Good News Quote #15

From Chapter Two, Why You Don't Have to Believe Your Intuitions Are the Holy Spirit: Or, How the Spirit Shapes Our Hearts.

But then -- we might want to ask -- how do we know the Spirit is working within us at all? Like many "how do you know?" questions, this turns out to be a very modern obsession, which often results in our searching our own hearts instead of searching the Scriptures. The biblical answer to questions about how we know God keeps coming back to God's word and especially his promise. There is a promise of the Holy Spirit in the Scriptures (Gal. 3:14; see also Acts 2:38). If we think that's not good enough, then we'll end up having to look to ourselves for an answer. So the more anxious we are, the less we trust God's word, and the more likely we are to try looking into our own hearts to find the Holy Spirit.


But honestly, God's word is good enough. It is hard for us sinners to trust it -- we would much rather see things for ourselves than trust what God has to say, even about himself -- but trusting God's word is what faith does, and faith is how we know who God really is.

Good News Quote #14

From Chapter Two, Why You Don't Have to Believe Your Intuitions Are the Holy Spirit: Or, How the Spirit Shapes Our Hearts.

So the fruit of the Holy Spirit is a sanctified heart. And the intuitions of a sanctified heart are well worth listening to. To listen to the sanctified heart -- which normally means hearing what other Christians have to say -- is to benefit from the fruit of the Spirit in them. It is not to hear the Spirit's voice directly -- for again, the voices belong to human beings, even when what they are saying, teaching, or preaching is the word of God. But it is to hear the fruit of the Spirit's work, growing from the freedom of a heart shaped by Christian virtues.


The connection between the intuitions and the sanctified heart is essential. Intuitions coming from a heart that has not been formed in Christian virtue are not spiritual -- not in the biblical sense, which is always tied to the Holy Spirit and therefore to the holiness of Christian virtues. And that leads us to one of the deepest errors of the new evangelical theology. It teaches people to identify their intuitions as the Spirit speaking, without teaching them the virtues that are the real fruit of the Spirit working within. It tries to find the voice of God in the intuitions of the unsanctified heart.