Every day, we find ourselves doing something miraculous without giving it much thought at all. Breathing! We live by a universal truth that everyone needs to breathe air to live. While this principle is biological, it is also spiritual; there is the same universal truth for our spiritual life. When God created man, He breathed into him His breath of life (Gen. 2:7). This pneuma — air — mingled with clay to produce a living soul. That very divine breath made us living as human beings, and this remains our truth today as believers: “That everyone who believes into Him may have eternal life” (John 3:15). When we believed, a new life began in us, His Spirit came in to enliven our spirit, and we started to breathe.
Just as air cannot support us if it remains outside of us, we need the spirit to come into us and revitalize us to be able to live this new life. But what are we breathing every day? Just as God’s breath made man a living soul, whatever “breath” we take in will constitute us and determine who we are. Oftentimes we are already filled by our old life, concepts, and opinions. All of these prevent us from being simple — from simply breathing — and believing a simple truth. But as we start to breathe in this new life, we also expel — breathe out — all of the things of our old life. By exercising our human spirit, where this divine life in us lives, we are being restored breath by breath to a real human life in new creation.
A mysterious principle in a believer’s life is that our breathing doesn’t just happen by ourselves. The divine breath that we have received is for a corporate expression of that life from within. When we enter into the ecology of the church, we are helped to become simple again and brought back to man’s original purpose: to contain and express the breath of God — which is God Himself — as the one new man (Eph. 4:24). In our church life, we are not in a vacuum. On the contrary, the church is our life-saving atmosphere, our source of oxygen, our way to take in life. Catching our breath after a moment without air, we enjoy the sweetness of a deep breath. But it’s not normal to breathe just once in a while, or to constantly be out of breath. The church life is our daily breathing. Whenever and wherever we exercise the spirit, we breathe Him in, mingling His Spirit with our spirit, to live a new life on the earth today.
(Above are notes of fellowship taken from a gathering on 9/29/2024, not reviewed by the speaker.)