ORDINARY PEOPLE, EXTRAORDINARY GOD

On the night of his arrest, Jesus said: “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father” (John 14:12)

Jesus has made us all into tabernacles filled with the presence and power of God, doing the very things we’ve seen him doing. This is what the gifts of the Holy Spirit are all about: making the totally impractical (the supernatural, the miraculous, the Gospel ministry of Jesus) not only possible but practice-able (by ordinary people tabernacled by an extraordinary God).

Then on resurrection evening, Jesus breathed on his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven” (John 20:22−23).

What could that possibly mean? Well, remember how Jesus got in trouble for going around doing things tradition said you could do only in the temple? He promised his Spirit to his followers and commissioned them, “Now you do all those temple-specific things I’ve been doing.”

Does that mean you and I go around forgiving sins? No, and yes. It means people should experience the forgiveness of God through God’s people who carry his presence. Jesus commissioned his followers with the very presence and power that they’d seen in him, not as a comforting theory or a poetic metaphor but in actual practice.

We flock in and out of churches, ordering our lives around the teachings of Jesus, building on the foundation of the Father’s love, but totally unaware of how close this triune God has come, how entirely he has given himself to us.

Just as Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, acted as a living temple, so now he commissions his disciples to be filled with the Spirit and act in this world as living temples—indwelled with the presence of God. The rest of the Bible is essentially a bunch of ordinary people “tabernacling”: ordinary people filled with the Holy Spirit and carrying the ministry of Jesus forward.

How would you live differently if you truly believed the Holy Spirit dwells in you?