Etty Hillesum wrote this in a journal discovered after her death in a Nazi concentration camp:

One thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that You can not help us, so we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well...You cannot help us but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last.

It will sometimes appear that God cannot help us, or at least does not. It will appear that he has set us loose down here, alone amid the evil powers. In truth, we all want a divine problem-solver. Christians may feel the same impatience over the slow, unspectacular work of the Holy Spirit as Jews felt over Jesus the Messiah, who did not provide the kind of triumphant rescue they wanted.

The questions we ask of God, he often turns back on us. We plead for God to “come down” and only reluctantly acknowledge that God is already here, within us, and that what God does on earth closely resembles what the church does. In short, the chief “disadvantage” to knowing God as Spirit is the history of the church - and the spiritual biography of you and me.