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Key Bible Verse: Just as you cannot understand the path of the wind … so you cannot understand the activity of God (Ecclesiastes 11:5). Bonus Reading: John 3:3-9

When trees are waving wildly in the wind, journalist G.K. Chesterton once observed, people have historically thought that it is the wind that moves the trees—that the invisible gives energy to the visible. More recently others have concluded that the motion of the trees creates the wind—that what they see and hear and touch is basic reality and generates whatever can't be verified with the senses.

The word translated "spirit" in our English Bibles carries in Hebrew the primary meaning of "wind" and "breath." Imagine how our perceptions would change if we substituted these words for "spirit" in our language. For our ancestors, spirit was not "spiritual"; it was sensory. Although invisible, it was not immaterial. It had visible effects. Air, after all, provides the molecules for the quiet breathing that is part of all life, the puffs of air used to make words, the gentle breezes that caress the skin, the brisk winds that fill the sails of ships, the wild hurricanes that tear roofs off barns and uproot trees.

It would clarify things enormously if we could withdraw "spirit" and "spiritual" from our language stock for a while.

—Eugene Peterson in Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places

My Response: Can I honestly repeat Paul's claim that "we live by believing and not by seeing" (2 Cor. 5:7)?

Thought to Apply: Those who have the gale of the Holy Spirit go forward even in sleep.—Brother Lawrence

Adapted from Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Eerdmans, 2005).

Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today International/Men of Integrity magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Men of Integrity.

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Prayer for the Week

I'm not strong enough, Lord, to live up to your standards on my own. Teach me how to rely on the internal power your Spirit provides.

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