C. S. Lewis wrote a book entitled The Joyful Christian. It consists of 127 readings, and several relate to my own writings, which I will share on my blog with comments. The first is from his reading “Right and Wrong.”

“Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the ‘laws of nature,’ we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong ‘the Law of Nature,’ they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law - with this great difference, that a body could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.”

Believers have been blessed by the love and grace of God through the sin sacrifice of the living Jesus Christ to have the indwelling of the Holy Spirit restored. The Spirit of God serves as Counselor and Helper, guiding our choices in life and discerning right and wrong. But as Lewis states, we have also been given free will and can choose to obey or to disobey the Law of Right and Wrong. Recall from Genesis 2:8-9; 16-17 that God forbade Adam and Eve to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They did, and humanity suffered from the Fall until the resurrected Jesus sent as He promised the Holy Spirit to be restored to mankind as an indwelling when in repentance. We have the choice.

Johnson clarifies indwelling and infilling, two actions of the Holy Spirit I addressed in Chapter Four of my second book, The Boundless Love of God: A Holy Spirit Story.

“Indwelling refers to the Holy Spiri’s residence in the life of a believer upon their confession of faith. When we are saved, the Holy Spirit moves in!

“Ephesians 3:16-17 ‘I pray that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.’

“Infilling refers to a secondary act in which the Holy Spirit ‘baptizes’ or ‘fills’ the life of a person AFTER confession of faith. When you receive salvation, God then invites you into a deeper experience with His Holy Spirit!

“Acts 2:4 ‘All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.’”

In my books and blogs I have endeavored to present in compelling manner that the redemptive, sin sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross of crucifixion restored to repentant believers the indwelling of the Holy Spirit so that we can be in two-way communion with God’s Spirit that was lost by the Fall. The Holy Spirit was sent as promised by the resurrected, living Jesus Christ. Our minds are restored to an intimate, personal communion with the Mind of God.

I quote Johnson who addresses the Baptism of the Holy Spirit:

“When people receive salvation, the Holy Spirit comes to live in them. The Holy Spirit seals the work of salvation in an individual’s heart [mind, will and emotion, the soul] (Eph. 1:13).

“However, after salvation, every believer is invited to additionally ask for the Holy Spirit to fill them with power, boldness, and courage to be a witness in the earth.

“The baptism of the Holy Spirit was prophesied by John the Baptist. It is what Jesus tells His disciples to wait for in Jerusalem, prior to the rise of the New Testament Church. It was what the early church sought after in terms of supernatural impartation and it available to us today.”

Russell Johnson is the pastor of PursuitNW in Washington state, located in Snohomish, WA, the thriving church my family attends. I will cite several comments taken from his booklet, In Pursuit of the Spirit: Baptism of the Holy Spirit, Pursuit Press, 2021. He has personal knowledge of and experience with the Holy Spirit. Let us see what he shares.

“The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity. He’s not a force. He’s not a mystical aura. He’s not a vibration. He’s not a frequency. The Holy Spirit is a person.

“Because He is a person, the Holy Spirit can be honored, dishonored, grieved (Isa. 63:10), celebrated, quenched (1 Thess. 5:19), resisted (Acts 7:51), and blasphemed (Matt. 12:31). New Testament believers have a responsibility to steward their relationship with the Holy Spirit by earnestly desiring His gifts (1 Cor. 14:1), praying in the Spirit (Eph. 6:18), singing in the Spirit (1 Cor. 14:15), walking in the Spirit (Gal. 5:16), and being renewed in the spirit of their mind (Eph. 4:23).

“Being filled with the Holy Spirit is not a one-time activity. Instead, Scripture speaks to being continually filled on a daily basis (Eph. 5:18). The Holy Spirit is a person. He is honored when we recognize His importance in our life. He is honored when He is welcomed in our daily interactions. Just like any other person, the role and influence of the Holy Spirit grows as you tend to the development of this important relationship.”

The indwelling of the human spirit by the Holy Spirit has been renewed in repentant believers by the boundless love and grace of God through the sin sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ, who lives and sent the Holy Spirit as Counselor and Helper as He promised upon His resurrection. Believers are blessed to have the Holy Spirit guide their minds, their souls, in a dualist interaction in our time in anticipation of the everlasting communion with Jesus Christ to come.

I quote Burke:

“When we think about Jesus only as a meek, mild-mannered religious figure, stain-glassed into obscurity and mostly out of touch with our real lives today, we have been deceived. Jesus revealed the almighty, all-knowing, ever-present, infinite Creator of the universe in a form we could relate to because God wants relationship.

“But Jesus is not only fully man; he is fully God in all his majestic brilliance today. That’s what NDE’rs [near death experiencers] see: the majesty of god in the form of a man. And those who already know him, recognize him. Like Jesus said, ‘I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep, and they know me. . . . They will listen to my voice’ (John 10:14,16).”

In my books and blogs I have identified the present reality of communion between the Holy Spirit and the human spirit and soul. As he promised, the resurrected Jesus Christ sent the Holy Spirit to indwell repentant believers to restore the personal communion that was lost at the Fall of Adam. It is an everlasting communion.

In my writings I have endeavored to make a compelling case for dualist interaction between the immaterial mind, including the Mind of God, and the components of the material brain. I am including a very interesting post from Burke’s book that speaks to the increasing recognition of mind-matter interaction.

“Science used to think of matter as solid, but we now know the tiny atoms that make up matter are more like invisible waves [I have presented numerous posts that address wave forms and how they may interact with our neural synaptic networks], more mind-like than particle-like. In fact, atoms are 99.999 percent empty space. Cambridge and Princeton physicist James Jeans wrote, ‘the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we ought rather hail it as the governor of the realm of matter.’”

In my books and blogs I have pointed out that information comes only from a mind. The Mind of God is the ultimate Source of ALL information that has been instantiated into and sustains His creations with specification, that is with meaning and purpose and structure. Such information is transmitted within codes, linguistic codes in the case of neural spike trains of action potentials which are learned over a lifetime, interpreted by the human mind and archived in memory. So the comments of James Jeans are relevant to this reality, that the Mind of God governs the realm of matter, and the human mind/soul governs the transmission of specified information through the brain’s neural synaptic networks to express movement, ideas, will and the interpretation of sensory input. No, the universe is not thought per se, but thought of a Mind has been actualized within its very structure, meaning and purpose.

I quote Burke:

“With perfect communication and perfect love comes perfect unity. The very thing Jesus prayed that we would learn to experience more and more on earth will happen fully in Heaven’s Family: ‘I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one - I in them and you in me - so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ (John 17:20-23). In Heaven, Jesus’ prayer is tangibly felt by all.”

I quote Burke:
”Those who get a glimpse of Heaven agree on one thing more than anything - love is the point of it all. In the presence of God, they experience a love that words cannot explain, and the people of Heaven seem to be filled with a light that is love. So if love and relationship is the goal of life on earth, why would we think God wants to tear that apart or take relationship from us in Heaven. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“Some things people can’t express or are not allowed to tell, but other things God wants us to know. He wants Heaven to fire up our imaginations, and I believe that’s why he’s giving us more and more evidence and insight into the life to come - so we will live for it. . . . this new spiritual body is a promise from God conveyed in the Scriptures. Paul may be reflecting on his own near-death experience when he explains, ‘For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is, when we die and leave this earthly body), we will have a house in heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies. While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Rather, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life . . . . And we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord. So whether we are here in this body or away from this body, our goal is to please him.’” (2 Corinthians 5: 1-4, 8-9)

I cite John Burke: “One person summed it up well by recounting his thoughts during the experience in relation to what he had been taught in geometry. He had always accepted the existence of only three dimensions, but now he knew his teachers were mistaken - there are more. He concluded that this was the reason retelling his experiences was so difficult, because, ‘I have to describe it to you in words that are three-dimensional. That’s as close as I can get to it, but it’s not really adequate.’ So every individual near-death story is actually an interpretation of an experience that’s beyond our finite, earthly language.”