In last Saturday's classic Briefing snippet, John Woodhouse suggested that “Where you have the word of God creating faith in God (and nothing else can create real faith in God) there is all of biblical Christianity. Where the word of God is lacking there is no Christianity”.

The objection comes back: isn't this the problem with evangelical Christianity—that the emphasis on the Word produces a tediously arid religion of the mind?

John Woodhouse addresses precisely this in the second article in the series, ‘Word and Spirit’. Here's a tasty extract:

We will understand the work of the Spirit of God in the New Testament, and in our lives, only when we see the inseparable connection between God's Spirit and God's Word—when we see, as Paul puts it in Ephesians 6:17, that the sword of the Spirit is the word of God.

There are many statements in the New Testament where ‘Spirit’ and ‘Word’ are virtually interchangeable. When James says that God “brought us forth by the word of truth” (Jas 1:18), would he have been saying something very different if he had said, “God brought us forth by the work of his Spirit”?

Peter says:

You have been born anew, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living abiding word of God ... (1 Pet 1:23)

Is he speaking of something different from Jesus?

Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” (John 3:5)

Jesus said of the Holy Spirit:

When he comes, he will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgement: in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me; in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; and in regard to judgement, because the prince of this world now stands condemned. (John 16:8-11)

Was he speaking of something other than what would happen through the proclamation of the gospel? The Spirit is the Spirit of truth (John 16:13) who will lead us into all truth, and this truth is the gospel—as Jesus said “he will bear witness to me” (John 15:26).

Conclusion

Let me return to our proposition: Where there is the Word of God, and faith in God because of that word, there is the totality of Christianity.

There is a danger in this proposition. It can be misunderstood as: Where there are words about God and some kind of assent to the words, there is Christianity. And perhaps some of our Christianity has become like that. Certainly, you can have ten thousand words about God and not have Christianity. That is not what I am saying.

Where there is the word of God, there certainly is the Holy Spirit. After all, it is his sword. The Christian life is fully lived in the power of the Spirit, not when something additional to the word of God is discovered and called a spiritual gift, but when, and only when, the word of God is at work in you who believe—when God, by his Spirit, addresses us and we receive his word.

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