I just started reading “The Holy Spirit in Action” by Sheed and some of it is already blowing my mind. Some of it is just pondering the implications of God having and being a spirit. I’ll post the quote from the book, which is kind of heady and out there, then my interpretation which might be clearer or might be even more out there.
In a spirit – God, our soul – there is no division of parts as in matter. Therefore there is no dispersion of powers, but total concentration of being and of powers in one single act of being. the body has parts, each with its own function, which only it can perform. But all the things the should does are done by the whole soul, for there is no element in the soul which is not the whole of it. It knows, loves, hates, wants, chooses, refuses to choose, decides, animates a body. And one single soul does each of these things with the whole of itself.
Two things emerge from spirit’s absence of parts – it does not occupy space; it is everlasting.
Space is emptiness. A being which has parts can spread them in it! Even the minutest material thing has parts – the top is not the bottom, one end is not the other. But this is not so of the soul, not so of God: They have no parts to spread. They are not in space.
What of permanence? A being with parts can be taken apart; therefore it can always become something else by union with parts taken from some other source. But a spirit having no parts can not be taken apart; it has no parts to be taken from it. It is the whole of itself.
What he is saying here is that a spirit isn’t something that has distinct parts like a person. I have an arm and a nose, they are distinguishable parts that do different things. They also take up different spaces. If I reach for a hammer with my nose, it can’t do what my arm can do. If I dip my arm into a barrel of dandelions, it won’t sneeze. That part isn’t affected by pollen in the same way as my nose is.
That means that wherever the Holy Spirit is, there isn’t a part of it there that is different than another part. ALL OF GOD’S SPIRIT is there. God doesn’t put a little bit customized for Dan Sullivan into Dan Sullivan. All of God’s glorious self, is put, by the power of the Holy Spirit, into Dan Sullivan. The other wild part about this is that since the Holy Spirit can’t be cut up into parts, it can’t be combined with things and changed. Everything that exists in mass can be altered somehow like Lego blocks being switched out. The Holy Spirit isn’t and can’t. Therefore, the full and holy and complete spirit of God doesn’t get changed when He enters into someone. The person is what does the changing.
One more bit then we’ll give it a rest for the day. God’s unchanging, fully full and complete spirit is in all who believe in Him (Ephesians 1:13-14). Think about the implications of that. There is no training or urging or laboring as far as getting God to do something more because He has already filled you, Christian, with all the fullness of Himself. You have a lot more access to God than you realize, so pray today that we’d realize that!
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