C. S. Lewis comments on being drawn into a personal relation with the triune God when we pray:

“An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get in touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him [Italics added]. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God - that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying - the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him [Italics added] which is pushing him on - the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being caught up into the higher kind of life . . . he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself.”

The Being inside the praying man is the indwelling Holy Spirit, restored to repentant believers by the living Jesus Christ who redeemed us by being a sin sacrifice and sent as He promised upon His resurrection the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. And the interactive communion we can have with God through the indwelling Holy Spirit is available to us in our time.

C. S. Lewis distinguishes between begetting and making, important distinctions:

“One of the creeds says that Christ is the Son of God ‘begotten, not created’; and it adds ‘begotten by his Father before all worlds.’ Will you please get it quite clear that this has nothing to do with the fact that when Christ was born on earth as a man, that man was the son of a virgin? We are not now thinking about the Virgin Birth. We are thinking about something that happened before nature was created at all, before time began. ‘Before all worlds’ Christ is begotten, not created. What does it mean?

“We don’t use the words begetting or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is this. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers, and a bird begets eggs which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless set - or he may make something more like himself than a wireless set: say, a statue. If he is a clever enough carver, he may make a statue which is very like a man indeed. But, of course, it is not a real man; it only looks like one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.

“Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.”

I now share a thought-provoking reading by Lewis on Joy:

“I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, ‘This is it,’ had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed. . . . There was no doubt that Joy was a desire (and, insofar as it was also simultaneously a good, it was also a kind of love). But a desire is turned not to itself but to its object. . . . It may be asked whether my terror was at all relieved by the thought that I was now approaching the source from which those arrows of Joy had been shot at me ever since childhood. Not in the least. No slightest hint was vouchsafed me that there ever had been or ever would be any connection between God and Joy. If anything, it was the reverse. I had hoped that the heart of reality might be of such a kind that we can best symbolize it as a place; instead, I found it to be a Person. For all I knew, the total rejection of what I called Joy might be one of the demands, might be the very first demand, He would make upon me. There was no strain of music from within, no smell of eternal orchids at the threshold, when I was dragged through the doorway. No kind of desire was present at all. . . But what, in conclusion, of Joy? For that, after all, is what the story has mainly been about. To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian.”

C. S. Lewis has given us the truth of Joy, Christ in me!

From Lewis’ reading, “The Universe:”

“We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely our own case, and in that one case we find there is. Or put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe - no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall, or staircase, or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves.”

I suggest that Lewis has identified the Holy Spirit as the being inside ourselves.

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.