What the Spirit wants

Ever wish you could spy on someone’s thoughts? In the movie What Women Want (2000), Mel Gibson’s character, Nick Marshall, gets the chance to do just that. Nick is a financially successful womanizer who accidentally develops the ability to hear the thoughts of any woman around him. At first, he sees the uncanny gift as an annoyance, but soon realizes its potential in helping manipulate one particular woman, his career rival Darcy McGuire.

So, what is the relevance of all this to this month’s article? You may recall that last month I posed the question, “What does God’s Spirit want?” as a step toward transforming our iCulture mentality (“I want it. I need it. Now.”) into one that focuses on God’s desires. We, like Nick Marshall, have the tools to get into the mind of God, on some level at least. True, we will never be able to fully understand God’s thoughts, but He has given us a glorified peephole in the form of His written Word, the Bible. To begin to answer the question, “What does God’s Spirit want?”, one needs only crack open His Word—let’s look specifically at Romans 8 and Galatians 5.

In Romans 8, Paul first describes how Jesus fulfilled perfectly for us what the law required—what we were unable to do. He goes on to explain that we, having been made righteous by Jesus’ death and resurrection, and having received Jesus’ gift of the Holy Spirit, now have a new mindset: “For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit,” (v.5). In other words, this is where we seek to become Nick Marshalls—only we’re trying to understand the “things of the Spirit” rather than women (thank goodness!).

In Galatians 5:16-26, Paul gives us a closer look at the “things of the Spirit.” He explains that when we are led by the Spirit rather than the flesh, the end result will be “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control,” (v.22-23). This “fruit of the Spirit” flows directly from His desires. In fact, just by the Spirit dwelling within us, we gain insight into the desires of God. God’s desires are the Spirit’s desires, and the Spirit-led person naturally produces the fruit Paul mentions.

Next month, we’ll uncover what this sort of Spirit-following might look like in our culture today. In the meantime, let me leave you with an example from my own experience. Recently, my husband and I were on one of our late evening walks around the neighborhood when we encountered—or rather were accosted—by a lady running from her house toward us. “Hey you!” she kept shouting, frantically waving around a book which we later learned was about chinchillas. Sarah* told us how her sister was going to get a chinchilla, a story that somehow led to her sharing a myriad of other familial anecdotes in bullet-like fashion—rarely giving us a chance to speak at all. I immediately observed that Sarah was middle-aged, mentally challenged, and quite obviously very lonely. In the course of this long one-sided conversation, my husband and I discovered that Sarah used to go to church. She would ride with a neighbor every Sunday, but for some reason the neighbor stopped taking her. She now watches church on TV.

We were finally able to break free from the rather odd little chat with Sarah, but as our walk continued, my husband and I independently voiced a nagging question: Was there a reason God allowed Sarah to barge into our evening walk? My usual modus operandi in these types of situations is to silently pray for the individual and (conveniently for me) go on my way. This time I knew it was the Spirit nagging me and the more I tried to ignore the question, the guiltier I felt. Sarah needed our friendship and she needed God, and what better way to help satisfy those needs than to invite her to church with us. After much deliberation, we turned back and knocked on Sarah’s door. She has been attending church with us ever since.

In the story above, the Spirit showed my husband and me what to do in the midst of our indecision and fear. In fact, it was only by His power working within us that we were able to turn back and invite her to church with us. It would have been much more convenient to stay confined in our comfortable little church bubble, chatting merrily with friends before and after the service instead of spending time looking after Sarah. But sometimes following the Spirit’s lead requires us to ignore our culture’s craving for convenience and think more about someone else for a change. Acting out what the Spirit wants is challenging, but ultimately worth the cost.

*Name changed to protect the individual’s identity.