Notes on the Life of the Spirit (with permission, by Jack Hafer)

Walt and Jack used to work together for 5 years at Aliso Creek Presb. Church in Aliso Viejo, Ca, and they became great friends. Then we left Ca. and Jack went on to produce the movie, "To End All Wars," which was a truly great movie. This is what he wrote to Walt after reading his blog for Christ Coastal Church.

"What is missing today is an adequate understanding of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Yes, he's a person, but that is confusing in a certain context - in learning how to appropriate him. The spirit of something is its core values, or to say it in another way, the heart of it. It involves our disposition, our mood, our attitude, our feelings. We say the home team crowd had great spirit at the football game. There was a great spirit in the crowd. We say after meeting with someone we liked that we love her spirit - she is kind, she is compassionate, she is loving, she makes us feel good to be around her.

I wanted To End All Wars to have "the heart of the Father." There seemed no other way to quite say what I wanted. When we want the heart of the Father, we want what he wants, love what he loves, even hate what he hates. But to have his spirit is to have that heart. To have been with a person who has his Spirit is to have been with the Father.
The way I think we get that spirit is to sit in his presence and fill ourselves up with his love, and then go out in that love. I may have to stop 20 times a day and read a Biblical passage, just a couple of verses, to remind myself, to put myself in that "mood" again, to be full of love, to be full of his Spirit. That's why Paul said be full of the Spirit, walk in the Spirit, don't quench this Spirit - it's the heart of what it means to be a Christian. It's how living by the spirit was going to be different that merely living by the law. Being given the Spirit, the New Testament believer would naturally carry out the Law that the Old Testament believer was trying to do without having the Spirit - though some obviously did have the Spirit.

Too many of us think we're saved, on our way to heaven, have the rules, and then try to "obey" God, and think because we're "good" most the time, that we're living the Christian life. But we don't try to take that extra step to go to him and get full of his Spirit. We think that our new identity is enough - we don't need to "have" anything else. We don't know about being "full" of love, so we simply try to be compliant. Well that, to me, is the leaf that we put on in the Garden of Eden to cover our brokenness. Our compliance, our being good, our "obeying" God, is good, but is not enough. We need to learn the difference in who we are when we're experiencing a personal revival inside from his Spirit, and the normal human attempt to be good and stay out of trouble.

I don't know what more to say about this, but it's the difference in what you're saying about the Word and the Person, or about the Church and the Spirit-filled believer."