[This is the second in a series of six posts on the importance of Pentecost and the Holy Spirit. To catch up, here is the Introduction and Week 1.]
What does the Holy Spirit do? He gifts individual believers in order to build up the church.
Ephesians 2 was important to the main point of our previous post: there is no such thing as the church without the Holy Spirit, but with the Holy Spirit, we are the dwelling place of God. In classic fashion, Paul moves from declaration of what is true of us to exhortation to live more fully in light of this. And so, in chapter 4, Paul gives us a litany of “one’s”: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all (4:4-5). All of this ‘one’ talk is born out of Paul’s eagerness that we would “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (4:3). Paul knows our propensity to split up, to divide, and to pull apart what God has brought together. Paul knows that, left to ourselves, Cain (us) will kill Abel (our brother) every time.
So what is God’s answer to this? How will he ensure that the marriage of the church won’t result in divorce? He gives us the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit ‘gifts’ us for the good of the body. Just as the Holy Spirit is the bond of love between Father and Son, so also the Spirit is the bond of love in the church—the peace-maker, the unity-bringer. The Spirit pours out gifts to individuals for the sake of the church: “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:7). By granting gifts to all members of Christ’s body, the Spirit ensures that we are dependent upon one another for the fullness of life with God; we need each other if we are to “grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ” (Eph 4:15).
And here’s the point: if we need each other, we cannot be divided. Cain needs Abel. Jew needs Gentile. I need you. The foot without the leg cannot ‘grow up into the head’ (Christ). And here again we are circling in on the critical work of the Spirit, and therefore, the critical function of Pentecost. If I am to be connected to Christ, I will have to be connected to and with you. And this is the Spirit’s work: to graft us together, and therefore to graft us into Christ.
There is no room in our Pentecost faith for the autonomous individual Christian. To remove yourself from the body is to shun the Spirit’s work and to remove yourself from the possibility of connection to the head. We cannot connect ourselves to Christ. We cannot graft ourselves in to the body. But the good news is that we need not try, for as of Pentecost Sunday, the Holy Spirit has grafted us to Christ, and in Christ, to each other. As of Pentecost Sunday, the very diversity of our gifts—gifts required for the full functioning of the body—is good news, for a diversity of gifts means the unity of the church.[1] For God’s (and the church’s) sake, don’t withhold your Spirit-gifts; they are the very means by which, together, we might grow up in Christ.
[1] This is one of those moments where I'd like to say a lot more, but I'll constrain myself to this nugget: this relationship of unity in diversity is itself a reflection of the nature of the triune God, who is himself a Unity in Diversity. In other words, the church too is made in the image of God. The Christian church (unlike what we would fine in a religion like Islam) is characterized by neither uniformity nor sameness, but rather unity in diversity. It would be worth reflecting on what this means on the ground in our own local church.