“Do Your deep work.” This has been a prayer of mine for a little while now. Sometimes I pray it for myself. Sometimes I pray it over a service and for others.
Unfortunately, it’s human nature to gravitate towards the outward. It’s because we can see, touch, and manage the physical. But when God is doing a deep inward work in us, we sometimes associate it too much with an immediate outward expression that may or may not accompany that inward work. This becomes a problem when we start expecting and prioritizing the outward over the inward.
(The only immediate biblical outward expression that always comes with a particular inward work is speaking in tongues at Spirit-baptism.)
In this way, I’m afraid many have cheapened the work of the Holy Spirit. Because we have associated certain extra-biblical outward expressions with His work, we sometimes tend to reject any inward working from Him that is not accompanied by a particular outward expression.
I’ve sat in services and listened to men preach rich sermons with anointing and passion, though perhaps with less outward expression than the hearers appreciated. I’ve sat in other services where men preached with great emotion, personality, and familiar outward expressions. I’ve watched as the audience was swayed not by the words the preacher said, but by his performance, the movement of his body, and the volume of his voice. Tim Dilena wrote, “Authority does not need to shout. People who have no authority like to scream and shout; it is theatrics and props… Authority can simply whisper, and there is power.”
There’s something deeper, something higher for us. When we are first beginning, of course we may tend to feed on a more basic emotional experience. But at some point, we have to go deeper and reach higher. We have to learn to prioritize, desire, and appreciate a deeper work of the Spirit in our lives.
Shouting, dancing, and running can be expressions and byproducts of praise or of an inward work of the Spirit; but those things are not the work of the Spirit. The work of the Spirit is in conviction, in regeneration, in sanctification, in empowerment, and so on. When we trade off the inward work for fleeting outward expressions, we’ve cheapened the true power of the Spirit. When we always expect such outward things from ourselves and from others, we have lowered our expectations of what God wants to do and limited how He may do it. We should rather receive a quiet but long-lasting inward work in our lives than to make a lot of noise and still leave unchanged, unsaved, and unfilled.
Pray for a deep work of the Spirit in your life. Don’t settle for less. Don’t reject or shun the outward expression; but expect and prioritize the deep work that the Spirit wants to do on the inside.
The Azusa Weekly 