In | The Spirit Abides in Us

Read 1 John 3:24 ESV and 4:13 ESV:

As so many different terms and images appear in these short letters, and as we’re hearing profound things about the value of love in Christian community, it can be easy to overlook passages like this. But they touch on a central theme of Christian theology and of the biblical understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. 

We heard from Paul that there is a sense in which defining Christianity is quite simple—those who are indwelt by the Spirit belong to the body of Christ, or as we tend to put it, “are Christians.” Those who don’t have the Spirit, whatever else they have, say or do, are not Christians. 

The bluntness of this “equation” may have seemed like a simplification, but in Pauline theology it instead represents a complex and irreducible mystical reality. This conviction is rooted in Paul’s idea that common men and women who are Christians are the body of Christ, in a literal but incomprehensible way.  

The Spirit of Christ is the person who makes this participation possible. At the end of the gospel story, when Jesus ascends to heaven (Mark 16:19; Luke 24:51; Acts 1:9), He really leaves. The scene at the beginning of Acts isn’t a skit that Jesus performs to signal a new era for the church. He really goes away.

The era in history when the Son walked the earth and lived with us “in the flesh” is over, in one sense “forever,” apart from His second coming. But the arrival of the Spirit guarantees God’s presence in and among His people, as Jesus promised:

Passages like this from Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel of John are among the most theologically charged in the Bible, and tangled with meaning. But we can see at a glance the way they reinforce Paul’s theology of participation in Jesus. The Spirit will live in believers (14:17) and when the Spirit lives in believers, they are in Christ (14:20) who is, in turn, in us.

When Paul insists that anyone “who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him” (Romans 8:9 ESV), he’s not giving us an “equation” for salvation, and he’s not simplifying anything. He’s describing the way our new relationship with Jesus works. Incidentally, this is also the way our new relationship with the Spirit and the Father works, but we’ll talk about that in a later presentation.

This relationship is difficult to understand, and it isn’t systematic, but it’s the core reality of Christianity. We have a relationship with all three persons of the Trinity, but the intercessor is the Holy Spirit. Our relationship with Jesus is in that sense never direct or unmediated or isolated, but is possible and realized only through the Spirit in us, or as 1 John has framed it: