Increments don’t work for heart beats. There’s something about a heart beat that is counter intuitive for us. We tend to think in terms of increments. We like to plot everything out on a graph where “betterness” is vertical measurement and time is the horizontal measurement, and our line goes straight to up and to the right. But flat lines are bad for hearts. If your heart just squeezed harder and harder every passing moment, you would have a problem. Instead your heart beats, relaxes, beats, relaxes, and beats, and relaxes. Your heart squeezing increasingly hard would be just as detrimental to your health as if it just stopped squeezing.
There’s something about the work of the Holy Spirit in that metaphor of your heart. Often times we want the Holy Spirit to do *more* in our lives. “Give us more sanctification, better lives, less sin, more good works, etc,” is often our prayer. And that’s not a bad prayer, but it has to come in recognition that the Holy Spirit’s work often happens in a rhythm rather than a solid note played for a long time, even if that note is played increasingly louder.
The Holy Spirit works over and over again in cycles of confession/absolution, in the cycles of the story of Jesus played out in the Church year, in the cycles of forgiving and being forgiven by fellow Christians, even in the cycle of waking up and going to sleep. The theologian Gerhard Forde puts it this way: “Sanctification is the art of getting used to justification.” Justification, the cycle of sin, repentance, and forgiveness, is something that we get used to – and the more we get used to this cycle, the more we see the Holy Spirit at work.
So sometimes the work of the Spirit isn’t about “getting better” but is about knowing what comes next. The next heartbeat, the next proclamation of forgiveness, the next sermon, the next Bible reading. And in the midst of all of the Spirit’s work, we see the One to Whom the Spirit points: Jesus, who promises to always be there for us, even unto the end of the age.