Our little missionary family travels a lot. I hate traveling. I particularly don’t like airports. Airport food is expensive, and rarely good. Seats are tiny and people are grouchy (including me). Every hour spent in an airport is one less year in purgatory.
One time when traveling as a family, we had to rush from one gate to another in order to make our connecting flight. We hadn’t eaten much that day, so we quickly stopped at one of those food kiosks and grabbed some of those plastic wrapped sandwiches. Thankfully, we made our flight.
We finally settled down in our seats and began to relax a bit. It was a late-night flight, so I was already quite tired. We got up to 30,000 and cruising and the plane lights dimmed. I told myself, Just relax and enjoy your sandwich. I reclined my chair the generous 1.5 inches it afforded and reached for my sandwich. I was hungry. I unwrapped it and took a big bite. The sandwich wasn’t great, but it had bleu cheese on it, and I love bleu cheese. I took another bite. And another. I finished my half and handed the rest to my wife who was reading under the overhead light. She looked down at the sandwich with a puzzled, grossed-out look on her face.
“Hey, honey…” she said with some hesitation in her voice.
“Yep?”
“This sandwich is filledwith mold.”
That wasn’t bleu cheese. I spent the next twenty minutes in the wonderfully roomy airplane bathroom.
This is what the fiery light of the Holy Spirit does for us: reveals, or illuminates. One of the fatal mechanisms of sin is that it likes to remain hidden. It hides in the dark. By hiding, sin keeps us convinced that there is nothing wrong with us. Sin makes sure that we stay in the habit of measuring ourselves (behavior, attitudes, and thoughts) against other people rather than against Jesus and the Word of God. First John 1:8 says, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” It’s by grace-enabled invasion of the Holy Spirit in our lives that our eyes are opened to the fact that we’re sinners.
The Holy Spirit, in other words, convicts us of sin. The Apostle Paul writes to the Ephesians,
Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance and hardness of heart. They have lost all sensitivity and have abandoned themselves to licentiousness, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. That is not the way you learned Christ! For surely you have heard about him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus. You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Eph. 4:17–24).
Paul points out here that behavior problems originate in the mind and in the heart. Paul describes the stark contrast between the empty minds of pagans, and Christians who have “learned,” “heard,” and were “taught.” More specifically, when people act less than human, it’s their minds and hearts are darkened. The Holy Spirit brings light to darkened minds and hearts. The Holy Spirit, as the illuminating fire of God, reveals God’s will to us. We simply can’t live a holy life that conforms to the image of Jesus without knowing how God expects us to live. The Holy Spirit is the means through which we can know what God wants of us. The Holy Spirit is also the means through which we are empowered to live in such a way that conforms to God’s expectations for human thinking, and subsequently behavior.
