In the scriptures, spiritual maturity is compared to seeing rather than blindness (John 9:39). It is described as being awake instead of asleep (Ephesians 5:14), in the light as opposed to in darkness (Ephesians 5:8-9), and alive rather than dead (Romans 8:10). Among the many metaphors, it is also to be well-watered instead of parched (Isaiah 58:11), and to have within oneself a flowing spring of fresh water (John 4:14).
Our soul’s journey is from initial innocence and ignorance to a wise knowing which emerges, if it comes at all, through our experiences in life. The potential for insight, understanding, the development of an intuitive “feel” for the contours of a spiritual life and reality as it is, may be gained but only over time. Maturity, spiritual or otherwise, cannot come to us instantly.
If we ask “what is the work of God’s Spirit?”, we have our answer: the Spirit enlivens, awakens, enlightens, refreshes us from within, and removes our blindness, specifically with respect to how Jesus is the revelation of God. Jesus is the Word or Wisdom of God. The Spirit is the engine of this maturity, moving us toward God’s own self.
When the Spirit is active and powerful within us, we think not about the Spirit but about Jesus. This is the Spirit’s work, to reveal God in Christ to us because he is the Anointed One who has been sent, the expression of the Father’s love so that humanity might enter into the life of God.
The Spirit does not seek our attention because it was in Christ that God was reconciling the world to himself. Jesus in the union of God and humanity in himself; the Spirit creates that same union in each of us. To know Jesus is necessarily to be walking in the Spirit, and vice versa.
Like the Spirit, Jesus does not demand our attention, but directs us to the Father. He was not revealing himself but the Father to a world which did not know him. The Spirit reveals Christ who reveals God, so to be spiritual is to know God as revealed in Christ by the Spirit in us.
Spirituality is practical. The Spirit guides and empowers us that we might move daily, living in and depending on Jesus Christ as the way, truth, and life. In other words, in the person of Jesus, reality is made clear, and the reality is God. To be enlightened is to understand that God is summing up everything in heaven and on earth in Christ (Ephesians 1:9-10) and to trust this reality so that our posture in the world is deeply transformed.
Why am I attempting to describe the spiritual life in these terms? What is the point of being descriptive about the moving of the Spirit and how we are directed to fix our vision on Christ?
I do not say this because we can undertake such a journey ourselves, as if we can follow a set of instructions and be spiritual, but because we can more easily move with the Spirit’s work within if we have a sense of the focus and ends of what is being accomplished graciously in us. A misunderstanding of what it is to be spiritual may result in us resisting what we ought to welcome, and welcoming what we ought to resist.
To be spiritual is not to be prayerful, though such a person will pray. It is not to attend religious gatherings, though a spiritual person will seek the company of others and serve others. It is not to read scripture either. All the things we might rightly recognize as what spiritual people do are not what makes them spiritual. It is the Spirit in us revealing Christ as the One who shows us the Father, and the awakening to this reality, which is the essence of spirituality.
All the characteristics we associate with spiritual people are not the cause of anything, but the fruit. We cannot work backward from the fruit in order to arrive at the cause. God himself, in the Son whom he sent, and through the Spirit which proceeds from him, is the gracious Creator of spirituality. Our role is to openly receive.