Five Distinctives, pt 4-5

Jan 27

Our series on the “5 Distinctives of the Jesus Collective” concludes with the final two summarized below:

4) The Holy Spirit empowers us to partner in God’s work of reconciling all things

Many of us have a complicated relationship with the Holy Spirit. For some of us, the subject of the Spirit is frustrating and mysterious, and our understanding is limited to a handful of Bible stories or heady theological concepts. For others, our imagination of the Holy Spirit has been marred by painful church experiences and reckless bible interpretations that force people to give up on the Spirit entirely. But from the beginning of the biblical narrative, God has clued in His people on how the Spirit should be viewed, that is, as God’s personal, active presence working in all aspects of human life.

In Genesis 1, the Spirit hovers over the uncreated world, nurturing it into life, imagined in the original Hebrew as a hen brooding over her eggs. For the ancient writers, God’s Spirit is the “wind” that shapes reality and the “breath” that sustains it, integral to the unfolding of creation.

As the story of God begins intertwining with humankind, we begin to see the Spirit of God empowering individuals like the prophets to confront the idolatry of ancient Israel and the worldly power that was seducing them. As time went on, the prophets foresaw a time when the Spirit would no longer simply rest upon individuals but would return to indwell the people of God and launch a new creation, a new way of being human.

This promise finds its fulfillment in Jesus. At His baptism, we read that the Spirit descends on Him, empowering His ministry to bring healing, belonging, and order to a world plagued by chaos. After Jesus is raised by the Spirit, the new creation is launched and the disciples begin experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit collectively, empowering them to continue the embodied life of Jesus and to bridge the reality of the Kingdom of God to a broken world. Now, you and I, as the body of Christ, are empowered by the Spirit to partner with God as He reconciles all things to a reality where worldly power, greed, exclusion, and violence are overthrown by indiscriminate love, hospitality, peace, and goodness.

5) The Church is defined by our shared center, not by the lines we draw.

In Acts 2, the Spirit’s arrival at Pentecost demonstrates the unifying power of God’s Spirit. The disciples, mostly Galileans—known for their unique dialect and reputation for rebellion—are filled with the Spirit and begin speaking in the dialects of the diaspora Jews gathered in Jerusalem for Passover.

These Jews, who spoke Greek out of political necessity, were astonished to hear the Gospel in their mother tongues and dialects—languages tied to their deepest sense of home, tradition, and identity. This intimate act of communication revealed a God who welcomes all, breaking down divisions of language, culture, ideology, and history to unite people around the shared story of Jesus.

Living Out the Spirit’s Unity

The glorious takeaway from Acts 2 is that the Spirit doesn’t empower us to draw lines or elevate ourselves above others. Instead, the Spirit empowers us to descend from worldly postures and attitudes—into humility, presence, and co-suffering action:

To be present where injustice has cast its shadow.
To share burdens and suffer long with those who are hurting.
To listen and be open to the disruption that the Spirit sometimes challenges us with.

The Spirit reminds us that God is already at work ahead of us. We must trust His prevenient grace and enter into the spaces we’re called to, stripped of our desire to control and discern where the Spirit is working and how we can participate. This is a call to step into the unknown, to respond to the faint stirrings within us when we see evil overtaking our neighbors and to say, like Mary in her Magnificat, “Here I am, Lord.”