Dust and Breath (Pt. 1)

How do you respond when you read the New Testament description of life with God? Can you imagine actually seeing seas calmed, bodies healed, thousands saved, prisoners released, and the proud knocked off their high-horse? Can you imagine Christ reaching out to you, with hands of healing and words of grace?

No doubt the biblical narrative represents a highlight reel of sorts, but the reality is that throughout history God makes a point of invading our lives in big and small ways.

Would you not love to see a little more of that for yourself? Or maybe the big stuff is beyond your hopes, and you would be happy with nothing more than a tangible sense of God’s presence and peace.

Some days you probably look up from your Bible and consider the gap between the disciples’ stories and yours. You are possibly looking down the barrel of a daily grind with endless demands on time, a need to constantly produce income, a lack of rest, career challenges, a body that won’t cooperate, the need to be a “perfect parent,” and on it goes.

Will you have to wait for heaven to witness some real power, meaning, or even time with God?

Thousands of times, I have had this same conversation with individuals and groups. After asking about their own experience of engagement with Jesus, the themes that leak out are usually much the same. They go something like this:

• “I just don’t have time to press in to God. There are too many demands on my time.”
• “It was easier back in Jesus’ day; they didn’t have the schedule we do.”
• “You can’t be a spiritual mystic and also engage in the real world … we need to get things done.”
• “I am just not like that; only the truly exceptional get to see God do those things like He did in the Bible.”
• “I used to be engaged in church and ministry, but it left me dry. I ‘died to self’ so much it almost killed me.”

This is the talk of good-hearted but struggling Christians who have endured spiritual dehydration for so long they can’t even recognise their barrenness. They have settled for a life so far from what God genuinely offers that they believe it can’t exist for them.

Dust + Breath

Spiritual powerlessness and emotional dryness. They are so pervasive that now we have largely accepted them as normal. But if we are to do this, we are also obliged to rewrite our theology, philosophy of life, and spiritual expectations. We must also mould our lives around sustaining that debilitating reality, ensuring such a life and belief system makes sense, lest we feel guilty as well as dry.

In that arid version of reality, only half of the creation narrative in Genesis 2:7 makes sense – the part where God formed us from the dust of the earth. That half-verse confirms largely how we feel … dusty and devoid of spiritual life.

And yet there is a second half to that verse … God Himself breathed life into us, and only at that point did we became alive. Without His Spirit, we are living at best a half-life.

Profoundly, Jesus breathed on the disciples after His resurrection, saying, “Receive the Spirit.”¹ Through our newly restored relationship with God that Jesus’ sacrifice enabled, access to spiritual life was again made available. Now we are new creations, the original order of dust + breath restored.

Jesus had earlier promised that rivers of living water would flow from within us, and also declared that God gives the Spirit without limit.² The overarching theme we see here is that where God’s breath is, there is also tangible life. Without it, there is not.

But since so few actually seem to experience that life, we might feel obliged to re-scope the definition of what Jesus actually meant. We figure He must have meant that this experience is for later, in heaven.

Not so.

Take a closer look at the creation narrative. The source of our being is also that which sustains us on earth.

The water brought forth creatures, and they continued to draw life from that same sea.³ The earth brought forth land creatures who were designed to live from those same sustaining elements.⁴

Humanity was born of both dust of the earth and the breath of God. The reality is that we are meant to draw from the nutrients of this earth, and from the Spirit of God who breathes life into our being.⁵ We are people of both earth and heaven. According to our design, we can only experience true life when we draw from both realities.

When we work, we should be aware of – and draw from – God’s grace and power. Likewise when we rest, we should not assume that we need to disengage or merely escape life. Rest is about engaging with God to feed our soul, rather than merely escaping reality.

God’s presence is always available, but the real issue is that most of us aren’t sure how to draw on that life in the midst our current circumstance.

Continue reading on our next post to discover how we can better draw on the presence of God in our lives, and see the fruit of God’s grace and power multiplied in ways we never thought possible.

Reflect:

Are you satisfied with your current experience of the Christian life? Or are you hungry to witness some real power, meaning, or even just meaningful time with God? Do you think it’s possible to see miraculous works, and fruit beyond your wildest dreams this side of heaven?

References

1. John 20:22
2. John 7:38; John 3:34
3. Genesis 1:20 (KJV)
4. Genesis 1:24 (KJV)
5. Romans 8:11