Gordon Fee shared in the Preface to his book, Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God, comments that drove the writing of his book. I am sharing several of them that should give contemporary Christians reason to be more effective in their witness to the Holy Spirit.
“The bottom line is . . . the generally ineffective witness and perceived irrelevancy of the church in Western culture. Here, it seems to me, is where the real difference between Paul and us emerges, where in a culture similar to ours the early believers seem to have been more effective than we are. I am convinced this is due in large part to their experience of the reality of the Spirit’s presence. . . . Crucial to this experience was the early church’s understanding of the Spirit as the fulfillment of Jewish hopes of the return of the divine presence . . . . What this meant for early Christians was that the Spirit was not only the personal presence of God in and among them (both individually and corporately) but that their understanding of God had to be broadened so as to become trinitarian. . . . Equally crucial to the experience of the Spirit was the early church’s self-understanding as “thoroughly eschatological,” in the “already/not yet” sense [which I have discussed in my books]. The first believers really believed that the future had begun, being attested by the gift of the outpoured Spirit, who also served as the guarantee of the future consummation. . . . This personal, powerful, experience of the eschatological Spirit not only transformed them individually but made them effective in their being the people of the good news in pagan Grego-Roman culture. And this is why I think they had the better of it, and why we would do well to recapture something of that reality.”