Scot McKnight has been reviewing the book Gracious Christianity by Douglas Jacobsen and Ben Sawatsky. From what he’s written about so far, I really want to read this book.

The most recent installment of McKnight’s review focuses on the chapter about living in the reality and power of the Holy Spirit. It sounds like very good stuff.

McKnight quotes the authors regarding the gifts of the Spirit that connects with some stuff I was saying in my last post about reconstructing an authentic and viable pneumatology. The authors state that the gifts of the Spirit are “gifts given to the world through a person rather than as gifts specifically given to a person.” Wow! That’s exactly where my thinking has been going recently.

And I think you can only land at this place when you begin with the truth that the Spirit is the creating Spirit, the source of life. Nothing in life is separated from the Spirit as he sustains everything.

And he is also the consummating Spirit. In his sustaining, he is also renewing everything forward toward God’s full design.

Therefore, as we learn to participate with God in nurturing further and greater goodness in his good, but damaged world, the Spirit works through us, shaping us further into the likeness of Christ in character and power. Christ-likeness is the New Creation in human form. And as such, our lives and all the Spirit is doing in and through our lives, are given to the world as part of God’s plan to heal and transform the cosmos.