Category Archives: New Testament

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As the Father sent me, I send you—John 20:21

What dynamic empowered the earliest church for mission? When Jesus came to his disciples after his resurrection, they were hiding, afraid that they might meet their teacher’s fate (John 20:19). Jesus greeted them with the typical Jewish greeting (the blessing shalom, 20:19, 21). It was more than a greeting that evening, however: it fulfilled his promise to bring them peace (14:27).

Jesus then showed them his hands and side (20:20). Soldiers often displayed their wounds to prove their loyalty; others displayed wounds to evoke sympathy. Jesus may have displayed his wounds to demonstrate that he had in fact died, hence was in fact risen (cf. Luke 23:39-40). This would make sense to the disciples, since some Jewish thinkers expected God to resurrect the bodies of the righteous in the same form in which they died before healing them. When they saw him, the disciples rejoiced: his coming fulfilled his promise to bring them joy (John 16:20-22).

Now the Lord commissioned them. “As the Father sent me,” he announced, “that is how I send you” (20:21). How had the Father sent Jesus? He sent him as his agent and representative, to reveal by both his words and life the Father’s heart for the world. As the Father’s agent, he did what the Father would have done and said what the Father would have said (5:19). As the Father’s agent, he bore the Father’s authority to perform selected signs revealing God’s character. And as the Father’s agent, he was so one with the Father’s mission that he would die to carry it out.

Jesus passes this commission on to his followers. We are his agents and representatives: we must speak his message, and our lives must let the world know that we are truly his disciples (13:35). He authorizes us to speak the message that brings people life or judgment, depending on their response (20:23). But how can we fulfill such a dramatic commission?

Jesus granted his disciples the power to carry out his commission in 20:22. As God first breathed into Adam the breath of life (Gen 2:7), Jesus breathed on them new life. He had earlier promised Nicodemus that those who were born again would be born from the Spirit, who was as mysterious as the wind (John 3:8). Now he declared, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” This was the Spirit that Jewish people associated sometimes with spiritual cleansing and often with prophetic empowerment. This was the Spirit that Jesus had promised would continue his own presence among them (14:26; 16:13-15). The Spirit was Jesus’s agent as Jesus was the Father’s agent (16:14), and the Spirit had come to live in the believers.

How can we dare to attempt to fulfill God’s mission? We must trust him and the power with which he has equipped us. As we faithfully speak and live his mission, the Spirit will make Jesus real to those whose hearts God opens. Jesus made not some but all of his followers like the prophets of old; he has called us to let the world know his heart of love.

This article is adapted from an article written for the Missionary Seer in 2004; Craig has also written The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).

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A missionary meets the mother church—Acts 21:20-25

When Paul visited the church in Jerusalem, its leaders reaffirmed their acceptance of his Gentile mission: Gentiles did not have to become culturally Jewish to become followers of Jesus (Acts 21:25). Those in any culture who become Christians—whether the culture is geographically distant, immigrants near us, or even young people in our churches—are called to give up their sins, but not non-sinful elements of their culture.

What the Jerusalem church’s leaders understood, however, was more difficult for much of the Jerusalem church to fathom. Their local suffering had understandably shaped their approach to Gentiles. Roman governors had exploited Judea for years; the brief tenure of a Judean king, Agrippa I, had restored Judeans’ self-respect and desire for freedom, but his early death had been followed by even worse repression from irresponsible governors. Most Judeans, whose contact with Rome was entirely negative, felt they had good reason to mistrust Gentiles—and any Jews who compromised too much with them. Even in more recent history, this has been a natural response to colonial oppression.

Unfortunately, it rendered plausible rumors about Paul, a Jewish missionary among the Gentiles who was not back in Jerusalem often enough to defend himself (Acts 21:21). Today, no less than then, some Christians are ready to criticize other Christians without taking the time to understand how they often are relating to different situations than the critics face. Sometimes this criticism misrepresents those criticized and becomes slander.

Consciously or unconsciously, the church in Jerusalem had adopted some of the perspectives of its culture, just as most of us do in our various cultures today. Their identification with their culture was helpful in reaching their culture, to the extent that the values they shared were positive or neutral. After years of Jerusalem believers’ faithful witness within their culture (21:20), the message of Jesus was not as controversial there as it had once been; Paul’s audience in the temple later listened intently as he talked about Jesus (22:2-20). Once he talked about going Gentiles, however, many of his hearers demanded his death (22:21-22).

Paul himself was willing to accommodate local Jerusalem culture to reduce offense (21:20-26). He did this with Gentiles and was certainly ready to identify with his own heritage. (Even in the colonial era the best missionaries, who were often at odds with colonial authorities, related to local cultures much better than did contemporaries from the colonial cultures; e.g., William Carey, David Livingstone, Mary Slessor, and Hudson Taylor.)

But Paul was not willing to compromise the demand for unity with believers from other cultures or the need to preach to other peoples; to do so was to compromise the gospel itself. (From Paul’s letters we may even infer that he was in Jerusalem precisely on a mission of ethnic reconciliation, Rom 15:27.) When any local culture’s nationalism refuses to love people in other cultures, unity with one’s brothers and sisters in Christ comes before unity with our culture. Thus Paul spoke about going to the Gentiles even though it was likely to arouse his hearers’ anger (22:21-22).

The danger of overidentifying with our culture at the expense of the gospel was not distinctive to the Jerusalem church; it is a temptation in most cultures. Missiologists distinguish contextualization from syncretism. Contextualization involves making the gospel message culturally relevant, translating it in such a way that people in a given culture understand it thoroughly. Syncretism is where one replaces or mixes the gospel with cultural elements religiously incompatible with it. Paul identified with local culture, but would not compromise his gospel message. Elsewhere, he rejected false gods and sexual immorality even though they were widespread in local cultures. In Jerusalem, he refused to compromise the universality of Christ’s claim (seeking followers from all nations) to fit the expectations of his own culture.

Only God knew how much the future lay more with Paul’s mission than with the megachurch in Jerusalem. Within a decade, Jesus’ followers had to flee Jerusalem in view of its impending destruction. The Diaspora churches eventually outgrew the Judean churches. In the centuries that immediately followed, Christianity grew especially in western Asia, north Africa and southern Europe; then it spread further west in Asia, north in Europe and south into east Africa. In the nineteenth century, western nations sent most missionaries. Today, many younger churches in Africa, Asia, and Latin America far outnumber churches in the west, often outpace them in devotion to prayer and evangelism, and often send more missionaries. More believers live in these regions than in the west, and much of the gospel’s future lies with them. Mission today requires heeding the voices of the church throughout the world. No one culture’s church has everything. We need one another, and must partner together for Christ’s gospel.

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Born from water and the Spirit—John 3:3-5

When Nicodemus, himself a religious teacher, praised Jesus as a great teacher, Jesus revealed himself as more than a teacher. Jesus is a savior, and he confronts this religious teacher with his need for salvation. “You must be born from above,” Jesus told him (John 3:3). The Greek word for “above” can also mean, “again,” and Nicodemus supposes that Jesus asks him to enter his mother’s womb again (3:4). So Jesus explains further: “You must be born from water and the Spirit” (3:5).

 

Not only Nicodemus, but a host of interpreters through history, have wondered what Jesus meant. What Jesus most naturally meant in light of first-century culture Nicodemus assumed that he could not mean! When Gentiles converted to Judaism, they normally ritually immersed themselves to wash away their former Gentile impurities. According to later Jewish teachers, once a Gentile converted to Judaism they were like a newborn child, having forsaken their previous people and lifestyle and now serving the God of Israel. Had Jesus told a Gentile to be “born of water,” Nicodemus could have guessed what he meant. But he could hardly imagine that Jesus would demand the same of him, a religious Jewish teacher descended from Abraham!

 

Yet this is likely precisely Jesus’ point. We are not saved by our ethnicity or because we grew up in church; we are not saved even by our religious deeds. We are saved because Jesus died for us (John 3:16) and rose again. Jesus was telling Nicodemus that he had to come to God on the same terms that Gentiles did, the same terms that we all do: he had to accept God’s gift of salvation in Jesus Christ. Later, in John 8:44, Jesus argues that people who have sinned (everyone) are children of the devil, following his nature; when Jesus comes into our lives, however, we get a new nature and are born from God. We may not start off by living out that new nature perfectly, but at least we are aware that we have a new Lord.

 

But why does Jesus add, “born from the Spirit”? As Calvin and others have suggested, the Greek phrase here translated, “water and the Spirit,” may be what is called a hendiadys, using the conjunction epexegetically. In other words, we might translate it, “born from the water of the Spirit.” Jesus uses “water” as a symbol for the Spirit in John’s Gospel (John 7:37-39). Thus he is telling Nicodemus not that he will be saved by Jewish ritual immersion, but that he will be saved instead by a spiritual baptism by the Spirit, i.e., by the gift of God’s Spirit transforming his heart. All those who embrace Christ as savior become God’s children (John 1:12-13).

 

Jesus probably alludes in this context to the restoration promise of Ezekiel 36:25-27: God would sprinkle clean water on his people, put a new spirit in them, and give them his own Spirit. Thus, Jesus speaks of the spirit that is born from the Spirit (John 3:6). He goes on to compare God’s life-giving Spirit with the wind (3:8), just as in Ezekiel’s next chapter (Ezek 37:1-14).

 

God does not save us because we are Jewish or Gentile; God loves the entire world, including all peoples and cultures (John 3:16). All of us have sinned and left God’s way, but when we accept and trust the gift of God’s Son, he welcomes each of us as his children. May we labor until all know about him.

 

This is adapted from Craig’s 2005 article in the Missionary Seer; Craig has also authored The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic), which received an award of merit in the Christianity Today book awards.

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Jesus is the only way, John 14:6

When Jesus declares that He is the way, the truth, and the life, the context makes clear that He means that He is the way to the Father. He further claims that no one comes to the Father except through Him (John 14:6). This fits the rest of John’s Gospel: there, even many of the religious people who believed in the one true God opposed God’s agent; if they were not following God’s heart, how much less those who worship false gods or (like myself before my conversion) no God at all?

 

This claim is a startling and offensive one in our culture, where all truth is often considered relative (except the truth of relativism). But while some truth may be relative, sometimes it matters what one believes: if I drink nitric acid because someone tells me that it is orange juice, there will be consequences to my faulty information. Yet the claim is no more offensive today than it was for the early Christians; had they agreed to the existence of other gods in addition to their own, they would not have faced much persecution in the Roman world. Gentiles did not deny the Jewish God, but often despised Jews and Christians for worshiping him exclusively.

 

The claim is also painful. Many people we love do not know Christ; half the world has never even had the gospel explained to them. But the painfulness of a claim need not make it untrue. That tens of thousands of people die daily from malnutrition and preventable diseases is catastrophic, but we do the world no good by denying its reality; instead we must pour our resources into meeting those needs. In the same way, if Jesus is the fullest revelation of God’s heart, we must devote our labors to making that available to spiritually needy people that God created for fellowship with Himself. We do this by sharing our faith (both with our lips and with lives consistent with our testimony), directly with with those around us, and less directly by supporting our fellow laborers who share God’s love in Christ among those who have not heard it.

 

Some people object that all religions are the same regarding “what matters.” Unfortunately, such an objection is offensive to most religions, because it waters down what matters to them. One religion says that Jesus is God’s Son; another says that God has no son. Some religions say that there is only one God; others that there are many gods; others still that everything is god. While such distinctions may not matter to outsiders, they matter to practitioners of these faiths. Tolerance and kindness are necessary virtues, but genuine tolerance means that we get along (and, according to Christian teaching, love our neighbor) even when we disagree, not that we always agree. Many who want to make all religions the same are unwilling to tolerate the differences!

 

When John’s Gospel claims that Jesus is the only way to the Father, it is not saying that no one else has any truth. It does, however, claim that Jesus is the only way to a completely saving, personal relationship with the Father. The apostolic message throughout the New Testament preaches as if our eternal destiny depends on our response to God’s offer of a relationship with Himself in Christ. If we genuinely believe that claim, we will live in such a way as to devote our lives and resources to making Christ known.

 

This article is adapted from Craig’s 2004 article in the Missionary Seer; Craig has also authored The Gospel of John: A Commentary (Baker Academic).

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Global sharing, 2 Corinthians 8—9

Any reader of the Gospels knows that Jesus taught radical sharing of our possessions with people who need our help. Luke’s Gospel is particularly emphatic about this principle. God’s prophet invites the truly repentant person to share anything they have beyond what they need to live on, even if they have just a second pair of clothes and someone else has none (Luke 3:8-11). Whoever wants to be Jesus’ disciple will surrender all his or her possessions (Luke 14:33; cf. 12:33).

Whether literally or as a principle expressed perhaps hyperbolically, these passages are surely demanding. Some Christians in history, such as St. Anthony and many monastic movements, followed this literally for themselves. Others, such as Charles Finney, suggested that this teaching applied to all prospective disciples: we do not lose all our possessions at the moment of conversion, but we do lose our ownership of them.

We see this principle lived out by the early Christians in times of revival in Acts 2:44-45 and 4:32-35. The church eventually developed mechanisms for strategic sharing with local Christians, and handled fairly complaints of minority groups within the church (6:1-5). Eventually, however, the church outgrew a single locale, and Christians who had more than what they needed to live on in one location needed to help Christians who had less than what they needed to live on in another location. Paul and his coworker Barnabas were agents of the Antioch church’s gifts to the Jerusalem church (Acts 11:28-30), and this may have provided the model for one of Paul’s most ambitious projects: a collection for the poor in Jerusalem (cf. 24:17).

One of Paul’s driving concerns involved Jerusalem’s status as the mother church. Because Jewish Christians contributed to the Gentiles spiritually, Gentile Christians owed them material aid in their time of need (Rom 15:27). Paul probably uses this collection to establish reconciliation between the culturally distant churches of Jerusalem and the rest of the Roman world.

Another aspect of his concern is particularly relevant to us, however. Many of Paul’s “mission churches” were in cities with stronger economies than Jerusalem, and many of the members in his churches had more than what they needed to live on. This may have been true in Galatia (1 Cor 16:1), but believers in Macedonia (Rom 15:26) gave even from relative poverty (2 Cor 8:1-5). Corinth, however, was one of the wealthiest cities in the Roman world—and its Christians there unfortunately had to be prodded into giving!

Paul lays out the principle plainly for them: “equality” (2 Cor 8:13-15). If God supplied Christians in some parts of the world more than what they needed to live on, it was so they could help Christians in other parts if the world who had less than what they needed. God supplied the total church with sufficient resources to make sure that everyone was taken care of, but gave some individual churches more than others. Why? So those with resources could share God’s ministry of giving. God is the provider for all of us, so when we share with others the praise goes to God (9:8-15). The church in each part of the world must, of course, be self-supporting, except in times of emergency such as famines; but we can still coordinate our various resources as strategically as possible. Someday the roles of the needy may be reversed (8:14), but the principle remains unchanged.

Paul shows that sharing is not just with needy individuals (as one might guess from reading the Gospels), but also with needy churches. Some have spiritual resources to contribute; some have material resources; each individual and each church must contribute what we can for the greater good of Christ’s body.

Given the exchange rates, a dollar can do many times more in most African countries, and many other parts of the world, than it can do in the United States. In one country, I was told that my background commentary would cost a pastor two months’ salary. Twenty year ago, after I discovered that, I re-prioritized my giving. At the time, 25¢ could provide a meal for a person in a famine-stricken country. I was single at that time, and chose to live in an efficiency apartment that doubled as my office, eating as simply as I could so as to make available every cent possible for wider needs. Having a family has since adjusted how I must budget my resources, but the principle of caring for others remains important. In a world where millions of children die annually from hunger, malnutrition and preventable diseases; in a world where some countries have over a million AIDS orphans; in a world where millions of people live in cardboard boxes in dumps and lack clean drinking water, the sacrificial generosity of Christians can make a life-and-death difference.

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A tale of two kings, Luke 2:1-20

Part of our Christmas story is a tale of two kings: one powerful in the eyes of the world, and the other identifying with the lowliest of people. It is the latter who is the true King, and this reminds us that we serve a God who is not impressed with power or status, but who dwells close to the lowly (Ps 34:18; Is 57:15). If we want to find God’s presence, we too will likelier find Him among the lowly.

This passage opens with a decree of Augustus Caesar, who displays his power here by censuses used to collect taxes for Rome and its empire (Lk 2:1). Augustus had achieved power by brutally crushing his competition, and he maintained power through absolute political control. Emperors fed Rome with free grain levied as taxes on Egyptian farmers—whose children sometimes starved. His was an empire maintained by force and propaganda, utterly different from the unpretentious kingdom that Christ came to bring.

All the important people would feel honored to be in Caesar’s presence; by contrast, Christ was born to a betrothed village couple from Judea’s “frontier” of Galilee, forced to migrate to Bethlehem for Caesar’s census. In contrast to Caesar, Christ was not born in what people of status would have viewed as a “respectable” family.

For readers in the Roman Empire, the narrative here is full of similar contrasts. Augustus lived in a palace; Christ was born in a feeding trough meant for animals. Choirs in Augustus’ temples hailed him as a god, lord and a “savior” for the empire; an angelic voice hailed Jesus as “born this day a savior,” “Christ the Lord” (Lk 2:11). The empire celebrated Augustus’ birthday; heaven celebrated Christ’s.

Imperial propaganda announced and celebrated the “Pax Romana,” the “peace” that Augustus established (i.e., imposed) for the empire by subduing (i.e., conquering) many of its enemies (i.e., neighbors). By contrast, at Jesus’ birth heaven announced God’s offer of true peace to humanity (Lk 2:14).

Virtually everyone in the empire knew of the emperor. Yet God chose to reveal Jesus’ identity to shepherds, who were outcasts to most of ancient Mediterranean society. Who would heed shepherds? Yet they faithfully proclaimed what they had experienced to anyone who would listen (Lk 2:18). Some ancient laws rejected the testimony of shepherds and women; yet Luke’s Gospel opens and closes with such testimony, approved by God.

If Augustus had a son now, he would be born in a palace and clothed with expensive garments (cf. Lk 7:25). But some time after Mary and Joseph reached Bethlehem, Mary gave birth and laid Jesus in a manger in a cave, apparently because the house was too crowded. (Contrary to most translations, there was no “inn” involved; if anyone excluded them from the house at all, it was apparently not an innkeeper, but relatives!) Mary wrapped Jesus with “swaddling cloths” (wrappings meant to help a baby’s limbs grow straight), not royal robes.

At Christmas we celebrate the incarnation of God in flesh, the incomparably great one sharing our broken humanity and ultimately our mortality. When God came among us, he came not among the great and mighty. He was not impressed with the pretension of human power, as if the prestige of powerful human empires mattered anything to him. Instead, he came among the broken, among the lowly, and showed us that we do not need to pretend to be anything great; he welcomes us by his own generosity. Like the shepherds, let us recognize the love of our king who cares for each of us, and tell everyone about him.

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Minding Christ’s body—Romans 12:1-6

Paul summons believers to present themselves to God as a living, holy, and pleasing sacrifice to God (Rom 12:1). That is, he calls for total consecration, what some nineteenth-century Holiness preachers called, “laying all on the altar.” Moreover, he identifies this sacrifice as one’s “rational service,” a form of worship offered by a mind that thinks about reality in the right way. (Though some translations render the Greek word here as spiritual, the term more often involves the intellect.)

This consecration to God contrasts with blending into the world and its values that dominate the present age: “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:2). Too often the world around us sets our agendas for what we value: status, wealth, convenience, sex, honor, and so forth.

Worldliness takes different forms in different cultures. One example in much of Western culture is that most of us cannot readily understand the concept of a “Lord.” While there are definite advantages in having a president rather than a king, U.S. culture is accustomed to voting for or against presidents, and then criticizing them afterward even if we voted for them. Voters expect them to work for (or against) our special interest groups. But Jesus is not our president; he is our Lord. We have often reduced God to a means to give us what we want, instead of considering how we may serve God.

Yet Paul tells us the outcome of our minds being renewed: we perform our rational service of yielding our lives to God’s service (Rom 12:1-2). We also learn to recognize God’s will: that which is “good, pleasing, and perfect” (12:2). Paul here describes God’s will with three adjectives, one of them carried over from the three adjectives describing the living sacrifice in 12:1. The renewed mind recognizes what is good, and acts accordingly, for that is God’s will. Paul goes on to show that the renewed mind is not self-centered, but thinks about how to use God’s gifts to serve others (12:3-6). Sometimes we need to pray for the Spirit’s guidance, but sometimes God has already given us guidance and we just don’t want to recognize it. If I see needs, and God has equipped me to help meet those needs, I don’t need to pray for guidance; I already have guidance. We must use our bodies to serve Christ’s body (12:1, 4-5).

What we choose to meditate on, what we deliberately fill our minds with, will be what shapes our understanding of our identity, mission and activity in this world. As early programmers said about computers, “garbage in, garbage out”: what you put in is what you get out, whether data or nonsense. If we use our free time to imbibe more deeply the values of the present world, we will inevitably conform to those values. If instead we fill our thoughts with God’s Word and God’s values, God might just use us as prophetic voices to speak God’s heart to our world and his church today.

This adapts an article originally written for the A.M.E. Zion Missionary Seer. Craig Keener is author of a commentary on Romans (Cascade 2009).

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When miracles don’t happen

Miracles have often been associated with missions. In both Acts and the history of missions, miracles have often been reported on the cutting edge of ground-breaking evangelism. In the early medieval period, examples include Augustine of Canterbury’s early work among the English, Columba’s among the Scots, and Boniface’s among the Germans. They are reported especially frequently in the past half-century in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America (though they also appeared in times of revival there earlier, such as in India in the 1850s and the Korean revival of the early twentieth century).

One could offer only samples of such miracle reports in many places where the gospel is breaking new ground today. An eyewitness shared with me, for example, how he witnessed the instant healing of one nonbeliever’s arm, which had been paralyzed for decades. Local witnesses of this one event sparked a revival among a long-resistant people group in Suriname, leading to tens of thousands of conversions over the next few years. Likewise, many reports surround the spreading of the gospel in previously unevangelized villages in Mozambique, where a number of deaf non-Christians were healed when Christians prayed for them. A team from the United States documented some of these cases to the best that conditions allowed and reported on them in Southern Medical Journal in September 2010. (Objections were answered in Candy Gunther Brown’s book Testing Prayer, published by Harvard in 2012.)

But what happens when miracles do not occur? What happens when we pray and nothing physically changes? Jesus healed all who came to him, but the Bible does not lead us to expect that God will do extraordinary signs every time people pray. Jesus proclaimed the kingdom, or reign of God, and demonstrated God’s reign by his authority over sickness, spirits, and storms. Jesus warned his detractors that if he was driving out demons by the finger or Spirit of God, then God’s kingdom had come upon them (Matt 12:28/Luke 11:20). Jesus also described his miraculous ministry in language that evoked Isaiah’s picture of the future era of restoration (Matt 11:5//Luke 7:22). In his ministry, the promised restoration of the kingdom era had begun.

Miracles, however, are signs of the kingdom, and not the fulness of the kingdom itself. The first century apostles died, and so far as we know, no one raised them. Even those whom Jesus or others miraculously raised eventually died again later; unlike Jesus’s resurrection, these raisings were not meant to be permanent and eternal. Believers through history have continued to die; healings are real, but when they happen they only delay the inevitable that all people through history have faced. Jesus admonished his followers to give special honor to people who were blind and disabled (Luke 14:13), presumably implying that such conditions would often continue in this age.

God often does miracles. I have collected hundreds of miracle reports from eyewitnesses in my recent book on the subject; although I cannot verify the reliability of every claim, many came from witnesses that I know and trust, and some are well-documented. Whereas some are recoveries that could possibly be attributed to natural immune responses (which are also God’s gift), some, such as the instant disappearance of cataracts, reversal of auditory nerve damage, raisings of persons believed to be dead for hours, the instant healing of severe burns or closing of a large wound overnight, are dramatic signs of God’s activity. Hearing these reports encouraged my own faith and motivated me to believe that God can do anything. I pray with renewed confidence and am more prepared to recognize answers to prayer.

At the same time, the world’s suffering continues. In places like Congo, where my wife is from, people have to depend on God and often see miracles, but the rate of mothers dying in childbirth, of children losing limbs, of babies dying of malaria or typhoid fever or meningitis, are unacceptably high. Miracles are not meant as an easy panacea for the world’s problems. Jesus multiplied the fishes and loaves, but then commanded the disciples to gather up the fragments that remain, because they would not need a miracle for their next meal. In a world where health care, clean drinking water and other resources are inequitably distributed, Jesus’s miracles speak an uncomfortable word to us. They show us what Jesus cares about: people’s health and deliverance. They therefore invite us to use all means possible—prayers for healing, medical missions, work for political and economic justice, and the like—to help people. Sometimes we don’t need a miracle—we need to use what God has already given us. Praying for our daily bread, for example, does not mean that we don’t also work for a living if we’re able to.

We pray for miracles that only God can do, and work for transformations that he has given us the ability to do. In both cases, we help people to have a foretaste of God’s coming kingdom, when he will wipe away all tears from our eyes and there will be no more sorrow or sighing or death. There is a message in the Gospels that runs deeper than miracles: the message of the Cross. In the Cross God shows that even in the deepest tragedy, God still has a plan. Miracles are samples of the future, meant to keep hope kindled; but the deepest sign of hope is the cross that gave way to the resurrection. Even when God does not do a miracle when we think we need it, the future is secure.

This is adapted from an article for the A.M.E. Zion Missionary Seer. Craig S. Keener is author of the award-winning Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts (2 volumes; Baker Academic, 2011).

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The Spirit as a divine person — John 14:16-17, 26

Christians honor God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Yet we may not always recognize the biblical foundations for what we believe.

That the Father is God goes without saying. That Jesus is divine in the New Testament would be equally obvious to its first readers, and would be to everyone today if we recognized ancient literary devices. For example, New Testament letters open with blessings from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, even though ancient blessings invoked deities. Old Testament descriptions of God are often applied to Jesus (e.g., Phil 2:6, 10-11; Rev 7:16-17). Even his title “Lord” would often imply his deity no less than the title “God,” especially in passages like 1 Cor 8:5-6, which evokes Deut 6:4 (one God, one Lord). Many passages are even more explicit, such as John 1:1; 8:58; and 20:28, framing the heart of John’s Gospel.

But what about the Spirit? This is more explicit in some passages (treated below) than in some others. In contrast to Jesus’s deity, the Spirit as a divine person was not a primary issue of contention with the earliest church’s contemporaries, so it received less attention at first. Jewish people recognized the Spirit as divine, although not as a person within God distinct from the Father. In the Old Testament, God was more concerned about defining himself as Israel’s one God as opposed to the false gods worshiped by other nations. At best there are possible hints that the Spirit could be distinguished from the one whom Christians call God the Father (cf. perhaps Isa 48:16). God was schooling his people in monotheism, but the term for God’s oneness is also the term for the oneness of husband and wife (Gen 2:24). That is, the necessary emphasis on God’s oneness does not exclude the later revelation of different persons sharing the nature of the one God.

Various passages in the New Testament provide much fuller hints, connecting the Spirit with the Father and the Son in special ways that presuppose their deity (1 Cor 12:4-6; 2 Cor 13:14; Eph 4:4-6; most explicitly, Matt 28:19). Sometimes in Acts the Spirit also acts in personal ways.

That the Spirit acts as a person becomes most clear in Jesus’s final discourse to his disciples in John 14—16. This is not so much because Jesus uses a masculine pronoun for the Spirit here; the masculine pronoun fits the gender of the Greek word paraklêtos (“counselor,” “advocate,” “comforter”) used in this context. That use no more makes the Spirit male than the feminine and neuter pronouns for the Spirit associated with the feminine Hebrew (ruach) and neuter Greek (pneuma) terms for “spirit” make the Spirit female or neuter.

The reason we recognize the Spirit as personal in these passages is that he carries forward Jesus’s mission after his ascension, working as “another advocate” (John 14:16-17, 26; 16:7-15). The Spirit convicts the world concerning sin and judgment (16:8-9, 11) just as Jesus does (3:19-20; 8:46; 12:31); he acts in Jesus’ place after Jesus’s exaltation (14:16; 16:10). He comes and speaks to the disciples whatever he hears (16:13), just as Jesus did (15:15). It is not surprising, then, that once Christians began considering these questions they recognized the Spirit as a divine person like the Father and the Son.

Christians today sometimes treat the Spirit—or even the Father and the Son—as an impersonal force. But God comes to us in a personal way, a way that invites us into a personal relationship with him. As we worship God together, let us remember and embrace that invitation.

(This post is adapted from my article for the A.M.E. Zion Missionary Seer; more details are in my book Gift & Giver and in my two-volume commentary on John, both with Baker.)

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The fruit of the Spirit — Galatians 5:22-23

At a time when many teachers and members of churches misunderstood grace, John Wesley rightly emphasized that salvation by grace is a transforming experience. That is, we do not earn salvation by behaving righteously; rather, we are saved from sin by God’s power and therefore able to live more righteously.

Wesley’s insight fit well a central emphasis in Paul’s theology. Paul emphasized that it is God who saves us in Christ, that it is God who gifts us by his Spirit to minister to one another, and God who empowers us by the Spirit to live for him. In other words, Paul’s theology focused on God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This did not mean that Christians had nothing left to do; rather, it meant they had power in Christ and by the Spirit to do what they should.

Not everyone was so convinced that Christ’s transforming power was sufficient. Specifically, some insisted on imposing their own culture’s customs on new believers in Galatia. Paul warned his Galatian converts that we are saved not by our works, not by our own flesh, but by God’s Spirit (see Gal 3:5). It is the context of such an extended argument in his letter to Galatians that he speaks about the Spirit’s fruit. He contrasts here the “works of the flesh”—which are sinful (Gal 5:19-21)—with the “fruit of the Spirit,” against which is no law (5:22-23).

Works of flesh are what we can do in our own strength; fruit of the Spirit comes from a new nature and new identity in Christ. God had promised to someday empower his people to obey his commands by putting his Spirit within them and making them new (Ezek 36:26-27). The fruit of the Spirit exhibits the reality of this promise. God has not only given us a new identity, but also the renewal of the Spirit in our lives so we can learn to believe that new identity, to act out of who God has called us to be rather than out of what we had been in our own strength alone.

We do not nail fruit onto trees; it grows there, based on the nature of the tree. As Jesus pointed out, good fruit grows on a good tree; the nature of a tree determines the nature of its fruit. When God’s Spirit comes to live inside us (when we accept Christ), he gives us a new character in his own image. Second Peter 1:4 speaks of being made partakers of the divine nature. This does not of course mean that we become God or become omnipotent or lose our humanity; it means instead that we are transformed into his likeness, into what we were designed to be. The fruit of the Spirit is the moral character that flows from Christ’s image placed in us. In the language of John 15, as we dwell in him, fruit grows on us because we as branches are connected with the vine.

Paul lists nine examples of this fruit, but pride of place goes to the first fruit on his list, love (Gal 5:22). Paul has been explaining that love is the chief commandment and characteristic of the Christian life (5:13-14). Now he emphasizes that it flows naturally from God’s presence in our lives, and we can choose to depend on him to bring forth that fruit in our lives.

All of this fits Paul’s emphasis in Galatians. Such love fulfills the law (5:13), and no law legislates against the fruit of the Spirit (5:23). Those who are led by the Spirit are not subject to the law (5:18), but that is not because grace ignores holiness. Instead, once Christ lives inside us, we live for God so that we live even more purely than the law would have demanded. We fulfill God’s will now because we want to, because God has given us a new heart. Paul’s point about the fruit of the Spirit is that God gets the credit, because it is his work in us that makes us into what he wants us to be. If we believe God to save us from sin’s penalty, we can also believe him to save us from its power. Christ completed that work (5:24); we now learn to appropriate it by faith.
(Adapted from my article originally for the A.M.E. Zion Missionary Seer; see further discussion in my book, Gift & Giver, published by Baker)