Jim Van Gelderen: This is Jim Van Gelderen, and I am podcasting from Fort Walton Beach, Florida. My last podcast was from here as well. We had our final War of Special Forces, and I left my truck and trailer down here, then drove our team vehicle with the equipment trailer back to Wisconsin, where it is right now.

My wife and I flew down here a couple of days ago to pick up our truck and trailer and start heading toward Houston, where our first meeting will be in about a week.

It has been a little over a month since we last had our podcast. During that time, it has been a very exciting season—the holidays. I hope you had a merry Christmas and enjoyed your New Year’s festivities.

As we think about a new year, there is always a fresh understanding of a new opportunity and new challenges. I want to give you some thoughts about a passage of Scripture in 2 Corinthians chapter 3, a passage the Lord has used in my youth and along the way as a reminder of the importance of living a life of dependence upon the Holy Spirit.

Second Corinthians chapter 3 talks about the veil and Moses. In verse 5, it says, “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves, but our sufficiency is of God,” who also made us able ministers of the New Testament, “not of the letter, but of the spirit.” Why?

“For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” I want to focus on that little phrase: “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” What in the world is that talking about?

It is an important truth and an important concept. Obviously, in a short podcast, we cannot cover it all, but I would like to begin to open your eyes to the thought.

Let me start with a quote that I heard several years ago. It was, I believe, attributed to Dwight L. Moody, the great evangelist: “There is nothing as death-dealing as the gospel without the Spirit’s power.” The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.

That is his quote. It is very interesting that he would say that. It is kind of jarring, but what he means is that, obviously, when we give the gospel without the power of the Holy Spirit, the Bible is telling us here that the letter kills.

That is corroborated in 1 Thessalonians 1:5, when the Apostle Paul said, “For our gospel came not unto you in word only, but also in power of the Holy Ghost, and of much assurance.” What is the Apostle Paul saying there? When we gave you the gospel, it was not just words—it was not even merely correct words, though they probably were correct words.

It was given in Holy Spirit power.

The same Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 2 talks about, “For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” Then in verse 5 he said, “That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” What he was saying is that when we got there to Corinth, we preached the gospel.

But when you got saved, your dependence was not on our wisdom or our ability to present the gospel. You depended on the empowered gospel—the empowered Word.

In other words, the Word was given, but it was given with Holy Spirit power. When you got saved, you trusted the gospel message. It was an empowered message that God spoke to your heart.

So when you got saved, it was obviously the real deal. What are we saying? We are saying that the Bible is telling us there are two dynamics for change.

The first one is the power of the Word, but the second one is important: the power of the Holy Spirit. The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.

I think sometimes in the Christian school movement, over the years, I have seen this. When the Christian school movement began, I was just a child and then a teenager. I think many people thought, “We are going to reenergize the missionary movement, and we are going to have a lot of full-time Christian workers.”

Of course, that has not happened. I think one of the reasons is that people just felt they were going to have Bible class and memorize Scripture, which are all good things, and have preaching in chapel—again, wonderful things. But if it does not have the life-giving breath of the Spirit, it is death-dealing.

Certainly, I have seen that. I have seen kids come to chapel every day, check out, and not be arrested by the power of the Spirit. That is not what we want.

As a preacher of the gospel, I want to be able to preach it knowing the Holy Spirit will empower it, so a young person will realize the confrontation is not just with truth; it is with the God of truth.

The Bible does not say, “The letter killeth, the spirit giveth life,” and imply by that that the problem is with the letter. In other words, the Bible does not say, “The letter kills, so get rid of the letter.” It says, “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life to the letter.”

There is nothing wrong with the Ten Commandments, but without the power of the Spirit, they are not life-changing. They actually provoke us to sin, as Romans chapter 7 explains.

How do we keep God’s commandments? “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” How do we love Him?

Spiritually, God illumines our hearts with the truth that God loves us, and we love Him because He first loved us. When you are spiritually confronted with the reality that God loves you, you cannot help but love God in return, because it is a spiritual reality. The love of God is made manifest to you through the power of the Holy Spirit, and you respond in love.

Then you keep His commandments, and they are spiritually empowered and enabled.

I think many times I see young people grow up and feel like there are a lot of rules. They may not sense the power of the Spirit, and they react to that. What do they do?

They pitch the letter. The answer is not to pitch the letter. The answer is that the Spirit gives life to the Word of God, gives life to a Christian life, and gives life to obeying God.

We do not do it because we have to; we do it because we want to. That is because the Holy Spirit has done a work in our hearts.

I want to challenge every young person listening: if you have reacted to strong preaching or to so-called standards in your home or your church, consider the fact that the problem is never with the Bible, nor with application of the Bible—in other words, a standard of somebody who is generally trying to apply the Bible to their life. The problem is not necessarily with the rules or with the commandments. God’s commandments are not the problem.

The problem is not with God’s law, with God’s commandments, or with our application of them as we endeavor to keep them and perhaps encourage our young people to do the same.

The answer to “the letter killeth” is not to get rid of the letter. The answer is that the Spirit giveth life. If you are a young person out there struggling with Christianity, seeing it as a bunch of rules, finding yourself provoked to break the rules, and finding yourself in Romans 7—“The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do”—the answer is not to pitch the law.

The answer is not to say, “I do not want to do what God commands me to do.” The answer is the Holy Spirit.

Friends, Christianity does not work without Christ. I tell people all the time, if you have Christianity without Christ, all you have is “entity,” which means you do not have very much left. Christianity is all about Jesus Christ—His Spirit living in us, living through us, manifesting to us the love of God.

When that happens, we have an automatic response to love God. If we love God, we will keep His commandments—not because we have to, but because we want to, because we love Him and want to please Him.

Without faith it is impossible to please God. When we endeavor to keep God’s commandments, it is not through self-dependent self-effort. It is through faith—a dependence upon God to enable us, to change us, and to manifest His love to us so that we have an automatic love for Him in return.

If you are struggling with God’s commandments or the application of them—and I recognize sometimes you may feel like somebody is making an application of God’s commandments that is a stretch; that is another topic entirely—the point is that when you have God’s law and God’s commandments without the Spirit, the Bible says it kills because you cannot keep those commandments. They provoke you, as I mentioned in Romans 7, to sin.

We sometimes feel like the problem is the letter or the law, and God is saying, “No, that is not the issue. The issue is that you need the Holy Spirit. He gives life.”

At the very end of Romans 7, the Apostle says, “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” The next verse is stunning: “I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

I will tell you, friends, if you are struggling with God’s commandments or God’s law, the issue is not to get rid of the letter. The issue is not to get rid of the law. The issue is that the Spirit gives life.

That is the key to the Christian life: walking with Jesus. We walk with Him when we depend on Him and look to Him.

Most of you who listen to the podcast know that, but I guess the thought I want to get across to you is this: the problem is not the letter; the problem is the lack of the Spirit. When the letter kills, the answer is not, “Let’s get rid of the letter.” A lot of young people go out that window, and it does not work.

The answer is, “I need the Holy Spirit. The Spirit will give me life.”

Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. There is life, liberty, and freedom. It is the freedom to do what God wants you to do because you want to, and you have spiritual enablement to do it.

It is supernatural. It is divine intervention. That is what the Christian life is all about.

May the Lord bless you in this new year. May you set your eyes on Him. May this be a year where you grow.

Will you learn what it means to walk in the Spirit, looking to Him for divine enablement? That is what Thee Generation is all about: total surrender to God’s will and total dependence on His grace to live in.