of him. Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won’t know what we’re talking about. But for you who welcome him, in whom he dwells—even though you still experience all the limitations of sin—you yourself experience life on God’s terms. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that if the alive-and-present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, he’ll do the same thing in you that he did in Jesus, bringing you alive to himself? When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as he did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With his Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ’s! (Romans 8:9-11, MSG,*)

It is time to let the Holy Spirit also work through you.
It is time to be part of God’s salvation plan.
It’s time to share the goodness of God.

And that’s what the happenings of Pentecost empowers us to do. God created us, Jesus redeemed us and the Holy Spirit sends us out to share the Good News. By loving, by serving, by doing what the Holy Spirit plans for us to do. All this just by letting the Holy Spirit freely work in and through us.

Answer this question: Does the God who lavishly provides you with his own presence, his Holy Spirit, working things in your lives you could never do for yourselves, does he do these things because of your strenuous moral striving or because you trust him to do them in you? Don’t these things happen among you just as they happened with Abraham? He believed God, and that act of belief was turned into a life that was right with God. (Gal.3:5-6, MSG,*)

Salvation is indeed God’s idea and work from start to finish. We are solely recipients of God’s amazing love and just passing it on. Only God in us and through us makes this possible.

We just receive all God’s gifts with open arms. How blessed we are! Thank you, God!

 

Gracious God,
You are everything and then some.
We are in awe of you.
How amazing is your salvation plan,
your idea and work from start to finish.
Thank you for creating us, saving us and
living and working in and through us.
May only your will happen in and through our lives.
We praise you forever and ever.
In Jesus’ name,
Amen

Q4U: How is God working in and through you?

Be blessed, my fellow pilgrim, as you enjoy the intimate friendship of the Holy Spirit!

* [As you might have noticed, I enjoy reading the Bible in different translations and love comparing them. I have started linking the Bible verses to Biblegateway.com so you can easily read (and compare) them in the different versions I’ve used while preparing each post.]

Image courtesy of Kevin Carden, design Mari-Anna Stålnacke. This post is refurbished from 2010. Linking up today with Unite the Bloggersphere , Three Word Wednesday and #tellhisstory.

2 thoughts on “God In and Through Us

  1. This is beautiful and worthy of further pondering. You are my neighbor at Beth’s and so thankful for God gives us everything, blessing us so. We are here to be His in the ways that He appoints for our lives.
    Caring through Christ, ~ linda

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

RSS
Follow by Email