Why Don’t We Live in the Power of the Holy Spirit? Simply put, we don’t live in the power of the Holy Spirit because we love our sin too much. In any given moment, it is impossible to live in the power of the Spirit and sin at the same time. Sin is wholly opposed to everything that is of the Spirit. They are mutually exclusive and totally contrary to each other.
As a follower of Jesus Christ, you are a temple of the Holy Spirit. You are not just a person living your life by human power. The Spirit of God is in you; that is why Jesus said it was before for Him to go and the Spirit to come.
Living in the power of the Spirit requires complete and total surrender on your part. Nowhere in Scripture do you find people who have this beautiful balanced life with a little bit of God added in. But when you look at the modern-day church, this is exactly what you see: a lot of people who have added Jesus to their lives. People who have, in a sense, asked Him to join them on their life journey, to follow them wherever they feel they should go, rather than following Him as we are commanded.
The God of the Universe is not something we can just add to our lives and keep on as we did before. The Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is not someone we can just call on when we want a little extra power in our lives. Jesus Christ did not die in order to follow us. He died and rose again so that we could forget everything else and follow Him in the power of the Holy Spirit.
So if a little bit of spirituality added in to our lives is not what God has in mind, what does He want for His children? How does He desire us to live? We are called by Christ to give up everything. His call is to come and take up the cross. In a phrase, it is death to self and life in His Spirit.
Through the Holy Spirit, you have the power of God residing within you. Now this is good news and bad news. The bad news is, you have no more excuses for living in your sin. The good new is, you have the power to overcome through the indwelling Spirit of the risen Christ!
(Portions of this post are borrowed from Francis Chan’s book, Forgotten God)
