Listening to Ray Ortlund preach on Galatians 5:16-18, I was encouraged with a quote he used from J.I. Packer’s book, Keeping in Step With the Spirit:
Packer is speaking of the year 1908 when some missionaries in Manchuria wrote home as follows:
“A power has come into the church that we cannot control if we would. It is a miracle for solid, self-righteous John Chinaman to go out of his way to confess to sins that no torture of the Yamen could force from him; for a Chinaman to demean himself to weep and ask for the prayers of his fellow-believers is beyond all human explanation.
Perhaps you will say it’s a sort of religious hysteria.
So did some of us… But here we are, about sixty Scottish and Irish Presbyterians who have seen it — all shades of temperament — and, much as many of us shrank from it at first, every one who has seen and heard what we have, every day last week, is certain there is only one explanation…that it is God’s Holy Spirit manifesting Himself… One clause of the Creed that lives before us now in all its inevitable, awful solemnity is, ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit.'”
Last Sunday, in Galatians 5, we were called to walk, be led by, live, and march by the Spirit. Will you do this today?