Spiritual energies in daily life
From the introduction
The great experts — those who know from the inside what religion Is — always make much of its dynamic power, its energizing and propulsive power.
Power is a word often on the lips of Jesus; never used, it should be said, in the sense of extrinsic authority or the right to command and govern, but always in reference to an intrinsic and interior moral and spiritual energy of life.
The kingdom of God comes with power, not because the Messiah is supplied with ten legions of angels and can sweep the Roman eagles back to the frontiers of the Holy Land, but it " comes with power " because it is a divine and life-transforming energy, working in the moral and spiritual nature of man, as the expanding yeast works in the flour or as the forces of life push the seed into germination and on into the successive stages toward the maturity of the full-grown plant and grain.
The little fellowship of followers and witnesses who formed the nucleus of the newborn Church felt " endued with power " on the day of Pentecost. Something new and dynamic entered the consciousness of the feeble band and left them no longer feeble.
There was an in- rushing, up-welling sense of Invasion. They passed over from a visible Leader and master to an invisible and inward Presence revealed to them as unwonted energy. Ecstatic utterance. which seems to have followed, is not the all-important thing.
The important thing is heightened moral quality, intensified fellowship, a fused and undying loyalty, an irresistible boldness in the face of danger and opposition, and a fortification of spirit that nothing could break. This energy which came with their experience is what marks the event as an epoch.
St. Paul writes as though he were an expert in dynamics. " Dynamos," the Greek word for power, is one of his favourite words. He seems to have found out how to draw upon energies in the universe that nobody else had suspected were even there.
It is a fundamental feature of his "Aegean gospel" that God is not self-contained but self-giving, that He circulates, as does the sun, as does the sea, and comes into us as energy. This incoming energy he calls by many names: " The Spirit," " holy Spirit," " Christ," " the Spirit of Christ," " Christ in you," and " God that worketh in us." Whatever his word or term is, he is always declaring, and he bases his testimony on experience, that God, as Christ reveals Him, is active energy working with us and in us for the complete transformation of our fundamental nature and for a new creation in us.
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