March 25, 2019
You yourselves are God’s temple and God’s Spirit lives in you.
—1 Corinthians 3:16
Doubtless the church is the kingdom, the home, the temple of the Spirit; but how?54 The Spirit governing the church is not like a human monarch, controlling his or her subjects, so to speak, as a force above and outside them. The Spirit is not only an atmosphere in which the church’s members move and breathe. He is not any merely external power or influence. The presence of the Spirit in the church is realized by his presence in the separate souls of her children. He is given without measure to the whole because he is given in a measure to each. Although he lives in souls because he lives in the church, yet the collective church is the temple of deity because the souls of regenerated Christians are already so many tenements in which the Heavenly Guest deigns to tarry and to bless.
The presence on which he insists is ultimately a presence in the individual. Such was to be the law of the messianic kingdom: each of its subjects was to be gifted with an inward presence of the Holy One.
The [Spirit’s] presence carries with it the gift of a new nature, the nature of God’s sinless Son. Along with this Spirit comes the gift of a new moral being, a new capacity and direction to the affections and the will, a clear perception of the truth by the renewed intelligence. And it becomes us today to remember that this gift dates from the morning of the first Christian Pentecost.
That intimate, absorbing, transforming gift of himself by God presupposes a recipient unlike all creatures that merely grow and feel, while they are incapable of reflective thought and self-determination. The human being, as an immortal spirit, is the temple of God. But how the divine Spirit enters into the human, who will say? But just so far as we bear constantly in mind the immateriality of our real selves can we understand the high privilege to which we are called in Christ. The presence of the Spirit, having its seat in the immortal human spirit, is inseparable from the presence of the incarnate Christ. This sanctification of the Christian’s whole being radiates from the sanctification of the inmost self-consciousness, involving the self-dedication to God of that imperishable center of life, that “I,” which is at the root of all feeling and all thought, which is each person’s true, indivisible, inmost self.
—H. P. Liddon
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