Matera on the Spirit

"If contemporary believers find this Pauline teaching [on the Spirit] foreign, the fault does not lie so much with the apostle's theology as it does with the absence of an experience of the Spirit that often characterizes contemporary Christianity. For just as this experience of the Spirit accounts for the amazing growth and vitality of the early church, so the absence of this experience accounts for the malaise that afflicts much of contemporary Christianity." - Frank J. Matera, Romans (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2010), 210.