The Holy Spirit Gives Life

Inhale deeply right now, in through your nose, and hold your breath while you read the following paragraph.

Take this moment, quickly, to measure the tightness caused by your inflated lungs pressing against the inside of your chest. See if you can feel the beating of your heart within you, or even hear it thrumming in your ears. Check for tingling in your fingers and toes. Is pressure building behind your eyes?

OK, exhale.

If you’re like most of us, you involuntarily let out a long breath, followed immediately by another deep inhale of oxygen, before your body instinctively settles back into a steady breathing rhythm. That’s good. It’s normal. It’s the way you are designed.

What you’ve just experienced is what’s known as “signs of life.” Heart beating, skin tingling, oxygen cravings within you—these are just a few of the simplest, most rudimentary proofs that you’re a living being. This stunning miracle of life goes beyond just your body, though, involving your spirit and soul as well. And then when your daily life becomes a Christian life, well, that’s when it gets really exciting.

Biologists tell us that seven factors must be evident in order for something to be classified as “living.” They are (in no particular order):

• Respiration
• Growth
• Sensitivity
• Movement
• Nutrition
• Excretion
• Reproduction

Right now, without any intentional effort on your part, you’re demonstrating at least five of those seven factors (unless you’re reading this on the toilet, then you’re probably demonstrating six!). Assuming there’s not a physiological or psychological limitation, you also have the innate potential to accomplish the remaining factor as well.

You are alive, by all definitions—even though you’re not trying to be alive. Why is that? Because God’s Spirit alone is the source of life.

What’s more, your physical life right now is utterly dependent on an intricate cosmological balance with so many interconnected, global, and galactic factors that it’d be impossible to number them all. At the same time, your individual body must also have so many unconscious, unreasonable, flawless functions (like a heart that just keeps beating!) that even if you could number them, it’d be an exercise in futility for you to attempt to manage them all. And yet this morning you woke up, you stretched your muscles, and got out of bed as if that action in itself were no miracle at all.

Amazing, isn’t it?