Part 1 of this series made a claim: that Christian practices are not tools for managing God but the natural overflow of knowing Him. That the order matters. That practicing toward intimacy and practicing from it are not the same thing.
But that claim raises a question the first essay did not fully answer.
If practices are meant to flow from knowing God, how does that knowing become possible? How does the inner life of God (His character, His purposes, His heart) become accessible to us at all? We are not God. We cannot see into Him by effort or intelligence or sincerity.
The answer is the Spirit.
Not the Spirit as a force we learn to activate. Not the Spirit as the atmosphere of intense religious experience. The Spirit as the third Person of the Trinity, given to dwell within His people, the one who alone searches the depths of God and makes what He finds there known to us.
Every practice in this series depends on Him: the one who makes them possible from within.
The Spirit Himself
The Spirit is not a force at the edge of Christian experience. He is not reserved for moments of crisis or intensity, nor is He the explanation for what happens when ordinary faith runs out. He is God Himself: present always, and given without reserve.
And yet, He is the most easily reduced member of the Trinity.
Some reduce Him by excess. The Spirit becomes the source of experiences to be pursued, the one invoked when something supernatural is needed. His presence is measured by what can be felt or seen. Knowing God becomes secondary to encountering intensity, and the quiet, interior work of the Spirit goes unrecognized precisely because it does not announce itself.
Others reduce Him by absence. The Spirit becomes the theological explanation for why sanctification happens, present in the system but not particularly encountered as a Person. He is affirmed in doctrine and absent in expectation. The result is a serious, diligent Christian life that is also, underneath, a lonely one.
The Spirit is the third Person of the Trinity: glorifying the Son, proceeding from the Father, dwelling within the church as the fulfillment of everything the temple once signified. His purpose is to draw us into communion with the God who formed us.
Union with Christ
The Spirit’s foundational work is uniting us to Christ. Paul writes in Romans 8 that the Spirit of Christ dwells in us, that the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead now gives life to our mortal bodies through His indwelling. This is not a minor religious category. It is a statement about position. We have been placed, by the Spirit, inside a relationship we could never have entered from the outside.
The reason that matters for knowing God is this: Christ is the Son, the one in whom the fullness of God dwells bodily, the image of the invisible God made visible. To be united to Him by the Spirit is to be joined to the one who stands in unrestricted relationship with the Father. We are not approaching God from a distance and hoping to be admitted. We are, in Christ, already inside.
And the Spirit who accomplishes that union is the same one who searches the depths of God. Paul writes: “These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10–11).
He dwells in us. He searches the depths of God. Those two facts together are what make knowing God possible at all, and what make it something other than a human achievement.
Union with Christ also settles something we might otherwise spend our entire lives trying to secure: our standing before God. The Spirit does not unite us to Christ as strangers on probation. He brings us in as sons and daughters. Paul writes: “You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:15–16). The Spirit does not only tell us what is true about our position. He makes it felt. The witness He bears is not merely cognitive. It reaches the place in us where fear lives and speaks directly to it: you are known. You belong.
For the reader whose approach to God has been shaped by performance and earning, this reorders everything. We are not approaching a God we must persuade. We are known, already, by the one the Spirit has united us to. The practices this series explores are not attempts to close a distance. They are the activity of people who have already been brought near, who are learning, slowly, what it means to live from that place rather than toward it. That practicing is still real. It is still costly. But it is oriented toward someone rather than toward a result.
The Spirit has placed us inside a relationship with God we could not have entered on our own. What He does within that relationship is a different question, and Scripture’s answer to it reaches further back than the New Testament.
The Spirit’s Works Toward Knowing
Scripture traces the Spirit’s presence across both Testaments, and what comes into clarity through the New Testament is this: He is the one through whom God makes Himself accessible to His people. Before naming what He does, we need to see that this was always the intention.
Through Ezekiel, God promised: “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you... And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules” (Ezekiel 36:26–27). The promise runs one way: the Spirit comes first. A people in whom God dwells are a people who can finally know Him from within.
That promise now has a name, and a face, and a set of works.
The name is the Holy Spirit. The face is the one Jesus promised before His departure: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever” (John 14:16). What Ezekiel saw from a distance, the disciples received in a room. The Spirit poured out at Pentecost was the arrival of what God had always been moving toward: His own presence, not above His people or among them, but within them. Through that indwelling, God became knowable in a way He had not been before.
His works are not separate functions. They are one presence moving in one direction: that we would know the one in whom we dwell.
The Spirit sanctifies. Not to make us generically better people, but to make us more like Christ, who is himself the image of the invisible God. Formation is real and it matters, but it is not only about character improvement. It is about becoming, through the Spirit’s work, increasingly capable of knowing and reflecting the God whose image Christ bears.
The Spirit intercedes. When we cannot find our way to God in words, He prays within us, toward the Father, holding open the access we cannot hold open ourselves. We do not need to arrive at prayer with the right words. The Spirit is already speaking what we cannot.
The Spirit seals us. What we have begun to know of God now, we will know fully then. The relationship cannot be abandoned halfway because it has been secured from the other side. Knowing God is not a project that collapses under the weight of our inconsistency. It has been guaranteed by the one who does not abandon what He has begun.
The Spirit illuminates. The one who breathed the Word into being is the same one who opens it to the reader. When we come to Scripture, we are not coming to a text the Spirit once inspired and left. We are coming to a text He inhabits still, through which the God who cannot be seen makes Himself known.
All of it moves in one direction. Which makes what we do with Him consequential in ways that go beyond spiritual progress.
Paul writes: “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption” (Ephesians 4:30). And again: “Do not quench the Spirit” (1 Thessalonians 5:19).
We can grieve Him through sin. We can quench Him through resistance or neglect.
The consequence is not only that growth slows. It is that we have closed ourselves to the one through whom God is known. He does not depart. The seal of Ephesians 4 is also the guarantee of Ephesians 1, and He does not abandon what He has secured. But when we grieve or quench Him, we are turning away from the only one who searches the depths of God and makes what He finds there known to us. We have not lost the relationship. We have stopped being present to it.
Staying open to Him is a choice: the ongoing decision to remain available to the one who makes God accessible, to stop insisting on our own direction long enough to receive what He is already revealing.
Walking with the One Who Knows
The Spirit is present. He works. We rely on Him or we go without Him. But what does reliance actually look like from the inside? Not as a theological category but as a way of moving through a day, a decision, a practice?
Paul names it simply.
“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16).
Later he adds: “If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25).
Walk by. Keep in step with.
These are, before anything else, orientation instructions. Paul is describing what it looks like to move through life in conscious dependence on the one through whom God is known: bringing Him into everything, not as a technique, but as the one without whom we are navigating in the dark.
Every practice this series explores is an attempt to turn toward God: prayer, lament, fasting, sabbath, generosity, worship. The Spirit is the one who makes that turning possible. He is already present before we arrive at any of it, already holding open the access, already speaking what we cannot.
We do not bring ourselves to God and hope He meets us. We are met before we begin.
A personal note:
I thought I knew what ‘seriousness’ with God looked like. I was waking up on five hours of sleep to have my quiet time. Praying in tongues for hours, waking my husband in the process. Fasting once a week. Because that was what people who meant business were supposed to do.
What I did not notice until later was what the striving was producing in me. A quiet spiritual elitism had started to take shape — the kind that looks, on reflection, uncomfortably like the Pharisee praying in the temple. I was not just practicing. I was becoming someone who measured others by whether they practiced the way I did.
In the end, it was not wisdom that stopped me. I am a rebel by nature, and I simply got tired. Then I got frustrated. I started telling God directly that His ways made no sense, that it was unreasonable to require this kind of effort from people who were trying to find Him.
And instead of correcting me for the frustration, He started showing me in Scripture that this had never been His way. That I had been missing my Helper. That the one who was supposed to be doing this work from within me had been there the whole time while I exhausted myself trying to do it from the outside.
The frustration turned out to be more honest than the compliance had been. I had stopped performing and started talking, and He answered the talking.
That is a quieter conversion than the version I had been handed. But it is truer. And it holds.
Practices Rooted is a 25-part series on Christian disciplines, grounded in the conviction that practice flows from knowing God rather than earning His approval. Browse the full series.