Inside I was ripping myself to shreds, frustrated to point of questioning the fruits of my spirit, questioning whether I belonged at church or not. I went and, after dropping the boys off for Sunday school, found a corner of the sanctuary to sit in, trying to find a quiet place to rest and get reoriented.

I was mute during the music worship, fighting the words. Reflecting, reflecting, reflecting hard before communion… pleading to bear the fruit of the Spirit and not the foul garbage that had been evident earlier. My heart screamed as the woman in the pew in front of me read her junk mail during communion, wafer in one hand, Father’s Day ad flyer in the other.

Pastor came to the front and began his remarks. “… some of you may be having a crisis of Spirit and don’t know which way to turn … you may be questioning whether you even have the Spirit in you … you desire to be full, to experience life fully.” The sermon was on Ephesians 5:18 and being filled by the Spirit, the conclusion of a lengthy series that’s been taught on the Holy Spirit.

15 Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, 16 making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. 17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. 18 Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, 19 speaking to one another with psalms, hymns and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, 20 always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Ephesians 5:15-20, TNIV)

At the start of the day, I felt like I had been physically and spiritually cut open and all the crap revealed, so that I experienced the extreme negative of being empty in the Spirit. Then overflowing with goodness as the word was preached and taught and I was filled with the Spirit. I will try to post a little more on the sermon specifics later this week, but the reality is that the specifics of what was said mattered little; the reality is that my heart was prepared for the message and I received it.

The preparation was painful, but at the finish of the service, I sang (finally!) and made music from my heart to the Lord, experiencing the joy of worship again. Amen!

Note: I originally began writing this post after Brian’s first post on the topic, but since then, he’s followed up with another and Peter Kirk has added his rebuttal thoughts as well. The rest of this entry tries to reflect some of the discussion in these additional posts.

On a personal level, my family is experiencing physical ailment again. My wife has been diagnosed with a form of vertigo, which (rationally) explains a great many things that she’s experienced over the past few years, but has been quite disabling for the past week or so (also explaining my spotty participation in blogdom). We give thanks to God that she did not black out when she had a severe episode while driving on the freeway last week and was able to get safely off before calling an ambulance.

In his second post, Brian presented Paul Heibert’s three-tier model of rational/physical explanation, the presence of spiritual beings and divine sovereignty. From Brian’s perspective, the cause of any event would be rooted in one of these tiers, e.g. my wife’s vertigo could be explained as an inner ear disorder (physical), an attack by demonic forces (spiritual) or the pruning discipline of God (divine).

It is difficult to know whether our family is being pruned or goaded. We are over committed and busy, with barely a minute or two to breath in relationship with each other. Is God stepping in and using physical ailment to force us to cut back and restore ourselves to each other and Him? Is the enemy driving us on and on and on to the point of breakdown, cutting our roots and placing our lives on shifting sand? Or is this just the natural affect of my wife’s seasonal allergies on her body as she grows older?

Peter’s critique is that we shouldn’t look to just one of the tiers for an explanation, but to all three, such that my wife’s ailment is the result of a physical disorder that has a spiritual warfare equivalent, but that may have been orchestrated by God with an overall good purpose in mind.