For Outward Growth

In our fourth and final week studying the Holy Spirit before Pentecost, we consider how God’s Spirit produces growth in Christians. Please enjoy J’non’s insights on our journey from wasteland to wonder, and click below to download the your free printable study guide.

“The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1:2).

When we go through particularly hard changes, we are experiencing the disruption and disorder of a time between. One way of life, which has been our “normal,” has to become a different way of living. Consider what that disruptive, jarring change might look like in these examples:  the death of a loved one; finally breaking away from a long-term, damaging relationship; or a sudden change in our physical body and health. 

The natural, necessary, but also horrible period in which we feel like we’re in a wilderness of chaos is where we ask God to make us into something new. Genesis 1:2 gives us the blueprint for how God uses His Spirit to make something that is “without form and void” into something that has an intentional order and functionality: something beautiful.

“Without form and void” can mean: to lie waste, formlessness, confusion, unreality, nothingness, emptiness, place of chaos, wasteland, wilderness of solitary places. I hope it’s not often that we might see ourselves in those defining words, but if you are in or have been in one of those disruptive seasons of a time between, you may suddenly feel a kinship with the earth before God brought all the elements together in the ordered form that we know and love. 

“[...] the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” 

“Hovering.” râchaph, raw-khaf'; a primitive root; to brood; by implication, to be relaxed:—flutter, move, shake.

I think of God’s Spirit right there in those times of formlessness and confusion, still covering and serving as an incubator for the messy process by which we will be changed at a core level into something new and beautiful. 

And here it begins, in the next verse: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness.” Out of the emptiness and confusion, only He can divide the light from the dark. That is a function of His Holy Spirit in us, and that is what we have access to when we fully offer our lives into His creative hands. God alone has the power to turn on the lights.

Ephesians 5:8-10 says, “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), finding out what is acceptable to the Lord.”

When God divides the light from the darkness in us through the work of the Holy Spirit, then we can actually find out what is acceptable to the Lord. That word “acceptable” means fully agreeable or well-pleasing. It hearkens back to sacrifices that were either accepted by God or rejected. It pricks my conscience to pay attention to what God desires from my life as a living sacrifice rather than what I may initially want to give.

“But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, [He] will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you” (John 14:26).

Consider the miracle that the Apostles experienced. Before receiving the Holy Spirit they had experienced a time between, also. Christ had been taken from them forcibly, died horribly, had ascended, and they were now in a time between--waiting for God to give them power. To give them purpose. To light the fire which would become the New Covenant church.

Through the Holy Spirit that day of Pentecost, God again revealed His power to turn on the lights.

-J’non