The Actual Presence of the Spirit

Taken from The Relational Soul - A secular orientation creates huge challenge for relationships. It displaces the mystery of God’s actual life-giving presence from creation. Gone is the vision that assumes God’s personal presence is the opportunity and the power to engage relationally, that God’s personal presence is the fuel of our relational engine, that God’s personal presence is love. Gone is the understanding that every loving relationship we experience owes its existence to the actual presence of Christ’s Spirit.Scripture is clear that “whatever is good and perfect” comes to us from God (James 1:17). This includes the gift of loving, participatory, engaged relationships. So when we see children playing together, a husband lovingly engaged with his wife, friends enjoying each other’s company we are witnessing the life-giving presence of God in the created order.We languish when God is distant, remote, and uninvolved. There is ultimately little reason or capacity to trust. We are on our own and life is too dangerous to be vulnerable. When God is “way out there” and we are “way over here” the soul suffers under the weight of its radical autonomy. It is a weight that proves too heavy to bear. Ultimately, we can wind up in narcissistic nihilism, a sense of meaningless existence, where relationships are stripped of dignity. About all that is left is utility—using others for one’s own profit or pleasure. The radical giving and receiving that constitutes relational communion languishes. As a consequence, relationships are diminished. Is it any wonder that so often relationships today are self-serving, leaving many feeling manipulated or abused?Taken from The Relational Soul by Richard Plass and James Cofield. Copyright (c) 2014 by Richard Plass and James Cofield. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL  60515-1426. www.ivpress.com