146. 3. In respect to the clergy, the divine actions and powerful effects meant by "the sending of the Holy Spirit" are the acts of enlightening and teaching. The actions of the Lord listed in the preceding point - reforming, regenerating, renewing, bringing to life, sanctifying, justifying, purifying, forgiving sins, and finally saving - flow from the Lord into both clergy and lay people. These actions are accepted by those who are in the Lord and in whom the Lord is (John 6:56; 14:20; 15:4-5).

In the case of the clergy, however, there are other actions of the Lord as well: enlightening and teaching. The reason is that for ministers, being enlightened and taught is a part of their jobs that comes with their inauguration into the ministry.

Also, when ministers preach with passion they believe they are inspired, just like the Lord's disciples on whom the Lord breathed and said, "Receive the Holy Spirit" (John 20:22; see also what Mark 13:11 says). Some ministers even maintain that they have felt an inflow.

Ministers have to be very careful, though, not to convince themselves that the passion that comes over many of them when they preach is God at work in their hearts. The same level of passion and an even more ardent one is found in fanatics who believe they are divinely inspired, in people who have the falsest teachings, and even in people who see no value in the Word and worship nature as their god, who toss faith and goodwill into packs on their backs. When they preach and teach they hang these packs in front of their faces like some ruminatory stomach, squeezing and regurgitating out of them things they know will feed their listeners.

Passion in preaching is just an intensity in the earthly self. If passion has a love for truth inside it, then it is like the sacred fire that flowed into the apostles, about which it says in Acts:

There appeared to them divided tongues as of fire, and one rested on each one of them. As a result they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. (Acts of the Apostles 2:3-4)

If, on the other hand, there is a love for falsity inside that passion or intensity, then it is like fire smoldering inside a piece of wood that bursts into flame and burns the house down.

You who deny that the Word is holy and the Lord divine, please take your pack off your back and open it (as you freely do when you are at home). You will see.

When they enter the church, and even more when they climb the stairs into the pulpit, I know that the people meant by Lucifer in Isaiah - the people of Babylon, especially those who named themselves the Society of Jesus - are overcome with passion. For many of them that passion comes from a hellish love. They raise their voices more vehemently and draw sighs from their chests more deeply than those whose passion comes from a heavenly love.

There are also two other spiritual actions of the Lord in members of the clergy; see 155 below.

510. Repentance Is the Beginning of the Church within Us

The extended community that is known as the church consists of all the people who have the church within them. The church takes hold in us when we are regenerated, and we are all regenerated when we abstain from things that are evil and sinful and run away from them as we would run if we saw hordes of hellish spirits pursuing us with flaming torches, intending to attack us and throw us onto a bonfire.

As we go through the early stages of our lives, there are many things that prepare us for the church and introduce us into it; but acts of repentance are the things that actually produce the church within us. Acts of repentance include any and all actions that result in our not willing, and consequently not doing, evil things that are sins against God.

Before repentance, we stand outside regeneration. In that condition, if any thought of eternal salvation somehow makes its way into us, we at first turn toward it but soon turn away. That thought does not penetrate us any farther than the outer areas where we have ideas; it then goes out into our spoken words and perhaps into a few gestures that go along with those words. When the thought of eternal salvation penetrates our will, however, then it is truly inside us. The will is the real self, because it is where our love dwells; our thoughts are outside us, unless they come from our will, in which case our will and our thought act as one, and together make us who we are. From these points it follows that in order for repentance to be genuine and effective within us, it has to be done both by our will and by thinking that comes from our will. It cannot be done by thought alone. Therefore it has to be a matter of actions, and not of words alone.

[2] The Word makes it obvious that repentance is the beginning of the church. John the Baptist was sent out in advance to prepare people for the church that the Lord was about to establish. At the same time as he was baptizing people he was also preaching repentance; his baptism was therefore called a baptism of repentance. Baptism means a spiritual washing, that is, being cleansed from sins. John baptized in the Jordan river because the Jordan means introduction into the church, since it was the first border of the land of Canaan, where the church was. The Lord himself also preached that people should repent so that their sins would be forgiven. He taught, in effect, that repentance is the beginning of the church; that if we repent, the sins within us will be removed; and that if our sins are removed, they are also forgiven. Furthermore, when the Lord sent out his twelve apostles and also the seventy, he commanded them to preach repentance. From all this it is clear that repentance is the beginning of the church.