Thursday: The Spirit-Quickened Life
WEEK 24
THURSDAY
THE SPIRIT-QUICKENED LIFE
Romans 8:9-11
We saw yesterday that the very thing modern advice tells you—discover your hidden resources—actually did take place. They had inner resources beyond their dreams. But those resources were Resources—they were rooted in God within. The Spirit quickened their mortal bodies (Rom 8:11 KJV). Their bodies had power to resist disease, to recover from wounds and bruises, as when they stood around Paul, who had been dragged out of the city as dead, and he arose and went into the city on his own two legs. Then the next day went from Lystra to Derbe (Acts 14:19-21). Amazing vitality! God had given them new wineskins to hold this new wine of the kingdom. Then the Spirit quickened their minds, bringing to their remembrance everything that Jesus had said to them. Their hitherto dull minds were dancing with new truth and insights. The ancient scriptures lived—lived with Jesus as their central theme. Their minds were opened as to what was to be, for they could see the curve of the future in the present. Uncultured people taught the cultured and confounded the wisdom of the wise. “They couldn’t resist the wisdom the Spirit gave him as he spoke” (Acts 6:10). They could resist his wisdom but not the Spirit in that wisdom. It was wisdom without any worm of human pride at the core of the apple. It was sound wisdom because it was Spirit-touched wisdom. It was a wisdom that led them to lay the foundations of life securely in the moral foundations of the universe. It was a wisdom that kept them off the odd, the marginal, and the irrelevant. It was sifted wisdom—sifted from legalism, from the local, the passing. It was universal wisdom rooted in concrete fact.
Just how can we account for the fact that a group of provincial people, who had never been outside their own narrow country or outside their own narrow religion, could lay the foundations of life in such broad and universal terms that we are building on them in our complex age? Building on them? We know instinctively that if we don’t, we are building on sand and nothing but sand.
O Divine Spirit, touch our wisdom into Wisdom, our being into Being, our ways into the Way, and our very life into Life. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: My body, my mind, and my spirit shall be Spirit-quickened today.