Active Waiting and the Holy Spirit

If I have not convinced you by now, you need to go and purchase Jesus , Continued by J. D. Greear.  It is a helpful book on the Holy Spirit and Christian life.  I definitely think it will be included in Go Deeper Class next year.  Here are more quotes from Chapters 6-7:

A heart that truly understands the gospel overflows with gratefulness to God. Extravagant grace produces extravagant givers.

Realizing the love of God for us produces love of God in us.

God steers moving ships--ships driven by the winds of worship, gratefulness, love to God for what he's done, and compassion for those he cares about.

Wonder at his sacrifice for me compels my sacrifice for him, making it a joy and delight.

The Holy Spirit, you could say, is always leading to the cross or from it, to carry its message of healing to others.

Our waiting is not passive, however; it is extremely active. Because we already have the Holy Spirit, we don't sit around in inactivity, waiting on Jesus to send something from heaven. We've already go it. We aggressively offer our lives in living sacrifice to his mission, looking to him to steer us in the where and how. 

Every blessing in the Christian life flows from faith in the gospel, including the fullness of the Spirit. . .The more you grow in your knowledge of the gospel, the more intimate you will become with the Spirit.

The more intimate we become with the gospel, the more the Spirit manifests himself to us. The more I embrace that I am his son, the more I am filled with his Spirit.

God's Spirit declares God's name in our hearts, hiding us within his cross, rehearsing his mercy toward us, and making his holiness, justice, love and glory come alive.

We received the Spirit not by asking for him, but by believing the gospel. So if we want to grow in the Spirit, we don't just plead for more of the Spirit--we put renewed faith in the gospel! Fullness of the Spirit, you see, is a byproduct of believing the gospel.

Justification by faith is the "root"; the fullness of the Spirit is the "fruit." The two are inseparably linked.

 We don't believe we are dead to sin because we see the evidence in our lives, but because God has declared it to be so in Christ. As we believe it has been done, God gives us the power of the Spirit to live that way.

When the Spirit is alive in us, his fruit will grow naturally in our hearts. The deeper we go in the gospel, Paul says, the larger the Spirit's presence in our heart, and the larger his presence, the more his fruit begins to abound in our lives.

we don't grow by going beyond the gospel, but by going deeper into it.